Customer Reviews

Total Nutrition: The Only Guide You'll Ever Need - From The Mount Sinai School Of Medicine

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I completely disagree with the review of October 25, 1998. Total Nutrition is a serious medical text about nutrition that supports its claims with scientific studies. I have a serious medical condition (a kidney transplant), and have had to learn a considerable amount about nutrition in order to keep my transplant healthy. I have over 60 books on nutrition, and this is the ONLY text that I reccommend to fellow transplant patients to understand nutrition.

The book is in three parts: Part I: Nutrition is explained in detail so that the reader understands what a macronutrient (fat, protein and carbohydrates) and micronutrient (vitamins and minerals) is. Part II: Nutrition and its importance to aging and gender is explained, everything from infants to geriatrics. Part III: Nutrition as it relates to chronic and acute illnesses is explained. Every manner of illness is covered (I learned the most from the section on kidney ailments).

I highly reccommend this book. If you have very little or no understanding of nutrition, Understanding Nutrition (by Ziff Davis press) is a very good introduction to nutrition and explains it in very easy terms. I read that book first and nutrition became very easy to comprehend. Stay healty!!

Dreamers need not read this book. If you believe that there is a magic herb, vitamin combination, etc that will relieve your need to understand how what you eat impacts your long term looks and health... seek guidance elsewhere (AM radio is full of such information). If you can wade through a fair amount of information to be used as a starting point in building your nutrition IQ, this is a great book. Includes nutrition specifics those with special dietary requirements.

This is an excellent nutrition book I'd recommend for anyone interested in non-fad information on healthy eating. It's an excellent reference. I think a second edition is needed with updates from more recent studies. Most of the basics don't change, however, and I still recommend this edition.

On the upside, the book is a comprehensive collection of many doctors works on nutrition (as according to FDA and "old school" knowledge). It does explain very well many concepts with great details as expected in any college type text book.

On the downside, the editor Victor Herbert sounds like a very angry skeptic that looks down upon anyone that contributes to the field of nutrition that does not have a "M.D., F.A.C.P" after their name. According to him, even PH.D's are "quacks" (a term by the way which he grossly overuses throughout the book).

I was looking for a unbiased, non-fad, non-hype book on nutrition and what I found was a complete one-sided story that could have been written by Olvier Stone - trying to expose all nutrition's misinformation like...

- Don't beleive any advice about nutrition unless it comes from an M.D. - Organic foods and Health stores are a scam - Vitamin supplements are completely worthless and do nothing - Processed foods are just as good as natural foods

.. the list goes on. Herbert makes claims that he does not back up, with the exception of a few references to his own books that he wrote. This is like a hacker using several computers to hide where they are really coming from.

If you are one that has enough common sense to block out the biased opinion and learn from the facts, then this book is useful. However I am sure there are better choices out there for some good facts.

As a student earning my master's degree in public health, I have taken a special interest in nutrition books that are on the market. It often frightens me when I read the things that are getting published. This is an excellent book that provides the basics that one might need to improve health. I only gave it four stars because I felt it lacked some specifics that a person might look for. For instance, how much one should exercise to lose or maintain weight. If you want specifics you may have to supplement with another book.

This is an excellent reference source for anyone wanting to obtain information for a school paper or learn more about nutrition. I tend to agree and disagree with the previous reviewers. Don't expect this book to have an exhausting amount of information on a specific subject you are looking for. This book is a broad and total reference on the subject of nutrition. At times I have had to search the index to find a subject located in multiple places in the book. Not uncommon for a large reference book. This book is one of the best for general, quick information on nutrition. I sometimes use it exclusively to research a paper for school. But at times find myself using several books to get all the information. Overall, AN EXCELLENT BOOK!

This book is a required educational textbook for one of my classes just months from 2011. I'm irked the school has us reading this. It is so outdated, so condescending and full of ego, I'm offended at reading what I have. The stance of the author feels rigid as he goes on explaining his archaic thoughts and approach to supplements, natural alternatives to medicine, and what degrees he thinks qualifies people to have any "real" knowledge about nutrition.

For example, he regards a Certified Nutritionist as a quack/snake-oiler, and while I am not a nutritionist at any level, someone with a straight and narrow field of study just might have more specialized knowledge than say, an assistant pharmacist who happens to randomly just know what he reads off of a screen.

Just my opinion, I wouldn't completely disregard a nutritionist just because they don't have an M.D. And I wouldn't trust an M.D. to know the fine details about nutrition when he should know the fine details about the symptoms of my ailments or an inflammation quite frankly. lol.

This book was written in 1995 and a lot of the better-star reviews are from closer to when it was published and relevant data was current. Realistically if these doctors were in the age of their 40s at the time they wrote this book, the (authors) are educated out of a school of thought that had just experienced many medical and nutritional breakthroughs in the 1950s. And in the 1950s, psychiatry and how the brain, hormones and other processes of the body are affected by sugars and other food constituents, among other things, were at a very basic and still VERY experimental point in research and much of it still undeveloped. A lot about how any of it worked was still highly misunderstood and mysterious.

Now ok, I do give them credit for continued education from what they might have learned back then, however, back to the contents of the book, even still, the tables, charts, statistics and most of their data is from pre-1995. A lot of references early in the book go back to the 80s as their "current" information.

-This stuff was written from back when *all* fats and *all* cholesterols were bad such as those in avocado and eggs and it just doesn't stand true anymore.

-Several times within the first 30 pages of this book they insist that supplements are worthless, have no value and do nothing. That is a seriously strong claim to have made back then even at that time! Certainly an absorption of just a small amount vitamin does something and not "nothing".

-I read this on page 29: "Quacks falsely claim that the soil has been depleted of nutrients and food grown in it is lacking vitamins and minerals and that the use of chemical fertilizers produces foods that are nutritionally inferior to those that organically grown... In fairness, it must be stated that nothing is wrong with the foods in health-food stores. It is their pills, powders and potions that are the real rip-off..."

-Page 161: "Avoid loose teas commonly sold in health-food stores. Often they are not clearly identified, and many of them are contaminated by other substances that may have harmful affects."

-This is on page 440: "Although most people believe that psychosocial stress is important in causing heart attacks, the scientific evidence for this is extremely weak." (Defunct in 2010)

The author was so vehemently in disagreement with the use of any kind of supplement as being beneficial, and so trusting that our soil bears nothing but healthy product even though pesticides are in the genes and flesh of our food products these days, I wonder how much kick-back they were getting from big-pharma to say these things. /sarcasm

I don't know what the word "supplements" meant to the authors back then but I can say that regeneratives like glucosamine chondroitin and resveratrol along with many other types of supplements like saw palmetto, cinnamon and cranberry whose benefits are all backed with real scientific data, control and placebo groups are very much worthy supplements to have.

I could go on forever. Dr. Herbert was anti- everything-but-himself. I rated it 1 star because the book should be taken off of the shelves because the data and findings are old, invalid and many of his ever-so-not-humble opinions are proven scientifically wrong. Sorting through what data is still valid and what is not is too much work. There are certainly some valid points and some powerful reminders but not enough to override what is outdated, and not so profound that I couldn't find the advice elsewhere. If it weren't for my tests having to come out of the material found in this book, it would be tossed.

This book is by far the absolute worst book ever. Please save your money and invest in a much better book.

The author is clearly very one-sided, and takes a very strong defensive stand. His strong negativity comes out starting in only the third chapter. He says that malnutrition is impossible in the USA and that no one living in the USA has any nutritional deficiencies. This is obviously false and the author is very ignorant towards homeless people, poor people, and the elderly which can very easily and quickly become deficient in various vitamins and minerals. After reading that in the book I simply could not trust anything else he wrote, and was very happy to burn the book.

If you want a good, complete nutrition book, I highly recommend ISBN-13: 978-1592574391. It's the book I purchased after this one to learn all the fundamentals of nutrition (and exercise).

I was looking for a no-nonsense book on nutrition that wasn't trying to just tell me what I wanted to hear, and while this book fits that description to a T, it's not as good as it should be.

First off it seems about 20% of the content of the book is dedicated to slamming "quacks". This is completely wasted words that just make the book 20% less information dense to me, having never subscribed to any fad diets or health gimmicks in the first place. Even if the reader did need a good smack upside the head (nutrition information wise) the contents are likely to immediately offend the pride of the reader, and that it will turn off everybody who otherwise could have gained from the information herein. (see all the 1 star reviews as evidence).

Another problem is it seems to claim that "everbody just needs to trust the scientists and the food chain to add whatever chemicals they want and only fools would claim that they are harmful", which is just not scientific. While there are crazies out there who believe we should immediately ban dihydrogen monoxide from our food supply, that shouldn't stop healthy scientific criticism.

Next the book is old. If you're going to attack fad diets, having no mention of atkins or low carb diets at all is pretty ridiculous. The book defends our centralized mass produced food chain, and since it was published (1995) we have had several high profile cases of it failing, Mad cow, Chinese baby formula, and just recently the peanut co e. coli thing. Our food sources have changed since the book was published. There is barely a mention of trans fats.

If this book was updated to this millenia, had a good author that cut back the jaded scientist zeal which just turns a lot of people off, it could be the basis for a solid book of facts.

This book is outdated, biased, and more opinion based than fact based. Contrary to the cover page quote by John H. Renner, MD., President, Consumer Health Information Research Institute, "every family does NOT need one [this book]". Because of Renner's endorsement, the credibility of the Consumer Health Information Research Institute just went down the tubes. Don't waste your money. Good grief, there must be a better and more current resource out there. I'm looking...