If you only read one, start with Benjamin Bikman's Why We Get Sick for the mechanism, Jason Fung's The Obesity Code if calorie counting has already failed you, and Jessie Inchauspé's Glucose Revolution if you want something to do at your next meal. They answer three different questions, and most people who feel stuck are reading the wrong one for the question they actually have. Below is what each gets right, where each leaves you standing in front of a plate with no verdict, and what a per-meal score adds that a book structurally cannot.
What does Benjamin Bikman's Why We Get Sick get right?
Bikman is a physiologist, and his book does the single most useful thing in this whole category: it moves the conversation from glucose to insulin. Most people are handed a glucose number by their doctor and assume that is the whole story. Bikman's argument is that insulin resistance sits upstream of a long list of conditions that get treated as unrelated, and that you can have years of rising insulin before a glucose test looks abnormal.
Read it if you want to understand why any of this matters. It is the book that makes the problem legible. What it will not give you is a decision procedure. You finish it convinced that insulin load matters and still unsure whether the sweet potato is a better choice than the white rice tonight.
What does Jason Fung add that Bikman doesn't?
Fung, a nephrologist, is the one who reframes obesity and type 2 diabetes as hormonal rather than purely a matter of willpower or arithmetic. If you have spent years eating less and moving more and watching the weight come back, The Obesity Code is the book that explains why that felt like a rigged game. The Diabetes Code extends the argument to type 2 diabetes and makes the case that it is a dietary condition that may be improved rather than a one-way sentence.
Fung is also the clearest popular writer on fasting: not just that it works, but meal timing and eating windows as levers you can pull. That is genuinely additive to Bikman.
Where Fung leaves people stuck is the middle ground. Fasting is a binary tool. You are either eating or you are not. Most of your life is spent in the eating part, and that is where a lot of readers go quiet.
Is Jessie Inchauspé's Glucose Revolution worth reading?
Yes, and it is the most immediately actionable book on the shelf. Inchauspé is a biochemist who built her work around continuous glucose monitor data and turned it into a set of concrete hacks: eat vegetables before starch and protein, take a walk after eating, put vinegar in the mix before a carb-heavy meal, choose a savoury breakfast over a sweet one.
I will say plainly that our food order hack is not original to us. Inchauspé popularised it, and she deserves the credit. It is in the method because it is one of the highest-return changes a person can make without giving anything up.
The limit is that hacks are rules of thumb, not comparisons. "Vegetables first" tells you the order to eat a meal in. It does not tell you whether the meal was a good idea.
Who else belongs on the shelf?
- Robert Lustig (Metabolical, Fat Chance): the strongest case that processing and sugar, especially in liquid form, deserve their own category rather than being averaged into a diet.
- Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat, Good Calories, Bad Calories): the journalist who put the carbohydrate-insulin argument into public circulation. Long, argumentative, worth it if you like seeing the history of how nutrition advice got made.
- David Ludwig (Always Hungry?): a clinician-researcher on why hunger, not discipline, is the variable that decides whether an eating pattern lasts.
- Casey Means (Good Energy): metabolic health as the common thread across symptoms people normally treat separately.
- Tim Spector (Food for Life, Spoon-Fed): the reminder that two people can eat the same meal and respond differently, which is the honest caveat on every list above.
Where do all of these books leave you stuck?
Every one of them is a book about principles, and principles do not survive contact with a Tuesday. Here is the gap, stated as plainly as I can:
- They cannot rank two real options. You are looking at a menu with a burrito bowl and a chicken salad with candied nuts and a sweet dressing. Principles say "real food, low glycemic, healthy fats." Both dishes can claim some of that. You still have to guess.
- They cannot handle the combination. Insulin load is not one variable. Glycemic load, protein, fibre, how processed the thing is, the quality of the fat, whether the carbs arrive as liquid, and what order you eat it in all pull in different directions in the same meal. A book teaches you seven principles one chapter at a time. A plate applies all seven at once.
- They report after the fact, or not at all. A CGM is the closest thing to feedback, and it tells you what happened thirty minutes after you already ate it. Useful for learning. Useless for choosing.
- They do not scale to a shelf at the supermarket. Nobody reasons from first principles for the twentieth item in a trolley.
What does a per-meal insulin load score add that a book cannot?
A verdict, before you eat, in a form you can compare. The Insulin Fix score runs 0 to 100, and a higher score means a lower insulin load. It takes the same variables these authors argue about, glycemic load, protein, fibre, processing level, fat quality, liquid calories and food order, and resolves them into one number for this specific meal.
That is not a rival theory. It is the books' theory, compiled into something you can act on in four seconds. Bikman tells you insulin load is the thing that matters. A score tells you what the insulin load of your lunch is. Inchauspé tells you food order changes the response. A score adjusts when you tell it you had the salad first. Fung tells you the eating window is a lever. A score tells you what you are putting inside the window.
The other thing a number does that prose cannot is let you improve without quitting anything. When you can see that one dish scores 71 and the near-identical version with a sweetened sauce scores in the forties, the swap makes itself. That is the whole point of the 80/20 hack: you do not need every meal to be perfect, you need to know which meals are the ones worth changing.
How would you actually combine the books and a score?
A reasonable sequence, if you are starting from zero:
- Read Bikman first for the reason you are doing any of this. Motivation that comes from understanding tends to outlast motivation that comes from a deadline.
- Read Fung second if calorie-based dieting has already burned you, and to get a working model of fasting and eating windows.
- Read Inchauspé third and actually do the hacks. Vegetables before starch. A short walk after your biggest meal. Savoury breakfast for two weeks and notice what happens to your afternoon.
- Score your meals in parallel, starting with the three or four you eat most often. Most people find their insulin load is concentrated in a small number of repeated meals and one drink.
- Get labs. No book and no app is a diagnosis. Fasting insulin and HbA1c, discussed with a clinician, are how you find out where you actually stand.
Books change what you believe. A score changes what you order. You want both.
FAQ
Is there a book that covers all of this in one place? Not really, and that is the honest answer. Bikman owns the mechanism, Fung owns fasting, Inchauspé owns the in-the-moment tactics, Lustig owns processing. They overlap and occasionally disagree, mostly on emphasis rather than direction.
Do I need a CGM to apply any of this? No. A CGM is a good learning tool if you are curious and can afford one, and it tends to teach people that their personal responses are not identical to the averages in a book. But it measures after the meal. If your goal is choosing better, a per-meal score covers the decision that a monitor arrives too late for.
Do these authors contradict each other? On the big claim, that insulin load deserves more attention than it gets, they broadly agree. They differ on how much fat to eat, how central fasting should be, and how much of the problem is sugar specifically versus refined carbohydrate generally. Reading two of them is a good way to notice where the confident parts end.
Can any of this reverse insulin resistance? Research suggests that dietary pattern, movement and meal timing can meaningfully improve markers of insulin resistance in many people, and some clinicians report substantial improvement in type 2 diabetes. It is not a guarantee, it varies by person, and it belongs in a conversation with your doctor, especially if you take medication that affects blood sugar.