Happily surprised by this recipe book. I asked to read a copy as I am trying to reduce the amount of sugar my family consume. I have a 2 year old and was pleasantly surprised to see how inclusive of children this book is. Each recipe has a bit at the bottom with ways of encouraging the children to join in (labelled what the kids can do). At the beginning is a really informative introduction stating how much sugar each member of the family should have and then a list of beautiful low sugared recipes. There's a useful diagram of sugar cubes at the top of each recipe so you can see how much sugar is in it. The recipes are easy to follow with useful hints and tips. There are lots of fabulous looking main meals too! A good, healthy cookbook for the whole family. Thanks netgalley!

Terrific cookbook for families or individuals looking to reduce sugar in their daily diet. Recipes for breakfasts to desserts vary from Chinese chicken salad with mandarin vinaigrette to double chocolate brownies. Easy to follow instructions, lots of pictures, and tips on "what kids can do" (mixing yogurt, sprinkling nuts on top, etc.), as well as parts that can be made ahead, and nutritional information. I will be buying a copy for our library and one for myself.

This book was received as an ARC from Workman Publishing Company in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

We have been getting a lot of request from patrons and members of our community on cookbooks with little to no sugar in them for various reasons including diabetes, and weight loss and there are not many of them out there where the dishes look so delicious and creative. Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel gathered up the most delectable desserts that I couldn't believe contained half of the sugar including the peaches and cream breakfast pops and the overnight french toast strata. I know a lot of people will be requesting this book and probably most likely, I will have to add this to my personal cookbook collection.

We will consider adding this title to our Cookbook collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

This is a really nice cookbook with very nice pictures. I am not supposed to eat sugar due to some health issues I have and that can be a real struggle, so having another cookbook in my arsenal that helps me with that is fantastic. I like this because they don't eliminate it all together but decrease the amount needed significantly. The author covers a lot of information including myths about sugar, and what it does to your body. These recipes are easy to follow and I can do some of them with my son. I would definitely recommend!

I received this ARC from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Half the Sugar, All the Love by Jennifer Tyler Lee and Anisha Patel is a lovely book of 100 recipes and full color photos. I love the beginning of the book that explains all about sugar and how it adds up over the day. These recipes look great and seem easy enough for basic cooks and bakers to accomplish. This would be a nice addition to any cookbook collection.

Half the Sugar, All the Love features an abundance of recipes that are all low in sugar. I tried a few of these recipes and was very pleased with all of the results. The recipes have fantastic flavour and were a hit for my friend with diabetes. I loved that all recipes had nutritional information and plenty of pictures!
Highly recommended for all to buy. I will definitely buy a copy of this book to have on hand.

*Thank you NetGalley for the advanced reader's copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is a good recipe book for sweet eats without the sugar! It has some
really good recipes included. I think it is one of the best I've seen for
someone serious about going off sugar. There are even several recipes
for condiments that we eat and sometimes never think of the sugar inside.

Thank you so much to the writers, the publisher and of course to NetGalley
for the chance to read and use this early copy!

Half the Sugar, All the Love is not quite what I was expecting from the title. I thought I would be reading a book with reduced sugar and carb content. Instead, the book focuses on having half of the "added sugar" as compared to other recipes. So the overall sugar content is less, but it is still not necessarily recipes that can be used by anyone currently dealing with diabetes, which is what I thought from the title.

That being said, once I got past that this book what not exactly what I was expecting, I did enjoy the recipes and information that was provided here. Cutting added sugar and using more natural ways to sweeten food can be tricky, but this book does a great job of explaining why it is important and then providing yummy ways to do it!

Lovely photographs with promising recipes. Front matter is extensive and small text size might deter readers. The true test of any cookbook is actually following the directions as written. These directions seemed doable and would be family friendly.

Really enjoyed this cookbook and testing out the recipes. Anytime you can decrease or eliminate sugar from a recipe and it still tastes amazing is a great thing. This cookbook focuses on recipes most will know and the author has re-created them to be tasty while sugar free.

This is a good cookbook with some inventive ways to lessen one’s sugar intake. As a hypoglycemic, I’ve gotten good at collecting recipes for cutting out sugar completely, and there were some recipes here that I could use. I think this would be good for someone just beginning to work on letting go of sugar addiction. I wanted more photos!

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

As I'm diabetic I'm always looking for recipes that helps me to vary my dietary regime.
This is a good book, full of interesting recipes and I will surely try some of them.
Recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Yes I am a sugar addict. I can admit it. I am a grown adult who still cannot pass a piece of candy without picking it up. I crave the sweet goodness, I also know how bad it is for me and as I get older how actually unhealthy and what too much sugar really does to your body. However, I am not good at deprivation. So when I find something that helps me get my sweet fix and lower sugar I am all in.

I also love baking and I really enjoyed that this book gives tips and tricks for lowering the sugar in sweets as well as some substitutes that can be made. These have some great family classics that are made in a new way and still just as yummy.

I really liked this book.

Most cookbooks that discuss reducing sugar really mean using *natural* sugars like honey, agave or alternative/artificial sugars instead. I just want to eat whole foods and not add any other sources and this was perfect for that.

Lee uses whole fruits like peaches and dates to sweeten instead of sugar explaining how fiber can help slow the absorption of sugar.

She also helps you to read labels for *added* sugars and make better choices a the supermarket. For example - buy plain almond milk rather than sweetened then add your own (food based) sweeteners later to reduce the overall sugar content. And has 7 Simple Tips for Reducing sugar to get you started.

All your meals are covered with recipes from breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert and condiments, sauces and include nutritional comparisons with the original sugar added recipes and hers.

The only thing I wish was included is how much sugar there is in a recipe. While she shows how much you reduced - she doesn't say how much sugar there is in each recipe. Unless I am somehow missing something.

Most of the recipes are simple, with a few more complex (but still easy) and photographs.

I expected to like this cookbook more than I actually did. As a health-conscious mom of five, I am well aware of the hidden sugar in so many packaged foods and meals. When my kids ask for yogurt like Yoplait I remind them that it's basically dessert, filled with sugar and negligible health benefits. I read labels to see how many grams of sugar are in breakfast cereals, and also know to check things like ketchup and pizza sauce (though we tend to make our own). So this seemed like a great book for me.

It wasn't a great fit for several reasons:

1. Sugar is pretty much the only bad guy in this cookbook. The recipes frequently call for ingredients that many families also want to limit, such as white flour, lots of butter, GMO ingredients like corn starch, etc. There is no talk about processed, genetically engineered or other unhealthy foods, or either side of these issues. For the most part, the book is designed only to lower sugar intake.

2. While the sugar is lowered substantially in these recipes, the overall health benefits of many recipes are still pretty lagging. For instance, one breakfast recipe is for blueberry scones. It calls for 2 cups of white flour, 3/4 a stick of butter, 1/2 cup yogurt, one egg, 1/2 of a pear, blueberries, the usual spices and baking soda and such, and 1 1/2 cups of blueberries, with only 2 TBS of sugar. While this is a healthier blueberry scone recipe than most, it's still not packing in much nutrition for a breakfast. Kids would be better off just having the yogurt, blueberries and chopped pear, maybe with a sprinkle of granola on top. Another recipe makes a basically healthier pop tart, with white flour and filled with homemade jam instead of the junk in commercial pop tarts. In this way, it's a great choice for those who are currently serving things like pop tarts and scones to their kids for breakfast but not so great for those who are already serving homemade meals that are designed to pack a lot of nutritional punch with lots of protein, whole grains, healthy fats, etc.

3. The recipes are not allergy-friendly or made with alternative diets in mind. Wheat is featured in most of them, along with dairy, nuts and eggs. No substitutes are provided, and it's one of those books where it's like people with allergies and vegetarians/vegans don't even exist.

4. Many of the recipes don't seem as if they'd actually work well. For instance, she has a nutella-banana roll up featured where you use her homemade nutella alternative spread on smashed whole wheat bread and roll up a half a banana in it, then cut it into slices and put it in a lunch box. Anybody who's ever cut up a banana for a child knows that in less than 5 minutes all the cut areas are browned and the child would rather eat a worm off the ground than said banana. It looks great in the picture, but picturing the way a cut banana-smashed-bread-nut spread roll-up would look hours after being put in a lunch box does not seem nearly as appealing as the carefully styled photo.

5. Many of the recipes are rather time consuming. I'm sure the Salmon Yaki Onigiri (grilled rice balls) are tasty for a child's lunch box, but how many mothers are really going to make a batch of rice, cool it slightly, cook salmon, form the rice balls into pressed triangle shapes, form a well and stuff them with the salmon, grill them, and then brush them with the homemade lower-sugar teriyaki glaze, individually wrap each one in plastic wrap, pack with ice and make sure your child eats it in the next 4-5 hours?

6. There were not many pictures for the recipes (maybe one in 4 or 5?).

7. A great deal of the recipes are for lunches and dinners, and while I know that most packaged soups, sauces and meals are packed with hidden sugars, I cook these things from scratch and don't add more than a pinch of sugar, if that, to my sauces and meals already.

8. I didn't find the recipes that appealing, personally (and most won't work for our family's dietary needs anyway).

I did appreciate the nutritional information for each recipe, and most of the information about sugar in the intro was good to know. I disagreed with some of it. For instance, we do use stevia at times and I consider all-natural stevia products and stevia leaves to be great ways to lower sugar, and I disagree that honey and sugar are equally bad.

This would make a good book for those who are new to the idea of the negative effects of sugar and who usually cook standard American diet types of foods. Keep in mind you are expected to do a fair amount of cooking and prepping for most recipes.

My rating system:
1 = hated it
2 = it was okay
3 = liked it
4 = really liked it
5 = love it, plan to purchase, and/or would buy it again if it was lost

I read a temporary digital ARC of the book for the purpose of review.

The premise of this book is great and really appealing. It tries to allow you to focus on you and your family's health without giving up things that bring them together like baking. There are some heath focused parts on sugar in many forms and what types are better than others (fiber in fruit vs. the juice stuff like that). It seems to lean heavily on dates as a sweetener in foods.

Overall the book is inviting without being preachy about sugar. I think that is its greatest asset, focusing on moderation.

Cutting sugar does not mean that you have to cut out fruit ... the fiber offsets the sugar.  And, it doesn't mean that you have to cut out dessert .... you can cut the added sugar in other items like condiments and sauces to make room for that dessert.  This book shows you a few ways in which to do just that .... which a lesson in how to read a nutrition label, some tips for reducing added sugar and some great recipes for every meal, including recipes for Creamy Ranch Dressing, Three-Ingredient Strawberry Jam, Newtella, and even Ketchup!  I am planning to try the Blueberry Scones, Carmelized Pumpkin Bread and Double Chocolate Layer Cake with Whipped Chocolate Frosting very soon!

At first I had a feeling that this was not going to be a cookbook for me. I like cookbooks that have a photo of every recipe and this one doesn’t. What it does have however, are a lot of interesting recipes some of which are unusual such as breakfast popsicles. The first few pages contain information on the problems of eating too much added sugar, tips on how to avoid doing that as well as information about each kind of sugar. It also has a section providing clarity around some sugar related myths which I found enlightening. Then I got to the recipes. There are many that I can’t wait to try like the caramel coffee frappe, the strawberry quinoa salad and the chai spiced rice pudding. There are two “newtella” recipes, one which is nut free. There are sections for breakfast, lunches, snacks, dinners, desserts, beverages and more so it covers the entire spectrum. Turns out this cookbook is for me.

This is a great book for anyone looking to reduce the amount of sugar they eat. It is very informative, explaining the dangers of too much sugar and why we need to reduce our intake. I think it is more realistic than most cook books of its type as it doesn't cut sugar out completely. Some of the recipes sound delicious, and the pictures are beautiful (would have liked a picture for everything though). Overall a very useful book

This cookbook is fantastic! Beautiful pictures and delicious recipes galore!

There are so many things about this book that set it apart. First, there are nutritional facts for each recipe. Many cookbooks have this but not all do. I was very happy to see that this one does! In keeping with the low sugar theme, it talks in depth about types of sugar and specifies the amount of added sugar visually for each recipe. It makes it very clear and user friendly when flipping through the books.

Some cookbooks have many less than desirable recipes among a few select enticing ones, however, all of the recipes in here looked so good! I am so excited to try them all out!