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The idea of this book is a good one. The authors have set out to review and assess in a practical manner what is currently known of the biochemical and physiological background of the nutritional diseases of childhood. For the uninitiated, this is ordinarily a difficult task as relevant information is buried in a wide scatter of journals and monographs mostly unavailable to those working in the field. Up to a point the book succeeds and has much useful information and a good bibliography. However, there is a surprising lack of critical or informed comment on much of the cited published work. The reader is presented in places with many abstracted and rather unrelated facts from the literature and is left wondering about their significance. Some of the work cited is already out of date, admittedly a hazard that all publications are exposed to these days. At best, the