I picked up this one on a whim when browsing audiobooks at the library- it was right next to What to Eat When. Found this a much better read (or listen, ha) even though, like usual, I am not quite sure how to judge the veracity of all that’s said here. Certainly a lot to think about. I admit he lost me a few times with the details, and one section where he promotes his own company I really zoned out on. But I feel it was worth my time getting to the end.
It’s about improving your health individually, and starts by explaining how very complicated the human body is, how anything that affects something, will have an influence on something else. This is down to the cellular level, protein interactions, etc. Then it goes into genetics, but it gets into a lot of future projections, what medicine might be able to do in the future. There’s also plenty of very familiar advice: get better sleep, eat real food, exercise regularly – but some of the particulars were a bit different than I’ve heard before. Another main point was to eat the freshest food possible (frozen sometimes being a better choice than what’s in the produce section!) and that juicing produce to make drinks might not give your body the best nutrition. I’m not into juicing things, but wonder about that idea- that juicing oxidizes things quickly, and apparently that degrades the food quality. I was surprised that this doctor says daily multivitamins are worthless and possibly even harmful, but claims everyone over forty should be on baby aspirin and statin drugs. Hm. Not sure what to think about that. There’s a lot more in here, and most of it about cancer (even though he says near the beginning this isn’t a book about cancer, it really feels like it is) but the main takeaway is: take care of yourself, prevention is better than a cure. Which most of us probably already agree with. In the end he goes into a lot about how medical knowledge and patient info should be more freely shared, and laments the lack of young people going into research, which is stalling progress in the field. It was kind of an odd note to leave the book on.
Borrowed from the public library in audiobook format, 10.7 listening hours. Voice by Holter Graham (intro and conclusion read by the author).
