Healthy Living Publications The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines and Happiness

After watching interviews with Alan Goldhamer I was excited to read this book. It is not what I was expecting - more on water only fasting, but it is very educational and through the pages many gems are found.

As with most personal improvement books it's just a long tirade full of metaphors and anecdotes, which stretches the information that could have been contained in a single blog post. What's worse, the majority of this book is just the author preaching a certain lifestyle. There's almost no actual information about addiction or pleasure mechanisms or how to "master" the forces behind them. It could be okay, if the book had a completely different title.The book also gets extra negative points for:* A clearly non-objective tone. The author uses an emotionally loaded language, mentions typical truisms the society likes to repeat, and sparsely quotes scientific references, which give off an impression of being cherry-picked to support his point.* Sweeping statements for which it's easy to find counterexamples.* A typical for this kind of books narrow world view. Everything good is attributed to what the author proposes and everything bad is attributed to not doing so.If you want to know all the information that the book contains about the pleasure and addiction themselves, just watch the 5 minute (!) TED talk by the book's author.

My life changed considerably 6 years ago when I was looking into the right food for my daughter to eat - she had cancer at that time. I came across some amazing stuff - Colin Campbell's The China Study having the greatest impact on me. I understood why a wholefood Plant-Based diet was the right diet for people both with and without illness. My journey has been fascinating. And I have worked my way through many other books and authors. Whilst aware of The Pleasure Trap, I have only recently read it. And it has had an effect similar to China Study -namely it is mind-blowing. It makes sense of so many issues and answers so many questions. And it makes it easier to avoid the attractions and addictions of the modern world, knowing why we act in the way we do. My family, including my well daughter and now my grandchildren all eat and love a Wholefood Plant-Based diet. If you are interested in this (and you should be) then the Pleasure Trap is a must-read. It has also provided me with a favourite new quote, albeit from Albert Schweitzer, 'Example is not the main thing when influencing others. It is the only thing'

As a health practitioner with 35 years experience on a mission to find the aetiology of health to help my patients enjoy a long healthy life I would rank this remarkable book number one. If we understand why we behave the way we do then we can learn to change our behaviour, this book gives anyone willing to learn this vital lesson a succinct simple explanation.

Excellent book.....I thought it was going to be a dry read, but I found that I couldn’t stop reading it. Full of new and useful imformation that I found to have been of great benefit to me, I learnt so much from this book it been a real life changer, something that I have never gained from reading a book before. I was so impressed that I bought a second copy to send to my daughter who also read it straight through. My husband is now reading it.Do yourself a big favour, improve your life and get a copy.

Absolutely brilliant book. Been getting into reading health and have ranged from How Not To Die, CHINA study, Protronaholic, to Robert Morse and Arnold Ehret teachings and toxemia. None of these compare to the insightful reasons as to how we have got into this health crisis we have reached now as good as this book.