EAT YOUR VITAMINS by Mascha Davis reflects her credentials: Masters of Public Health and Registered Dietician Nutritionist. This book is packed with information and will serve as a ready reference source for our Health classes, especially during their Nutrition Unit when they complete a project on various foods and their components. Davis has organized this text alphabetically with entries for roughly 50 vitamins, minerals and nutrients. For each, she includes comments about its role in the body, signs of deficiency, how much one needs, and natural sources. A recipe, such as Asian-Inspired Beef and Broccoli (for iron), follows. Nutrition information is included, but photos are not. The cover of EAT YOUR VITAMINS is appealing and in line with the images on Davis' blog where she posted in early March about the Corona diet, reminding readers to build immunity and eat vegetables of all colors, lean protein, and nuts and seeds.

Link in live post:
https://nomadistanutrition.com/blog/2020/3/7/the-corona-diet

Eat Your Vitamins is an A - Z guide of the nutrients people need and where to get them. Davis includes the benefits of each nutrient, the symptoms of deficiency, recommended daily intake and some recipes. In addition to the amount of the featured nutrient, the recipes also include information you might find on a standard nutrition label (such as sodium, fiber, carbs, etc) even though these nutrients all explained individually as well. Where possible, Davis mentions both vegan and non-vegan sources of the vitamins, and specifies when vegans should consider supplementation.

My biggest takeaway from Eat Your Vitamins is that it's remarkably easy to get full servings of each vitamin and mineral without any special pills. Unless you have certain digestive issues or allergies or dietary considerations that prevent you from eating certain categories of food, simply eating a variety of fruits and veggies throughout the week should be enough to keep you healthy. In theory, you can get all the vitamins you need from one or two plant-based meals per day (this depends on the specific plants and the serving size, of course). Diet Culture has us believing that pill bottles are better than what God and mother nature gave us. It's time to change that.

I'm knocking off one star because the book was a little dry, but I suppose that's because it's meant to be a straight-forward guide more than a "fun read."

Very informative. This book was extremely helpful in determining the vitamins that will benefit each individual person. I loved getting the list of foods you can get the vitamins from and the recipes.

I received this galley from NetGalley.

Eat Your Vitamins by Mascha Davis is an A to Z guide of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients and which foods contain these nutrients. There are also recipes. All in all I found it a good guide for someone who is wanting to begin the journey to better understanding and healthy lifestyle.

"Eat Your Vitamins" is about vitamins and minerals. The author listed 43 entries covering essential vitamins and minerals as well as things like amino acids, antioxidants, cobalt, fiber, omega-3s, water, and sleep. She started with a brief explanation of why you should get your vitamins and minerals from food rather than synthetic supplements. However, the rest of the book focused more on information about the vitamins and minerals rather than the food. Each entry talked about what that nutrient does in your body, the signs of deficiency, how much you need, if you can get too much, and listed about 9 to 13 food sources high in that nutrient. She also included a recipe using foods high in that nutrient. Overall, I'd recommend this book to someone wanting to know more about vitamins and minerals. However, it did not contain very extensive information on what foods to eat to meet your needs.

I should also mention that when she talked about choline, she repeated a recommendation that is not based off of studies (which she admits) but which suggests that everyone needs to eat an egg a day (which is not true). I'd recommend that she look up Dr. Greger's videos about choline as you can get an unhealthy amount of it.

oh, this was such a disappointment :(

based on the cover and the author's instagram, i thought this would be a light, fun, easy to read book about the best ways to get all the vitamins you need.

there's so much information out there that it can get overwhelming. like most people, i've read bits and pieces and know the general advice, but if i write down the best way to get 10 vitamins that i think i need, i end up with 10 or more different kinds of foods. depending on what they are and how they go together, i can't eat all 10 of them in a day. but maybe 2 of those items hit 2 different vitamins, you know? that's what i want.

i want to know what are the best things to eat to hit as many vitamins as i can. spinach hits a bunch of vitamins, so if i eat spinach, i don't need to eat the other thing for the other vitamin. you know? but maybe there's an item that only hits one vitamin so i gotta make sure to eat that.

perhaps that's my fault for expecting that out of this book, but i just feel like it missed the mark. it's easy to google vitamins and what foods i need to eat to get that vitamin. i've done that, likely lots of people have. i was really hoping this would be a book about overall, what are the best things to eat to get all your vitamins. not a list of literally every single food for every single vitamin. i don't even know if i am making sense, obviously i am not a writer, nor am i a nutritionist. basically, i thought i would get a book with advice on the best things to eat, maybe some meal plans or whole day plans with snacks that combine all the things you need... not the same lists i can find by googling. i wanted someone to take those lists and that information and give me ideas of what to eat to hit all the vitamins.

i was also hoping it would be interesting and easy to read - it's not. my eyes glazed over so many times, it was like i was reading a textbook. so boring. the author has the opportunity to turn something kind of complicated into something interesting and accessible, and it definitely did not do that. again, maybe my fault for expecting one thing based on the cover/author's instagram, but ultimately i was disappointed and can't recommend.

What a missed opportunity. I was so excited to review this book, as I've been compiling this information on my own for myself and my family for years. The first time I read about the importance of selenium and that one brazil nut gave you your RDA of it, I was determined to just look up our needs and the best food sources and find ways to work them into our daily diets rather than have us all take synthetic, expensive and less healthy vitamins. It sounds much easier than it is, especially as needs are different for males and females at all different ages and food sources vary widely. So I was thrilled at the premise of this book, that it would give you the information about what nutrients you needed and how to get them through food.

So why did this miss the boat for me? First off, it leaves out a ton of information I find important. For instance, I didn't see any information about the fact that most of our grains are already fortified with synthetic versions of many vitamins. White flour, rice, corn and other grains have many vitamins added to them, like it or not. Some of these may be problematic like folic acid, which has been linked to cancer in several studies (and a much higher death rate to cancer if you are taking supplementation versus cancer patients who are not taking folic acid). In addition, many people (as many as 40% of the US population) have a common genetic mutation known as MTHFR that means we cannot process folic acid and create folate, making us much more vulnerable to deficiency. While the author does mention that synthetic folic acid has been linked to cancer and that too much has negative health effects, she doesn't go into any of the rest of this at all. For those who want to consume folate as food and avoid synthetic folic acid, it's important to also know to avoid processed foods like white flour, corn meal, etc. that make up the vast majority of many diets -- these are used to make commercial bread, pasta, cereal, rice, tortilla chips, you name it. I am not a nutritionist and can not go into the subject properly here, but this author is and I'm so disappointed that this kind of information is completely omitted.

In addition, the book is just dull. It's written entirely in black, white and blue, and then written in a very textbook way. There are no illustrations, photos, nothing to break it up. It's written like an encyclopedia. I am a nutrition nerd so I actually read it, but few people are going to want to slog through something written like a car manual to get the important information about getting all of the nutrients they need and why each one matters.

There are one or two recipes after each nutrient to tell you a good way to get that nutrient, but there's another huge failing there. The nutritional information for the recipes doesn't include the nutrient listed. WTH? If you've just convinced me that I need more magnesium in my diet and then you offer up a smoothie recipe to give me magnesium, why on earth will you not tell me how much magnesium is in it? Isn't that the point of this book? Yes, I can get out a calculator and piece of paper and look up how much magnesium is in two tablespoons of sunflower seeds (the information on the previous page is for a half cup, so I then need to find out how many tablespoons in a half cup) and then look to see what other ingredients may have magnesium and then do the math... but I shouldn't have to. The recipe for magnesium should tell me how much magnesium is in it. (Incidentally, magnesium is really important and while it can be hard to get all you need via diet it is well absorbed through the skin and epsom salt baths are great for upping you or your kids' intake.) Besides all this, the recipes often don't even give you an appreciable amount of the nutrient for your daily needs, making it seem hopeless to actually get enough of everything you need through diet.

There are no sample meal plans provided, which also surprised me. I kind of expected to see some lists of daily meals and snacks that would meet the RDA of an adult or child, showing that the reader can actually get all of her/his dietary needs met through a healthy diet. There's nothing of this sort at all.

I had many more issues with this book (regarding her advice about fluoride, vitamin D and DHA, to name three more), but those are the biggest. All in all, it was just such a disappointment. I will continue to compile my own lists.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

I got an advance copy of this book via Netgalley. What to say about an A-Z guide? The cover looks great and there is indeed a very comprehensive list of vitamins et al and what they can do for your body. It is not reading material as such but a handy book for looking things up.