Autophagy Fasting with Water for Beginners by Jason Berg and Eric Fung

A Hot Mess

This book is a hot mess. One look at the table of contents will reveal that the book is all over the map. The book is definitely repetitive in places, and the structure does not follow a logical pattern. With a topic like this, the book should open with a good background section which should be followed by a clearly defined method. Instead, here, the initial part is scattered and disorganized. I don’t think they define autophagy quickly enough before they start using it everywhere. Because it is such an unusual word, the author should let the reader know that right away. I thought that the background information should have been structured more cleanly and less repetitively; there are several places where they could have said a concept once instead of over and over in different areas in the text. The authors seem to grapple with the idea of distinguishing regular fasting from autophagy water fasting; this actually happened in several places in the book. These concepts definitely need to be streamlined for the reader. The method that the authors suggest is not all set in one place. It is mostly after the background, but some of it is contained within the initial section as well. There is at least one chapter that should have been split into more to aid clarity. Some statements in the text contradicted each other. The medical claims seem outlandish at times and aren’t backed up with mentions or links to research.

There are definitely some issues with language. For one thing, I think the authors are trying to impress the reader with the use of medical- and scientific-sounding words. It is evident in places that they don’t really seem to understand these terms. I am an RN, and I was surprised to see their description of the medical suffix of “-phagy” as “engulf”; it actually means to digest or to eat. There was at least one place where I just about laughed out loud because what they said was nonsensical: “In Type I and type II diabetes, fasting could aggravate the side effect of diabetes.” Mercy! Diseases have symptoms and complications; medications/drugs have side effects! And which “side effect” of diabetes could fasting aggravate? Aside from these aspects of language, the book is rife with grammatical, punctuation, and usage errors; it seems unlikely that this was self-edited (let alone professionally edited). Words were left in that should have been removed; in other places, words appeared to be missing. The language for the nonscientific jargon part of the text is a bit stilted in a way that makes me think that the authors may not be native English speakers. If you are interested in the topic of water fasting, I think you could find a better book on the subject.