Michael Pollan says that instead of food, we're consuming "edible food-like substances." The Western diet has traded food for nutrients and common sense for confusion. The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become. Thirty years of nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter. Learn what Pollan offers as a simple solution to eating well. Dr. Dean Ornish is founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito.

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The New Yorker staff writer Atul Gawande is the author of Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance and Complications, a humane and passionate reminders that doctors are people, too. A MacArthur Fellow, a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and an assistant professor at Harvard, Gawande's latest work finds a remedy for grievous medical errors in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospi­tal infection.

Dr. Kessler, the controversial former head of the FDA who took on the big tobacco companies, now strikes out at the food industry in The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Isatiable American Appetite. Kessler reveals startling facts. Did you know that many foods are created to stimulate the appetite even after we're full and are engineered to literally melt in your mouth so that you'll eat faster and consume more calories? You may never look at restaurant chicken, often injected with sugar, salt and fat, the same way again.

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Dr. Verghese's interest in a more patient-sensitive approach to medicine and his remarkable empathy for patient suffering have brought him national renown. His acclaimed My Own Country is based on his experience in treating HIV patients, and his latest book, Cutting for Stone, mines the story of his own life, from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City.

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