Meenu Grover is a nutritionist and dietician who has an unique approach to diets and lifestyles, she designs diets and in this book teaches us how to do just that. It is a textbook. So it gets into facts and figures in an orderly chapterwise manner. It provides the basics of nutrition, grouping them and giving the reader details about what carbohydrates do, what aminoacids mean.
The writer says, before the biotech era, research on food dealt with just establishing which carbohydrates, proteins and fats were present in the food we eat—that is the specific food under study and what these are good for—that is good for growth or good for eyes etc.


‘The biotech era we are entering now concerns the understanding of the effects oon specific gene expressions of certain compounds as we eat.’ A good example, the writer says, is ‘the regulation of a diverse group of genes whose proteins (generally enzymes) tend to either directly or indirectly scavange strong oxidants’ or decrease the production of strong oxidants. Strong oxidants can damage DNA and lead to illnesses like cancer and cause inflammations or hypertension.

There is a chapter on the goals of preventing diet-related diseases. What regulatory authorities recommend in States and countries and what international bodies say. The chapter on Food and Drug Administration Plan has a section on health through better information. If and when it is compiled logically, leading one towards good health—a good book on what is engineered food, what is labelling, what is dating, what is recommended, what things do, what is obeseity, the economics behind what is put on the shelf and if it is good or bad is all chalked out in this one volume, making the book a broadspectrum study book, for university students as well as lay readers.