BowTiedPhys Comprehensive Reading Stack
24 categories. 53 titles. Something for everyone.
One of the most common questions I get: What do you recommend reading to learn more in this area?
A few months ago, I posted a few of my favorite picks - a “Basic Reading Stack”. Now, as promised, I’ve developed a Comprehensive Reading Stack.
Many of the titles here have served as the foundation of my own health framework today - but simply because I recommend a book here doesn’t mean I agree with everything the author advocates for or even the basic premise of the writing. So why am I recommended the title then? Because it will challenge your a priori like it did mine. Bolster your argument. As Charlie Munger states: "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do." This is how you get güd.
Many overestimate just how little time & effort needed to put yourself into the top 5% (maybe even 1-2%) of the population in health knowledge: 3 - 4 books on a topic. Yes - that’s it. While at the same time it’s easy to underestimate the sheer volume & sensitivity required to become a true expert in any field - tens of thousands of iterations.
Whether you want to be able to hold your own in basic health discussions with your family & friends or get your own health in order in 2025 - the point here is to be comprehensive across a breadth of topics. Use this as a reference point as you continue to build out your knowledge in the areas you wish to be most advanced in. There’s something for everyone. And this is the place to start.
Here’s the full list below:
Biohacking
Boundless: Upgrade Your Brain, Optimize Your Body & Defy Aging
“You will discover that you actually can look, feel, and perform the way you’ve always sensed that remarkable and complex human beings should be able to. You’ll find that your willpower, cognition, decision-making, lack of procrastination, and focus can all be biologically enhanced without spending thousands of dollars on biohacks or an advanced mind-training vacation.”
Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever
“You simply weren’t engineered to live a long time while swimming in the modern soup of man-made chemicals and toxic metals more present in our food supply and in our bodies than Mother Nature ever intended.”
Biomarkers
Your Blood Never Lies: How to Read a Blood Test
“A blood test is essentially a blueprint of your health and a glimpse of its future. It tells you so much about what is going on inside your body, and it can speak volumes about what may go on inside of it somewhere down the line. The information obtained from lab results can push you to take the needed steps to put (or keep) your health on the right track.”
The Blood Code: Unlock the Secrets of Your Metabolism
“The most important thing to understand is this: Your lifestyle and diet interact with your genetic code. Your health, vitality, and disease symptoms occur where these factors intersect…When your daily habits are properly matched to your genetic code, the results will be expressed in your current health and your long-term wellness. And if you have children in the future, it will also be found in their genetic expression and health.”
Bodybuilding
The Wisdom of Mike Mentzer: The Art, Science and Philosophy of a Bodybuilding Legend
“Mike believed he had to grow in all areas of his humanity. He studied philosophy to better determine truth from falsehood, he studied art to understand both its meaning and purpose, he studied psychology to better learn the workings of the mind, he studied logic to learn the rules of correct thought, he studied the sciences to understand the workings of human physiology and how best to strengthen his body, he studied business to learn how to earn a living by working not for others but for himself and on his own terms, and he studied communication to better express to others the knowledge he had obtained.”
Science & Development of Muscle Hypertrophy
“Training across a wide spectrum of repetition ranges (1 to 20+) is recommended to ensure the complete development of the whole muscle. There is merit to focusing on a medium-repetition range (6- to 12RM) and devoting specific training cycles to lower- and higher-repetition training.”
Body by Science: A Research Based Program for Strength Training, Body building, and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week
“Your muscles deal only with force-production requirements, determined by the resistance to which the muscles are exposed—whether that resistance comes in the form of a free weight, a Nautilus machine, or a bucket of rocks. The scientific literature backs this up: according to the few properly performed studies that measured the effects of free weights versus machines, both are equally effective.”
Breathwork
Breath: The New Science of A Lost Art
“The perfect breath is this: Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air.”
Oxygen Advantage
“The earlier you begin to encourage your children to breathe through their nose and ensure the correct positioning of the tongue, the better. Not only might you help them avoid orthodontic treatment altogether, but the shape of their face, their general health, and their athleticism will be significantly influenced during these few short years. Even genetic predispositions can be minimized when the right action and behavior is enshrined.”
Cancer
Tripping Over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine's Most Entrenched Paradigms
“Once cancer is framed as a metabolic disease, ketone bodies develop an interesting therapeutic potential. Unlike glucose, ketone bodies burn oxidatively. They have to be metabolized in healthy, functioning mitochondria…cancer cells don’t have many of. Metabolically, normal cells have other options, but cancer cells do not.”
Cardiorespiratory Fitness
VO2 Max Essentials: The comprehensive guide to aerobic fitness, how to improve it, and what it means for health, performance, and longevity
“There is an incredible amount of evidence indicating that your VO2 max can predict your risk for cardiovascular disease and even death. What is more, the association of VO2 max with morbidity and mortality is stronger than that for traditional cardiovascular disease risk factors (e.g., cholesterol, BMI, & blood glucose).”
Norwegian Method: The Culture, Science & Humans Behind the Groundbreaking Approach to Elite Endurance Performance
“The simplest way to summarize the Norwegian method is likely something you’ve read or heard before: It’s a very high-volume, relatively low-intensity approach to training, with threshold sessions controlled by lactate measurement…The logic behind a double-threshold day is that you can maximize the aerobic benefit and recovery all at once by doing two hard sessions on a single day instead of spreading them throughout the week.”
Circadian Health
The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight
“Our modern lifestyle, in which we spend most of our time indoors looking at bright screens and turn on bright lights at night, activates melanopsin at the wrong times of day and night, which then disrupts our circadian rhythms and reduces the production of the sleep hormone melatonin; as a result, we cannot get restorative sleep. When we wake up the next day and spend most of the day indoors, the dim indoor light cannot fully activate melanopsin, which means that we cannot align our circadian clock to the day-night cycle, making us feel sleepy and less alert. After a few days or weeks, we get into depression and anxiety.”
EMF
The Body Electric: Electromagnetism And The Foundation Of Life
“Both electric and magnetic fields are really just abstractions that scientists have made up to try to understand electricity's and magnetism's action at a distance, produced by no known intervening material or energy, a phenomenon that used to be considered impossible until it became undeniable. A field is represented by lines of force, another abstraction, to indicate its direction and shape. Both kinds of fields decline with distance, but their influence is technically infinite: Every time you use your toaster, the fields around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so slightly.”
The Non-Tinfoil Guide to EMFs: How to Fix Our Stupid Use of Technology
“You can sit around and wait for the Government to fix things. But our institutions are not only often in a position serious conflicts of interest when it comes to EMFs — they’ll also touch such a huge paycheck in taxes when the 5G technology rolls out they’ll probably take action as fast as they did for trans fats, banning the heart attack-inducing substance around 60 years after its introduction.”
Environmental Toxins
Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race
“I think of the fact that the rate of adverse reproductive changes in males is increasing by about 1 percent per year. This includes the rates of declining sperm counts and testosterone levels, increasing rates of testicular cancer, and the projected worldwide increase in the prevalence of erectile dysfunction. On the female side of the equation, miscarriage rates are also increasing by about 1 percent per year. A coincidence? I think not.”
Food Forensics: The Hidden Toxins Lurking in Your Food and How You Can Avoid Them for Lifelong Health
“I have been offered money not to publish this book. I’ve been offered large advertising contracts to leave certain products out of this book. I’ve been threatened with lawsuits for publishing laboratory results on the Internet. One of the largest natural products retailers in the United States, a $12 billion company, deliberately trained its employees to lie about me in very specific terms by telling customers that “Mike Adams doesn’t have a lab” and that all the laboratory results I’ve been publishing are fictional.”
The Toxin Solution: How Hidden Poisons in the Air, Water, Food, and Products We Use Are Destroying Our Health - And What We Can Do To Fix It
“When a chemical toxin enters your body, it actually alters the speed at which many key functions take place. This alteration can decrease the activity of the enzymes that are required for every bodily function. For example, toxins may increase or decrease heart rate, interrupt neuron connections necessary for the brain to function, decrease the production of thyroid hormones that regulate how fast enzymes work, & block insulin-receptor sites on cells so sugar can’t get in to produce energy.”
Grounding
Earth & Water: A Short Story of Life’s Matrix
“More than just a textual exploration, this volume is underpinned by over 500 academic citations. It merges well-researched facts with an engaging narrative within its scientifically informed pages, a compelling story unfolds, drawing readers into an engaging narrative journey alongside the author.”
Hair
Hair Like a Fox
“The suspicion arises that androgens are not the 'directly causative' agent in baldness, but only one member—albeit a frequently effective one—of a family of remote causes that affect local areas capable of reacting in a special manner”
Hormonal Health
Testosterone Advantage: A Complete Guide to Male Hormonal Balance and Endocrine Health
“DHT is one of the most misunderstood hormones out there. One common misconception is that high levels of DHT directly cause hair loss and prostate problems, leading some individuals to seek ways to reduce its levels by using inhibitors like Finasteride. However, the relationship between DHT, hair loss, and prostate problems is more complex than most people think.”
The Testosterone Optimization Therapy Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Living a Fully Optimized Life
“Testosterone deficiency is a real, global phenomenon afflicting a massive number of men and it will only continue to grow. This means that there’s a growing market of millions of men who are looking for help. But after decades of media misinformation about testosterone, while mislabeling the use of therapeutic testosterone as ‘anabolic steroids’ or ‘juicing’, many men are reluctant to undergo hormone optimization due to erroneous concerns over dangerous side effects. As a result, they look to slickly marketed natural remedies in the hopes of boosting their testosterone levels. And now, tons of fraudsters have spun up YouTube channels and portrayed themselves as experts in order to turn a profit.”
Immunity
The Book of Lymph: Self-Care Practices to Enhance Immunity, Health, and Beauty
“When I address a patient’s lymphatic health, such symptoms often abate, and my client experiences both physical and emotional improvements. This is because the lymphatic system is connected to every other system in the body—including the nervous system, the digestive system, and the neurological system—with branches that run through its wide geography like an intricate web of rivers.”
Light
Chasing the Sun: How The Science of Sunlight Shapes Our Bodies and Minds
“Being out in the sun, we are starting to understand, can lower blood pressure, calm our immune system and even alter our mood. Even without such knowledge, most of us are instinctively drawn to sunlight because sitting in it just feels so great, and there may be a reason for that: when the sunlight hits our skin, our bodies release endorphins, the same 'feel good' hormones that produce a runner's high.”
The Ultimate Guide To Red Light Therapy: How to Use Red and Near-Infrared Light Therapy for Anti-Aging, Fat Loss, Muscle Gain, Performance Enhancement, and Brain Optimization
“If there were a pill that was proven to have powerful anti-aging effects on our skin, combat neurological disease, fight depression and anxiety, increase fat loss, speed recovery from exercise, increase strength and endurance, combat certain autoimmune conditions, fight hair loss, and speed healing from injury—all with little to no side effects—it would be a billion-dollar blockbuster drug. Hundreds of millions of people would be told to start taking it by their doctors every day. And doctors all over the world would call it a ‘miracle drug’.”
Medical System
Code Blue: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex
“Americans spend from 50 percent to 100 percent more on health care as a share of GDP than people in other industrialized countries...yet for all our high expenditure, we get collective outcomes that are demonstrably worse.”
Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health
“If the modern medical establishment got so many major health recommendations wrong over the last few decades, it raises an unsettling question: What are we getting wrong today? Unfortunately, medical dogma may be more prevalent today than in the past because intolerance for different opinions is on the rise, and medical authority is more centralized.”
Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health
“The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.”
Secret History of the War on Cancer
“At the official launch of the war on cancer in the United States in 1971, proof that how and where we live and work affects the chances we may get cancer was basically ignored. Astonishing alliances between naïve or far too clever academics and folks with major economic interests in selling potentially cancerous materials have kept us from figuring out whether or not many modern products affect our chances of developing cancer.”
Metabolic Health
Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health
“We are amid a modern health crisis. The good news is that our system can be fixed, and the crisis can end. Just 120 years ago, starvation, malnutrition, and early death were the norm. Tuberculosis and pneumonia were leading causes of death. Life expectancy in the United States was around age forty-seven. Back then, 30 percent of all U.S. deaths occurred in children under five years of age, compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999. If you transported someone living in those times to the present day, they’d be in utter shock as they tried to process society’s advancements.”
Epi-Paleo Rx: The Prescription for Disease Reversal and Optimal Health
“We are mismatched to our current environment because of what our thoughts have created. We all know that when we eat badly we are making a decision that could ultimately kill us, albeit, slowly. I watch “serial suicide” daily at the fast-food drive-through joints and in the hospital cafeteria. Disease by food is insidious and sinister because the consequences are not apparent until the person ends up in an office like mine with a chronic health condition. We need to abolish the paradox of our marvelous brain’s capacity to alter our environment to the detriment of our ancestral genes. Moreover, we need to realize this mismatch is the Rosetta Stone to regaining optimal health.”
Mitochondria and the Future of Medicine: The Key to Understanding Disease, Chronic Illness, Aging, and Life Itself
“As the onslaught of free radicals continues day in and day out, these mutations build up over a lifetime. Once the damage reaches a threshold, the cell dies, and slowly over time, tissues start to degenerate with each dying cell. This steady erosion is what’s responsible for many age-related degenerative diseases and even the aging process itself.”
Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease - and How to Fight It
“There is no single variable more relevant to heart disease than insulin resistance. Any successful efforts to reduce our high risk of heart disease must address it. When we acknowledge the central role of insulin resistance, we start resolving the fundamental causes, rather than symptoms (which is all medications can do). As much as worldwide efforts to stem heart disease have tried, the longer we overlook insulin resistance, the worse the problem will get”
Nootropics
Head First: The Complete Guide to Healing and Optimizing Your Brain with Nootropic Supplements
“One of the most critical things to understand in using nootropics is that your stack must work synergistically. Because each supplement has a different mechanism of action in your brain and body. And each supplement in your stack should support the other nootropics in your stack.”
Nutrition
Flexible Dieting
“Flexible dieting involves individualizing the degree of dietary flexibility (or rigidity).It also individualizes the precision of tracking and accountability…you just maintain an awareness of your requirements for the least amount of dietary variables that still allows progress (or maintenance of progress). This option involves developing your awareness of hunger and satiety cues.”
The Magnesium Factor
“Magnesium is low-tech. It was an era in love with technology when the epidemic of heart disease peaked. It was a time of Sputnik, nuclear power, and hi-fi recordings; an age for cracking the genetic code, going to the moon, and wiping out smallpox all over the planet. The epidemic of heart disease cried for heroic measures—heart transplants, artificial hearts, bypass surgery, balloon angioplasty, defibrillators and pacemakers, designer foods with no cholesterol and the right kind of fats, and designer drugs to treat risk factors and save lives. A simple nutritional deficiency, quite frankly, didn’t capture anyone's imagination. And by the time real results with magnesium came in consistently, we were already highly invested in high-tech heart treatment and training.”
Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food
“The Deep Nutrition formula for weight loss is simple: Get rid of inflammation that blocks cellular communication, and eat foods that enable you to convert fat cells into healthier tissues. Of course, there’s more to health than a healthy diet. Sleep and physical activity generate other chemicals that help your body know what you are expecting of it. So in order to reshape your body and achieve maximum health, your regimen must include eating real food, resting properly, reducing stress, and doing the right kinds of exercise.”
Real Food for Pregnancy: The Science and Wisdom of Optimal Prenatal Nutrition
“Nutrients work synergistically. Nature is not stupid. And a supplement is rarely superior to what’s available in real, whole foods.”
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects
“The origin of personality and character appear in the light of the newer data to be biologic products and to a much less degree than usually considered pure hereditary traits. Since these various factors are biologic, being directly related to both the nutrition of the parents and to the nutritional environment of the individuals in the formative and growth period any common contributing factor such as food deficiencies due to soil depletion will be seen to produce degeneration of the masses of people due to a common cause. Mass behavior therefore, in this new light becomes the result of natural forces, the expression of which may not be modified by propaganda but will require correction at the source.”
Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism
“Humans require frequent input of energy to perform mechanical work, including cardiac and skeletal muscle contractions; active transport of molecules and ions; and synthesis of complex molecules from simple precursors. The demand for energy by cells and the intake of energy from food are rarely synchronized, so the body is constantly adjusting metabolic pathways to maintain energy homeostasis. Despite the complexity, metabolic integration is achieved by the cells’ ability to use a common energy currency (i.e., ATP) and surprisingly few intermediates (e.g., pyruvate and acetyl-CoA) that tie together metabolic pathways.”
Peptides
Peptide Protocols: Volume One
“We can spend time thinking about this missed opportunity…or we can empower ourselves and our patients to delve into and learn exactly how peptides work, and how they play crucial roles in human physiology—for instance, they are included in interactions between hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors, ion channel control, ligands, and anti-infective properties of cell function. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of these naturally occurring peptides is how they function as therapeutics: when they are re-created, their specificity translates into excellent profiles for safety, tolerability, and efficacy in humans.”
Optimize Your Health with Therapeutic Peptides: Extend Your Life by Becoming More Muscular, Leaner, Smarter, Injury-Free, and Younger
“Peptides are a widely variable group of molecules serving many purposes and functions in the human body. As such, each peptide will exert one or more effects impacting one or more biological systems within the human body. When you start adding peptides back into your regimen - whether using naturally derived peptides or lab-synthesized peptides - you can unlock the body’s ability to heal itself on a cellular level.”
Recovery
Becoming a Supple Leopard: The Ultimate Guide to Resolving Pain, Preventing Injury, and Optimizing Athletic Performance
“We need to walk because walking gets everything flowing in our body. It’s how we nourish all our tissues, how we decongest, how we stimulate the body to release waste.”
Rebuilding Milo: A Lifter's Guide to Fixing Common Injuries and Building a Strong Foundation for Enhancing Performance
“What I’m going to say in this final chapter may shock you. It may even anger you. The statement I’m going to make flies in the face of what many in the medical field have been preaching for decades, but it’s something you need to hear: You need to stop using ice on injuries and sore muscles.”
Sauna
Sauna Detoxification Using Niacin: Following The Recommended Protocol Of Dr. David E. Root
“Patients, and indeed all of us, are exposed to low levels of many different toxic compounds on a daily basis. Even with known drug interactions, the physician, nevertheless, has a difficult time keeping track of the interactions of the many different medications he may prescribe to a single individual. The literature of pharmacology and toxicology is replete with examples in which one agent enhances the effects of others, either directly or indirectly. Reiter notes, “Although one might prefer to know more about the potential effects of toxicants when administered alone before we tackle the problem of mixtures, the ‘real world’ situation demands the development of a strategy for the evaluation of mixtures.”
Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing
“Saunas dramatically improve circulation and relieve internal congestion. Heating the body helps destroy bacteria, viruses and tumors. Sweating promotes the elimination of toxic metals and chemicals, radioactive particles and other toxins. The skin's ability to eliminate poisons increases. Saunas offer many of the benefits of exercise while requiring much less exertion.”
Sleep
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”
Stress
Why Zebras Don't Have Ulcers
“If you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies. For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically. A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.”
When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress
“The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today — at least in the industrialized world — are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.”
The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild Side
“Scientists are finding that certain discomforts protect us from physical and psychological problems like obesity, heart disease, cancers, diabetes, depression, and anxiety, and even more fundamental issues like feeling a lack of meaning and purpose.”
The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In the Healing of Trauma
“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.”
Women's Health
This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: How the Pill Changes Everything
“It’s sort of like dropping an atomic bomb on your house to blow out a candle. Dropping a bomb on a house will blow out a candle. It’s just that its (birth control) effects are sufficiently…nonspecific…to make this a fairly unpopular way to deal with one’s candle-extinguishing needs.”
ROAR, Revised Edition: Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong Body for Life
“Neural mechanisms (mind-muscle connections) are actually more important for women’s adaptations to strength training than they are for men’s. So by doing power moves and low-rep, high-weight strength training, you enhance the number of fibers recruited for a contraction but don’t really grow the size of your muscles very much. The short of it is that you end up with a stronger, more powerful contraction with less muscle bulk.”
That’s a wrap for this week. Use as a reference guide. A 2025 reading list. Or gift list for your family this year. Regardless of how you use it, stay curious & dial in on what works best for you.
We’re more bullish than ever on the future here. As always, stay healthy & we’ll see you next week.
Your friend,
BTP
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Great list. I think I’m going to pick up a few of these books for the new year.