This book purports to be a useful calorie counter for restaurant and takeout eating, but more than half the book contains calorie counts for snack foods where 1)the nutrition label on the package contains the same information or 2) the information is readily available from USDA charts on the internet.

It appears that the restaurant information, even for those restaurants included, is incomplete. For instance, the section on Friendly's includes only a few ice cream and dessert information and nothing about the meals. Only information readily available (information about McDonald's meals, for example) is included. The sample contains only random selection of fast food restaurants. There are no guesstimates about typical dishes in non-fast food restaurants. Admitedly the accuracy of these guesses would be ball park figures, but it could serve as a guideline.

This book has calories, fat, carbs, chol, and sodium but NOT protein. If that is not important to you, it is a good guide.

This is a nice informative book. Only trouble is how the listings are arranged and the fact that some of the foods available at the chain restaurants were omitted. An index, would have helped out tremendously. All in all though, the listings for the foods are fairly extensive. I guess the book would have been enormous as well as quite costly if every food available at the chain restaurants was included. I was able to find the approximate caloric content of many Chinese foods plus alchohol beverages. It was a pleasant surprise to be able to have info such as this, in the book. :-)

This book is a big disappointment. The cover brags that the book contains "15,000 entries - more listings than any other guide!" What the cover doesn't tell you is that for hundreds of these listings, the counts of sugar and fiber are listed as "data not available." I'm not talking about exotic foods here; there are missing entries for basics like apples and bananas. I am surprised and disappointed that the authors and the publisher would market such a sloppy and incomplete book. With so much missing information, even for many basic foods, I have found this book to be nearly useless and quite frustrating. I plan to return this book for a refund. Save your money on this one.

This book does not cover basic whole foods adequately. I would think most people looking for such a book are interested in eating healthier and not looking for junk and processed food.

There are no listing for common grains like wheat, oats &, rye. There are many processed wheat products listed as well as obscure things. I could find quinoa, beaver, bear, & whale; but, no wheat.

The listing for beans contained only processed junk like canned baked beans, dips, refried stuff, etc. By looking up individual beans I could find some. Unfortunately, I found them to be of minimal use. There was either no listing for dried beans or if there was a listing it often did not have a fiber count. Initially I thought they were listing cooked dried beans to have no fiber. But, after comparing other entries I realized they were merely omitted.

There are a lot of processed foods in the book along with useless entries like whale. The thing I found really offensive is the fact that they list no less than 15 entries for water. I'm sorry, I think anyone purchasing such a book is intelligent enough to know that water from 15 sources is going to contain the same amount of calories, carbohydrates, fiber, & sugar ZERO!

It seems to me that a majority of this book was collected from package labels. Well, I can go online to one of the online shop at home services and collect package labels of products I'm interested in too. From what I understand they are not reliable as to amounts of fiber in products. I was expecting to get a comprehensive and realistic listing or real foods in this book and was sadly disappointed.

After thumbing through this book at the bookstore, I've decided it's a must-have and will purchase it from Amazon.com. The book will enable any person to be aware of and to track their carb, fiber and sugar consumption anytime and anywhere. It's the most comprehensive food counter currently on the market for Dr. Atkins dieters.

This calorie counter is full of calories for items that come with labels. i.e. it will have pages and pages of store-bought soups or salad dressings and then will have little or no information on something that doesn't come with a label (i.e. fruit servings) so you have to extrapolate form what they've listed. don't waste your money on something like this. you can read the label yourself.

I bought this book along with The Complete Book of Food Counts by Corinne T. Netzer. This book (The Calorie Counter) only lists Calories (yes I know that's what the title says!) - I thought that they would list carbs, protein, etc. in addition to calories.