REVIEW | Primal Body, Primal Mind by Nora Gedgaudas

The first half of the book is on nutrition and is quite good, backed up by a lot of evidence and careful referencing. The second half turns more speculative. You can tell because the scientific references simply start to vanish, leaving the author speaking of her opinions. This is where we start talking about cell phones killing us and a few other much more questionable assertions about which no conclusive evidence exists one way or the other that is popular with the, what is it now? Neo-New-Age?

This is especially disappointing and perhaps even dangerous because the nutrition stuff gets you into a rational mood, the author builds some credibility, and then the whole thing seems to start sliding into technophobic imagination, which might drag some readers down with it (the one's who didn't notice the precipitous decline in scientific references). There are plenty of better established dangers, and mixing in what seems to amount to groundless technophobia undermines the credibility of the otherwise solid nutrition research.

You can get some good ideas out of this book, but if you aren't careful, you might also get some quite weak ones mixed in. Overall, I would say that more solid presentations are available that do not get as lost after halftime, and these should be prioritized. My own list after reading a lot of books in this field reads: Sisson, Taubes, Wolf, and Cordain (the newest one; he's revised a few things).