If you have young children or perhaps grandchildren, you probably care deeply about those children and their wellbeing, but there can often be a lot more guesswork than would be ideal, when it comes to ensuring they be and remain healthy.

Nevertheless, a lot of common treatments for children are based (whether parents know it or not—and often they dont) on what is most convenient for the parent, not necessarily what is best for the child. Dr. Song looks to correct that.

Rather than dosing kids with acetaminophen or even antibiotics, assuming eczema can be best fixed with a topical cream (treating the symptom rather than the cause, much?), and that some things like asthma “just are”, and “that’s unfortunate”, Dr. Song takes us on a tour of pediatric health, centered around the gut.

Why the gut? Well, it’s pretty central to us as adults, and it’s the same for kids, except one difference: their gut microbiome is changing even more quickly than ours (along with the rest of their body), and as such, is even more susceptible to little nudges for better or for worse, having a big impact in either direction. So, might as well make it a good one!

After an explanatory overview, most of the book is given over to recognizing and correcting what things can go wrong, including the top 25 acute childhood conditions, and the most critical chronic ones, and how to keep things on-track as a team (the child is part of the team! An important part!).

The style of the book is very direct and instructional; easy to understand throughout. It’s a lot like being in a room with a very competent pediatrician who knows her stuff and explains it well, thus neither patronizing nor mystifying.

Bottom line: if there are kids in your life, be they yours or your grandkids or someone else, this is a fine book for giving them the best foundational health.

Click here to check out Healthy Kids, Happy Kids, and take care of yours!

You may be wondering: do we really need a 416-page book to say “don’t use vegetable oils”?

The author, who was a biochemist before becoming a family physician, takes a lot of care to explain in ways the non-chemists amongst us can understand (with molecular diagrams very well-labelled), exactly why certain seed/vegetable oils (both of those names being imprecise and unhelpful as umbrella terms) cause metabolic problems for us, when in contrast olive oil, avocado oil, and even peanut oil, do not.

Understanding is, for many, the root foundation of compliance. We are more likely to abide by rules we understand the logic behind, than seemingly arbitrary “thou shalt not…” proclamations.

So that’s an important strength of the book, demystifying various fats and how our body responds to them on a biochemical level, not just “is associated with such-and-such, based on observational population studies”. This kind of explanation clears up why, for example, seed oils correlate with obesity more than calories, sugar, wheat, or beef—having as it does to do with affecting our body’s ability to generate and use energy.

She also offers practical tips/reminders throughout, such as how “organic” does not necessarily mean “healthy” (indeed, many poisonous plants can be grown “organically”), and nor does “organic” mean “unrefined”, it speaks only for the conditions in which the raw product was first made, before other things were done to it later.

We learn a lot, too, about the processes of oxidation, the biochemistry behind that (more diagrams!), and of course the inflammatory response to same (an important factor in most if not all chronic disease).

The style is mostly very easy-to-read pop-science, though if you’re not a chemist, you’ll probably need to slow down for the biochemistry explanations (this reviewer certainly did).

Bottom line: this is more than just a litany against vegetable oils; it’s a ground-upwards education in metabolic biochemistry for the layperson, and what that means for us in terms of chronic disease risks.

Click here to check out Dark Calories, and learn what’s going on with these oils!