Eating Well, Living Well: An Everyday Guide for Optimum Health - Softcover

B�liveau, Richard; Gingras, Denis

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9780771011382: Eating Well, Living Well: An Everyday Guide for Optimum Health

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0771011385 ISBN 13: 9780771011382

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2009

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From the authors of the bestselling Foods That Fight Cancer and Cooking with Foods That Fight Cancer comes a vital resource: a fascinating, indispensable guide to eating our way to good health

In this highly anticipated addition to their bestselling series, Dr. Richard B�liveau and Dr. Denis Gingras continue to discuss the powerful link between food and health, this time turning their lens on a broader array of diseases and conditions. With their trademark accessible explanations of complex medicine and research, the authors discuss the impact of diet on obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer. And again they show us just how easy (and pleasurable) it can be to alter our diets for optimum health.

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About the Author:

Dr. Richard B�liveau, a leading authority in the field of cancer and nutriceutical research, holds the Chair in the Prevention and Treatment of Cancer at the University of Quebec at Montreal, where he is a professor of biochemistry.

Dr. Denis Gingras is a researcher in the Molecular Medicine Lab of UQAM and co-writer, with Dr. B�liveau, of Foods That Fight Cancer and Cooking with Foods That Fight Cancer.

Chapter 1
When Diet Leads to Illness

A child born today in an industrialized country can hope to live on average for nearly 80 years, a remarkable statistic considering that for the greater part of our history, life expectancy has been no more than 20 to 30 years (Figure 1). Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did life expectancy signifi cantly improve, continuing upward thanks to the amazing breakthroughs achieved by medical science during the twentieth century (Figure 2). In particular, the development of numerous antibiotics, vaccines, drugs, surgical procedures, and other medical achievements over the past 50 years has considerably reduced the toll taken by serious diseases, particularly those of the infectious kind. Barely a century has passed since tuberculosis, pneumonia, and diarrhea alone were responsible for one third of all deaths in the United States. These diseases today represent only a small percentage of deaths, well behind mortalities from "new diseases" such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic conditions like Type-2 diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases (Figure 3). These illnesses therefore constitute the principal challenge faced by medicine today, well ahead of certain risk factors that often make headlines but whose real impact on public health is much less signifi cant (Figure 4).

Even though longer life expectancy has clearly played a role in the soaring mortality rates from chronic diseases, it is nonetheless worrisome that these diseases also strike people in their prime, considerably diminishing the duration and quality of life. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) states that a person who lives for 95 years will lose an average of almost ten years of good health as a result of one or more of these chronic diseases. It goes without saying that the loss of independence and suffering resulting from the treatment of these diseases (surgery, chemotherapy, dialysis, etc.) represent a substantial loss of the benefi ts that should derive from a longer life span. Although the continued increase in life expectancy we have seen over the last 150 years suggests that average life spans could reach 90 or even 95 years in a few decades from now, this high incidence of serious chronic diseases threatens not only to halt the trend, but also to undermine the main reason for living longer: staying in good health for as many years as possible.

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