What is Red Pen Reviews?
Red Pen Reviews uses a structured expert review method to deliver the most informative, consistent, and unbiased nutrition/health book reviews available, free of charge. Our reviewers all have a master’s degree, equivalent, or higher in a relevant field of science. Each book review is the work of two experts: a primary reviewer who writes the review, and a peer reviewer who checks his work.
We exist to help consumers distinguish between books that are evidence-based and will promote health, and those that aren’t evidence-based and may harm health. We have two ultimate goals. First, to create an incentive for nutrition/health book authors and publishers to value truth more than they currently do. Second and more importantly, to improve public health by elevating the quality of the health-related information that surrounds us.
In the spirit of open science and transparency, we share our full review method so you can see exactly what’s under the hood at Red Pen Reviews. We don’t claim our method is perfect, but we do claim it’s substantially better than the main alternative: unstructured non-expert book reviews that take few concrete steps to promote completeness, consistency, or objectivity. We also clearly identify our reviewers’ conflicts of interest and recuse ourselves when substantial conflicts are present.
Although all our expert reviewers are human beings with their own unique views, Red Pen Reviews doesn’t advocate for any particular diet or lifestyle philosophy, and we have taken steps to avoid systematically penalizing specific diets in our method. We don’t want to stifle the open marketplace of ideas that ultimately drives our understanding forward, but we do want to give consumers a powerful tool for evaluating the accuracy of information in nutrition/health books.
In order to make this project sustainable, Red Pen Reviews aims to pay its expert reviewers a fair wage for their time. Currently, our funding comes primarily from reader donations, and the amount we’re able to pay our reviewers depends on how much we receive. We’re seeking more stable sources of income such as larger donors and/or grants so we can continue to deliver this unique and valuable content. Red Pen Reviews, LLC is a registered charitable organization in Washington state.
Our story
The seeds of Red Pen Reviews were planted in 2016 when Stephan Guyenet came across an intriguing series of articles written by a nutrition scientist named Seth Yoder. The premise of Seth’s articles was very simple: he looked up every reference in a popular nutrition/health book and evaluated whether those references were accurately represented in the book. The results, to put it lightly, were illuminating. Seth’s method uncovered widespread misuse of evidence in best-selling nutrition/health books that had received glowing reviews in popular media. Stephan realized that the public couldn’t count on typical book reviews to sort fact from fiction. Besides Seth’s articles, there were few effective alarms in place to warn consumers about low-quality information and direct them to high-quality information.
Yet Seth’s method had a major limitation: it was extremely time-consuming, meaning he could only complete one or two reviews per year. His method also offered a narrow window into a book’s factual accuracy, and as useful as this window was, it didn’t provide all the information a consumer needs to decide whether to read a book. Seeing the value of Seth’s method, Stephan resolved to build on it to create something more efficient, more consistent, more objective, more informative, and more accessible for the typical consumer. He recruited a team of thoughtful nutrition scientists including Seth, Mario Kratz, Katherine Pett, and Kevin Klatt, and together they built and refined the Red Pen Reviews method.
Inspired by the semi-quantitative scoring systems Stephan had used in his research and Seth uses in his food safety inspection work, the Red Pen Reviews method addresses many of the limitations of typical nutrition/health book reviews. The end result is better information for consumers and media, better incentives for authors and publishers, and ultimately we hope, better health for us all.