YOU: The Owner's Manual

“AMD is one of the leading causes of vision loss and blindness,” says Dr. Andrea Zimmerman, Low Vision Specialist at Lighthouse Guild. “If you are over 60, you are at risk for AMD, which is why even if you have no symptoms, you should get an eye exam once a year,” In addition to age, other risk factors for AMD include: a history of smoking, genetics and family history, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels. Dr. Zimmerman is here today to discuss everything you need to know about AMD and steps you can take to protect your vision.

The New Approach to Health: Using Power Foods to Cause Rapid, Permanent Weight Loss Scientists have found that certain foods trigger weight loss automatically. Unlike the usual approach to dieting which focuses on going hungry and avoiding the foods you love, the Power Foods approach encourages you to add specific foods that cause weight loss. Power Foods work in three ways: First, they trigger satiety, taming your appetite so that you naturally eat less. Second, they trap calories in your digestive tract and carry them out with the wastes. Third, they ramp up your metabolism, so you burn calories faster hour after hour. There are dozens of Power Foods, including common, everyday foods, like blueberries, melons, apples, and asparagus, as well as certain spices (cinnamon, ginger, and hot peppers). Blueberries, for example, get their color from anthocyanins, which have been associated with weight loss in research studies. Cinnamon contains a natural ingredient that boosts metabolism. Weight loss can be as easy as including these foods in your daily routine, say, with French toast made with cinnamon and topped with blueberry syrup. The Power Foods and how to use them are spelled out in the Power Foods Diet, the new book by Neal Barnard, MD, author of the best-sellers Power Foods for the Brain and The 21-Day Weight-Loss Kickstart. In this scientifically proven program, Power Foods do the work for you at home, at restaurants—anywhere you eat. You will never count calories again. And while exercise is always a good idea, the program works whether you exercise or not. The Power Foods Diet includes 120 mouthwatering recipes, from French Toast and Wild Blueberry Muffins to Creamy Chipotle Butternut Soup, Southwest Chili, and Pesto Spaghetti with Broccoli and Sundried Tomatoes. And don’t forget dessert! The Power Foods ingredients are built into Blueberry Pops, Triple Berry No Churn Sorbet, a Fruity Banana Split, and Carrot Cake. There are also plenty of tips for people who prefer convenience foods or who generally eat in restaurants. The approach is revolutionary: • Power Foods bring you a healthier weight, healthier cholesterol level, lower blood pressure, and healthier blood sugar. • Power Foods boost your energy, making you look and feel younger. • Power Foods let you end “dieting” forever. • Power Food allow you to enjoy eating again—at home or restaurants. No more skimpy portions. • Among the Power Foods are those under study for their ability to reduce the risk of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. The Power Foods Diet: The Breakthrough Plan That Traps, Tames, and Burns Calories for Easy and Permanent Weight Loss By Neal D. Barnard, MD, FACC, with menus and recipes by Dustin Harder and Lindsay S. Nixon. Balance Books (Hachette) Publication date: March 26, 2024

Much of what we know about women’s bodies and health has come from men. Their points of view have helped shape the way we feel about our bodies—and the kind of medical attention we receive. Our “normal” bodily functions—as well as our pain, pleasure, strength, and intellectual capacity—have been based on an overwhelmingly male narrative uninformed by women’s own voices, and often used to shame and subjugate us. The result is a cultural and societal legacy that continues to shape our health and care, despite recent advances that challenge it. In ALL IN HER HEAD: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today (Harper Wave; on-sale February 13; ISBN: 9780063293014; 448 pages), medical historian and Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist Elizabeth Comen, M.D. unpacks this legacy and reframes the conversation to empower women. Comen shines a light on the female medicalized body and illuminates the myths and blind spots we’ve unwittingly inherited through generations. She takes readers back in time to meet the legendary—and sometimes infamous—doctors who shaped the field of medicine, as well as the patients they cared for (or in some cases, didn’t.) Comen explores the sanitariums of 18th century Europe, the anatomy labs of Victorian New York City, the makeshift hospitals of the Antebellum South. She connects the dots to show how a legacy of ignorance, indifference, oppression, and subjugation toward women’s medical issues commands women’s medical present.

Dr. McConnell, through his work with the American Heart Association and the National Fitness Foundation, highlights the many ways our society can reduce heart disease for all. Fight Heart Disease Like Cancer covers, among other topics: • simple and powerful therapies to reverse heart disease and prevent heart attacks and strokes • digital health technologies, including wearable devices and artificial intelligence, that broaden access for detecting and monitoring heart disease • prevention techniques that incorporate both a heart-healthy lifestyle and medical help when needed and screening for early heart disease

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.

As far back as the sixth century B.C., physicians have looked to treat diabetes through diet. Today, it is estimated that over 30 million Americans have been diagnosed with this chronic disease and up to 9 million suffer undiagnosed. In RETHINKING DIABETES: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments (Knopf, Nonfiction; January 2, 2024), Gary Taubes explores the history of diabetes research to look towards more effective treatment in the future. Delving into the history of diabetes research shows at times conflicting and contradictory medical advice. Taubes re-examines this research alongside the most recent studies to provide new insight that shows the current standard treatment is not enough. He argues for doctors to look beyond prescribing drugs to incorporate dietary and lifestyle changes as an essential part of treatment. In his latest book, Taubes challenges conventional medical thinking to reveal the limits of medical science for diabetes treatment. The proposed changes in RETHINKING DIABETES could revolutionize how people live with diabetes and help the millions of Americans struggling for years to come.

A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In this groundbreaking tour of the mind and brain, one of the world’s top memory researchers radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, Ranganath reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power-- and its quirks--we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.

Three years on, COVID is clearly here to stay. So what do we do now? Drawing on his expertise as one of the world’s top virologists, Dr. Paul Offit helps weary readers address that crucial question in this brief, definitive guide. As a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee and a former member of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices to the CDC, Offit has been in the room for the creation of policies that have affected hundreds of millions of people.In these pages, he marshals the power of hindsight to offer a fascinating frontline look at where we were, where we are, and where we’re heading in the now-permanent fight against the disease. Accompanied by a companion website populated with breaking news and relevant commentary, this book contains everything you need to know to navigate COVID going forward. Offit addresses fundamental issues like boosters, immunity induced by natural infection, and what it means to be fully vaccinated. He explores the dueling origin stories of the disease, tracing today’s strident anti-vax rhetoric to twelve online sources and tracking the fallout. He breaks down long COVID—what it is, and what the known treatments are. And he looks to the future, revealing whether we can make a better vaccine, whether it should be mandated, and providing a crucial list of fourteen takeaways to eradicate further spread. Filled with pragmatic analysis and sensible advice, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER is for anyone interested in finding new solutions to the new normal.

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.

We are living in an age of monetized anger, writes Anderson, who’s helped launch more than 100 magazines. If we don’t change course soon, the disease will be terminal. Thankfully, the author offers a remarkably straightforward remedy: Think less about commerce and more about simple, grassroots generosity. As the head of the TED organization, Anderson has lived the idea, bringing interesting and useful ideas to millions of people for free. In this uplifting book, the author examines how social media has become a maze of algorithms designed to glue people to screens in a fog of simmering resentment, unwilling to even talk to strangers, let alone help them. Yet signs of change do exist, and Anderson recounts stories of people acting generously—the hairdresser who started to give free cuts to homeless people or the anonymous donors who distributed substantial grants to help good causes. Video records of these incidents and many similar ones were circulated online; in numerous cases, people who watched them were inspired to become generous themselves, volunteering at or making a donation to a worthy organization. Anderson sees this pattern as proof that social media can be a positive force—and that many people want to be generous. He cites research showing that those who perform real-world generous acts are happier than self-centered people who live online. “Whether our collective future is a good one or not depends largely on whether the majority of people give more to the world than they take from it,” he writes, continuing, “Generosity is a key ingredient for a contented life.” A joyful road map away from a polarized, selfish society to the hopeful, humane place where we should be.

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.

Have you seen the Gwyneth Paltrow movie, SLIDING DOORS? It features the inimitable Gwyneth, playing Helen, freshly fired from her corporate job, stumbling into a train station, still in shock. The movie parallels the life-altering consequences of Helen missing her train home. Brian Klaas moves the “sliding doors” theory one step further in FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (on sale Jan 23). In it, Klaas demonstrates how linear ideas of progress are (at best) outmoded and suggests that “embracing the unpredictable” is not only more realistic—but is ultimately the key to happiness. Using history, evolutionary biology and chaos theory, Klaas shows how “letting go” is not only better for mental health, it can also be an empowering tool for success. The core argument of the book is that our world—and our lives—are more swayed by the accidental than we imagine. As people accustomed to recognizing patterns, we often wrongly weave unrelated data points together into a more pleasing tapestry. That is that the “storybook reality” produced by our modern simplified computer models, which systematically search for “the signal” and delete “the noise.” Recall that for Gwyneth, her life was altered less by losing her corporate job than missing her train afterward. ABOUT THE BOOK: If you could rewind life and redo one moment, would everything turn out the same? Or could catching a train or missing an exit change your life—or history itself? Would you even know what to change, being blind to the radically different worlds you unknowingly left behind? In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small, chance events can divert our lives and change everything, by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas. In FLUKE: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters (on sale Jan 23rd, 2024), Klaas tackles these questions and changes the way we look at the world. Klaas encourages a shift away from our obsession with linear ideas about progress and suggests that embracing the unpredictable nature of life is not only a more reality-based outlook—but is the secret to happiness. For Klaas, all of our fates are inextricably linked to a web of people and events not only outside of our control, but not even within our purview whatsoever. Pull on one thread and it effects the whole web. It is these often random “flukes” that have outsized influence on our lives. Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, FLUKE provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen and offers lessons on living smarter, being happier, and learning to let things go.

What causes schizophrenia? Is it a genetic glitch or are environmental factors at play? A combination of the two? Whatever the reason, what medication and course of action will give the patient the best chance at a normal life? Of all the mental illnesses, schizophrenia eludes us the most. Despite the strides scientists have made in neurological research and doctors have made in psychiatric treatment, schizophrenia remains misunderstood, almost complacently mythologized. Without a reason for the illness, patients feel even more alienated than they already do, families are left hopeless, and doctors struggle to provide effective care. After an almost forty-year medical career dedicated to caring for those affected by schizophrenia, Dr. Steven Lesk became determined to find the answer to its existence. In Footprints of Schizophrenia, he presents a groundbreaking theory that weaves evolutionary evidence with neurological findings. His conclusions promise to forever change the lives of the mentally ill by generating much-needed cultural dialogue about this stigmatized illness, and ultimately by provoking new psychiatric and pharmacological research. Dr. Lesk’s “primitive organization theory” has its basis in human evolution—from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens—and the specific changes to our brains after the emergence of language. We’ve existed in human-like form for six million years, but we’ve only had language for 50,000; as Dr. Lesk explains, within the vast span of evolutionary time that’s hardly any time at all. He posits that the twenty million people in the world who have schizophrenia don’t suppress the hormone dopamine, which is affected by language, in the way evolution has trained us, so their brains don’t process language well, leaving them to function as if they’re in a hallucinatory, delusional dream state. In addition to focusing treatment efforts for schizophrenia, Dr. Lesk’s theory could affect what we can do to help people with other dopamine-related illnesses like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s chorea, Tourette’s, ADD, and more. Calling on such diverse fields as anthropology, language theory, neurochemistry, evolution, and even the second law of thermodynamics, Footprints of Schizophrenia offers hope to those with schizophrenia whose dopamine doesn’t flow in our new, adaptive way. It will usher in a new era of psychiatric understanding—one that the field and the public desperately need.

Did you know that each year, up to 1.5 million women are diagnosed with pelvic (adnexal) masses? While most of these masses are noncancerous, a pelvic mass diagnosis can lead to a significant decision: the potential removal of one or both ovaries, known as oophorectomy, which may result in surgical menopause. A pelvic mass is a growth or enlargement originating in or around the uterus, which can involve the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and neighboring tissues (adnexal masses). Ovarian cancer, though relatively rare, impacts about 20,000 women annually in the United States. Early identification is crucial for positive outcomes. The decision to proceed with surgery is not one to be taken lightly, as 6 out of 7 women who undergo ovarian removal due to pelvic masses do not have cancer. Surgical menopause, particularly before natural menopause, can lead to immediate and long-term health implications, affecting bone health, neurological conditions, mental health, and heart health. To empower women facing these challenges, here are three proactive steps they can take: What Women Need To Know About Ovarian Cancer - According to The American Cancer Society, Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women and is the deadliest of all gynecologic cancers. It accounts for more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system. Ovarian cancer is often called the "silent killer" because symptoms may be subtle, but they can include bloating, pelvic or abdominal pain, difficulty eating, and frequent urination. Estimates for ovarian cancer in the United States for 2023: about 19,710 women will receive a new diagnosis of ovarian cancer and about 13,270 women will die from ovarian cancer.

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.

When Dr. Michael Greger, founder of NutritionFacts.org, dove into the top peer-reviewed anti-aging medical research, he realized that diet could regulate every one of the most promising strategies for combating the effects of aging. We don’t need Big Pharma to keep us feeling young—we already have the tools. In How Not to Age, the internationally renowned physician and nutritionist breaks down the science of aging and chronic illness and explains how to help avoid the diseases most commonly encountered in our journeys through life. Physicians have long treated aging as a malady, but getting older does not have to mean getting sicker. There are eleven pathways for aging in our bodies’ cells and we can disrupt each of them. Processes like autophagy, the upcycling of unusable junk, can be boosted with spermidine, a compound found in tempeh, mushrooms, and wheat germ. Senescent “zombie” cells that spew inflammation and are linked to many age-related diseases may be cleared in part with quercetin-rich foods like onions, apples, and kale. And we can combat effects of aging without breaking the bank. Why spend a small fortune on vitamin C and nicotinamide facial serums when you can make your own for up to 2,000 times cheaper? Inspired by the dietary and lifestyle patterns of centenarians and residents of “blue zone” regions where people live the longest, Dr. Greger presents simple, accessible, and evidence-based methods to preserve the body functions that keep you feeling youthful, both physically and mentally. Brimming with expertise and actionable takeaways, How Not to Age lays out practical strategies for achieving ultimate longevity.

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.

Dr. Roizen talks about the latest health headlines that YOU need to know.