It is not often that I read a cookbook from cover to cover, but I did with this one. The book was not quite what I was expecting, based on the title. I am not diabetic or have pre-diabetes. I am at risk and I have also discovered that my body requires a very high fiber diet so I thought this cookbook might be helpful to me in upping my natural fiber consumption.

After sampling some of the introductory information and reading that they recommend 50 g of fiber per day (in proportion to calorie intake - though they never addressed how to figure that out) I was expecting fiber powerhouse recipes. That was not the case. In fact, the 4 weeks of meal plans offered don't really come close to 50 g of fiber per day either, though if you made the meal plan vegetarian by subbing in tofu, seitan and tempeh in place of the meats you may well hit that mark. There are a surprising number of recipes that have no fiber and very few that have 10 of more grams per serving.

The book did have guidelines that differ from much of what I've read and they seem a bit more attainable, especially since I live with a vegetarian who does not care for me to cook meat products in the home. The big one for me was having 55-65% of your calories to come from carbohydrates - though they should be complex carbs, not processed sugars and the like. I will no longer berate myself when my carbs are up around 50% or so once I achieve my 30+ g of fiber for the day. But getting the high fiber I required and trying to stay near 40% carbs was quite the challenge and was actually causing me to intentionally up my fat intake to bring down my percentage from carbs.

I haven't cooked any of the recipes yet, but I've marked about 30 or so that I'm excited to try. The refreshing thing I found with the recipes in this cookbook is the lack of artificial sweetener. It seems so many diabetic and low carb cookbooks rely on them and I'd rather cut back on those as well.

I am disappointed in the Kindle formatting of this book, however. I needed the Kindle format so my mom could use the cookbook (she's blind so the text-to-speech capabilities make it accessible to her), but if you are waffling between the print and the Kindle I'd recommend the print version. The table of contents is fully clickable, but for some reason many (no, not all of them though) of the chapters are simply title by number and have no name telling you the type of recipes in that chapter and I find the never ending list of recipes in each chapter kind of difficult to skim because of how it is formatted - all caps, with text flow having the first line indented but the second one not. The index is not clickable so you can't easily just look up an ingredient you want to work with and see those recipes. Yes, you can search in the book, but that doesn't always turn up the name of the recipe so it can mean lots of clicking back and forth. Definitely not the most usable Kindle cookbook I've read. ( )