• The simple tips offered in Glucose Revolution can transform your life
• Anyone who has ever suffered from insomnia will find Life Time essential reading
• Dr Gallop provides eye-opening insights into the cutting edge of forensics  

Glucose Revolution

by Jessie Inchauspe (Short Books £16.99, 320 pp)

Glucose is the fuel that keeps us all going — every second we burn eight billion molecules of it. As Jessie Inchauspe remarks in one of the more flabbergasting statements in her book, ‘If each glucose molecule were a grain of sand, you’d burn every single grain of sand on all the beaches of the Earth every ten minutes.’

Yet its connection with our health and well-being is rarely discussed except in the context of diabetes. And spikes in glucose levels can cause short-term problems like fatigue and poor sleep to chronic conditions such as depression and heart disease.

Inchauspé runs the Glucose Goddess online community. Relatively small changes in eating habits, she argues, can have major effects: eat foods in the right order; pick a post-meal dessert over a random sweet snack; if you must snack, always choose a savoury one.

The simple tips offered in this reader-friendly guide to regulating glucose levels can transform your life.

Life Time

by Russell Foster (Penguin Life £16.99, 480 pp)

Why are some people up with the lark, at their best in the morning, while others are night owls who only come alive when darkness falls? Why do teenagers and the elderly often struggle to get properly restorative sleep?

Does the clock going forwards in spring and back in autumn disrupt our sense of time unnecessarily? The answers to these and other questions lie within our biorhythms.

Russell Foster is a neuroscientist who has spent his career investigating the intertwining links between our body clocks and our sleep. These are the areas of biology that, in his words, ‘define and dominate our health’.

He explains the sometimes complicated ideas behind the workings of the human body clock with great clarity and elegance. Anyone who has ever suffered from insomnia or disrupted sleep, and indeed all of us who want to maximise our health, happiness and lifespan, will find it essential reading.

Hybrid Humans 

by Harry Parker (Wellcome £14.99, 224pp)

By his own reckoning, Harry Parker is only 88 per cent human. The rest of him is machine.

As a soldier in Afghanistan, he lost both his legs in an explosion. Now 12 per cent of his body consists of the sophisticated prosthetics that enable him to walk.

In this absorbing book, he argues that ‘we are all hybrid’, in that we all use aids to overcome the losses of accidents and ageing.

In fact, people have done so for millennia — a Roman artificial leg, made from bronze and wood, has been excavated from a grave in Italy. Only now we have the technology to achieve extraordinary results.

From humanoid robots acting as companions for the sick, to two ‘cyborg artists’ communicating via tooth implants, Parker takes us on a tour of the weird and wonderful world where man and machine meet.

How To Solve A Crime

by Dr Angela Gallop (Hodder £20, 272 pp)

Forensic science has long exerted a fascination on TV audiences in shows like CSI and Silent Witness, but Angela Gallop’s book reveals that the facts are even more interesting than the fiction.

With a career of more than 40 years, which includes involvement in high-profile murders like those of Stephen Lawrence and Rachel Nickell, she has much experience on which to draw.

Bite marks, fingerprints and even ear prints can identify the perpetrators of crimes. And who knew there were such people as forensic knot experts? A platoon of pundits with unlikely knowledge assist in bringing criminals to justice.

Dr Gallop provides eye-opening insights into what she modestly calls a ‘strange but important little corner of scientific endeavour’.