Hence I was disappointed to find that although there are a couple of chapters specific to women’s needs (“Fertility, Pregnancy, and the Role of Estrogen” and “Type 2 Diabetes, Menopause, and Aging”), the bulk of the book is simply a basic primer on type 2 diabetes with a few sentences here and there mentioning women’s needs.

Rosenthal takes a standard ADA approach, telling you to learn the exchange system, eat low-fat food, eat 40 percent carbohydrates, and exercise (although the chapter on exercise has been removed). She also takes the ADA position that low-carb diets are dangerous because they stress the kidneys, and wants you to eat “potato, rice, pasta, or bread” for a “balanced” meal. She does, however, support the glycemic index, which the ADA has yet to do.

This book is a revised version of The Type 2 Diabetic Woman, with some chapters added and others removed, and I felt that no editor had gone through the revision closely to make sure it all hung together. Hence the text contains some contradictions. For example, on one page she says Humalog and NovoLog are short-acting insulins (like Regular), on the next she says they’re rapid-acting insulins (the correct category). Several pages earlier she said they were “immediate-acting,” which a reader might confuse with intermediate acting (like NPH). She also says they both peak in 3.5 to 4.5 hours (they peak at about an hour). I would not use this book as a guide to insulin use.

There are also some important omissions: For example, she doesn’t mention the drug Zetia for cholesterol control, and it has been on the market for several years.

The book would have benefited from a review by a chemist. She says table sugar consists of sucrose and glucose (it’s just sucrose) and dextrose and maltose break down into fructose and glucose (dextrose is another name for glucose, and maltose contains only glucose). And she repeats the old idea — which glycemic index research disproved many years ago — that sugar raises blood glucose faster than starch.

I’m probably overly picky when I read diabetes books. Rosenthal does support some good things such as frequent testing, especially for the newly diagnosed. And she says some diabetes experts now say that insulin resistance causes obesity, instead of the other way around. This is what patients have been saying for years, but no one listened.

If you really want the woman-specific information in the chapters I mentioned earlier and can deal with some inconsistencies and inexact science, you might enjoy this book. I hope the next edition will really focus on women’s problems and not try to cover so many bases. Does a person who has just been diagnosed with diabetes really need to know how to select a prosthetic limb?

McGraw-Hill just published The Type 2 Diabetes Sourcebook for Women for $17.95. The ISBN number is 0-0714492-9-9.