"Nothing Taste As Good" a comprehensive review
"Nothing Taste As Good" by Luke Dumas describes as:
Retail worker Emmett Truesdale has never fit the Southern California mold of six-pack, suntanned masculinity. Over three hundred pounds, he carries the weight of his childhood trauma and millennial ennui around his waist and in his soul. After trying every diet under the sun, he remains stuck—in his dead-end job, in love, and in his body.
Desperate for help, he enrolls in a clinical trial for a new weight loss product called Obexity. The treatment is as horrifying as the results are miraculous and as Emmett sheds pounds at superhuman speed, every part of his life improves overnight.
Unfortunately, Obexity comes with some killer side effects, including lost stretches of time and overwhelming cravings. Worse, people who were cruel to him have started disappearing and when the police warn of a cannibalistic killer on the loose, he fears that Obexity is turning him into a monster. But how can he give it up now that people are finally starting to treat him like he’s human?
Nerve-racking, sinister, and at times surreal, Nothing Tastes as Good is an unputdownable thriller that combines the body horror and social commentary of The Substance with the best of Stephen King and keeps you guessing until the final page.
This book published in 2026, in the hight of the GLP-1 uprise takes a new approach to science fiction and horror. Based in California, centered around someone we all see in our careers. Someone who feels let down by the medical systems. Who goes to doctor after doctor looking for answers to his over eating, using food to fill the void and cure the trauma he has experienced in life. Providing Appendixes from the FDA investigation of the GLP like drug trying to explain away the side effects that Emmett faces.
This book although fiction provides an interesting look into the mental and physical strain that someone who is over weight might feel as well as providing clear insight into where the medical system has failed him.
And while I do believe that this book is well written and a great read for someone that wants to going the weight loss field, or really anyone in the medical field, as it might help create some empathy for how people in the same place as Emmett might feel when entering medical spaces. The general issue I have with the book is single fold.
Im all of the pages of this book, all of the better understanding of how to treat someone who classifies as obese. Dietitians are reduced to one line on one page....
No mention of the need for them in the clinical trial, but he does have regular check ups with a PCP. No allusion to them helping with healthy eating habits once the trial is over and the patient is no longer allowed to use the medications. And no mention of what will happen when they get to gaol weight. But on one page, in one line "... only to be referred again and again to nutritionist and dieticians, to be treated each and every time to the same lecture about healthy choices" (page 69, 21%). Yes by the way THEY SPELLED DIETITIAN WITH A C IN THE PUBLISHED BOOK. And while I find a part of my soul happy to have a dietitian even mentioned in the book. It is spelled wrong.... and in tandem with a nutrition.
If we are not even taken seriously in a fiction text, what does that mean for our profession in the eyes of mass media slandering us online daily. If a mass produced text can be published with the incorrect spelling (something I had to fight my laptop to spell because it deemed it wrong), what does that mean for us in literature. If a book written about a trail of a GLP-1 can not even view us as important enough to be written into the plot point as more then just a one line lamenting about how awful we are, how will we grow? How will we over come mass media slander and establish our selves as important?
I'll leave you with this. If we want to be taken seriously as a profession, how can we withstand books, fiction or not that reduce us to one single line and a miss spelled title?
AMC
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