Formerly Known As Food by Kristin Lawless explains all of the problems with America's food. Most of the information should come as no surprise, but the scope of damage is shocking. I expected for this book to read like a textbook. The book was enjoyable to read although a bit repetitive at times. At the end the author offered some "solutions" but no feasible way for them to be enacted. A system broken due to big corporations and government apathy cannot be fixed by more government involvement. It does discuss important information regarding the issues facing current and future generations. Formerly Known as Food was much more enjoyable to read than similar books on the same topic.

Hard to rate this one... but I must say despite the scientific language and bombardment of stats, I was utterly rapt reading about how detrimental the industrial food industry is to our health. I had an inkling, but I had no idea that the escalation of hormones, antibiotics and various pesticides and herbicides has so infiltrated nearly every piece of meat and produce to the point where unless a consumer knows the farmer personally, it's unlikely one can truly know what residue or nutrients are actually in the food stuffs being purchased. The current generation of children and young adults are likely to have shorter life spans due to the shear prevalence of overly processed foods and lack of "whole foods" in their diets from Day 1. The one tidbit that will stay with me (aside from whole eggs essentially being a superfood which should never be separated for egg white omelets) is how important natural birth and breastfeeding is for babies, and the lack of vaginal birth and over-saturation of formula use in the last century has wiped out an important microbiota in our digestive track, but no longer naturally occurs due to the ingestion of antibiotics by any woman in the family line, C-sections, and formula. Absolutely fascinating, yet horrifying.

This was an intense read and I came away better educated but also feeling overwhelmed by the task ahead for us as consumers. From the start, she makes it crystal clear that there is a vast amount of, at this time, unavoidable and unhealthy, stuff in our foods. On one level that's not really news to most of us. We know about organic food, clean food, whole food diets, etc, etc. We now know that nothing has changed and it's only gotten worse. Over the last almost 100 years, we have been eating a very additive rich diet and hopefully it isn't too late to improve it. Kristin Lawless is passionate on the subject of good food for everyone. She even speaks out for child care leave, reducing the big agra push of infant formula over breast feeding and striving to create a better diet for all of us. After reading this excellent book, I have to say my food choices ,which I thought were getting better, are in need of a lot of hard work..

Kristin Lawless is a necessary voice in the world of nutrition and food production. With so much of our food being genetically modified and chemically processed it's difficult to know what's actually good for you. In Formerly Known As Food Ms. Lawless sheds light on many of the issues surrounding the food supply in our modern world.

Didn't really care for this as the information didn't seem new or presented in any new way. It seemed there was a fair amount of mommy-shaming due to formula feeding. I kept waiting for the bit where author might suggest what could be done on an individual basis, but it never seem to come, so the only feeling I have with reading this was a helplessness over my diet.

This is a difficult book to read, but one I wish more people would. It is a big picture look at the food system that is going to make readers uncomfortable whether they have never thought about what is on their plate and where it comes from or they already try to avoid GMO products in their food and shop local. Very important topic.

Kristin Lawless believes in the importance of whole organic foods, breast feeding, etc., but says it is not enough. She will scare you to death with her descriptions of what is getting into our food supply and what it is doing to our bodies. And all this has come to be in the past 75-100 years--for the sake of speed, efficiency, convenience and profit. "What about public health, nourishment, stewardship of the land and water, the preservation of Earth and all its species, and the protection of the young and their future?"

There is much information here and it is not always easy to read. Alarming to say the least. But perhaps it is time that all of us really understand what we are feeding ourselves and our families and what it may be doing to our health.

Lawless concludes her book with 'a radical food manifesto' listing what she'd personally like to see happen but only if we come together and demand change:

--the end to poor-quality industrial foods, primarily pushed on low-income people;

--that food processors stop marketing infant formula to parents;

--warning labels on processed food packaging stating these foods may be harmful to your health;

--third party testing of chemicals used in and on our food supply;

--affordable access to chemical-free and whole foods for all;

--nutrition and cooking classes in our schools;

--a universal basic income;

--a wage given for cooking and household work;

--a six-month paid parental leave to encourage breast feeding.

Read this book and perhaps be inspired to join her challenge for better food, and perhaps a better world, for all.

I received an arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange foe my honest opinion. I am grateful for the opportunity.

#FormerlyKnownAsFood #NetGalley #Nutrition #Parenthood #Wellness

This book is powerful! The author is nutrition educator working with cardiologists in Manhattan. She not only demystifies the danger of processed food but also the so called labelled super food or healthy food like the Organic Mac & Cheese and the healthy an veggie options of the big chain of fast food. Kristin teach us more about other factors that affect our health like free radicals and more.

This was a really informative book and it made me think a lot about food - what real food means, and how we should be careful about what we put into our bodies. It also had good information about big food companies, how the farmer needs to be supported, or the food we eat is no longer going to be real food, which may be happening already. It is also good for opening people's eyes that we need to be the ones demanding change with our words and our money, or no change will ever happen. It is a sensible book that deals with why we need to eat whole foods, and make sure everyone has access to whole foods, through fair wage programs, without being overly sensational and exaggerated. I think that everyone should have access to this book, or information like what is in this book.

Whether you like it or not this is the sort of book that everyone should pick up and read as it involves one of the most basic actions that we do every day, which is eating food. You don't need to be obsessive about the subject to justify spending a few hours in your life to have your eyes opened about the way in which food production is having a negative impact on our health. And if you already think that you are eating healthy food, you may be even more surprised. The biggest issue for me is who is going to do anything to change the direction in which we are going? It reminds me of a speech given last year (2017) by Danone CEO Emmanuel Faber last year, a video of which can be found by a simple Internet search.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

Erratum:
"...so information flow constantly back and forth between the gut and the brain....” should read "flows"?
Subtitled "How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture," this book is a tour-de-force of information on how our diet had changed over the last few generations to a point where it bears little relation to what our grandparents and great-grandparents ate. This may not seem like a problem: active change is pretty much the definition of life, when you think about it, but just like the ocean surface reveals very little about what’s going on underneath, so our dietary changes and the way food is grown, processed and packaged are having a significant, and in many cases dangerous, impact on our bodies and minds.

There's no table of contents in the front of this book. It's in the back! Whether there will be changed in the published print copy I can’t say. it was clickable back and forth - something which i see little value in. Imagine my amazement then to discover that the references - it was a very referenced effort - did not work at all!! So when it came to checking the copious references the author includes in her text, the lack of clickability (or tappability these days - if these were not words, they are now!) was a nuisance because it made it really hard to find the actual reference. In this book there are no footnotes and no chapter-end notes. There is a long set of references at the end of the book, but you can’t click to them or click back from them.

This isn't a problem with the writing quality or the book topic, but it bothers me how primitive this is in an era of common and very pervasive ebooks. These days it ought to be possible to reference something in your book and be able to tap that reference to have it pop up right there on the page without having to swipe to the back of the book to find it and hope you're looking at the right one! In a semi-scholarly work like this one, it ought to be possible to tap the reference and have it open your browser and go to the study or paper the book is referring to so you can see it right there and then. Evidently we're still a long way from that.

I know Amazon's crappy Kindle app is probably the worst in the business as compared with other formats such as PDF or the Nook, for example, for facilitating a good reader experience. Kindle is another way of saying 'mangle' in my experience, and we all know what 'kindling' is good for, but publishers are powerful entities. Some would argue they're too powerful, but that's not quite so true in this era of self-publishing as it used to be. That said, why are they not using that power to pressure the makers of reading apps to make books like this much more user-friendly? Pet peeve! Moving on!

I recommend this book because it carries an important message and not only that, it also marshals an impressive array of evidence. There are caveats to that though, which I shall delve into shortly, but that aside, this is, overall, a good effort. The author is not a scientist. She's a Certified Nutrition Educator, but she makes smart arguments and puts together a good basic case.

My problems with this book ran to referenced supportive material. References are often only tangentially supportive of the assertions made by the author, and they are not 'clickable' - once in a while there is one that is highlighted in blue and if you can tap it with your finger, will take you to a reference, but this applies only to rare end of chapter notes, not to book notes. It was often difficult to tap those references and get there, especially if it was at the top of a screen, because instead of going to the link, Kindle would drop down the little margin at the top of their screen which contains the time and settings icons! I actually tapped one link only by pure accident after I was ready to give up an trying to tap it! Annoying!

The lack of tappable links for the references though, made it a nightmare trying to verify the author's statements connected with the link because I had to jump to the back of the book and wade through the large number of references jammed together there, to try and find the one I needed. I think instead of starting numbering the references over for each chapter, they should have been continually numbered so a reader can be sure they have the correct one: was I in chapter two or chapter three? Which reference '1' out of several back there do I need to look at? I did not try to look at every reference, just a few. While noting that this was an advance review copy and therefore subject to change before publishing, what follows is what I found with regard to some of them.

At one point I read, "...the current generation of children is expected to have a shorter life span than their parents." yet when I followed the link and looked at the reference, the paper was by S. Jay Olshansky, et al, and the title was “A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States Note the word 'potential'! There is a big difference between an expectation of, and a potential for something happening! Things like this harm a book's message because they make the author look more sensationalist than sensational.

At another point I read "GMOs were not introduced to the American food supply until the 1990s, so we don’t know a lot about their long-term safety or healthfulness. Even organic corn is likely contaminated with GMOs." I have yet to see what the harm is in GMOs. My position is that some are probably a bad idea, others are fine. I, like the author evidently, do have reservations about the activities of a very powerful company like Monsanto, yet while keeping that caveat in mind, the fact is that nature mixes genes between plants all the time, and the human race goes on! I don't think the jury is in yet on the benefits or otherwise of GMO's in general, so I have to ask why the negative connotation added by the author and carried in that one word: contaminated? Like this is necessarily an evil thing? So again, the wording was overly dramatic.

After talking about how food monitoring agencies are funded by agribusiness, the author extolls a report by Monell Chemical Senses Center which is funded from a variety of sources including, according to Wikipedia, “unrestricted corporate sponsorships”! Pot meet kettle!

I read, “My grandmother...was always skeptical of the benefits of organic foods. She thought it a marketing ploy to get people to spend more money,” but in my understanding,there is no real regulation or inspection of organic foods, so I've never been a big fan. But let;s not get overly dramatic about them. I read, “The review stated that pesticide residues were found in only 7 percent of organics but 38 percent of conventional foods,” and while that's far from ideal, it's certainly not the massive contamination that's been suggested! Two third of non-oganic food is also fine! And some organic food is actually 'contaminated'!

The author mentions “Horizon Organic milk, with its bright red label and happy cow on the container, gives the impression of a bucolic standard” After buying a carton of Horizon milk that, when opened, smelled of fish one time, and complaining to Horizon only to be brushed off, I have never bought another thing with their name on it. I won't touch Horizon products, so I was onboard with the comments made about how big and blended they were! I am not a fan of mega-corporations.

The author says, “Some of that common sense wisdom that farmers speak of is being replicated in the lab with findings that the fruits and vegetables we eat today are far less nutrient dense than those our grandparents ate,” and she cites “a study” but gives no reference! This made me suspicious, as did a claim in an article that was quoted uncritically which said, “...the recipe for mother's milk is one that female bodies have been developing for 300 million years,” but the earliest known mammal is barely over 200 million years old! I'm not sure where the author of the article gets this ancient date from!

There's a section of this book which bemoans the increase of C-section births, antibiotics, and lack of breastfeeding, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350908/ published online in October 2014 makes no mention of the disappearance of Bifidobacterium longum subspecies infantis from our gut. In fact, I couldn't find anything online which did talk about the disappearance of this group of bacteria even as I found mention after mention of its benefits.

The paper referenced by me above says, "The colonization of the fetal gut begins in utero with swallowing of amniotic fluid" so it's not entirely dependent on vaginal delivery. I do agree though that antibiotics and C-Section pose threats of one sort or another, but the author fails to mention that while C-sections have risen alarmingly, so that they now comprise about a third of births in the western world, it's still only a third, and only in the last two to three decades. Allergies and other issues began rising long before that. It's the rather alarmist parts of this book which bothered me, even as I considered it a worthy read for the important information it does convey. A more measured tone would have been wiser.

Breastfeeding is also not a rarity. In Australia for example, almost all mothers start out breastfeeding. It's the lack of continuation of it that's a potential problem, because by the age of one year less than a third are still doing it. I guess they feel they need to wean children asap because breastfeeding is time-consuming and they're poorly educated with regard to the importance of continuing it. Prevalence of breastfeeding was the lowest in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, but even in these countries, the prevalence was 70%, 69.5%, and 62.6% according to this study in 2012.

So it's misleading for this author to imply that Caesarian section has risen to such dramatic heights or that breastfeeding has plummeted so precipitously that it's affecting children's health and contributing massively to opportunistic disease, allergies, and conditions. I do allow that she has a point about antibiotics, but while we can suggest natural birth as much as possible, as an antidote to C-Sections, and a lengthy breastfeeding as an alternative to formula, what is the use of antibiotics going to be replaced with? Crossed fingers and a hope that infection doesn't set in?

We could ask that antibiotics only be used as needed and not routinely, but that's a medical decision and I think most doctors know this, but there's the ever-present danger, particularly in litigation-happy USA, of a lawsuit if something is omitted and there are consequences. What we can do is have children fed a dose of the good bacteria after they're born, and after any series of antibiotics has ended, in order to keep their gut in good shape, but the author never raised this option as far as I recall.

Instead, I read, “Because traveling down the birth canal is the critical means for acquiring your microbiota, those who miss out on this process face lifelong health consequences,“ yet the reference in this case was useless with regard to supporting the author's thesis and was really hard to get to to boot!

part of the problem with this book that I had was what was not covered. It seems to be largely US-based, like the USA is the only country int hew world worth considering. it;s nit. What I kept wondering, but was kept in the dark about, was how other countries fare. Yes, there was an occasional reference here and there that strayed outside the borders, but always it was back to the USASAP. I felt there was a lot that could have been learned by taking a more global view. For example, obesity is rare in Japan, so what is it they're doing that we're not? This book was silent on such things.

I read quite a bit about the Hadza bush people in Africa. The idea is that since they lead an existence far more akin to what all humans did before farming became prevalent in our culture, maybe we can learn things from them and their microbiota. A putative dissenting voice was addressed so: “The argument usually goes something like, 'Well, we live far longer than those populations so we must be doing something right'.” The response was along the lines of "But that argument falls flat with just a little bit of scrutiny. In hunter-gatherer societies most mortality occurs within the first five years of life because their sanitation isn’t on par with ours, thereby increasing the risk for infections. In addition, they don’t have access to antibiotics for true life-threatening infections, or access to vaccinations, so it is understandable that infant mortality rates are high.“

Isn't this a refutation of precisely the argument the author is making with regard to natural birth and eating whole, unadulterated food, which these people do exclusively? Never once did this author ask why infant mortality was so high. And yes, the Hadza do have a comparable life-span to the rest of us if they survive the first five years, after that, but this is one society. Why look only at one that supports your thesis and ignore others which do not - such as, for example, ancient Egyptians, who had a relatively stress-free life and very pure foods compared with ours, and yet who lived only into their thirties for the most part? It would have been nice to have seen the author play devil's advocate instead of harping only on her own theme.

The author references a 2016 paper regarding an experiment by Erica D. Sonnenburg et al with two sets of mice, each of which was artificially infested with the same specific set of gut microorganisms. One set of mice was fed a diet rich in fiber whereas the other was poor in fiber. The results over four generations showed that gut bacteria diversity was adversely impacted by the low fiber diet. I don't have a problem accepting this at all, but the author's report made no mention of the mice's health! Was thatadversely impacted or were both groups equally healthy? In which case, what did this study show that was relevant to her thesis?

I couldn't read the study itself, because it's hidden behind Nature journal's paywall. It may well be that health was impacted (or would be), but to present a study like this which does not directly support the author's thesis is confusing a best, and misleading in that it implies such a thing when it actually makes no such claim. Another example of this was when I read that “It’s important to remember that you first must have microbes that are capable of feeding on the short-chain fatty acids. The findings of German and his colleagues and the Sonnenburgs and their colleagues remind us that many strains of these beneficial bacteria have probably disappeared from the guts of those of us living in Western world.“ Probably? The reference for this was hard to find in the end notes, but seems to refer to insulin growth factor which isn't relevant here! i read a similar thing when I read, “The discovery that many of the chemicals we are consuming every day are EDCs, and are probably changing our bodies” Again, note key word 'probably'! That may well be true, but it’s not a strong argument!

Interestingly, while searching for the article to which the author referred, I came across one which explicitly says that "Human populations with a diet enriched in complex carbohydrates, such as the Hadza hunter gatherers from Tanzania, have increased diversity of the gut microbiota (Schnorr et al., 2014). In contrast, long-term intake of high-fat and high-sucrose diet can lead to the extinction of several taxa of the gut microbiota." This one would seem to fly in the face of earlier suggestions in this book that we should reduce carbohydrates and increase fats! It only goes to show that this is a very complex topic, and the welter of information flying around can be confusing to the lay person (which includes me!). The author sort of touches on this aspect of the problem without going into much of an exploration of it and how it can be counteracted. Even such a simple thing as defining terms can help.

I read of one man who had lived with the Hadza and followed their way of life for a while and he discovered: "The results showed clear differences between my starting sample and after three days of my forager diet. The good news was my gut microbial diversity increased a stunning 20%, including some totally novel African microbes, such as those of the phylum Synergistetes." note that this isn't a study and the plural of anecdote, as scientists ay, is not data But though it is just an anecdote of one man's experience, it does suggest, as a counter to some of the author's assertions, that all is not lost and a change in diet can increase diversity.

Note that this article: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/08/hunter-gatherers-seasonal-gut-microbe-diversity-loss.html
suggests that there are few Hadza and fewer still who pursue traditional lifestyle. Additionally, their diet is extremely restricted: "The Hadza number just over 1,000 people, fewer than 200 of whom adhere to the traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle, which includes a diet composed mainly of five items: meat, berries, baobab (a fruit), tubers and honey." This isn't clear from what the author writes so again this book was misleading as to sample size, and dietary variation.

The article also says, "A 2016 study, published in Nature and led by Sonnenburg and senior research scientist Erica Sonnenburg, PhD, showed that while depriving mice of dietary fiber greatly reduced their gut-microbial species diversity, this diversity was restored when the dietary-fiber restriction was lifted. But if this fiber deprivation was maintained for four generations, microbial species that had initially bounced back robustly became permanently lost." This isn't exactly clear from the book, which talks only of diversity being lost over several generations, and doesn't emphasize that while we cannot replace what has truly been completely lost - not through ordinary means - we can repair what we have by a change in our diet.

It would have been nice in this book to have had less a tsunami of facts and references and more of a coherent story as to what the problem is, what the real connection is to diet and micro biota, and what we can do, realistically and practically to fix it. The author does get into that towards the end of the book and that made for impressive reading. It just takes a while to get there! I think that's one of the weaknesses of the book in that it makes for very dense reading and I cannot see this taking off popularly, which is really what a book like this needs to do, and if it doesn't, that will be a shame.

Another issue was the conflation of correlation with causation! I read, “As I mentioned, this also points to why colon and rectal cancers are now on the rise in people in their twenties and thirties in the Western world...” but just because two things happen at the same time doesn't mean they're connected. I encountered this error several times; perhaps the author has arguments and data to support such assertions, but these were either not made or not well made.

What really shone in this book for me was chapter nine where the author launches a polemic as breathtaking as it is depressing about the devaluation and even oppression of women over the last hundred years by confining them to the house and effectively enslaving them - because that's what unpaid labor is and that's what far too many women have been reduced to doing for far too many years as "housewives' stuck between the kitchen and a vacuum cleaner. This chapter is excellent, well-written, forceful, and really quite beautiful to read. It certainly won back a lot of my good grace (as well as "Goodness Gracious!") after some of the issues I'd had earlier.

So, overall, and with the caveat that this book takes some reading, I recommend it as a worthy read because it makes some really good arguments and is an important contribution to our understanding of an increasing lack of wellness in society and of possible counter-measures we - as individuals - can undertake - and the hell with government and agribusiness who, let's face it, aren't going to do a damned thing to help as long as they can keep on minting money on the backs of the sick people they;re promoting. And you can read that last clause however you like!

Delving into the history of American industrial food production, Lawless makes a compelling argument for returning to a time when we ate whole foods rather than processed, packaged food. She discusses the social and environmental impacts, as well.

This book will have you rethinking what you put in your shopping cart as well as what you put in your plate! With the changes in our lifestyle choices, it becomes crucial to rethink the foods we are consuming. This book will be part of the conversation. I voluntarily reviewed an Advanced Reader Copy of this book.

This book describes foods that we should be eating, these foods are vastly different from those that our grandparents and great grandparents ate in the 1930’s and 40’s before processed food became common. At that time period, most people ate home grown food or food that had been grown locally.
Our modern organic food is healthier than some processed food, but a great deal of it contains pesticides, trans fats and sugars.
You will discover the difference between organic foods and whole foods such as locally produced grass fed beef, eggs, whole milk, butter, and avocados, rotated crop foods, locally grown produce and other foods.
You will see why the American diet is causing long term health problems, and how this diet will affect future generations.
You will learn why breastfeeding is better for a baby’s long term health than infant formula, and why children should be eating the same food as their parents.
You will discover why bacteria are essential to a developing infant’s health, if a baby is not born vaginally and breast fed (but he/she are born via a C-Section and fed with formula), the baby does not receive the bacteria he/she needs for their health, which will affect them for the rest of their lives in the form of disease and poor health.
This book contains an encyclopedia’s worth of information on what you eat,how eating poorly affects your long - term health, and how you can change your way of eating and improve your family’s and the next generations health.

Formerly Known as Food is jam packed with information about our food production system, the impact of farming and other chemicals on our health, the "magic" of baby digestive systems developing and the lifelong impact they have and so much more. There are several paths of research and education in this book and while each was interesting, it seemed as though they weren't cohesively presented. Some could read this book and walk away with a sense of "we're doomed" because of the detail about how some chemicals and treatment exposures have multi-generational impacts and so we have already impacted our grandchildren and beyond with the chemicals in our lives. Others may walk away feeling like they want to get engaged by aren't sure what to do. The book can be filed on the book shelf with many other books that I've read about the state of food production and health today - and seems best suited for people that are reading across the spectrum of food/health books. Compared with other books of this vein, I felt like the author was more self focused in her narrative than some others.

Free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Book is available June 19th.

I do have a pet interest in this topic and have read a couple in a similar vein. This is a good primer in the current state of affairs in our industrial food system. If you enjoyed this and wanted more nuanced exploration, check out "The Dorito Effect", "The World According to Monsanto", "Combat Ready Kitchen", "The Omnivore's Dilemma", and "Food, Inc".

Great history on the evolution of food but not a whole lot of new information. Maybe that is the point? To go back to the basics of organic fresh produce locally grown. Good quick read but not a ton of new info.

This exposé about the food industry in our country and how the food industry, itself, has made food unhealthful for the consumer is a must-read for everyone interested in their health.

The bulk of the treatise exposes the dangers of food additives and packaging. Lawless was quite specific and documented her concerns with multiple studies. She fleshes this out nicely and presents her case well. Anyone reading this and wanting to make a change can see how to do it. She also explains how we got into the quagmire we’re in.

The last sections of the book, which are calls to action, are less easily put into action. She offers many opportunities for getting involved, but most are not feasible for regular people. And many are just plain unrealistic. In her summary, her loudest cry is for more and more government involvement and action. In the first 2/3 of the book I felt like she was wanting to educate everyone so that the consumers would exercise more personal responsibility for what they ate and/or fed to their families. By the end I felt like she was saying personal responsibility was no longer a possibility and the government should step in making all sorts of new rules, regulations and laws regulating everything from TV advertising to spokesmen for various food products.

There’s a lot that doesn’t apply to everyone, but there’s enough excellent universal information for each reader to glean something important. I highly recommend this book.

I received this ARC from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press. This review will be published on GoodReads immediately and at Amazon and on my library’s website
https://publiclibrary.cc following the publication date.

With the giant caveat that this galley copy did not have complete footnotes for each chapter, which makes it REALLY difficult to assess the content without being able to see the actual references being used...

Having some personal interest in the overall topic and coming in with quite a lot of highly specialized knowledge about gut microbiology and GI inflammatory diseases, this book seemed right up my alley. And for the most part, I think this is a pretty decent summary of what we know so far from the research and why it’s concerning. It’s definitely not perfect: Some sections do cherry-pick the data — the chapter on pregnancy and the early child microbiome is... rather problematic, shall we say — and in places it can get repetitive. I would have liked to see more thorough discussion about what can be done (realistically!) about these issues, rather than just a depressing litany of grim studies.

A really interesting look at the evolution of "food" as we know it and made for a useful advanced beginner nutrition reader. I knew some of the material she explained as someone who has followed health trends in the last decade, but a lot was new to me.

.What I think made this book most accessible is that while it relied on (solid) research, the author also made good use of interviews that were understandable to the lay reader. I appreciated that she took an honest look that there's no easy answer to the food marketing challenges, it's truly not as simple as "eat better", although that is a worthy goal. As a result, this came through as a useful "how to" rather than scolding readers.