Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World--Why They Work and How to Bring Them Home
Author: Daphne Miller
Pizza, pasta, hamburgers, sushi, tacos, and french fries . . . whether our ancestors were born in Madrid, Malaysia, or Mexico, chances are our daily food choices come from all around the globe. Unfortunately, we have taken some of the worst aspects of our varied ancestral menus to turn healthy cuisine into not-so-healthy junk food. Where did we go wrong?
Why is it that non-Western immigrants are so much more susceptible to diabetes and other diet-related chronic diseases than white Americans? How is it possible that relatively poor native populations in Mexico and Africa have such low levels of the chronic diseases that plague the United States? What is the secret behind the extremely low rate of clinical depression in Iceland—a country where dreary weather is the norm? The Jungle Effect has the life-changing answers to these important questions, and many more.
Dr. Daphne Miller undertook a worldwide quest to find diets that are both delicious and healthy. Written in a style reminiscent of Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, this book is filled with inspiring stories from Dr. Miller's patients, quirky travel adventures, interviews with world-renowned food experts, delicious (yet authentic) indigenous recipes, and valuable diet secrets that will stick with you for a lifetime.
Whether it's the heart-healthy Cretan diet, with its reliance on olive oil and fresh vegetables; the antidepression Icelandic diet and its extremely high levels of Omega 3s; the age-defying Okinawa diet and its emphasis on vegetables and fish; or the other diets explored herein, everyone who reads this book will come away with the secrets of a longer, healthier lifeand the recipes necessary to put those secrets into effect.
Publishers Weekly
Family physician Miller had seen countless cases of chronic illness and weight gain, but it wasn't until she saw a patient recently returned from Brazil that a light bulb went off in her head: the patient had noticed marked improvement after just a few weeks in her father's native village. Intrigued, Miller did some research and found a number of "cold spots" around the world, areas where chronic diseases like diabetes, depression and heart disease are disproportionately low. She then embarked on a world tour to find out why. As she travels through Copper Canyon, Mexico to Cameroon, West Africa to Iceland-where locals manage to avoid depression in one of the darkest and coldest regions in the world-and beyond, Miller finds that, in each case, local diet plays a key role. Many of her overarching tips will sound familiar (eat fresh foods, eat more fish, avoid refined sugar, watch the salt, etc.), but a handful of suggestions, such as eating fermented foods and using mushrooms to fight cancer, should come as news. Miller's work is consistently informative and educational, if at times meandering; each "cold spot" is accompanied by a specific regimen, and Miller's practical advice and recipes are all geared for the novice. Anyone unafraid of modifying their diet will find this anthropological diet guide useful.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents:
Foreword Andrew Weil, MD ix1
Introduction: The Jungle Effect 3
Dining in the Cold Spots 9
Anatomy of an Indigenous Diet 23
A Diet Lost in Translation 39
Feeding Our Genes or Our Taste Buds? 47
2
Copper Canyon, Mexico: A Cold Spot for Diabetes 59
Crete, Greece: A Cold Spot for Heart Disease 89
Iceland: A Cold Spot for Depression 127
Cameroon, West Africa: A Cold Spot for Bowel Trouble 161
Okinawa, Japan: A Cold Spot for Breast and Prostate Cancers 193
Foraging for Indigenous Foods in a Modern World 231
3
Cold Spot Recipes 249
Appendices
Cold Spot Shopping Lists 301
How to Cook Indigenous Grains and Beans 307
More About Fats and Cooking Oils 313
Getting Your Omega-3 Fats 319
Organic? A Priority List 321
Useful Cooking Equipment for Preparing Indigenous Foods 325
Recommended Indigenous Cookbooks 327
Notes 331
Acknowledgments 367
New interesting textbook: Decent People Decent Company or Pastoralists
Younger Next Year: A Man's Guide to Living like 50 until You're 80 and Beyond
Author: Chris Crowley
Turn back your biological clock. A breakthrough book for men--as much fun to read as it is persuasive--Younger Next Year draws on the very latest science of aging to show how men 50 or older can become functionally younger every year for the next five to ten years, and continue to live like fifty-year-olds until well into their eighties. To enjoy life and be stronger, healthier, and more alert. To stave off 70% of the normal decay associated with aging (weakness, sore joints, apathy), and to eliminate over 50% of all illness and potential injuries. This is the real thing, a program that will work for anyone who decides to apply himself to "Harry's Rules."
Harry is Henry S. Lodge, M.D., a specialist in internal medicine and preventive healthcare. Chris Crowley is Harry's 70-year-old patient who's stronger today (and skiing better) than when he was 40. Together, in alternating chapters that are lively, sometimes outspoken, and always utterly convincing, they spell out Harry's Rules and the science behind them. The rules are deceptively simple: Exercise Six Days a Week. Eat What You Know You Should. Connect to Other People and Commit to Feeling Passionate About Something. The science, simplified and demystified, ranges from the molecular biology of growth and decay to how our bodies and minds evolved (and why they fare so poorly in our sedentary, all-feast no-famine culture). The result is nothing less than a paradigm shift in our view of aging.
Welcome to the next third of your life--train for it, and you'll have a ball.
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