Lustig's anger and frustration at the government regulators and the food industry come through loud and clear. Some of the information is a bit of a retread if you read extensively in this subject, but he also builds nicely on both his and other authors' work in making the case that our system is messed up -- and is slowly killing us if we don't change things fast.

METABOLICAL by Robert H. Lustig (Fat Chance and The Hacking of the American Mind) is subtitled "The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine." And the author, a trained physician and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, refers to the text as "medical heresy" because of its strident appeal to the profession to focus more on nutrition, diet, and healthier eating. In fact, he offers an entire chapter titled "Assembling the Clues to Diagnose Yourself" which will likely add anxiety to those of us who are considered well within the "normal" range by our time-pressed physicians. Lustig argues that overly processed foods, particularly those with added sugars and salt, are contributing to disease (such as cancer, dementia, diabetes, hypertension or heart issues) in the United States. He points out that physicians should be spending greater effort promoting changes in lifestyle and eating habits, rather than waiting for disease symptoms to appear and need treatment. For added perspective and numerous relevant examples, he devotes a chapter each to What and How Adults Eat; What and How Children and Adolescents Eat; and What and How Fetuses, Infants, and Toddlers Eat. Subsequent sections discuss public policy, including educational campaigns, changes in law and economics (taxes, subsidies, etc.), and incentivizing real food. This thought-provoking book with certainly be of interest to student researchers. METABOLICAL received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Interesting Concept. Remarkable Honesty. Questionable Science. First, I gotta mention that the author intentionally left out the Bibliography, claiming it would run to 70 pages and add $5 to the cost of the book, so he instead put it on the website of the book. Which is an interesting idea, but part of his reasoning was also that this would allow users to click the links and see the sources directly... which eReader users can already do in an appropriately linked (re: fully publication-ready) bibliography. But he discusses this in the very introduction of the book, which sets the tone for how frankly he expresses his views throughout. Still, to this reader this was an attempt to obfuscate the sources at best, and was thus an automatic star reduction.

The other lost star comes from the at times questionable science. Rather than actually discussing various claims made by those with competing ideas, he simply claims massive conspiracies from Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Government, and whoever else he can try to conveniently scapegoat. And then he completely ignores the economic and social sciences in his recommendations for measures that would make Josef Stalin blanch at just how extreme this author wants to dictate to the masses.

Still, the ideas - while ultimately not truly novel and ultimately self serving as he *just happens* to run a nonprofit advocating these very positions - are interesting and explained in quite a bit of detail, from the chemical and cellular all the way up to the global. Making this a worthy text to read and consider... just don't buy the farm based on just this one book, and make sure you seek out competing narratives to fill in the author's inconsistencies. Recommended.