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 Absolute must read if you have Diabetes or Heart Disease! Feb 10, 2010
Dr. James ROCKS! Wow!I just read the book and learned so much. I have been low carb dieting for a while and I love it. I have beaten Type II Diabetes after being on meds and an Insulin pump. The doctor will not steer you wrong with this outstanding advice. I know from experience what happened in my life with the weight loss and now great health. I am 54, I just ran my first marathon and plan on another one. I feel like in 30 and I have my life back. Dr. Carlson's book tells my journey. Now I know what was going on inside of me all the time!!
Do NOT miss this read. It is fantastic!!!
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Dr. Carlson Speaks Facts/Common Sense, Easy Read Aug 01, 2009
This is a must read! Dr. Carlson has written this in simple, easy to understand terms. As you read it, you will be thinking to yourself, yes, that makes sense! Dr. Carlson has a biochemistry and cellular background, and can prove what he says is factual.
Unfortunately, all the decades of eating low fat, high carb, (sugar, sugar, sugar) has led to coronary artery disease. Now as a heart patient, I am following a low carb. lifestyle, staying away from sugar,(in all of its' forms!) as much as possible. My first blood test my Triglycerides dropped 50 points from my previous blood test, now at 135. This is an example of how "not" eating low fat, can reduce your important health numbers.
When I follow Dr. Carlson's recommendations of low carb, no sugar, I feel better and have no heart burn. Many do not correlate the carbs they eat with heartburn, but they are absolutely tied together. Reduce your carb intake and you will reduce, if not eliminate your heart burn. Every person I know who follows this positive way to eat has had the same results.
Pick up this eye opening book. The facts speak for themselves. You will be glad you did.
PS - Dr. Carlson has been my physician for 5 months. I am so grateful to have found him. I don't have to worry or try to convince my doctor anymore, that eating low carb is the way to go. Dr. Carlson already knows better! Anyone who is fortunate enough to live in this area, owes it to themselves, to schedule an office visit with Dr. Carlson. You will learn how we have been steered down the road, to ill health. FIRST - Buy this book!
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
 Greatly In Need of Editing - but Great Message Oct 18, 2008
Genocide, a book about eating healthy by avoiding sugar, has a subtitle of "how your doctor's dietary ignorance will kill you!!!!" That quadruple exclamation point gives you an indication of how this book will read.
The first thing to be aware of here is that this book did not go through much editing. Normally I am all in favor of self published books, but the process requires a solid team of "friends" who do the editing for you. It was really missing in this case. You have to be very patient to read through this, past the many errors, the multiple strings of !!!! and !?!? and SHOUTING LANGUAGE and back and forth commentary. It several instances this "technique" of writing makes the actual message very hard to understand.
Even more strange, he left justifies EVERYTHING in the book so the paragraphs all run together, and he has massive spacing between lines making the book much thicker than it needs to be. Does that make the information seem more weighty?
On to the message. Author James Carlson has been a doctor for many years and has always advised his people NOT to follow low carb diets - until he read an actual book about low carb diets and realized just how they work medically. Suddenly he understood that they were about removing sugar from your system, and he realized just how critical that was for his patients. Almost overnight he switched to a low carb diet himself and put all his patients on low carb diets - and saw amazing results.
He explains that cholesterol in the body RARELY comes from eating cholesterol. Most of the time it comes from eating sugar that the body then converts into cholesterol. In the same way, triglycerides don't come from eating fat. They come from eating sugars which get converted in the body. These are medical facts that most people aren't taught. Therefore, as they gobble up high-sugar diets with soda and cookies and ice cream, they are causing their own cholesterol problems and triglyceride problems. Their doctors then blame the issues on them eating meat and fat - so they cut back on those, and things only get worse.
James talks about why looking at "calories" in a food item can be meaningless. Literally, the biological measurement of a calorie is taking a food item (say a Big Mac), putting it into a beaker and lighting it on fire. The calories is simply how much heat (actual heat with a thermometer) that Big Mac causes. The problem of course is that a human body digests foods quite differently than a burning match! Just as one example, you can set fiber on fire. It burns quite nicely. However, when you EAT fiber, it goes in one end and out the other, sort of like a scrubby sponge to keep your system clean. It doesn't cause you to gain weight or anything. There are many other similar situations in the human body where the way we digest (or do not digest) something is vastly different than how a match would burn it up in a beaker.
James warns against the dangers of trans fats - something we should all know by now. He warns that the food pyramid with its emphasis on eating tons of grains is wrong. I agree with those. On the other hand, he bashes vegetarianism as being completely unhealthy, which I disagree with. Also, he claims stevia is a blend of hundreds of herbs. Actually, stevia is a green, leafy herb that grows in Central and South America. The official name of the plant is Stevia rebaudiana.
Still, there are only minor errors in a book chock full of solid medical history and explanation. One quote that every doctor should read is on ketones. He says, "I have heard some docs say that you can lose weight but there should never be any ketones in the urine. This is dietary ignorance at its finest. There is absolutely no way to lose fat without the creation of ketones, because ketones are the byproduct of fat digestion. If we are digesting and getting rid of fat, ketones will be created. End of story."
He has several sections dedicated to PCOS and pregnancy, explaining how many women he's helped by getting them to cut sugar from their diets. Many women who were infertile suddenly got pregnant once they reduced their sugar intake and began eating more healthily.
He had one patient with a blood sugar of over 400. In only a few weeks of cutting out sugar and focusing on low carb, his blood sugar was at 150. He has story after story with these results. He's helped people with GERD, and since overweight / obese size has been directly linked to cancer rates, he honestly feels this is saving lives every day.
Finally, for people living on a budget, look at this stat. $65.7 BILLION dollars a year are spent just on coronary artery bypass grafts and angioplasties. Another $22.9 BILLION dollars a year are spent on diabetes II care. We all pay those prices in our insurance premiums. The money you pay into taxes and health care premiums could be vastly reduced if we weren't all paying out those high costs for drug companies to fix people and pump drugs into them. Think of what our society could do with billions of dollars "free" and available for people to spend on other things! It is a sobering thought. One can only hope that more doctors - and food pyramid creators - read this information and start to actually understand it.
So to summarize, the message is great. The science provided to prove the message is great. It makes very clear even to a layperson why every human should be vastly reducing their sugar intake. My only wish is that the book go through a serious editing process, so that it becomes readable to many more people.
As a final note, author James Carlson is a Doctor of Osteopathy, which is "separate but equal" to a Medical Doctor. I had no idea there were two "types" of doctors in the US which were both equivalently licensed to practice medicine. It's very intriguing, and worth a read on Wikipedia.
18 of 34 found the following review helpful:
 I really, really wanted to like this... Jul 18, 2008
James E. Carlson, Genocide!: How Your Doctor's Dietary Ignorance Will Kill You!!!! (BookSurge, 2007)
I'll admit right up front that the whole reason I grabbed this one for review when it was offered to me is the horribly ungrammatical title. Any time more than one exclamation point is used in series, I know that I'll be reading the book with an eye toward "how much worse can it get?". The answer in this case is that if I found out my doctor had written this book, I'd change doctors. Whether it's correct to do so or no, one of the factors I use in determining a person's intelligence is their mastery of the language in which that person chooses to communicate. In this case, four exclamation points at the end of the subtitle is only the tip of a very smelly, grammatically incorrect iceberg. James Carlson may be the smartest person in America. I don't know. I do know, however, that this book was in desperate need of a proofreading, or two, or three, before it got anywhere near a publishing house. Ah, the wonders of vanity publishing.
This is more the pity because when you look beyond the constant grammatical errors and some of the godawful language use (the word "oops" is spelled with only one P, and that one will get on your nerves, since you'll see it quite often, usually with a number of exclamation points blazing along in its wake), there's a lot of information here that's well worth reading. This is yet another "carbs are bad, mmmkay?" book, but unlike Atkins and his other more visible contemporaries, Carlson actually gets into the science behind why low-carb diets work-- something that, had Atkins done it thirty-five years ago, might have made him a blockbuster long before he actually became one. His arguments are persuasive and well thought out, they're just presented badly. And while Carlson doesn't (as did Atkins) spend three-quarters of the book describing the low-carb diet, he does mention it in passing (sixty grams a day unless you're diabetic, then lower it to twenty), preferring to spend most of his time on the whys rather than the whats. This, to my way of thinking, is exactly the kick in the pants the low-carb diet has needed for so long. If only it were readable.
Add to the spelling and grammar problems (and some other basic structural flaws; the man never met a sentence fragment he didn't like, from the looks of it) a tone that attempts to be conversational, but instead often comes out self-aggrandizing (when addressing his scientific critics) or demeaning. Not something that's bound to help one's case, and something the prospective reader of the book will need to get past in order to soak up the actual information contained therein.
I hope there is a second edition of this book some time in the near future-- one that has been extensively edited and proofread. I'm relatively sure that such a beast would be picked up by a non-vanity publisher, and it might actually become a bestseller. Yeah, the information in here is that good, and that worthwhile. Packaging, however, is everything in the book industry. When you're dealing with a culture that's already resistant to reading, make it as easy for them as possible and they'll like you more. This is the antithesis of that sentiment. **
15 of 18 found the following review helpful:
 Good information, but needed a proofreader Jul 14, 2008
The author has credentials galore, including an MD, an MBA, and a JD. So I have to wonder how it is that such an educated person failed to have the text edited and proofed prior to publication; even the best writers know that this needs to be done. As a result, it is virtually impossible to get through two consecutive paragraphs without stumbling over egregious examples of writing that's in serious need of attention. Check out the excerpt provided via the "Search Inside!" link and you'll see what I mean.
1. You'll find extraneous commas that impair readability, while necessary commas are often missing-in-action.
2. There may be more semi-colons in this book than you've seen in all of your prior reading combined, and virtually none of them is used correctly.
3. There are very basic factual errors that would not have gotten past even an average editor. Example: "A vegetarian is someone who does not eat meat. There are your lacto vegetarians, those who don't eat meat or drink milk [wrong: lacto-vegetarians specifically do drink milk]. And there are your lacto-ova vegetarians, those who don't eat meat, eggs or drink milk [wrong: lacto-ovo means they DO consume milk and eggs]. (I see that the author has acknowledged this error on this website, but my point remains valid.)
4. There is no index.
5. There is no table-of-contents.
6. This should be a 150-page book, not almost 300. But combine wide margins with the largest line-spacing you've seen in any book (again, check-out the online excerpt and you'll see what I'm talking about), and that's what happens.
Yet, there is a *LOT* of important information in this book and I believe that most readers will learn a lot from it. There will be very little in it, however, that you'll need to refer back to later. Given that it's really only a 150-page book, I'd recommend looking for it at your library.
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