Tom Watson began to put on weight in his early 20s, having developed an appetite for fast food and cheap beer while studying at the University of Hull. As time progressed - and his penchant for anything sweet, fatty or fizzy persisted - he found himself adjusting his belt, loosening his collar and upsizing his wardrobe to XXL. He continued to pile on the pounds when he entered the world of politics as MP for West Bromwich East (despite short-lived flirtations with fad diets and fitness classes). By December 2014, his bathroom scales had tipped to 22 stone. 

We are all increasingly bewildered by the simple question of what to eat. Despite advice from experts, governments and dieticians about the dangers of too much fat, sugar, protein and lack of exercise, our nutrition - and the global obesity crisis - is getting worse. Why can one person eat a certain meal and gain weight and another eat exactly the same food and lose pounds? Genes provide part of the answer, but we have been overlooking one vital aspect of diet that lies within us.

Through his pioneering scientific research, Tim Spector has been shocked to discover how little good evidence there is for many of our most deep-rooted ideas about food. In a series of short, myth-busting chapters, Spoon-Fed reveals why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong. Spector explores the scandalous lack of good science behind many medical and government food recommendations and how the food industry holds sway over these policies and our choices.

Building upon this critical work in Good Calories, Bad Calories and presenting fresh evidence for his claim, Taubes now revisits the urgent question of what’s making us fat—and how we can change—in this exciting new book. Persuasive, straightforward, and practical, Why We Get Fat makes Taubes’s crucial argument newly accessible to a wider audience.

Type 2 diabetes has been regarded as an incurable, lifelong condition for centuries. Even worse, it seemed to be inevitably progressive. When you got the diagnosis, it was as though above the clinic door was written: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Professor Roy Taylor is the world's leading expert on type 2, the man who in 2006 finally found the missing piece in the scientific jigsaw that paved the way for a cure. 

In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion - most of what we’re consuming today is longer the product of nature but of food science. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American Paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become. With In Defense of Food, Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Cambridge geneticist Dr Giles Yeo has dedicated over 20 years studying how genes influence our eating habits. Instead of looking at how we have become obese, Gene Eating tackles the question of why some people eat more than others. The UK has the biggest waistlines in Western Europe and an enormous problem of other diet-related illnesses.

Appetite Correction (AC) is a revolutionary new focus in weight loss based on years of user experience with Dr. Bert’s ground-breaking guide to daily intermittent fasting, The Fast-5 Diet and the Fast-5 Lifestyle. AC means getting your body’s appetite center working again, so not only do you lose excess fat, you lose it without being hungry, and once you’ve lost the weight, it stays off if you maintain the flexible, low-effort AC lifestyle. When the appetite center is working properly, you don’t want to eat more than you need.

Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life, health and longevity and yet it is increasingly neglected in 21st century society, with devastating consequences: every major disease in the developed world - Alzheimer's, cancer, obesity, diabetes - has very strong causal links to deficient sleep. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why its absence is so damaging to our health. Compared to the other basic drives in life - eating, drinking and reproducing - the purpose of sleep remained elusive.

A scientist reveals the groundbreaking evidence linking many major diseases, including cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, to a common root cause - insulin resistance - and shares an easy, effective plan to reverse and prevent it. 

In industrialised nations, our sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. A key remedy, we are told, is exercise - voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. However, most of us struggle to stay fit, and our attitudes to exercise are plagued by misconceptions, finger-pointing and anxiety. But, as Daniel Lieberman shows in Exercised, the first book of its kind by a leading scientific expert, we never evolved to exercise.

The Longevity Solution explains how to incorporate time-honored wellness traditions while doing away with fads, unnecessary supplements, and unsubstantiated wellness practices. It investigates the dietary habits and other practices of the healthiest, longest-lived humans on the planet, who live in regions known as Blue Zones, as a model for what and how we should eat. It teaches the benefits of intermittent fasting and calorie restriction, which have been shown to slow the aging process, while consuming proper ratios of protein and healthy fats.

A good night's sleep is essential for a healthy brain and body. So why do so many of us struggle to sleep well? In Fast Asleep, Dr Michael Mosley explains what happens when we sleep, what triggers common sleep problems and why standard advice rarely works. Prone to insomnia, he has taken part in numerous sleep experiments and tested every remedy going. The result is a radical, four-week programme, based on the latest science, designed to help you re-establish a healthy sleep pattern in record time.

This is a book about the good, the terrible and the avocado toast. A riveting exploration of the hidden forces behind what we eat, The Way We Eat Now explains how modern food, in all its complexity, has transformed our lives and our world. To re-establish eating as something that gives us both joy and health, we need to find out where we are right now, how we got here and what it is that we share. 

Has food become your enemy? Now you can call a truce by consulting the one expert you can really trust - your own body. In this original audio program based on their popular book Intuitive Eating and updated with new practices and techniques, nutrition therapist Elyse Resch and dietitian Evelyn Tribole give you all the ammunition you need to get off the roller coaster of chronic dieting and heal your relationship with food.