Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm embarassed to admit it, but when I got this book several years ago, I loved it. It took me years to see through the B.S. and realise that I believed this book because I wanted to believe it, not because it was particularly compelling. Even at the outset, its vitriolic tone and faulty arguments were hard to ignore. This book is less a cookbook and more a platform for the authors' crusade (against the "Diet Dictocrats", no less) and they seem happy to use any distortion, half-truth, and fabrication they can to promote their position. Here's just one (quite mild!) example: On page 24, the authors write about how sugar leeches calcium from teeth. They then continue: "Thus, sugar consumption causes tooth decay not because it promotes bacterial growth in the mouth, as most dentists believe, but because it alters the internal body chemistry". What?! How on earth does the calcium-leeching theory disprove the bacterial-growth theory? How simplistic do these authors think the body is if they think there can only be one factor involved in tooth decay? It's like saying "smoking is bad for your health because it causes heart disease and not, as previously thought, because it causes lung cancer". The logic is rubbish, but they happily use it to dimiss almost the entire dental community. This kind of thing happens over and over in the book. They take one study, twist it to meet their ends, and try and use it to discredit just about every other school of thought on the subject, often with spurious logic. Often, they don't quote studies, but just anecdotes, or even their own books, or nothing at all. Do some research online and you'll find plenty of criticism of these women and their organisation (The Weston A Price foundation) for how dodgy their 'research' is: quoting things out of context, quoting from abstracts and not considering the full studies, and so on. I remember reading about one anti-soy article where they quoted a study that found there was a chemical in soy that was bad for the brain. It turns out that the very same study mentioned about 10 other chemicals that were good for the brain, and concluded that soy was actually good for brain health overall. This kind of misrepresentation is offensive and unethical. I'm all for questioning modern Western medicine and looking towards more holistic viewpoints for answers, but these people throw out the baby with the bathwater. Some of what they write is so biased and their arguments so shoddy that it's hard to trust anything they say. And once they've dismissed the bulk of Western nutritional science, who do they look to instead? Weston A Price - a dentist who worked some 100 years ago. Seriously. So you'll read all about about how native peoples like the far-North Inuit ate mostly animal products and had healthy teeth. Teeth, we are told, are a good indicator of general health, which sounds reasonable enough, if a little crude. Though a little tidbit the authors fail to mention is that many of these tribal cultures had some of lowest life expectancies on the planet. So load up on meat everybody! You'll die young, but you'll have lovely teeth! It's never fully clear what the authors' motivation for their crusade is, other than an unwavering belief that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Yet the zeal with which they try and discredit the "diet dictocrats" almost reminds me of ultra-conservative TV evangelists blathering about Communists. It's clear that they don't try and use the facts to help them find the truth, but rather they already have a pre-imagined version of the truth and they bend the facts to match. So that's the nutrition side of the book, but what about the recipe side? Well, if you can get past the brain omellettes and offal burritos, there are some half-decent recipes in there, but nothing too special. The format isn't great either: recipes are cramped on account of nutrition quotes filling the margins, and there are no pictures or written descriptions of the dishes - just ingredients and instructions. The instructions are in paragraph form, which I find annoying (I prefer point-form). There are some useful obscure things, like how to make sauerkraut or kimchee or sprouts, but there are probably better books out there devoted to those sorts of things. Ultimately, I think this book is mainly aimed at people who want to feel better about eating animal products. Do you feel bad about the environmental devastation, animal cruelty and health problems connected with your animal-based diet? Want a book that'll ease your conscience by telling you that you HAVE to eat them to be healthy - even if it uses all sorts of really shonky reasoning to arrive at that conclusion? Then this book is for you. PS - The authors' reckless disregard for the facts is shameful enough, but almost as bad is the way negative reviews get voted down here on Amazon. I've read reviews for hundreds of products on Amazon and I don't ever remember seeing negative reviews being voted "unhelpful" by so many people. Even very well-written, poignant, respectful reviews written by scientists and doctors have recieved overwhelmingly high "unhelpful" votes. It's clear that some people - the authors, people linked to their organisation, and/or their fans - are coming here in droves to vote down the negative reviews. Who are the real diet dictocrats, eh?