Welcome to the latest installment of Integrative Nutrition Reviews, where we consider books, movies, and other media related to health, food, and personal wellness. Want to suggest something for us to review? Post it in the comments!

As you probably know, obesity and type 2 diabetes—two diseases that go hand in hand—have become major global epidemics. Recent estimates predict that by the year 2030, over half of American adults will be obese and 552 million people will struggle with diabetes.

The statistics look grim, but is there anything we can do? As it turns out, there’s hope after all. In his new book, The Blood Sugar Solution, renowned physician and IIN visiting teacher Dr. Mark Hyman offers an encouraging answer for the dual-pronged problem of obesity and insulin resistant diabetes, which Hyman refers to as “diabesity.”

Diabesity may have a tight grip on the world’s population, but Hyman offers some good news: the condition is highly preventable, treatable, and often reversible. The Blood Sugar Solution provides a personal plan that breaks through myths and misconceptions about diabesity, and lays out seven key steps to preventing, treating and reversing both diseases by dealing with the underlying causes.

The eight-week plan is designed to reboot the metabolism, foster weight loss, and essentially reverse type 2 diabetes. According to Hyman, additional benefits may include reduced blood pressure, increased energy, the elimination of joint and muscle pain, improved sleep, and an overall better mood and outlook.

If you just use your phone to make calls and play Angry Birds, you could be missing out on some great new tools to help you live a healthy, happy life! If you liked our previous posts, 23 Apps for Health & Happiness and More Apps for Your Health & Happiness, you're sure to love our latest list of IIN-approved apps!

Sustainability

Clean Plates - iPhone

Find your next healthy, sustainable restaurant pick with this app! Browse for organic meats, vegan or vegetarian fare, gluten-free options, and naturally sweetened desserts, alongside more standard restaurant filters, like price and ambiance. We're so excited about this app version of 2005 graduate Jared Koch's essential guide to New York dining, Clean Plates! Currently, only restaurants in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles are included in the search, but we'll update when the app expands! (FREE)

inBloom - iPhone

Like to buy organic? Or gluten-free? Paleo-friendly, raw, or local? This customizable app will help you find food to suit your dietary and environmental preferences, whatever they are! Based on your location, the app can direct you to the nearest of any of its hundreds of listed farmers markets, grocery stores, CSAs, green hotels, biodiesel and electric charging stations, green supply stores, and clothing stores. Finding your favorite sustainable products will be a piece of organic cake. (FREE)

In November, we brought you 23 iPhone apps to help you achieve health and wellness everywhere you go. But since not all of you are using iPhones, we thought we’d rework that list to also include links to Android and Blackberry versions, if available. Now we’ve brought you 10 more apps, many of which are available on several different platforms!

Food & Nutrition Apps

The Eatery - iOS

Learn more about yourself and your eating habits with this easy food tracking app. Simply snap a photo and rate your meal. It's not about counting calories, but studies support the idea that just recording what you eat can help you get healthier. (Free)

Meal Plans - Food on the Table – Android / iOS

Is planning out your meals for the week a hassle? Are you spending too much on groceries? This app can help! Using your location, this app will find foods on sale at your local supermarket, provide recipes using those ingredients and based on your preferences, and compile an organized grocery list for you. Meal planning is now a cinch! (Free)

Chemical Cuisine - Android / iOS 

Ever wondered what that long, scientific-sounding ingredient on your favorite snack’s nutrition label is? This is the app for you. With safety ratings and descriptions for over 130 food additives, you can search and find the information to help you make healthy decisions. ($0.99)

Calorie Counter by FatSecret - Blackberry / Android / iOS 

This simple food tracker will help you find nutritional info for all your foods, plus log your daily intake, exercise, and weight. Consistent food journaling is proven to lead to a healthier lifestyle – start now, and for free! (Free)

Did you know that in the United States alone, there are more than 400,000 child migrant workers between the age of 5 and 18 that work in fields picking fruit and vegetables? Children, who often work 14 hours a day for 6 months out of the year, harvest 25% of the food that Americans eat. 

The Harvest, a new film from Shine Global in collaboration with executive producer Eva Longoria, documents the sad reality of child migrant workers. The film follows the lives of three children, Zulema, Perla and Victor, as they are taken from their homes and schools and forced to travel with their families from South to North, following the harvest seasons.

All three children are shown packing up their belongings and saying good-bye to their friends, then traveling in search of migrant work. Zulema drives with her family to the Midwest to pick strawberries and cucumbers and eventually moves North to follow the apple harvest in the fall. Her family lives in a cramped and dirty migrant camp, with barely enough room for her and her mother, let alone her siblings and grandparents.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In those seven simple words, celebrated writer and activist Michael Pollan cuts through all the confusion surrounding nutrition and sums up almost everything you need to know about healthy eating.

The premise of Pollan’s mantra is simple: until recently, people relied on food traditions instead of nutrition facts to guide their eating habits. All meals were home-cooked, made from fresh seasonal ingredients, and families and friends enjoyed them together sitting down at the table.

Fast forward to today, when the world has become dependent on what Pollan calls “edible food-like substances” – highly processed food that is produced not by nature, but in a lab – and eating meals has been replaced by scarfing down pre-packaged snacks on the go. The paradox is that the more we worry about nutrition and dieting, the less healthy we seem to become.

In Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Pollan gives solid bits of wisdom and advice on how to adopt a saner approach towards food. This handbook of sorts provides simple common-sense rules, one on each page, that include such pearls as: 

At IIN, we are always looking for good, healthy cookbooks, so it’s no surprise that we are very excited about the release of Integrative Nutrition Graduate, class of 2011, Elizabeth Rider’s new book, WholeEating Cookbook!

The book is a vegetarian, gluten-free cookbook with an emphasis on low-glycemic recipes. What is low-glycemic? The glycemic scale measures the rate at which the food that you eat increases your blood sugar levels. Foods with lower numbers, 0-55, are low glycemic foods, and only raise your blood sugar level slightly. Foods that are medium glycemic range from 56-70, and high glycemic are from 71-100. Rider’s book features recipes for foods that satisfy your appetite without spiking your blood sugar level.

WholeEating Cookbook is full of healthy recipes that are perfect to serve at your holiday party this year. Our favorites include the Orange Pomegranate Sparkler, a sweet, fizzy, and festive drink, and the Crunchy Spiced Chickpeas, an appetizer recipe we recommend doubling – your guests will love it!

Smartphones are nearly ubiquitous in this day and age, and we’re excited to see so many nutrition, fitness, and wellness apps on the market! If you’d like to find out how your phone can be turned into a tool for your personal health, check out this next segment in our Integrative Nutrition Reviews series.

Fitness

RunKeeper - iOS / Android

Enter activity manually, or use the GPS feature to track your run automatically. The app will save information about how far you went, your pace, calories burned, and your route and upload them to RunKeeper.com. It even integrates your phone's music, and makes it easy to share your accomplishments with friends online. (Free)

C25K - iOS / Android / Blackberry

Never run a day of your life? No problem. This app already has your gradual training for a 5K all planned out. With GPS support, music integration, and alerts to let you know when you need to switch between walking and running, you'll be a regular runner in no time. ($2.99)

If you are on a gluten-free diet, or you have celiac disease, you know that reading cookbooks, cooking magazines or anything of the sort can be tough. It’s no fun looking at pictures of beautiful, delicious food that you can’t eat!

Enter Easy Eats, the newest digital food magazine to hit the web.

At first glance, the cover that features delectable glazed doughnuts scattered with rainbow sprinkles might have gluten-free eaters running for the hills. However, the tagline will, without a doubt, pull them back in: "It’s good to be gluten free."

Editor-In-Chief Slivana Nardone, whose most recent gig was Editor-In-Chief of Rachael Ray magazine, decided to create the online magazine after her children were both diagnosed with gluten and dairy intolerance.  As a cookbook writer, former bakery owner, and food lover, she created Easy Eats to prove to her children (and everyone else) that it’s good to be gluten free! As Slivana says "My intentions all originate from the same place: positivity. Yes, you can eat mac and cheese. Yes, I will make cupcakes for your school birthday party."

This is part of our new Integrative Nutrition Reviews series, where we will consider books, movies, and other media related to health, food, and personal wellness. If you'd like to suggest a particular book or movie for Integrative Nutrition to review in the future, please comment!

"Let food be thy medicine." - Hippocrates, Father of Western Medicine

Hippocrates' message is intimately familiar to the Integrative Nutrition community, but what was once obvious to the ancient Father of Western Medicine is increasingly forgotten amongst modern eaters.

The 2011 documentary Forks Over Knives hopes to remind us.

The 90-minute film relates the medical findings of two doctors, T. Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn, both over-seventy years old but still vibrant and active. After years of research in health and nutrition, the MDs (who incidentally both grew up on dairy farms) found themselves on the fringes of their medical communities when they determined that their most effective treatment for the world's most common diseases was no pill or surgery, but the vegan diet.

Study after study, and patient after patient, the doctors found that not only could they treat the symptoms of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer with a vegan diet, but even reverse high-cholesterol and blood pressure, cure diabetes, and in some cases, send cancer into remission.