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Fun premise though it was frustrating at times. Felt like large plot holes were introduced in order to make it follow a typical story narrative. I will probably give the sequel a chance to see if it improves.


Characters make many seemingly crazy decisions, especially near the beginning -- your best idea for an escape button is.. medieval England? Before even checking to see if your phone will work from there? Why not like.. the roof of some building in the same city? Also seems ridiculous that the wizards would make their robe/hat/staff an actual requirement of casting all their magic.. sure, you can wear them if you want but it's just an unnecessary complication added to justify all the wizards in the story being dressed as wizards, and it gets predictably taken advantage of.

As a side note, it seems hard to believe that a bunch of independent computer nerds would rely on one centralized shell without having any programs hosted on their own computers as backup in case the shell stopped working.

Took me a while to get through it all, but felt well worth it. I feel convinced for now that this is an important issue. The fact that the author has such a strong/respected medical background in the same domain as his argument lends a lot to his opposition to commonly-held beliefs in the wider medical (and general) population.

Lustig explains things I never thought about when it comes to what the actual effect of sugar is on the body. I also appreciated him going into more detail about how important fiber is as well. It helped clear up a lot of the confusion I felt concerning the advice I have received from doctors/others about what foods and activities are healthy.

The criticism I read about his work online seemed to focus mainly on his neglect of the dose-dependent nature of the problem with sugar, and while that wasn't directly addressed in this book, it seemed like, especially in the second half of the book, the focus on sugar-sweetened beverages and heavily processed foods helped.

I appreciated the effort to address some steps to change policy in the last chapter, though it did feel like the weakest part of the book. The book did occasionally feel repetitive, but it came in handy more times than not, reminding me of parts that I hadn't absorbed fully, and helping with anyone jumping around the book.