Mixed feelings about this book.

On one hand, I agree that starches have been wrongly condemned. Our customers are often surprised when we don’t outlaw them, and even encourage them to eat potatoes and rice etc.

A starch-based diet is the norm for ALL of the longest lived populations. That doesn’t mean veganism, but it does mean they eat a lot of starches compared to other food groups.

This author, like many others, takes this too far and promotes veganism. He gets good clinical results with this, and I have also seen good results with it in a lot of people, but definitely not everyone. He goes to great lengths to justify this extreme diet while condemning supplements at the same time. This is very wrong to me, as those same starch-based populations he references also get a lot more micronutrients than we could possibly get in our food supply, from any diet.

He has many sections sharing null or bad results on specific vitamins and supplements. But those sections were short (about a page each), and they deserved entire chapters. I think if he really wanted to make the case against supplements he should have made that a whole new book, instead of stuffing it into this one..It’s easy to cherry pick null or bad results. It’s just as easy for me to cherry pick good results from studies on the same substances. There is tons of nuance to such studies and it requires a thorough discussion to understand why any result was obtained. Such detail was absent from this book.

Similarly, his condemnation of all animal fats is misplaced, the information cherry picked, and lots of useful context left out. Most of what he said about animal fats has been thoroughly debunked, and much of that was available before this book came out.

I do like starches myself and recommend them to clients. But the whole veganism thing and anti-supplements dragged this book down so much that I don’t want to recommend it.