Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Video
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$18.00$18.00
FREE delivery: Thursday, Feb 1 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $8.47
Other Sellers on Amazon
FREE Shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
What to Eat Paperback – April 17, 2007
Purchase options and add-ons
What to Eat is a classic―"the perfect guidebook to help navigate through the confusion of which foods are good for us" (USA Today).
Since its publication in 2006, Marion Nestle's What to Eat has become the definitive guide to making healthy and informed choices about food. Praised as "radiant with maxims to live by" in The New York Times Book Review and "accessible, reliable and comprehensive" in The Washington Post, What to Eat is an indispensable resource, packed with important information and useful advice from the acclaimed nutritionist who "has become to the food industry what . . . Ralph Nader [was] to the automobile industry" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
How we choose which foods to eat is growing more complicated by the day, and the straightforward, practical approach of What to Eat has been praised as welcome relief. As Nestle takes us through each supermarket section―produce, dairy, meat, fish―she explains the issues, cutting through foodie jargon and complicated nutrition labels, and debunking the misleading health claims made by big food companies. With Nestle as our guide, we are shown how to make wise food choices―and are inspired to eat sensibly and nutritiously.
- Print length624 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNorth Point Press
- Publication dateApril 17, 2007
- Dimensions6 x 1.38 x 9 inches
- ISBN-109780865477384
- ISBN-13978-0865477384
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
Review
“According to nutritionist Nestle, the increasing confusion among the general public about what to eat comes from two sources: experts who fail to create a holistic view by isolating food components and health issues, and a food industry that markets items on the basis of profits alone. She suggests that, often, research findings are deliberately obscure to placate special interests. Nestle says that simple, common-sense guidelines available decades ago still hold true: consume fewer calories, exercise more, eat more fruits and vegetables and, for today's consumers, less junk food. The key to eating well, Nestle advises, is to learn to navigate through the aisles (and thousands of items) in large supermarkets. To that end, she gives readers a virtual tour, highlighting the main concerns of each food group, including baby, health and prepared foods, and supplements. Nestle's prose is informative and entertaining; she takes on the role of detective, searching for clues to the puzzle of healthy and satisfying nutrition. Her intelligent and reassuring approach will likely make readers venture more confidently through the jungle of today's super-sized stores.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Nutritionist Nestle's newest volume aims to help the American consumer determine what best to eat to improve or to maintain good health. Pursuing what she hopes is a unique and beneficial approach, she surveys a supermarket on a food-by-food basis, noting for each category what nutritional benefits are claimed and what really are the advantages and dangers in consuming any grocery offering. She documents how food industry concerns have perverted nutritional and origin labeling, dismayed that economics has once more trumped open information. She assesses the roles of trans-fats in processed food, methylmercury in fish, calcium in dairy products, salmonella in fresh eggs, sugar in cereals, and genetic modification. Nestle is particularly concerned that consumers understand all the implications, good and bad, of the perennially contentious "organic" label.” ―Booklist
“[This] book is for anyone who has read a food label; been annoyed at how often their children nag them for certain cereals; wondered about the difference between natural and organic; or questioned who is minding the store when it comes to nutrition and food safety.” ―Marian Burros, The New York Times
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0865477388
- Publisher : North Point Press; First Edition (April 17, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 624 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780865477384
- ISBN-13 : 978-0865477384
- Item Weight : 1.99 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.38 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #509,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #653 in Detox & Cleansing Diets
- #2,501 in Weight Loss Diets (Books)
- #3,660 in Other Diet Books
- Customer Reviews:
Important information
To report an issue with this product or seller, click here.
About the author

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003. She also holds appointments as Professor of Sociology at NYU and Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. Her degrees include a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition, both from the University of California, Berkeley. She has held faculty positions at Brandeis University and the UCSF School of Medicine. From 1986-88, she was senior nutrition policy advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services and managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health. Her research examines scientific, economic, and social influences on food choice.
She is the author of three prize-winning books: "Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health" (2002, revised edition, 2007), "Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety" (2003, revised edition, 2010), and "What to Eat" (2006). "Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine" was published in September 2008 and in paperback in 2010. Her book with Dr. Malden Nesheim, "Feed Your Pet Right," was published by Free Press/Simon & Schuster in May 2010. "Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics," also co-authored with Dr. Nesheim, is scheduled for publication in March 2012.
She writes a monthly Food Matters column for the San Francisco Chronicle, and blogs daily (almost) at www.foodpolitics.com. She also twitters @marionnestle.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Although you could march through its 600-plus pages chronologically, it is wiser to use the table of contents to choose topics of special interest to you. For instance, I skipped the chapter on margarine because I do not eat it and never have, and thus do not need to know about its questionable ingredients or health hazards. If you, however, have switched from butter for health reasons, you should educate yourself on the fire now that you've leaped out of the frying pan.
Fearlessly, Nestle wades into the claims and counterclaims, the health benefits and the health hazards, the truths and the half-truths of fruits and vegetables, dairy products, cereals and breads, meat and seafood, snack food and yes, even bottled water. It gets confusing when you read labels and see such murky terms as "natural" which sound good but mean many things to many packagers.
Best of all, the book explains the politics of food -- how powerful lobbying groups ensure that their profits take precedence over your health via their strong control over both politicians and, more disturbingly, the very government organizations (such as the FDA and the USDA) responsible for protecting us, the consumers.
Though not as engaging as Michael Pollan's seminal book THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, Nestle's WHAT TO EAT deserves its spot in every foodie's library. If you're worried about what you're putting in your (and your kids') mouth, you should be. Arm yourself with knowledge. Speak the language (often the "doublespeak") of Big Food. Promote healthier practices in the food and agriculture business by voting with your food dollars (chiefly for organic and local foods which, with enough support, will come down in price). Sadly, money is the only language giant food corporations understand. Protests about the dangers of their practices and ingredients -- unless it affects their precious bottom lines -- will forever fall on deaf ears.
The one problem I had with this book is that it spent all of a paragraph on pastured meat; Nestle chooses organic over pastured and I find that questionable. The book is a few years old so maybe it is simply lacking in information that has only recently been made accessible, but I expect more from her than telling everyone that organic everything is better; countless others have demonstrated that often organically raised animals are hardly better treated than industrially farmed animals, so if you are buying organic chicken, organic pork, organic beef, realize that though the organic certification has merit (especially in terms of fruit and vegetables), you might be surprised to see organic chickens living in the same cramped conditions as Perdue chickens. They are only slightly better some of the time and to me it's not worth the chance.
Further, Nestle fails to mention an important point: much of farm stand food is grown organically; but for a farmer, organic certification can be prohibitively expensive. Local food is very often organic, but unlabeled, contributing further to the nebulous conditions under which our food is grown. As I said this is a great book and a must-read but I would suggest supplements: Fast Food Nation, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Peter Singer and Jim Mason's book "The Ethics of What We Eat." Those are probably my top three choices. If you've already been through those and want more detailed information, this is a great book, but there are a lot of perspectives on food and despite Nestle's expertise on the subject, it does not seem that buying food with an organic stamp solves all ethical dilemmas for today's consumer.
Some examples:
- in some NY state rivers, mercury levels in fishes are so high that a single fish is enough to exceed your monthly mercury levels.
- Some corn syrup doesn't qualify as sugar (and doesn't have to be listed as 'sugar'), but your body digests it just the same
- In the early 2000s, some large veggie producers tried to get sewage sludge allowed on organic crops to weaken the organic standard.
It takes about three or four 2-hours sittings to go through the book.







