Sometimes I enjoy a good scare. Reading THE CHEESE TRAP: How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy and Get Healthy (Grand Central Life & Style, $27) is like going to a horror movie, only instead of the killer being Chucky, it’s cheese. (O how I slay myself.) Neal D. Barnard even tosses out a line in the intro that would be perfect for the trailer of the movie: “You love cheese. But I’m sorry to tell you, it does not love you back.” Cue ominous cello music.

While cheese may be, as the legendary editor Clifton Fadiman called it, “milk’s leap toward immortality,” here it is death on a plate. Barnard, the founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, is an animal-rights activist and proponent of a vegan diet who has courted controversy before, and I’m in no position to judge the veracity of all his claims. But he cites studies that associate cheese with everything from America’s expanding waistline to migraines and joint pain. The problem is not just the high fat content. Cheese proteins contain casomorphins, chemical compounds that attach to the same opiate receptors in the brain as heroin or morphine. Additionally, the milk we buy was meant to nourish baby cows or goats or sheep; it is filled with growth hormones and estrogens we don’t want or need. Barnard does his best to make cheese not only terrifying (comparing its dangers to eating poisonous puffer fish) but gross: At one point he cites a performance artist who sat in a gallery and offered patrons three types of cheese made out of donated breast milk. Maybe you don’t find that disgusting, in which case you probably like performance art.

By the end of the book I was sufficiently freaked out to go and buy something calling itself paleo mozzarella-style cheese. It is vegan, and it tastes like tapioca flavored with coconut. Not bad! But you know what it doesn’t taste like? Cheese.

The idea behind Rebecca Scritchfield’s BODY KINDNESS: Transform Your Health From the Inside Out — and Never Say Diet Again (Workman, paper, $14.95) is simple and true: For a vast majority of us, big dietary changes don’t work, particularly if approached with kamikaze enthusiasm. Incremental change is the way to go. Scritchfield, a nutritionist, proposes ignoring the numbers on the scale and focusing instead on health. If you do this, and stop approaching food as a form of reward and punishment, you’ll eat less emotionally and more rationally; you’ll be able to “order dessert when you really want it” and not apologize. There is a lot of journaling here, a lot of fighting the “thought bully.” There is some controversy too. Scritchfield believes “you can be fit and fat” — that it’s inactivity, not obesity, that is linked to mortality and heart disease. Of course, when was the last time you saw a 90‑year-old sumo wrestler?

THE HUNGRY BRAIN: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat (Flatiron, $27.99, to be published this spring) is really no more a diet book than “Anna Karenina” is a romance novel, but for those interested in the complex science of overeating, it is essential. The neurobiologist Stephan J. Guyenet argues that we need to understand our brain circuitry in order to stop ourselves from overeating, and he chronicles years of research on the role of the hormonal regulators of appetite and the way they work on certain neural pathways in our brains. For example, the hormone leptin codes for satiety, and if you have no leptin in your body you can’t stop eating. So why did a drug to provide people with leptin never make it to market? It turns out (probably) that while low leptin levels create a starvation response that promotes weight gain, high levels of leptin don’t promote weight loss. So much for that magic pill.