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The DNA Restart: Unlock Your Personal Genetic Code to Eat for Your Genes, Lose Weight, and Reverse Aging
The DNA Restart turns traditional dietary advice on its head with groundbreaking research that demonstrates that we all require different diets based on our genes.
In The DNA Restart, Sharon Moalem, MD, PhD, provides a revolutionary step-by-step guide to the diet and lifestyle perfect for your individual genetic makeup. A physician, scientist, neurogeneticist, and New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Moalem has spent the last two decades researching and formulating how to reset your own genetic code using five essential pillars: eat for your genes; reverse aging; eat umami; drink oolong tea; and slow living. The DNA Restart plan utilizes decades of in-depth scientific research into genetics, epigenetics, nutrition, and longevity to explain the pivotal role genes play in the journey to ideal weight and health status. Dr. Moalem's unique 28-day plan shows how to upgrade sleep, harness sensory awareness, and use exercise to reset your DNA; how to determine the right amounts of protein, carbs, and fats you need for your individual genetic make-up; and how to incorporate umami-rich recipes and oolong tea into your diet to genetically thrive. Delicious recipes with mix-and-match meal plans, inspiring testimonials, and genetic self-tests round out this paradigm shifting diet book.
383 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 6, 2016
86 people are currently reading
826 people want to read
About the author
Sharon Moalem
17 books260 followersSharon Moalem, MD, PhD, is an award-winning physician-scientist and geneticist. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Survival of the Sickest and Inheritance, an Amazon Best Science Book of the Year, among other books. His work brings together evolution, genetics, and medicine to revolutionize how we understand and treat disease, and his clinical research led to the discovery of two new rare genetic conditions, and to his discovery of a first-in-class antibiotic which targets ‘superbug’ infections. His books have been translated into more than 35 languages.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
October 24, 2017
I enjoyed the author's approach to wellness in this book. He keeps it simple by making 5 key points, but I will add that some of it requires effort in finding what is needed....I guess there is always the internet for the shopping if some of this isn't available at the local grocery store. I enjoyed how he broke everything down and followed each segment with a recap. That part was well done.
The segment regarding exercise was inspiring. It wasn't the same old lecture saying we all know better so get moving. After listening to that part, I was ready to strap on my running shoes and hit the pavement. So 4 stars.
The segment regarding exercise was inspiring. It wasn't the same old lecture saying we all know better so get moving. After listening to that part, I was ready to strap on my running shoes and hit the pavement. So 4 stars.
September 16, 2021
A MD and PhD, this doc knows his stuff!
PopSugar 2020 - reread a 2019 book
PopSugar 2020 - reread a 2019 book
October 9, 2016
Read this book for my local healthy living book club. It was well written and researched. I really enjoyed the chapter on oolong tea, learned how it was different than green tea as well as the chapter on Umami. I will be working to get umami in my meals.
July 26, 2025
This was a very interesting book that I took a lot of notes on. I learned so much from reading it and will try to incorporate as many of the suggestions he gives as I reasonably can. I am sitting here drinking oblong tea as I write this, actually. And I have to say it has only been a week and a half but I am noticing some slight differences...I will definitely stick with that part for awhile. There are some self tests you can do at home to test how your body reacts to carbs and alcohol...one matters to me, one does not lol. Some of the foods he wants you to add are pretty easy to add to your day but some you need to take away might not be possible for me at this moment. But I will try to do as many as I can for awhile.
January 12, 2022
Very mixed experience. Interesting background info that isn’t properly gone through or discussed and self help book put together. Would work a lot better as two separate books, one with review of the science and motivation why this diet should work and one pure self help book.
September 15, 2016
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway.
Very interesting book. I will try to apply some of the tests suggested. I am not 100% convinced on some of the conclusions, but it is well researched
Very interesting book. I will try to apply some of the tests suggested. I am not 100% convinced on some of the conclusions, but it is well researched
May 15, 2021
Excellent resource! I gleaned so much valuable information from this one. Highly recommend!
June 17, 2020
I will tell you upfront, I hate dieting. It isn’t that I dislike being an optimal weight or anything like that, my issue is that it seems that there is always some new finding that put everything else to shame. I know to avoid ‘magic bullets,’ but it seems there is always something. There was the low fat craze, the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, Paleo. I think the worst ones are the ‘fad’ diets. The ones where you can tell that they just wanted a little bit of money. The FDA doesn’t help either since a lot of their advice is pushed forward by special interest groups. Hey America, remember the food pyramid that is totally wrong? That was the doing of lobbyists. So when a dieting book comes along that proposed to make you healthier in 28-days, you have to realize that I take the advice with a grain of salt.
The DNA Restart is a dietary self-help book written by Sharon Moalem. It describes a method to categorize yourself by what sort of foods you should have and how much. The book discusses five main pillars of wellness in this program; Eat For Your Genes, Reverse Aging, Eat Umami, Drink Oolong Tea, and Slow Living.
The book does go against some nutrition facts that I was taught, but that is not a terrible thing. There are a lot of testimonials supporting this program written in the book. I was in Weight Watchers at one time and it felt like that. The book is packed with information. It mainly focuses on genes and how the expressions of select genes allow you to digest certain macronutrients with more efficiency. One example this guy likes is with milk and dairy products. There are plenty of people throughout the world that are lactose intolerant. They can’t digest the lactose in milk and get bloating, cramps, and other gastrointestinal problems. There is actually a gene that has to remain active throughout your life, or you become lactose intolerant.
One thing to like about this book is that he doesn’t go totally in with the organic movement. I don’t remember his precise reasoning, but Moalem describes how plants had to master chemistry in order to survive and not get eaten. For example, take the humble tomato. Tomatoes are excellent sources of umami, which is something I did not know. If you eat them before they are ripe though, all of that umami goodness is not fully developed. Tomatoes that are grown without getting some stress in their lives don’t develop the phytonutrients that support health.
Moalem also includes a list of recipes to make food according to this diet.
All in all, there is a lot to like about this book, but there are also some things to dislike. Although I read it thoroughly, there was one point where I had to do a double-take, and this mainly had to do with apples. There is a confusing section where it says that apples are fine, and to my recollection, it states several pages later that you should not have apples. So that bothered me a bit. After a while, I chalked it up to my mistake or an editing error, but I still haven’t completely cleared that up. Maybe it stated that you should never have organic apples or something.
The book was written in 2016 which makes it recent enough to be relevant.
The DNA Restart is a dietary self-help book written by Sharon Moalem. It describes a method to categorize yourself by what sort of foods you should have and how much. The book discusses five main pillars of wellness in this program; Eat For Your Genes, Reverse Aging, Eat Umami, Drink Oolong Tea, and Slow Living.
The book does go against some nutrition facts that I was taught, but that is not a terrible thing. There are a lot of testimonials supporting this program written in the book. I was in Weight Watchers at one time and it felt like that. The book is packed with information. It mainly focuses on genes and how the expressions of select genes allow you to digest certain macronutrients with more efficiency. One example this guy likes is with milk and dairy products. There are plenty of people throughout the world that are lactose intolerant. They can’t digest the lactose in milk and get bloating, cramps, and other gastrointestinal problems. There is actually a gene that has to remain active throughout your life, or you become lactose intolerant.
One thing to like about this book is that he doesn’t go totally in with the organic movement. I don’t remember his precise reasoning, but Moalem describes how plants had to master chemistry in order to survive and not get eaten. For example, take the humble tomato. Tomatoes are excellent sources of umami, which is something I did not know. If you eat them before they are ripe though, all of that umami goodness is not fully developed. Tomatoes that are grown without getting some stress in their lives don’t develop the phytonutrients that support health.
Moalem also includes a list of recipes to make food according to this diet.
All in all, there is a lot to like about this book, but there are also some things to dislike. Although I read it thoroughly, there was one point where I had to do a double-take, and this mainly had to do with apples. There is a confusing section where it says that apples are fine, and to my recollection, it states several pages later that you should not have apples. So that bothered me a bit. After a while, I chalked it up to my mistake or an editing error, but I still haven’t completely cleared that up. Maybe it stated that you should never have organic apples or something.
The book was written in 2016 which makes it recent enough to be relevant.
September 18, 2024
I came very, very close to quitting this book about 80 pages in. It ended up being a decent book; however, I think the author set out to write one sort of book, and then realized that it wasn't going to happen and flailed around a bit before finding his footing.
The bad:
- The book starts out talking about how this diet is personalized for your own genetic makeup, but it's not. There's one Saltine cracker test, and that's it (and even with the one test, my bf and I had trouble deciphering the results because it involves detecting an extremely subtle change).
- The dietary advice is excessive. There's this detailed list of foods that you should not eat at all, and it's not even just blanket statements like "limit red meat." It's instructions to eat an abundance of fruits and vegetables, but then avoid very specific ones like apples or celery. It's instructions to eat nuts, but a very specific amount of nuts: two 4-oz servings weekly. It's instructions to avoid emulsifiers, and then gives a list of foreign sounding ingredients to look for on the ingredients list of everything you eat.
It's so many rules, and so hard to keep track of and implement that I think the author even realized it himself. There's a DNA Restart roadmap at the end of the book, that lists out the guidelines for you to follow on the diet, and some of the food rules laid out in the book didn't make it into the list of guidelines at the end.
- The way the book is written is somewhat aggravating. The author will be like "You should eat more foods with umami. I'll get to what those foods are in just a second ..." and you end up having to sift through a lot of hyping up of the ingredients or foods before you find out what those foods are.
The good:
- Moalem is a science writer, and once he gets further into the book, I think he does fall back on his background more. There's more interesting facts, interviews, and anecdotes, and it does eventually turn into a fun educational experience. The author also does a better job of focusing on a particular topic as you get further into the book.
Overall:
The book does have its place among dietary books.
- If you're looking for specific dietary guidelines that are easy to remember, easy to implement, but still beneficial to your health, I enjoyed Jessie Inchauspe's The Glucose Goddess Method: The 4-Week Guide to Cutting Cravings, Getting Your Energy Back, and Feeling Amazing.
- If you're looking for a book that will inspire you to be more mindful of how you eat, without prescribing any rules or delivering any lectures, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is fabulous.
- But if you really want to take a deep dive into the science of different foods and their nutritional value and shortcomings, including exactly how much to eat, how to prepare them, and what they do to damage or repair your DNA, this book is the gold standard. It doesn't just classify foods into broad categories like legumes or seafood. It goes into the distinction between different types of nuts, and which ones are the best ones for you to be eating. It goes into different types of seafood, which ones are best to eat, and which ones can be good or bad depending on how they were harvested. It talks about which foods are a good source of which type of umami, the benefits and drawbacks of green tea versus black tea, and which fruits and vegetables are most important to buy organically. It talks about naturally occurring carcinogens, the lactose content of a bunch of different dairy products, and how long you should let garlic sit out on the counter before throwing it into a skillet. Once this book evolves from an instructional diet book into more of a popular science text, that's when it starts to get good.
The bad:
- The book starts out talking about how this diet is personalized for your own genetic makeup, but it's not. There's one Saltine cracker test, and that's it (and even with the one test, my bf and I had trouble deciphering the results because it involves detecting an extremely subtle change).
- The dietary advice is excessive. There's this detailed list of foods that you should not eat at all, and it's not even just blanket statements like "limit red meat." It's instructions to eat an abundance of fruits and vegetables, but then avoid very specific ones like apples or celery. It's instructions to eat nuts, but a very specific amount of nuts: two 4-oz servings weekly. It's instructions to avoid emulsifiers, and then gives a list of foreign sounding ingredients to look for on the ingredients list of everything you eat.
It's so many rules, and so hard to keep track of and implement that I think the author even realized it himself. There's a DNA Restart roadmap at the end of the book, that lists out the guidelines for you to follow on the diet, and some of the food rules laid out in the book didn't make it into the list of guidelines at the end.
- The way the book is written is somewhat aggravating. The author will be like "You should eat more foods with umami. I'll get to what those foods are in just a second ..." and you end up having to sift through a lot of hyping up of the ingredients or foods before you find out what those foods are.
The good:
- Moalem is a science writer, and once he gets further into the book, I think he does fall back on his background more. There's more interesting facts, interviews, and anecdotes, and it does eventually turn into a fun educational experience. The author also does a better job of focusing on a particular topic as you get further into the book.
Overall:
The book does have its place among dietary books.
- If you're looking for specific dietary guidelines that are easy to remember, easy to implement, but still beneficial to your health, I enjoyed Jessie Inchauspe's The Glucose Goddess Method: The 4-Week Guide to Cutting Cravings, Getting Your Energy Back, and Feeling Amazing.
- If you're looking for a book that will inspire you to be more mindful of how you eat, without prescribing any rules or delivering any lectures, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is fabulous.
- But if you really want to take a deep dive into the science of different foods and their nutritional value and shortcomings, including exactly how much to eat, how to prepare them, and what they do to damage or repair your DNA, this book is the gold standard. It doesn't just classify foods into broad categories like legumes or seafood. It goes into the distinction between different types of nuts, and which ones are the best ones for you to be eating. It goes into different types of seafood, which ones are best to eat, and which ones can be good or bad depending on how they were harvested. It talks about which foods are a good source of which type of umami, the benefits and drawbacks of green tea versus black tea, and which fruits and vegetables are most important to buy organically. It talks about naturally occurring carcinogens, the lactose content of a bunch of different dairy products, and how long you should let garlic sit out on the counter before throwing it into a skillet. Once this book evolves from an instructional diet book into more of a popular science text, that's when it starts to get good.
November 4, 2019
This is one of those awesome books from Dr. Moalem, apart from the other good ones - "Survival of the Sickest", "Inheritance" and "How Sex Works". In this book, Dr. Moalem explains how Epigenetics, the things you inherited from your ancestors determine your weight when combined with your food habits. It makes sense that all the foods they ate are all encoded in the 97% of a human genome that they thought was "Junk DNA"! You got half of them from your father and half from your mother. But then when your ancestors did not have all the facilities that you have now, you are not expending the same number of calories they did like running away from wild animals or industrial agriculture and refrigeration. This book also has a DNA Restart diet plan that is based on simple Genetic tests Dr.Moalem suggests you do at home, and then tailoring what you eat and drink based on that! Interesting book, Indeed!
June 12, 2018
I read this book because I heard about the cracker test to determine carb tolerance. It's actually full of sensible advice on eating nutrient-rich foods, exercising, and getting enough sleep. There was surprisingly little mention of supplements and no selling of DNA testing kits. There is also little mention of topical DNA damage control, like using sunscreens etc.
September 13, 2017
Interesting generally nothing completely new if you are relevant with the food sector, it has some practical ways to do a personal genetic test that where new for me that might be very useful for those who are interested
June 9, 2018
Disappointed
I had hoped for some groundbreaking information. It's the same stuff: eat a good diet, exercise, get a good night's sleep.
I had hoped for some groundbreaking information. It's the same stuff: eat a good diet, exercise, get a good night's sleep.
April 27, 2020
Sounds good. Have had progress already by adopting some of the guidelines so I don’t have to totally adapt to everything at once.
December 22, 2020
I absolutely love all of Dr. Moalem's books! He breaks things down in such an entertaining way. I learn so much and have fun reading at the same time! I highly recommend!
January 11, 2017
This is fascinating material. I first picked up Dr. Moalem's Inheritance at the library and was amazed. So I had to read Survival of the Sickest. Again, amazing book! This DNA Restart is his newest one and I've noticed it's not written in the same witty, readable style as the other two. It's still remarkable information but he didn't write this with the help of Jonathan Prince as he did before. It's noticeable.
September 6, 2016
I found parts of the book interesting but very technical.
October 18, 2016
will edit after I've tried this for 28 days (or maybe after 21 days)
Read
November 24, 2016Very interesting reading.
January 14, 2017
This book is awesome, awesome, awesome! So informative, eye-opening, truthful, do-able. You will be motivated to be healthier and eat right for YOU when finished.
Want to read
September 5, 2016I have not received this book so sorry I cannot review.
April 28, 2017
The content deserves six stars but...
The content deserves six stars but for a book that's essentially a nutrition guide and a cookbook the order of it is quite jumbled. It's an ebook after all. Why not just include the recipe along with the discussion about the food? It may sound trivial but I found myself jumping back and forth looking for recipes and ingredients. With a hardcover it's no big deal. With an ebook it's a pain. That said I would buy it again at twice the price. The info is invaluable.
6 star content, 4 star editing.
The content deserves six stars but for a book that's essentially a nutrition guide and a cookbook the order of it is quite jumbled. It's an ebook after all. Why not just include the recipe along with the discussion about the food? It may sound trivial but I found myself jumping back and forth looking for recipes and ingredients. With a hardcover it's no big deal. With an ebook it's a pain. That said I would buy it again at twice the price. The info is invaluable.
6 star content, 4 star editing.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews