Living Low-Carb: The Complete Guide to Long-Term Low-Carb Dieting [Hardcover]

I bought the book together with some other books at the time when I was diagnosed with Type I diabetes, because I thought I should have one book with recipes which would ease my decisions on what should I eat.

Foolishly, when I got it, I left it on the shelf because I was reading Dr Bernstein's "Diabetes Solution", Eades's "Protein Power", Reaven's "Syndrome X", and Miller's et. al. "The G.I. factor: The Glucose revolution". I completely overlooked that I also bought this, as I found out later, very interesting and valuable book.

Book starts with a short overview of "The Theories" that are dealing with low-carb diets. Fran McCullough comments on The Zone, Dr. Atkins diet, The Go-Diet, The Careful Carb Diet, Glycemic index theory and other approaches to "The puzzle", as she calls the wealth of information and confusion around dieting and nutrition. She also gives you an insight to the objections of the nutritional establishment against low-carb diets.

Book continues with wealth of usable information on everyday problems of low-carb dieter, such are travelling abroad, eating on plane, eating out or indulgences. I loved the book because you can see that Fran knows what counts when you are perusing low-carb, and what you have to know to solve the issues that come when you are following diet.

Information in the first part of the book shows that, at the end, only you can choose, which approach - or combination of approaches - to low-carb diet might work for you.

McCullough also gives some quite specific information on how some foods or food components, such as Omega 3 and 6 oils, L-Carnitine, water or peanuts, might affect your body and its biochemistry. There is also information on how you might block body intake of the sugar, starch and fat by using nutritional supplements. Information that McCullough gives to a reader is useful and it is evident that she got it from scientific sources. Unfortunately, the bibliography at the end of the book is just too short. She references books, telephone numbers or addresses where you can get new products for low-carb cooking (not so useful, if you are not living in USA), and some websites with additional information very well, but some exact references to scientific data are missing.

As I understand, the book was not meant to give a deep insight to nutritional supplements, even supplements and their effects are mentioned quite often. For deeper understanding of vitamins and other nutritional supplements you will have to go somewhere else. The sources that are mentioned also in the book are also Protein Power or Dr. Atkins Vita-Nutrient Solution.

Jewel of "Living low-carb" book are recipes and cooking tips. Even book includes recipes that are not suitable for Type I diabetics as me (too high carb content) there are many that offer quite lot of ideas how to make your diet enjoyable and non-monotonous.

Conclusion:

Even the book is meant more for those who are trying to loose weight and only in some parts touches diabetes I found this book very useful. Important overall message of this book is "You can find you way of living low-carb!" and that message is supported by real life stories from different people successfully living on low-carb diets. Recipes in the book and cooking tips are great and they are also making this book a very valuable resource.

The book gives good overview and references to other low carb books, however I think that the next edition should include more references to mentioned scientific research.