Customer Reviews

Miracle Sugars: The Glyconutrient Link to Disease Prevention and Improved Health

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This is sugar education that everyone needs....no, not table sugars! This packed 41 pages gives plenty of evidence that we should be paying attention to our intake of the 8 essential sugars so we can attain proper cell-to-cell communication, and why. Several studies cited conclude that the addition of glyconutrients to the diet allowed folks with all kinds of immune system diseases, ADHD, even cancer, benefitted greatly through supplementation. Elkins includes the best natural sources and her suggestions about supplementation. For anyone who wants to restore their health and understand how this "new class of missing nutrients" can help, this is a great tool.

This book is easily read in 30 minutes time. It answers all my questions on glyconutrients. In fourteen chapters, it tells me the advantages of glyconutrients to mend the damage to our bodies resulted from pollution of chemicals and viruses. The eight saccharides - glucose, galactose, fucose, mannose, xylose, N-acetylneuraminic acid, N-acetyglucosamine and N-acetylgalactosamine are miracle ingredients to good health. The book also provides references of published articles on the goodness of glyconutrients, which makes reading more interesting.

I am such a happy reader and just happy to have any new tid bit of information that I am rarely disappointed with the books that I read. This book was one of my rare disappointments.

I feel as though I learned little.

It was extremely unorganized. For example, in one place, she has a list of one type of thing followed, seemingly randomly, with an explanation of some other issue/topic. The headings were not at all parallel one to the next or consistent. And there was a huge disconnect between WHAT these sugars were and WHERE they can be found. It is so unorganized that after careful reading, I am still not sure of where to get mannose, for example, if I felt that I needed that. A pill? A powder? Food? Medicinal mushroom? I don't know what the PRIMARY use if of mannose, or any of the other sugars. And it was so unorganized that I often could not figure out whether she was talking about a sugar or a type/category of sugar or a source of that sugar. Her referencing of these things was not at all consistent in a way to be sure.

There are many places where what she put out as fact was simply wrong/untrue. This was particularly true in the first half of the book which had almost nothing to do with "sugars" but was about health maintenance in general. She is an extremely simplistic thinker relative to health matters and appears to get some of her health paradigms from the unreferenced mainstream FDA propaganda about health (ie the food pyramid type of thinking). The errors were many and the simplistic view of things was significant. For example, for her, meat=bad, and that's that. It is obvious to her that we are not intended to eat meat - ever. It would have been far more valuable to not include any general primer on health maintenance if she was only able to do one simplistic to the point of so often being wrong.

And is it repetitious! This is related to its being unorganized. If it were organized, then when something was said once, it would be understood because the whole of the full organized context was there. Instead, she talks of mannose, for example, over and over again and I still don't know how I might use it....where to find it, in what form, how much, in what foods, etc. What was told in 187 pages could have been told far better in 15.

Normally, I am interested in the quality of the book (writing and facts of) and do not require credentials. It was only after I was so surprised at how poor the quality of this book was that I looked at her credentials. She has no EARNED degree, rather an honorary degree of a Master Herbalist. Ideally, school assignments require us to raise to an academic rigor which is not the central point in some other areas of life. Clearly, she has not learned how to be rigorously organized or to make a firm point or to clearly guide someone to a solution. Her conclusion at the end of the book is for me to eat "a variety of plants, herbs, flowers, gums, fungi and molds."

I did like the various clear phrasings in the book, the analogies and the definitions attached to the technical terms. Her writing style is clear within one sentence but is not organized throughout the book and she is missing functional actions and conclusions which might be useful for the reader.

Rather than get this book, just google the 8 sugars:
* Glucose (don't really need to google this!)
* Galactose
* Fucose
* Mannose
* Xylose
* N-acetylneuraminic acid.
* N-acetylglucosamine
* N-acetylgalactosamine

And google medicinal mushrooms! Good luck!

This is a book on plant and fungus based, herbal medicine masquerading as a book on sugars. Although many useful plant and fungal extracts are covered, ingestion of the 8 essential sugars as isolated sugars is barely touched on.

This is sort of like writing a book on "the amazing properties of carbon" and spending all of the subject matter on diamonds (complex form of carbon).

If there is a book with chapters like "Eating 2 grams a day of pure fucose (or galactose, or mannose etc.) does this!" please someone let me know!

I have ordered and read every book on Glyconutrients Amazon offers and even some not listed on Amazon. Miracle Sugars by Rita Elkins is by far my favorite. She writes in a way that make reading and understanding a fairly complex subject easy and fun. I have seen thousands of lives positively enhanced by supplementing Glyconutrients before reading this book. After reading this book I now understand how these 8 sugars work inside the body to improve immune function.