Books like The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet

Illnesses affect families as well as individuals. How would you react to the news that your Dad would soon lose a leg because of type 2 diabetes? Two brothers reacted by setting out to find the hard information about type 2 diabetes. That was tough—but the brothers tracked down the new information that this type of diabetes could be reversed to normal. Then persuading Dad that things had to change was an even greater challenge. The family’s journey, and the remarkable achievement of major weight loss, is brilliantly documented. The insights into the stresses on the family as they support Dad are sublime. Even after decades of dealing with human tragedies as a doctor, this book raised a lump in my throat. Today, Geoff still has two legs. 

First published in 1869, this short account describes the outrageous effects of ‘corpulence’ on the author’s daily life and his search for a solution. Routine advice was ineffective. For a decade he rowed a heavy boat on the river for two hours every morning. He ‘gained muscular vigour but with it a prodigious appetite’ and his weight increased. But eventually he found a doctor who had wise insight. He was advised to avoid foods that were easy to eat in quantity but did not satisfy appetite—bread, butter, beer, milk, sugar, and potatoes. He lost 50 pounds in weight, and over the course of the next four editions of his book, chronicled his long term return of good health. This is a parable for our time. 

Where can you get reliable information on how the body works? Online sites are notoriously unreliable. Most textbooks are unreadable. But here is a book that explains clearly how the body uses food for fuel. This book is not an ‘easy read,’ so don’t curl up with it expecting instant enlightenment. However, if you want to learn the beautiful details of how your body works, go for it. The chapter on "Integration of carbohydrate, fat and protein metabolism in normal daily life" conveys an understanding of how food handling works, and just looking at the diagrams and graphs will take you a long way. And simply reading the "Key learning points" at the start of each chapter will introduce you to the magic of metabolism. 

‘Counting’ calories at every meal is not a recipe for a sane or happy life. But knowing the approximate calorie content of what you regularly eat is certainly wise. This is a look-up book, not a reading book. So—how about the blueberry muffin you have been led to believe is the healthy option? What! 393 calories? But that is about a quarter of the daily calorie requirement for a smaller person. Orange juice? Ah yes, one of my five-a-day—so healthy. But at 90 calories per 250 ml glass it is easy to cut without bothering appetite. Taken in addition to a weight neutral diet, it would cause around six pounds of weight gain in a year. This is a book of information. Information useful for life. 

Forks Over Knives describes how changing your diet (forks) can be used to good effect to improve health, therefore, avoid the need for surgery (knives). This is a book about the most important advice on healthy eating – guess what? eating a whole-food, plant-based diet. It is full of inspiring success stories of people who have taken charge of their diet and transformed their health, as well as useful recipes. The author advocates entirely plant-based, and although there is a healthy way to eat animal products, the foundational diet for everyone needs to be mostly plants, and most definitely whole foods, meaning not processed or industrially produced.

Every book by Annemarie Mol is good but The Logic of Care is simply the best book on what medicine should be. It is short, deceptively simple but leaves no hiding places. Everyone will be able to understand it in the same way from a teenager up through a Professor of Medicine to a Minister for Health but don’t expect any Ministers to admit to reading it any time soon. Mol outlines a relationship-based rather than technology-based medicine. How do we ensure medical techniques help us to live the lives we want to live rather than force us to live lives that suit the companies that make the technologies want us to live? How do we care for people rather than service them?

Chicken Friend is another story about friends and family. Becca is taken out of school to be homeschooled in the country. She struggles to adjust and make friends with the cool kids who are her neighbors. I could definitely sympathize with that feeling of trying so hard to make friends and yet feeling so out of place. It also reminded me of my move at the beginning of high school. Becca is a fun character with a wacky but loving family. She also has things she hides from everyone, even the reader, that made the story a little bit of a mystery.

And now that I have chickens myself, I enjoy the story even more.

I instantly became of fan of Mira, a STEM-loving pre-teen who is dealing with a lot: her best friend moving away, a very sick cat she adores, and her father’s depression after losing his job. At first, she thinks her big brain has to be the key to unlocking how to solve her troubles, but over the course of the chapters, she realizes that opening her heart to new friends and modeling true perseverance goes a lot farther. This book has so much sweetness and humor, but it's not fluff. Every page feels like a real kid dealing with real stuff and trying to use whatever she can to help her family through a really tough time. 

Bliss’s classic book is the definitive account of the discovery of insulin by Canadians Frederick Banting, Charles Best, J.R.R. Macleod, and James Collip. I share this story in my book but Bliss delves far deeper into this incredible tale full of drama and human failings.

Bliss describes Banting as a failed surgeon who had a middle-of-the-night epiphany about how to isolate the unknown product of the pancreas’s mysterious islets of Langerhans cells. Eminent scientist Macleod gives Banting a chance and some lab space, but in the end, Banting accuses Macleod of stealing credit for this discovery that turns diabetes from a death sentence into a chronic, manageable illness.

Banting loathes Macleod so much that he almost refuses his Nobel Prize because he is so angry that Macleod will also get one!

The discovery of insulin in early 1922 was a medical milestone that has since saved countless lives–my own included. Until this moment, a diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes was a certain death sentence. But as diabetes clinician and historian of medicine, Chris Feudtner points out, the success of insulin has distorted historical accounts of diabetes by marginalising the experience of the patient in favour of narratives that focus on the development of medical technology to treat them. And Feudtner’s diagnosis is confined not just to diabetes but to the history of medicine in general. Following a personal epiphany that patients have an existence beyond X-rays and blood tests, Feudtner set out to address this problem by writing a history of diabetes as told from the perspective of patients. He does so magnificently and offers important insights about our relationship with technology that extend well beyond the treatment of diabetes.