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Book review: "The Fibre Factor" by Dr Joanna McMillan
July 16, 2026
One
of the most profitable niches in book publishing is the "Fad Diet",
where someone writes at length about the dangers of a food component
or the benefit of another. As examples, I have two books titled
"Sweet Poison" (book and song titles cannot be copyrighted, only the
content). One is written by a lawyer and warns of the damage caused
by fructose. The other is written by a "nutritionist" and screams
about aspartame. Neither contains any science. (Note: the word
"dietician" is legally protected and can only be used by people with
the relevant qualifications. Anyone can call themselves a
nutritionist without any formal training at all.)
Into this milieu comes this book extolling the advantages of fibre in our diets. The red flags start waving before you even open the book. The promises of "Stronger Heart and Sharper Brain" on the cover repeat the standard tropes of quack diets everywhere. Maybe they are true in this case, but finding them on the cover doesn't inspire confidence.
As I have Type 2 diabetes (well controlled according to my six-monthly blood tests) I thought a good place to start would be the chapter headed "Fibre and blood sugar". There is a bit of discussion about blood glucose ranges (apparently I'm usually in the "normal" range, have I mentioned "well controlled"?) and what is no secret - glucose in the blood goes up and down in response to food intake. The big red flag is that there is no mention anywhere of the test that real doctors use to look at the history of blood glucose - isolated spikes and drops aren't that important in themselves. The test is HbA1c, which indicates the average of blood glucose levels over the previous two to three months. Any discussion of blood sugar regulation which fails to mention this is suspect. When we get on to phytonutrients and other mysteries and how dietary fibre can adjust levels of these we are moving into the "doubtful advice" area.
The book has a remarkable 360 references listed at the back (in a book with only 249 pages, excluding references and index). As it would take a lifetime to check them all to see how relevant they might be it's a bit redolent of the Gish Gallop, where "facts" are thrown out faster than anyone can respond. Also, there is this possibility.
The chapter I sampled didn't inspire confidence or any desire to read the rest of the book. Maybe there's some good advice there somewhere. Maybe there's even some science to back up the claims. Maybe I'll just stick to the diet I currently have, the one that has my doctor saying "Keep doing what you're doing" when he looks at my HbA1c results.
It
would be hard to recommend this book to anyone. Maybe eating it
would provide the fibre your body needs.
You could get a copy of this book from Oberon Library but why bother? Borrow another book instead.
About the author
A search of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed database (the go-to place to find medical research worldwide) produced no papers with the author "Joanna McMillan" and the keyword "fibre". This doesn't mean that Dr McMillan hasn't done any research into dietary fibre, just that she hasn't had any of her work published in any of the world's medical journals.
