How to use your diet to heal your body

Countless studies have shown that food plays a major role in promoting health and preventing and treating disease.

Kirsten Hartvig draws on her deep knowledge - and her many years of hands-on experience as a natural health practitioner and researcher - to give you a unique guide to healthy eating and to the use of food as medicine.

You will learn how foods stimulate the body's natural self-healing ability, and you will gain understanding of the role of specific nutrients in treating everyday ailments, aches and pains.

Food As Medicine will also show you how to protect yourself against more serious health problems with practical diet and recipe advice.

As a unique daily health reference, Food As Medicine also takes a fresh look at the nutritional value of the foods we eat.

It will give you a better understanding of the quality of the calories obtained from the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in all sorts of foods, and it also looks in detail at the vital role played by vitamins, minerals and trace elements in maintaining health and treating disease.

The Big Book of Quick, Easy Family Recipes is packed with easy, delicious meals that kids love to eat, and parents feel great about serving. Each recipe is either quick to prepare, or allows you to pop it in the oven and get on with something else, so stressful meal prep is a thing the past. With over 500 recipes, you can find brilliant options for every meal of the day.

It is broken down into easy-to-use chapters:

Cloves from the Moluccas, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, pepper from the Malabar coast, chillis from Peru - for over 4,000 years spices have been used to bring recipes to life, as well as to enhance beauty and vitality, and treat and prevent disease. They have enriched our language and our folklore, excited our senses and inspired us to explore new culinary vistas. As we seek to live more healthily, the near-magical ability of spices to transform simple foods into memorable feasts can help us to rebalance our diet in fun and satisfying ways, and their powerful health-protecting and immune-stimulating properties enable us to deal more effectively with the stresses of modern living. The Healing Spices Cookbook will show you how to make the most of your spicerack and discover just how tasty healthy eating can be. Renowned nutritionist and naturopath Kirsten Hartvig offers over 100 delicious and easy recipes from around the world, from starters and preserves to confectionery and liqueurs. Also included in the book is a detailed directory of spices, featuring profiles of the healthiest, most popular kinds, including ginger, paprika, saffron and tamarind. This is a one-stop, easy-to-use, practical guide to the colourful world of spices, telling you all you need to know about buying, storing and using them so you can release their full potential for improving well-being and vitality.

A quintessential textbook which connects the different functions, systems and interactions of the human body as whole and emphasises the importance reconnecting human health with nature

Human structure, function and dysfunction is commonly taught under the headings of anatomy, physiology (including biochemistry and pharmacology), and pathology.

Whilst these divisions seem logical, the drawback is that they encourage us to consider parts of the body in isolation. Organs and tissues are divided into systems for ease of description, but relatively little time is spent learning how body systems relate to one another and to the wider world.

The result is a sense of disconnection between the body and the environment as a whole, and this in turn makes it for us hard to assimilate the impact of more recent knowledge - such as that we have several functioning brains capable of remembering things and taking decisions in different parts of the body in addition to our normal brain; or that our microbiomes - made up of cells that are not genetically part of us - can have a massive impact on health, and on the way we function.

An ecosystem consists of all the living components of a system and the physical environments with which they interact. Its components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Things are not separated into discrete systems - everything is a symphony of interaction, feedback and adjustment.

The Human Ecosystem explores the fundamental processes and interactions that maintain health and enable us to recover from illness. It considers human structure and function based on an understanding that human beings are complex, intelligent, adaptive, self-healing, networked ecosystems in which information is transferred and acted upon at incredible speed.

Above all, it presents us as part of the wider ecosystem, interdependent with Nature and all living things for our health and survival.