Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book really is a good read. It contains lots of nutritional advice, and techniques for incorporating fermented whole foods in the diet. IF you have time to experiment with this, it is definitely useful. But it is a book of philosophy and belief, not always of proven fact. It would be a top shelf book except for two very serious flaws: 1 The advocacy of dangerous levels of fat in the diet. Yes some fats and oils show some benefits. But it is faulty logic to extrapolate that to say that a diet high in fat and cholesterol is good for you. The American diet really is terrible in its use of sugar, salt, bleached flour and fat. This book contributes with high fat and salt. 2 Scientific misrepresentation on a grand scale. One would expect beliefs to be modified by science, but Sally modifies science to suit her beliefs. An example of an outdated science error: laboratory scientists once though seafood contained high cholesterol. They then discovered that this was a laboratory mistake and seafood is low cholesterol. But even in the second edition, this mistake persists in the book, and the fallacy is used to argue that high cholesterol is not harmful. The most outlandish error: That it is okay to feed ground up sheep to cows and that this does not cause mad cow disease. The most serious error: Science has not shown a high fat diet to cause arterial blockages. This is a book that can kill people through the mail box if they take it too seriously! Nutritional science does have a confusing history, and it requires humility and expertise to balance out the information. This book lacks these qualities, and unfortunately when reading the book there is no way of knowing what is true and what is not. Weston Price was at the cutting edge of science in his day, and I think he would be sorry to see this book ossify in its advice rather than to be properly updated according to the best science available. Yet another complication which I regret having to raise. Pickled and fermented foods cause cancer of the stomach and oesophagus. There are ways of reducing this risk. All of this should be discussed in the book; but it isn't. When we buy a book, we are paying for the author to have researched the subject thoroughly and to pre-digest some of the information for us. If she had done that properly, I wouldn't need to write such a long review. As it is, I would recommend that people who go down this diet path find some information on this. A culinary revolution amongst good cooks has occurred in the last few decades, with light fresh food prepared in delicious ways, but the style of the recipes is pre-revolution. One more strange thing - as Blejowski noted - previous critical reviews of this book have been negatively rated in a suspicious pattern.