There is no shortage of health information. That is the problem this volume addresses, and it is worth stating precisely, because the obvious remedy of adding more information is the wrong one.
A person who wants to eat better, train sensibly, sleep properly or understand a diagnosis has access to more material than any previous generation, and almost none of it arrives labeled with its reliability. A book resting on four decades of randomized trials and a book resting on one small study and an author's conviction look identical on a shelf. They are written with equal confidence, and confidence is the one signal a reader can detect without specialist training. It is also the least informative one. In this field, confidence and evidence are only loosely related, and the relationship is sometimes inverse: the strongest claims are frequently made where the evidence is thinnest, because a thin evidence base leaves more room to be certain in.
This volume describes six hundred and sixty books across twenty subjects, from the physiology of the body through nutrition, training, injury, recovery, aging and behavior change. Each entry states what the book covers, what distinguishes it from its neighbors, why it earns a place, and where its claims outrun what supports them. The last of those is the point. A reader who finishes an entry should know not only whether to read the book but which parts of it to trust.
It is equally important to say what this is not. It is not a health program. There is no diet here, no training plan, no protocol, and no position on what any individual reader should do. It is not medical advice, and nothing in it substitutes for a clinician who knows a particular body and its history. And it is not a ranking of books by quality. Several titles are included because they are influential rather than because they are correct, and where a book has shaped what people believe while resting on evidence that has since weakened, the entry says both things. A reader who mistakes inclusion for endorsement will misread the collection.
The books were selected against a consistent standard. Each chapter carries thirty-three titles arranged in three tiers by the background they assume rather than by their quality, with twelve marked as the best place to start. Author credentials are stated plainly in every entry, including when an author holds no credential relevant to the subject they are writing about, which in this field is more common than a reader might expect. Commercial interests are disclosed wherever an author sells a program, a supplement, a certification or a device connected to the argument their book makes. None of this is intended as accusation. People who develop methods are frequently the best people to explain them. It is information a reader is entitled to have.
A word about who this is for. It assumes no scientific training and no existing knowledge of any of the twenty subjects, and it assumes a reader capable of holding two ideas at once: that a book can be worth reading and also wrong in places. Most health writing asks the reader to accept or reject wholesale. This volume asks for something harder and more useful, which is a graded response, and every entry is written to make that possible by separating what a book establishes from what it merely asserts.
It is also written for a second reader, less often served. Clinicians, trainers, dietitians and coaches are asked constantly what to read and are frequently asked about books they have not read by patients and clients who have. The advanced tier of each chapter identifies the professional references that settle questions, and the entries throughout state where a popular book departs from what those references say. A practitioner who wants to know what their client has just read, and what is wrong with it, will find that here.
A note on the subject itself. Health, fitness and nutrition is unusual among the subjects in this series in that acting on bad information has direct physical consequences. A poor business book costs a reader time. A poor nutrition book can cost them years of unnecessary restriction, and a poor book on pain can leave them afraid to move. The entries in this volume are correspondingly more insistent about limitations than they would be in a subject where less rides on the answer, and where a claim is not supported the entry says so rather than leaving a polite gap.
The collection is maintained rather than fixed. Evidence in this field moves, and some of what is reported here as current will be revised. That is not a defect in the collection or in the research; it is what a working field looks like. The final chapter lists a set of positions that were once stated confidently by credible people and have since been abandoned, and it says plainly that some present certainties will join them.
If a reader takes one thing from this volume before reading any of the books in it, it should be this. Attention in health and fitness tracks what can be sold rather than what is supported. The interventions with the strongest evidence behind them are, almost without exception, free: moving regularly, sleeping enough, eating mostly whole food, not smoking, drinking little, keeping relationships in repair, and having something that matters to do. None of those can be packaged, so none of them is promoted, and the space that would otherwise be occupied by them is filled with supplements, devices, tests, protocols and branded methods whose evidence is weaker by an order of magnitude. A reader who understands that distribution will read the rest of this volume, and everything outside it, more accurately.
Source: the printed volume, pages 9–10. Reproduced from the printed volume.