Eat, Drink, & Be Merry: America's Doctor Tells You Why the Health Experts Are Wrong [Paperback] Edell M.D., Dean and Schrieberg, David

Product Description No wonder. How often have you felt whipsawed by the experts, confused by conflicting advice, or torn with guilt over what you eat, drink, think? Prepare yourself for a shock: You can relax, enjoy life, and still be healthy. Renowned for candid straight talk on radio and television, Dr. Dean Edell applies his unique common-sense perspective to America's growing obsession with health. Frank and iconoclastic, Dr. Edell walks readers through a lifetime of experience from deep inside twin worlds of media and medicine. As one of the first media doctors, he knows better than anyone the dangers of distorted medical reporting. With colorful detail, he shows how medical consumers are made neurotic at a time when people are healthier than ever before. Dr. Edell sorts through the morass of research, distinguishing documentable fact from panic-inducing fiction. With trademark humor, grace, and style, he shares with us the essential reassuring facts about our health: you can be fatter than you think; too much exercise might kill you; and yes, sex will add years to your life! Did You Know That... People who crave ice chips may have a nutritional deficiency? Saturated fat may reduce the risk of stroke? Dementia appears to be less common among those who eat more fish? You can lose weight by fidgeting, chewing on a pencil, or drinking coffee? Sex can cure headaches? Playing an instrument is not only good for your mental health, it burns 160 calories an hour? About the Author Dean Edell, M.D., probably has the largest medical practice in the United States -- his hugely popular radio and television broadcasts are heard by more than ten million fans every week. A graduate of Cornell University Medical College and the author of the national best-seller Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Trust the Media at Your Peril (It's Your Health, Not Theirs) Let's start at the bottom line. Americans enjoy the best health and longest life spans in our history. Yet medical advances aside, we worry more about our health than ever before. We have become obsessed and neurotic to the point where we bounce like pinballs from one health-related anxiety and scare to another. Be honest -- that's really why you bought this book (fortunately, you are that anxious). Rather than basking in triumph over the scourges of our ancestors and enjoying our good health, we live in fear and paranoia. Relax. Things are better than you think. Give me 325 pages or so, and I'll prove it to you. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying for a second that life is risk-free or comes with any guarantees. But from the start of this century in particular, medical science has advanced with extraordinary speed. In 1928 we had effective treatments for at most only 10 percent of the 360 most serious diseases. Nowadays we can handle most of them. Consider these numbers, culled by Harvard psychiatrist Arthur Barsky from government and other sources. If you were born in 1900, you were expected to live to age forty-seven. Through the century, life expectancy has rocketed. After the millennium, it will be over eighty. A child born today is likely to live longer than at any time since we started tap dancing onto the planet. Isn't it strange that as things get better, we feel worse? If we're not semistarving ourselves to a slimmer body, or trudging up StairMasters to nowhere, we feel guilty that we're not doing what we should do, whatever that is. When the wonders of modern medicine aren't perfect, we whine and complain and sue and turn back to witch-doctor wannabes in disguise and other quacks. Barsky calls this "the paradox of health." Our concept of healthiness, he found, has not kept pace with medicine's overall gains. Although methodologies differ among several surveys, all report similar trends. In the 1920s, the average American reported having a serious, acute, or disabling illness every si