Books like Fast Food Nation

01

Salt Sugar Fat

Michael Moss · Science

Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, spent four years inside the processed food industry to produce Salt Sugar Fat.

Shares food industry and public health with Fast Food Nation.

02

The End of Overeating

David A. Kessler · Science

David Kessler, a former FDA commissioner and dean of two medical schools, wrote The End of Overeating as a scientific investigation into why so many people — including himself — find it nearly impossible to stop eating hyperpalatable food once they start.

A kindred science read.

03

In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan · Health

In Defense of Food opens with seven words that amount to a quiet provocation: Eat food.

A kindred science read.

04

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Michael Pollan · Health

The Omnivore's Dilemma is Michael Pollan's investigation into four food chains — industrial, industrial organic, local pastoral, and hunted-and-gathered — organized around the question of what we should eat.

A kindred science read.

05

How Not to Die

Michael Greger · Health

How Not to Die is Michael Greger's systematic argument that the fifteen leading causes of death in the United States are largely preventable through diet and lifestyle change.

A kindred science read.

06

The Case Against Sugar

Gary Taubes · Health

The Case Against Sugar is Gary Taubes's focused argument that sugar — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup specifically — is the primary cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and the likely driver of the cluster of diseases, from heart disease to Alzheimer's, that researchers now associate with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

Shares food industry and public health with Fast Food Nation.

07

Bad Science

Ben Goldacre · Science

Bad Science is Ben Goldacre's dissection of how scientific evidence gets misrepresented, distorted, and invented in the service of selling health products, generating media coverage, and protecting bad actors from accountability.

Both dig into public health.

08

Spillover

David Quammen · Science

Spillover is David Quammen's exhaustive investigation into zoonotic disease — illness that jumps from animals to humans — and the ecological and evolutionary logic behind why such spillover events happen.

Both dig into public health.

09

The Coming Plague

Laurie Garrett · Science

The Coming Plague, published in 1994, is Laurie Garrett's argument that the era of conquest over infectious disease declared in the 1960s was a dangerous illusion, and that the conditions for catastrophic new pandemics were already in place.

Both dig into public health.

10

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Robert Whitaker · Health

Anatomy of an Epidemic is Robert Whitaker's investigation into a paradox: as the use of psychiatric medication in the United States has increased dramatically over the past half-century, the number of people on disability due to mental illness has risen in parallel.

Both dig into public health.

11

Bubble in the Sun

Christopher Knowlton · History

Bubble in the Sun is Christopher Knowlton's account of the Florida land boom of the 1920s, the single most spectacular speculative real estate bubble in American history before the 2000s.

Both dig into american culture.

12

Capital: Volume I

Karl Marx · Economics

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, published in 1867, is Karl Marx's systematic analysis of the capitalist mode of production.

Both dig into labor.