I spent a good week or so a couple years ago reading online articles, filtering it for unscientific gibberish, consolidating all the information, and turning it into a blog post (mainly intended for friends and family who were always complaining of ailments, trying to self-medicate or eat just the right super-food, or seeing "holistic" doctors and chiropractors as a means to health)
http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2013/04/be-healthy-my-friend.htmlIts about half diet and half exercise content.
It isn't scientific in the sense of it being a published experiment or written in an academic journal, but I used actual science as references. But it has graphics, and (in part 2) even a cartoon! so its (hopefully) a bit easier to read than some stuffy report.
Its follow up:
http://biodieselhauling.blogspot.com/2013/04/be-healthy-part-2-sub-section-fat.html gets into why the MMM, and paleo, and Atkins, etc actually work (summary: they all help you feel less hungry in a calorie deficit, especially compared to diets high in sugar and starch)
An absolutely enormous amount of health information is based on conjecture, or axioms, or assuming that a correlation implies causation (i.e. xyz culture is healthy, xyz eat a certain way, therefore that diet must be healthy)
I know a whole lot of people who live by the
"If you can buy organic, make sure you do...
if you have to open a box to get at the food 99% of the time you should not buy it...
if you need to mircrowave it dont buy it...
if it does not expire within a week of purchasing it the majority of the time you should not buy it...
if it has more then three ingredients dont buy it...
if you cant pronounce the ingrediets dont buy it..."
rules (not picking on Dmy, I just happened to see the ideas I hear SO often, neatly summarized here)
and among those people there is no deficit of overweight people, people who can't do a single pull-up, people who get sick several times a year, who go to doctors regularly, or all of the above. That does not qualify as "healthy" to me. That's what inspired the essay.