Customer Reviews
Broken Promises - By: C Knight, 06 Apr 2007 
This book promises so much & simply doesn't deliver. Quite apart from containing data on many foodstuffs not available in the UK (it is an Australian book after alll & most of the research into the GI diet has been done over there), it's far from complete, focuses way too much on processed foods, & it's not easy to find the food you're looking for.
The book usefully includes "an A to Z list of individual foods for easy reference" in addition to "a comprehensive list of foods & food categories for in-depth knowledge". A nice idea, except that the alphabetical section is itself subdivided into several categories, thus splitting this section into numerous A to Z subsections. To find a food in this section you must therefore first figure out which subsection it's in & that's not so obvious when, for instance, (Walker's Scotland) Highland Oatcakes are listed under "Cookies" rather than Crackers.
Average figures are sometimes given for similar, grouped products, but in the first one of these I saw the figures didn't add up.
Sloppy English/Australian makes this book even less readable. A "serve" can be a noun when, for example, it refers to tennis, but here "serve" is readily interchanged with "serving" to refer to a quantity of food. And perhaps terms such as "middy" (a medium sized glass of beer) are a little too colloquial for an international audience.
Someone's obviously put a lot of work into collating the data for this book, but it has the strong flavour of a rushed job, published to fill a gap in the market without much care being taken over content or usability. A nice little money earner I'm sure, but I hope someone out there writes a far better version sometime soon. If they do & they use colour on the pages to help identify GI values, that'll be even better.
Why is this book published over here? - By: , 25 Nov 2005 
Having read The Low GI Guide to Managing PCOS by the same author, I bought this book as I thought it would give me the GI values for a lot of different foods. It did just that, but sadly, I live in England & the GI values relate to food products available in the USA, Australia, Canada & New Zealand.Many of these are not available here & if they are, the values can differ due to the different ingrediants used!
Tha author states that the GI values of foods not available in Britian have been left in the book as they can be used as an approximate guide for a similiar brand, but quite frankly, what is the point in that? If I wanted to play a guessing game, I wouldn't have taken the time & trouble to purchase the book.
