Books like Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity

Very interesting, readable book about the interplay of diet and genetics, mostly comprehensible to a layman. Nabhan looks at several populations, along with their traditional and current diets and how that affects their overall health re: malaria, longevity, diabetes, clotting, and cardiovascular disease. His main point is that people are healthier when they eat the diets that they have evolved to eat over the last several thousand years, and that this sort of diet-connected evolution is fairly quick. This is convincing for people whose family history is known and fairly homogeneous: Southwestern Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and native Hawaiians who tried returning to native diets (and increased their activity levels) lost significant amounts of weight and many were able to stop using diabetes medications. It's less useful for people whose ancestry is mongrelized or whose ancestors had to move around a lot, but then, that's a much more complex puzzle. Some discussion of supertasters (hence the title).