Busy Mom’s Guide to Family Nutrition is a brief overview of nutritional topics: controlling sugars, what vitamins are essential, weight management, dieting, and helping children with weight problems.
What does this book have to offer that you can’t just get off the web? Nutrition is a vast topic so there’s quite a bit to wade through and evaluate. Rather than being a complete guide to anything, this book briefly addresses topics that arise when trying to plan meals for families and when trying to evaluate what is/isn’t healthy or helpful for raising healthy children. It provides the vocabulary and concepts that are useful for doing deeper research.
I have a basic knowledge of most of the bigger topics in this book (gained from pediatricians, nurses, and reading web and magazine articles). However, I found the discussion on sugars and sugar substitutes useful and I refer back to it often as I navigate the changing nutritional labels on packaged foods (though I tend to avoid sugar substitutes more than the author advises). I also found the history and comparison of different diet trends fascinating (Pritikin, Atkins, Raw Foods). That chapter is useful for evaluating diet claims.
Is this a useful book? Yes. Is this an essential book? Hard to say since this book is poorly indexed and you have to dig through each chapter to look for answers. It is, however, a good overview and would be useful as a starting point for discussing nutrition with your (or your child’s) doctor.
Recommended for families to read and teens to read themselves if they're interested in nutrition.
Tyndale House Publishers provided me with a complementary copy of this book.
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