YOU: The Owner's Manual

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

Vulnerable Minds: The Harm of Trauma and the Hope of Resilience (Penguin Random House / Avery; 3/12/24) by neurobiologist and educator Marc Hauser, PhD shows the importance of these dimensions, shows how they generate signatures of trauma, and provides a road map for treatment that emphasizes the idea of a toolkit of options.

This book offers a hopeful new pathway to understanding children’s trauma and providing effective interventions to build healthier communities. 

Each year at least a billion children around the world are victims of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) that range from physical abuse to racial discrimination to neglect and food deprivation.

The brain plasticity of our most vulnerable makes the adverse effects of trauma only that much more damaging to mental and physical development. Those dealt a hand of ACEs are more likely to drop out of school, have a shorter life, abuse substances, and suffer from myriad mental health and behavioral issues.

 The crucial question is: How do we intervene to offer these children a more hopeful future?

Dr. Hauser provides a novel, research-based framework to understand a child’s unique response to ACEs that goes beyond our current understanding and is centered around the five Ts—the timing during development when the trauma began, its type, tenure, toxicity, and how much turbulence it has caused in a child’s life.

Using this lens, adults can start to help children build resilience and recover—and even benefit—from their adversity through targeted community and school interventions, emotional regulation tools, as well as a new frontier of therapies focused on direct brain stimulation, including neurofeedback and psychedelics.

While human suffering experienced by children is the most devastating, it also presents the most promise for recovery; the plasticity of young people’s brains makes them vulnerable, but it also makes them apt to take back the joy, wonder, innocence, and curiosity of childhood when given the right support.

“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.