Tag Archives: health

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Ageless Brain: Think Faster, Remember More, and Stay Sharper by Lowering Your Brain Age – Julia VanTine

Break through research has revealed that through living a brain-healthy lifestyle, we can reduce our “brain age” to improve memory, hone sharpness, and reduce health risks as we age.

It’s normal for the brain to short-circuit every now and again—you put your keys in the fridge, or can’t find the pair of glasses on top of your head. But what if there was away to eat, exercise, and live that could eliminate these “senior moments?” Ageless Brain offers a plan to sharpen your memories and minds so that at 40, you have the quick, agile brain you had at 30. Based Off of groundbreaking scientific research, this plan is filled with brain-healthy foods, exercises, and little ways that you can positively impact your most vital organ every day by de-stressing, adjusting your attitude, and constantly interacting with the world through play.

Scientists have discovered that the human brain continually generates new neurons—forging new pathways and connections in our minds—well into old age as long as we pursue brain-healthy lifestyles from what we eat and how much we sleep, to how we exercise and how we handle stress. Exercising and nourishing our brains just like we do any other ailing organ encourages this growth—improving not only our mental fitness, but also our physical fitness as a side effect.

With Ageless Brain , you will discover the 10 Commandments of an ageless brain, reduce key risk-factors for Alzheimer’s, identify and avoid brain poisons lurking in their food, medicines, and home, learn to play and engage your brain more in everyday life, drop unsafe levels of blood pressure, cholesterol and sugar—as well as belly fat, and keep your brain nourished with 45 recipes.

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The New Menopause: Navigating Your Path Through Hormonal Change with Purpose, Power, and Facts – Mary Claire Haver

Filling a gaping hole in menopause care, everything a woman needs to know to thrive during her hormonal transition and beyond, as well as the tools to help her take charge of her health at this pivotal life stage–by the bestselling author of The Galveston Diet.

Menopause is inevitable, but suffering through it is not! This is the empowering approach to self-advocacy that pioneering women’s health advocate Dr. Mary Claire Haver takes for women in the midst of hormonal change in The New Menopause. A comprehensive, authoritative book of science-backed information and lived experience, it covers every woman’s needs:

The very latest research on the benefits and side effects of hormone replacement therapy.
Arming women with the power to secure vibrant health and well-being for the rest of their lives, The New Menopause is sure to become the bible of midlife wellness for present and future generations.

From changes in your appearance and sleep patterns to neurological, musculoskeletal, psychological, and sexual issues, a comprehensive A to Z toolkit of science-backed options for coping with symptoms.

What to do to mediate the risks associated with your body’s natural drop in estrogen production, including for diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and weight gain.

How to advocate and prepare for annual midlife wellness visits, including questions for your doctor and how to insist on whole life care.

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Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs – Johann Hari

The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the drugs upending weight loss as we knew it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to what these drugs mean for our society’s deeply dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodies.

In January 2023, bestselling author Johann Hari started to inject himself once a week with Ozempic, the diabetes drug that produces significant weight loss. He wasn’t alone—credible predictions suggest that in two years, a quarter of the U.S. population will be taking this class of drug.

Proponents say that this is a biological solution to a biological problem. While 95 percent of diets fail, the average person taking one of the new drugs will lose a quarter of their body weight in six months, and keep it off for as long as they take it. Here is a moment of liberation from an illness that massively increases your chances of diabetes, dementia, and cancer, and causes 10 percent of all deaths.

Still, Hari was wildly conflicted. The massive rise in obesity rates around the world in the last half century didn’t happen because something went wrong with human biology. We began to eat food designed to be maximally addictive. We built cities that are impossible to walk or bike around. We became much more stressed, making us seek out more comfort snacks.

From this perspective, the new weight loss drugs arrive at a moment of madness. We built a food system that poisons us, then decided en masse to inject ourselves with a different potential poison that puts us off all food.

A personal journey through weight loss combined with scientific evidence from experts, Magic Pill explores, as only Hari can, questions How did we get to this point? What does it reveal about our society that we couldn’t solve this problem socially, and instead turned to potentially risky pharmaceutical solutions? And will this free us from social pressure to conform to an ideal body type—or make that pressure even more dangerously intense?

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I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine – Daniel J. Levitin

Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.

In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

Levitin is not your typical scientist—he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

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I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life – Ed Yong

Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery.

Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are. The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. Those in cows and termites digest the plants they eat. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squids with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people.

I Contain Multitudes is the story of these extraordinary partnerships, between the creatures we are familiar with and those we are not. It reveals how we humans are disrupting these partnerships and how we might manipulate them for our own good. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.