I don't mean to say that a man who has done so much to call attention to the problems of sugar and other carbohydrates is part of the problem. Rather, it is more a problem of his own colleagues -- the medical establishment -- rather than the villains he chooses to blame.

The book's first half is valuable for debunking the old "a calorie is a calorie" mindset. The effects of sugar and other carbohydrates on insulin and leptin, and the resulting response to create and store rather than burn fat, needs to be wider known. While the text gets rather dense at times, sometimes in seemingly unnecessary detail, it does get this and other important information across. It turns on its head the old wisdom that obesity is just a matter of will, that fat is bad and you should eat more carbs, that counting calories is the way to weight loss.

I find the second part of the book less useful in that he spends all that time bashing "Big Food" without offering a real solution. In that, he blames the wrong villains. The companies that produce food go by this cardinal rule: they can only sell what people want to buy. Lustig kind of acknowledges this, but does not go the distance. Companies are happy to sell foods depending on demand: low fat, low salt, and now gluten-free foods are on the shelf. Consider also how quickly trans fats (itself a reaction against saturated fats) have been disappearing from manufactured foods. So why aren't more low carb, low sugar foods on the shelf? Here's where the real villains come in.

For too long, the food pyramid and its low-fat orthodoxy reigned supreme. The medical establishment and the government pushed this conventional wisdom, and so our calories shifted from fats to carbohydrates. Coinciding also with the food pyramid and the low fat craze is a dramatic spike in obesity (basically, in the 80s). Given the timing we can't blame only purely cultural or preexisting factors like the American love for dessert, or corn-fed beef. Rather, the low fat orthodoxy would tolerate no dissent, and the establishment still would not budge to this day. Moving away from a low carb diet would inevitably mean getting our calories from fats, something that establishment voices like the AHA continue to oppose. To this day, low carb nutrition -- a proven method of weight loss in the past -- remains a fringe movement. I think Lustig does us a disservice by avoiding direct confrontation with the government and medical establishments that control both public opinion and public policy.

Consider this: half-baked science blame salt and fat for heart disease. What kind of food do you get if you make low fat, low salt and low sugar food? Low flavor food. Nobody wants that. Something has to give, and as long as the medical establishment won't back down on salt nor fat, we'll end up with more sugar or worse.

Another good read is Gary Taubes' "Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It", a more readable book that blames the same nutritional villains without wasting time on political ones.

Update to my original review below: Sr Pascalina's own book has been translated into English and is now available on Amazon. It's called "His Humble Servant: Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert's Memoirs of Her Years of Service to Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII". You can now read from the original source, not this author's.

Having read the book, I find I would agree with this comment from Pius XII: Greatness Dishonoured, 1980, by Michael O'Carroll, p. 243-244 (epilogue):
There is another great lady deserving a salute in this period of papal history, Sister Mary Pascalina Lehnert. She had been Pius XII's housekeeper for fifty years when he died in 1958: in Munich, Berlin, the Vatican. Since his death she had lived in retirement, not from work but from the public gaze. She had set down some memories of him soon after his death, on orders from her superiors -- not a diary, but recollection of striking events in the Pope's career.
The prediction of a notorious critic of Pius XII, the ex-priest Carlo Falconi, that the nun's 'diary', if published, would be explosive, has not been fulfilled. There are certainly revelations but they do but serve to enhance the Pope's reputation. The book was published early in 1983 and already in that year went through four editions. Translations are being prepared. Sister Pascalina died on 13 November, 1983 returning to Rome after a ceremony in Vienna organised to commemorate the twenty fifth anniversary of Pius XII's death. (...)
What is one to say about a concoction allegedly based on her life, appearing in the United States under the title La Popessa? This is a world apart from the genuine memoirs of the nun; it is a world of arbitrary invention, carried at times to the wildest extremes. I refrain from giving examples, with which I could fill scores of pages of this book. Sister Pascalina was simply the Pope's housekeeper, yet to her is attributed a throughout [sic] knowledge of the most involved Church affairs, a memory of conversations of sixty years earlier, a brashness in dealing with high ecclesiastics, and power and influence over the Pope, all utterly without documentation, utterly unbelievable: she actually composed with the Pope one of the greatest theological encyclicals in the history of the Papacy, Mystici Corporis Christi! "The pseudo-Pascalina book", says Fr Graham, "is at best a practical joke on an unsuspecting public. At worst, it is a new low in U.S. book publishing."