Recently, I received a copy of “Unjunk Your Junk Food: Healthy Alternatives to Conventional Snacks.” This little book teaches you how you can still snack on “junk food,” while saving your health.

The Good
This is the ultimate beginner’s primer for those of you who want to learn how to read labels to feed your kids – and yourself – better!  The first 3 chapters guide you on how to start, including arming you with nearly all the information you need to spot unhealthy and toxic chemicals and items in your food.  ”The Worst Ingredients” is a must read, especially if you don’t want to read long, boring articles on what complicated sounding foods are.  ”Unjunk” is writen in a fun, colorful, and visual manner, so it’s great for those of you who are starting out in cleaning the garbage out of your cabinets.  The rest of the chapters cover specific foods, such as Candy, Ice Cream, or Granola and Snack Bars.  Each section gives you a helpful list of why  you might be craving those foods, what they found in the worst items, and helpful tips and interesting about them.  After that, they cover the most popular “bad” foods and the closest, healthiest replacement they could find.

I was very pleased to see many of my own food choices here, plus a few I didn’t know about, that I plan to add to my snacking list!  I was also surprised that a few brands didn’t make it hear (Kind, Larabar, UnReal Chocolate), but that’s ok, there’s enough in here to satisfy everyone.

The book ends with a glossary and “Naturally Savvy Approved Brands” for easy reference.

The Bad
There are only a handful of gluten-free or dairy-free selections, but they are discussed so that’s good.  They also did not cover hidden sources of MSG, only when MSG itself was listed on the label.  MSG is a serious neurotoxin; you can learn more about these in my article about MSG.

Overall Opinion
This is a very good book and I was pleasantly surprised to see the latest information about possible dangers in foods (i.e. carrageenan).  I highly recommend this to any parent looking to improve their diet or their kids’ diets without losing the goodies.  If you’re starting out in biomed, this book will give you a handy tip guide and fits in your large purse when you go shopping.  Go to the website and download a sample chapter.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of “Unjunk Your Junk Food” from the  Naturally Savvy Blogger program to facilitate this review. Image is from my Amazon Affiliate links.