Integrative Nutrition: Feed Your Hunger for Health and Happiness [Hardcover]

My name is Jennifer, and I'm a sugar addict! And I never would've realized it if it weren't for this book. The chapter on cravings really opened my eyes to the ways I was eating and how it affects me and my life. After finishing it, I went to my fridge and pantry--and everything I found in there, even healthy stuff I purchased at Whole Foods and the local organic market, were loaded with sugar! I couldn't believe it! Yogurt with 32 grams of sugar! Cereal with 25 grams of sugar! It's no wonder I was so high-strung and never able to concentrate or even sit still for a short period of time. I always thought I just had a minor case of Attention Deficit Disorder, but it turns out, no, I was just on a continuous sugar high! So I decided to take control of my sugar intake. Now, I read the packages of everything I buy, and do my best not to purchase anything with more than 10 grams of sugar, 5 or less is my goal though.

This book will make you take a good look at yourself and the way you're eating. It has awesome exercises at the end of each chapter that will help you see your eating habits and how they affect you. One of the first few chapters had an exercise where you keep track of what you eat for a couple weeks and make note of how hungry you were after you were finished eating and how hungry you were 2 hours later and it turns out, chicken is one of the only things that keeps me full for long periods of time. I was amazed!

Joshua Rosenthal's book Integrative Nutrition is the greatest present you could give yourself. It's the best present you can give anyone (I already gave a copy to my mom for her birthday!). If we all just stepped into our lives and the lives of those we care about and helped each other move in the healthy direction, then this country may have some hope after all.

I'm interested in eating more healthfully, and purchased this book from Amazon based on the overwhelmingly positive feedback. I normally do not review books here, but I was genuinely disappointed by this purchase and wanted to offer a few points of criticism for future buyers to consider.

I wouldn't have minded if the (considerable) preaching in this book was mostly regarding nutrition, but unfortunately, that was not the case. Paired with questionable editing (power statements were frequently repeated twice on the same page, and very peculiar usage/omission of punctuation), statements like "Wake up America" (not even "Wake up, America") were extremely grating to me. Rosenthal says that everything is nutrition, a claim that many experts make about their fields (be it biology, physics, probability, etc..), but never before have I seen someone take that claim so literally. If nutrition is everything and Rosenthal is an expert on nutrition, it must follow that he is an expert on everything, I suppose. Is it worth suggesting that sometimes marital problems (not poor nutrition) are the real reason you are in poor health? Sure, but I would not have purchased this book if I'd known that an entire chapter (1 of 11 total) was dedicated to assessing the health of one's relationships. Another of these few chapters is entirely dedicated to being your own person and not trying to fit in with the masses. Assuming the average reader of this book is not fourteen, the premise of a lot of this book was insulting to me. All I wanted from this book was a primer on how to feed myself better, but to get that information, I felt that I had to wade through a whole lot of rather high-handed motivational speaking.

While I admire Rosenthal's dedication to studying all dietary theories, I felt that this major theme of finding one's own path was seriously undermined by the testimonials of his students peppered throughout the book suggesting that the one true path is to attend the Center for Integrative Nutrition. Although this was hardly the only place in the book where anecdotal evidence was treated as empirical, these testimonials frequently made me feel like I was reading an advertisement for the school rather than a book intended to educate. And since this is a book I spent money on, I felt that this addition was unnecessary at best and exploitative at worst.

This is only the beginning of my many points of frustration regarding this purchase, but if you aren't put off by the above, I'd encourage you to give the book a try anyway. I gave it 3 stars as it did have good information and some illuminating commentary on why we eat the way that we do. In my case, I wish I had gone with another book and am surprised that the reviews for this one are so uniformly positive, when to me, the drawbacks were hardly subtle. Whatever book you buy, though, best of luck with your efforts to eat better!

This book does what no other book on the market is capable of doing. It empowers and inspires the reader without judgment or preaching that there is only one "diet". He addresses theories and nutrition without limitations or making the reader feel as though there is only one way to eat. He also successfully relates to the reader what so many other self proclaimed guru's fail to acknowledge, which is that it is about so much more than the food! Mr. Rosenthal also weaves a fair amount of inspirational stories of some of the amazing people who have trained under him.
Integrative Nutrition is a must read!