Sibling Rivalry and the Full Plate Diet – Week in Books #35

I bought Making Brothers and Sisters Best Friends at a garage sale thinking it would help me encourage my children to be better friends.  As it turns out, the book is really more geared toward kids who might want to be better friends with their siblings.  The book was written by three siblings, and I have to say that I found the writing to be tiresome.  But then again, the authors are kids, so I cut them some slack.  If your children are reading on a 6th-ish grade level and are interested in being better friends with each other, they might get something out of this book, but you should read it first because some of the suggestions and what the authors imply are roots of problems might seem a little legalistic or beyond what the Bible actually says or forbids.

Sorry that’s a wishy-washy review, but I call it like I see it.

I received an advance review copy of The Full Plate Diet a long time ago and finally got around to looking it over.  The premise of the diet is that if you can increase your fiber intake, you can lose weight without going hungry.  That’s a valid idea.  However, I felt the authors took the fiber thing too far, to the point of overlooking other useful nutrients that might not contain fiber, such as protein.  They write at one point that the ultimate high fiber diet would be vegan.  Not to get into a vegan/vegetarian/omnivore diet controversy here, but technically there is nothing about a piece of chicken that will sabotage your diet, even if it has less fiber than two cups of beans.  So if you read this book, just don’t go overboard.

Apart from that, I think the book is a helpful reference for fiber content, listing lots of the highest fiber foods from various food groups, and including with a section of high fiber recipes, many of which looked appealing.  The book also has a section on the fiber content of many, many packaged supermarket foods (why they included that when fiber is listed smack dab on the nutrition label is beyond me) and a section on high fiber choices at popular restaurant chains.

If you’re looking to slim down and don’t eat much fiber in your diet, this book would be helpful to you as long as you take it with a grain of salt and aren’t looking for a be-all-end-all diet plan.

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Related posts:

1. The Dukan Diet
2. Plenty, Week in Books #42b
3. The Week in Books 2008, No. 42