Book Review
4 stars
A good recapitulation of a very old topic; Incomplete in some respects
*******
Whom is this book for?

If you have read either the "Atkins Diet" or Fung's own "Obesity Code" and UNDERSTOOD them properly then 95% of this book will feel like recapitulation of what you already know.

Also, for people who have understood that you can lose weight on a diabetic diet and understood why that is, this will be preaching to the choir.

And in those cases, you can skip this book.

That's not to say that the book is useless:

1. More repetition of the information therein can only be an antidote to all of the several decades of misinformation that has been spread by various government nutritional agencies.
2. Repackaging old information in new ways can reach a wider audience of people--on the off chance that one of those packages is fortuitously more helpful to a given person than any other. (Atkins sold more books than every other diet book combined up until that time, but absolutely nothing that he said was new. It's just that it was repackaged in a way that it became a hit.)

This is something that you might also give to people that go on this or that silly diet and throw away perfectly good money in order to be convinced that there is some easy way to lose weight and if they pay another person then that person will give them that carefree answer.

*******
208 pages over 15 chapters works out to about 14 pages of chapter.

And the ease of this writing is such that it is very possible to knock out a couple of chapters over a lunch break or right after the kids are put in bed (but before it is your own bedtime).
*******

For people who are not familiar with things such as gluconeogenesis, this book will require rereading certain of the bite-sized chapters. But, even with all of that.. this is a book that can be read in two pieces over the course of a couple of days. (Say, your weekend / other off days.)

If I had to reduce this book to half a dozen major points they would be something like:

1. Government malfeasance with respect to dietary advice is a result of a position becoming entrenched by accident. And that position can become entrenched only before making decisions with insufficient data.

2. To control weight loss by calorie restriction as opposed to hormonal regulation are two very different things. Misunderstand this at your own peril.

3. Diabetes is some nasty stuff, and it is a causative agent for many many MANY secondary diseases. (Believe it or not, China actually has a higher rate of diabetes than the United states. And they've only been fat for a generation.)

4. The human body has two completely parallel energy systems: glucose as well as fat.

5. Not all obesity is the same, and people who are not ostensibly fat can have just as many problems as a person who is not...... provided the fat is in the wrong place.. (Visceral fat is much more dangerous than subcutaneous fat. A beer belly and an underslung buttocks are both unattractive, but the first is much more dangerous than the second.)

6. There is a lot more money in keeping people sick, because then they can be sold medication. Insulin is not cheap, and the author mentions the diabetic medications sold more than the NBA/NBL/NFL combined.
*******

There is a pretty decent discussion about chemistry here, but there are at least two major things that the author left out that he should have included:

1. The insulin glucagon axis.
2. Ketone production as well as how to measure ketone production.

Both of these things were covered in the Atkins book, although other parts of biochemistry there were less detailed than this here.

Verdict: recommended at the second hand price.