The Healthy Skeptic: Cutting Through the Hype about Your Health

This book will help you evaluate health claims of western and "natural" food, supplements, and medicine. Both often exaggerate, lie, and abuse statistics to convince you to buy whatever they're selling. The news media unfortunately gets a lot of its material from manufacturers or trade groups rather than scientific studies, so you always have to be skeptical of what information from newspapers, magazines, and TV. Nor is the government protecting you, so you can't assume that what is allowed on labels is true. In the good old days, the FDA used to only allow health claims backed by significant scientific agreement or an authoritative statement from the National Academy of Sciences. But now the FDA has yielded to pressures from industry that allows "qualified" claims with limited evidence. If you've been prescribed an expensive drug, or one with potentially life-threatening side effects, Davis suggests you can read the original scientific papers - if you do, I recommend also getting Woloshin's book "Know Your Chances" to help you interpret it. Luckily for you, Davis has done the hard work for you and investigates many widely used and prescribed remedies, such as Lunestra, statins, sunscreen, chemicals, dieting, anti-aging pills, and more. After reading this book I would never take any medication or supplements without doing in-depth research, because the side effects can range from unpleasant to life-threatening. And many drugs cost a huge amount of money, yet lower my odds of getting a disease by only one or two percent. Though you'd never know this from the ads, which might claim 33% -- Davis explains the math of how they can make such an outrageous claim and get away with it. Healthy Food Davis said many of his friends ask him what foods are the best to eat so they can stockpile these "superfoods". Davis tells them there is no such thing as a superfood - just try to eat as wide a variety as possible of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, legumes, and nuts (in moderation). Avoid red meat, white rice, white bread, and processed or junk food. The reason there aren't any "superfoods" is because all food has multiple nutrients that interact with each other and with other food you've eaten that affect your body in many ways. It's impossible to tease out the effect of individual components. The FDA now allows "weasel" words to make "structure/function" claims without any proof at all. So "lowers cholesterol" is not allowed, but the corporation or quack can get around this with "helps maintain healthy cholesterol levels". Some other weasel phrases: "maintains heart health" and "provides immune support". Unless a product is labeled clearly and unambiguously with a statement that it prevents a condition, ignore the label. A legitimate label can be found on whole grain products, because several decades of peer-reviewed scientific research has shown whole grains reduce your odds of getting heart disease, stroke, cancer, and

This book has been passed around the family and we bought an extra copy for our local library. In these days of overblown health stories that offer too much, it's nice to have Robert Davis sane and smart advice keeping us readers anchored.

I want to encourage a healthy lifestyle for my family, but it is difficult with all the changing data from the news media, web sites, etc. This is a good book to help you make informed decisions on a variety of health care issues. I suggest reading it to help you come to your own decisions about what is the best choice to make for your lifestyle.

Robert Davis has given us a good wake up call here. He reminds us how easy it is to get complacent in our lifestyle, going from diet to diet, falling prey to the latest fad health tips. "The Healthy Skeptic" doles out a good dose of common sense, backed up by a book-full of reminders to check out the research behind what we think is good advice - those "health" claims may not be supported by anything more than the air it took the promoters to utter their words aloud. A good read!

Finally a book that isn't afraid to take on the drug makers and public interest groups who (guess what?) don't always have our best interests at heart. From cholesterol drugs to sunscreen, this book will save you 10 times its cost by telling you what health info is really worth paying attention to--and what isn't. Smart, great read.