Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I like to read about nutrition. I have been interested in the results of studies being published in the news about there being no relationship between increased calcium intake and the prevention of osteoporosis. I was looking forward to reading this book to fill in some of the details. I was disappointed. The forward for this book was written by the CEO of Trace Elements Inc, a company that manufactures costly mineral supplements and costly mineral deficiency tests. The book "The Calcium Lie" is mentioned prominently on that company's web site. The authors of "The Calicum Lie", in turn, highly recommend the products of Trace Elements Inc throughout the book. At one point Dr. Thompson even writes that he would not trust mineral deficiency tests from anyone other than Trace Elements Inc. Dr. Thompson's basic claims are that people do not need as much calcium as the USRDA recommends and that people actually get too much calcium, causing a number of common, severe, medical problems. Dr. Thompson claims that this is all due to basic biochemistry which doctors ignore and that can be found in any basic biochemistry book. Dr. Thompson hasn't made any arguments to prove his claims. Instead he floods the book by mentioning statistics and studies that are not directly related to his claims. This is a common tactic among flim-flam people and a common mistake among people who make weak arguments. Additionally, the book has no footnotes or endnotes. The back of the book has *some* (very few ) references per chapter, but no way of looking up the precise references Dr. Thompson makes. A number of the references are old and also to other pop nutrition books. The authors do not give any evidence for it being safe to use less calcium, they do not tell people how much calcium to get nor do they tell the readers how much of each of the 12 minerals that bones are made of to get. The authors do tell people to use sea salt liberally when the Mayo Clinic is recommending that healthy adults limit themselves to 1500 mg a day. The authors do encourage the liberal use of costly supplements from Trace Minerals Inc. The prose of the book reads like the marketing copy you can find on the packaging of alternative health products.