I finished the rest of the existing A Song of Ice and Fire books. I'm not sure how I feel about them, the giant world of characters let's the story be told from all sorts of views, but it is also kind of unfocused. I've had a small weird obsession and over the last year I've listened to almost every diet book my library has on Overdrive. I started because I was curious about the major ideas in the debate (carbs/fat, omnivore/vegetarian). My concussion is that whole vegetables are probably less suspect than everything else. No other conclusions can be drawn without starting over with biology, anthropology, nutrition, med-school, and then 30 years reading and evaluating existing research, by which time I will have developed my own blinding bias of course. In Defense of Food probably resonated with me most.
I've heard Dance with Dragons was rewritten entirely once because the first draft, one of his buddies said "but if X is with Y then this whole thing with Z is wrong" so he had to start over. It's also the book where the story goes from "expanding outward" to "wrapping up loose ends" which means he had to be a lot more precise with it. I kinda feel a lot of the important stuff got buried in chaff so it wouldn't be so obviously important.
Went down the diet rabithole a couple times myself. These are the only recommendations that seem true to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/upshot/simple-rules-for-healthy-eating.html
I would agree with those guidelines. I had hoped that after reading a bunch I would be able to narrow it down more than "less processed, and don't forget veggies." There is some surface level BS that's easy to rule out, but I don't have the background to critique the scientific parts, and I have come to distrust the authors to use the same statistical criteria on evidence they like as on evidence they don't.
His writing feels very undisciplined to me. Events and people of greater and lesser significance are jumbled up together and what seemed to be entire plot lines are simply cut off or abandoned because (I think) the author has become distracted by something else.