Fiber Fueled: The Plant-Based Gut Health Program for Losing Weight, Restoring Your Health, and Optimizing Your Microbiome

This book could be boiled down to three words: “Eat more plants.”

That’s it. That’s the whole book.

This is one of situations where someone has a small idea, and they just beat the hell out of it for 275 pages because they had to get to a trade hardcover length to get on the shelves at Barnes and Noble. It gets repetitive.

(The book is about 400 pages, but the last third of it are recipes for a “28-day gut reset plan” or something. I skimmed through those. So. Many. Adjectives.)

And the author’s writing style is pandering. Lots of dumb jokes that fall flat.

Also, quite a bit of presumption and simplification/minification of deeper problems. He presents his lifestyle and diet as this idyllic version of perfection that we should all strive for and describes it in excessively glowing terms. This ignores that a lot of people eat poorly for emotional reasons, not because they’re ignorant of nutrition.

One of the problems of the American diet is that we eat to feed anxiety and self-hatred, knowing full well that we’re poisoning ourselves. Often eating poorly is the point. We use food as a proxy for self-harm.

There’s lots of jargon too. The author is a gastroenterologist, and every page is heavy with acronyms, Latin words, and medical terminology. It gets hard to keep track of all your “FODMAPs” and “prebiotics.”

Seriously: “Eat more plants.”

That’s it. That’s the book.