This book has a bold premise: high salt consumption is not, as global scientific consensus holds, a serious health risk, but rather, as the title suggests, a health fix.

Dr. DiNicolantonio, a pharmacist, explains how “our ancestors crawled out of the sea millions of years ago and we still crave that salt”, giving this as a reason why we should consume salt ad libitum, aiming for 8–10g per day, and thereafter a fair portion of the book is given over to discussing how many health conditions are caused/exacerbated by sugar, and that therefore we have demonized the wrong white crystal (scientific consensus is that there are many white crystals that can cause us harm).

Indeed, sugar can be a big health problem, but reading it at such length felt a lot like when all a politician can talk about is how their political rival is worse.

A lot of the studies the author cites to support the idea of healthy higher salt consumption rates were on non-human animals, and it’s always a lottery as to whether those results translate to humans or not. Also, many of the studies he’s citing are old and have methodological flaws, while others we could not find when we looked them up.

One of the sources cited is “my friend Jose tried this and it worked for him”.

Bottom line: sodium is an essential mineral that we do need to live, but we are not convinced that this book’s ideas have scientific merit. But are they well-argued? Also no.

Click here to check out The Salt Fix for yourself! It’s a fascinating book.

_{^{(Usually, if we do not approve of a book, we simply do not review it. We like to keep things positive. However, this one came up in Q&A, so it seemed appropriate to share our review. Also, the occasional negative review may reassure you, dear readers, that when we praise a book, we mean it)}}

We’ve often written that “what’s good for your heart is good for your brain”, because the former feeds the latter and takes away detritus. You cannot have a healthy brain without a healthy heart.

This book goes into that in more detail than we have ever had room to here! This follows from their previous book “Beat The Heart Attack Gene”, but we’re jumping in here because that book doesn’t really contain anything not also included in this one.

The idea is the same though: it is the authors’ opinion that far too many interventions are occurring far too late, and they want to “wake everyone up” (including their colleagues in the field) to encourage earlier (and broader!) testing.

Fun fact: that also reminded this reviewer that she had a pending invitation for blood tests to check these kinds of things—phlebotomy appointment now booked, yay!

True the spirit of such exhortation to early testing, this book does include diagnostic questionnaires, to help the reader know where we might be at. And, interestingly, while the in-book questionnaire format of “so many points for this answer, so many for that one”, etc is quite normal, what they do differently in the diagnostics is that in cases of having to answer “I don’t know”, it assigns the highest-risk point value, i.e. the test will err on the side of assume the worst, in the case of a reader not knowing, for example, what our triglycerides are like. Which, when one thinks about it, is probably a very sensible reasoning.

There’s a lot of advice about specific clinical diagnostic tools and things to ask for, and also things that may raise an alarm that most people might overlook (including doctors, especially if they are only looking for something else at the time).

You may be wondering: do they actually give advice on what to actually do to improve heart and brain health, or just how to be aware of potential problems? And the answer is that the latter is a route to the former, and yes they do offer comprehensive advice—well beyond “eat fiber and get some exercise”, and even down to the pros and cons of various supplements and medications. When it comes to treating a problem that has been identified, or warding off a risk that has been flagged, the advice is a personalized, tailored, approach. Obviously there’s a limit to how much they can do that in the book, but even so, we see a lot of “if this then that” pointers to optimize things along the way.

The style is… a little salesy for this reviewer’s tastes. That is to say, while it has a lot of information of serious value, it’s also quite padded with self-congratulatory anecdotes about the many occasions the authors have pulled a Dr. House and saved the day when everyone else was mystified or thought nothing was wrong, the wonders of their trademarked methodology, and a lot of hype for their own book, as in, the book that’s already in your hands. Without all this padding, the book could have been cut by perhaps a third, if not more. Still, none of that takes away from the valuable insights that are in the book too.

Bottom line: if you’d like to have a healthier heart and brain, and especially if you’d like to avoid diseases of those two rather important organs, then this book is a treasure trove of information.

Click here to check out Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain, and secure your good health now, for later!