Book Review
Title: An Apple A Day: The Myths, Misconceptions And Truths About The Food We Eat
Author: Joe Schwarcz
Publisher: Harper Collins Canada
Released: December 6^th 2007
Pages: 272
ISBN-10: 0002007649
ISBN-13: 978-0002007641
$32.95 CDN 

4 Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey (Ontario Correspondent - Canada) 

When I was living in Alberta many years ago my doctor at the time told me when he had start his education in medicine, it was mandatory that he read all of the Sherlock Holmes series before the first semester. The logic behind that? Doctors use the same skills of deduction when diagnosing as did the famous detective spawned from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mind. So when I pick up Joe Schwarcz's book An Apple A Day to review and the quote on the front page is "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has the data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts" by Sherlock Holmes, then I know I am in the presence of profound logic. 

Schwarcz furthers my own theory of his intelligence on the subject matter of health by stating in the intro "Eating used to be simple. As long as the food was tasty, looked reasonably appetizing and was plentiful, we were content. But then science came to dinner and all of a sudden sitting down at the table became a laboratory experience, and a confusing one at that." When did it all become so confusing? Genetically modified? Pumped with arsenic and rubbed with cyanide? Who took the pleasure of food away from us!

Aside from the occasional rant that my town doesn't have enough authentically diverse restaurants in it for my palette to be pandered to, I generally approach food as a logical process based in science. What I mean is that food needs to have a logical reasoning in order for it to be considered ‘bad' or ‘good' for me. I've read a lot of books on healthy living, not diet books, but books about how our bodies naturally process food. Like a vehicle, if we haven't got a clue how our bodies work, we are the cliché of a woman going into a mechanics saying ‘my vehicle makes a clunk, clunk, clunk noise, do you know what that is?' Schwarcz is of a similar philosophy, so it was truly delightful to pick up An Apple A Day and have an incredibly informative book that has taken all the boring and incomprehensible research and rendering down to chapters of information easy enough for anyone to comprehend.  

Schwarcz explains that An Apple A Day "does not purport to be an encyclopaedia OF nutrition or a comprehensive guide to healthy eating. It does, however, provide a healthy framework for sound nutritional thinking, along with a perspective on what is worth worrying about and what is not as we ply ourselves with the melange of molecules we call food." He talks about the positive link to soy in the research of women's breast cancer, and the research findings on tomatoes and the connection to men's prostate cancer. This isn't a book for people who are sick and looking for research answers and it isn't for over the top health nuts either. An Apple A Day is a great book on current research findings, and how that affects, improves and shapes our healthy living standard. 

As a pleasant and playful conclusion Schwarcz surmises at the end of the book his own simple eating habits.