(MONEY Magazine) – It's hard to read the health news these days without a paramedic present. There is alar on the fruit, radon in the rathskeller and cholesterol in Mom's apple pie. Diseases whiz in and out of the headlines -- remember toxic shock syndrome? And one week's alarming research report (''Coffee linked to cancer'') gets toppled by a later one (''Less than five cups a day okay'') just when you've given up the supposedly lethal stuff. In this atmosphere of ''medico-media'' hype, as one writer called it recently in the staid New England Journal of Medicine, it can be tough to decide which health and nutrition precautions are worth heeding. Thus it is no wonder that Americans are increasingly turning to a relatively new source of advice: the health newsletter for the general reader. The 13-year-old Harvard Medical School Health Letter gave birth to the genre, which now includes at least a dozen publications, many allied with leading hospitals or universities. These titles -- not to be confused with the throwaway promotional newsletters distributed by some doctors -- attempt to interpret the latest medical science without the hype and oversimplification that mars so much health reporting in the popular press. In an effort to identify the best for you, MONEY commissioned a panel of four doctors to read and evaluate back issues of seven leading titles -- four that dealt with health matters broadly, three that focused mainly on nutrition. We asked how each stacked up in terms of authority, utility, readability and visual appeal. The panel's favorite, and ours, is the lively, eight-page monthly Wellness Letter, published in association with the University of California at Berkeley. Though it does not sparkle graphically, the Wellness Letter delivers brisk, useful coverage of health, nutrition and exercise. ''We don't write for the health nut,'' says publisher and editor Rodney M. Friedman. ''Our readers need to devote just 20 minutes a month to finding out what they can do to live longer and feel better.'' In recent months, subscribers were told how to judge their own odds of contracting various diseases and what to do about it; advised to consider pink over white grapefruit (it has 44 times as much beta- carotene, a nutrient that may help protect against cancer); and cautioned to keep their eyelids closed for three minutes after putting in an eyedrop medicine (otherwise, normal blinking will pump the fluid out). While the Wellness Letter strives to reassure headline-traumatized readers, it scrupulously avoids jumping on the ''one study'' story. Thus when a widely publicized report proclaimed last year that aspirin reduced the risk of heart attacks, the editors considered but rejected the idea of rushing together a supplemental page. ''We decided we'd rather be a month late and get it right,'' says Friedman. Within two weeks the story had changed, and some doctors were questioning why, if it prevented blood clots, aspirin didn't help ward off strokes -- an aspect that Friedman's team was able to cover thoroughly, thanks to the extra time. Our top-rated nutritional publication is Environmental Nutrition, a timely and unpretentious monthly edited by registered dietitians. ''Our goal is to sum up new information in a way that our readers can act on,'' says publisher Betty Ivie Goldblatt. To that end, the newsletter recently compared six popular liquid diets (conclusion: they're all risky without a doctor's supervision); charted the nutritional values of 18 frozen cheese pizzas (Weight Watchers Deluxe Combination pie had the lowest proportion of calories coming from fat); and rated the new turkey bologna and salami products (forget 'em, they're too fatty; stick to turkey breast or turkey pastrami). Although such newsletters are published for lay readers, they may also help foment reform in the medical community. As the Wellness Letter's Friedman puts it: ''We see part of our role as pushing the university experts to take a stand on the issues that people care about -- like alar -- rather than saying on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand sorts of things.'' Hypochondriacal readers will find that a welcome antidote to the scare-of-the-week school of health journalism.