Whether you buy one health book a year or dozens, this book may well zoom to the top of your list. Fans of America's favorite radio doctor will delight in picking up the latest health facts delivered in Edell's typically irreverent and witty style. Go to the head of the class or become the hit of the party when you retell Dr. Dean Edell's stories of inaccurate media frenzies or dispense facts that challenge society's assumptions about overweight people, or even, gulp, the value of exercise for longevity. You'll also learn Edell's story of his journey from disillusioned medical student to hippie dropout to respected and entertaining media MD.

"One day you are told that eating rutabaga is the true path to everlasting health, and the next day you hear that rutabaga will rot your brain." Edell teaches you how to sort out information such as this. Want to lose weight? Follow the "Dr. Dean Shut Your Mouth Diet": Eat what you want, but less of it. Hate treadmills? Garden or walk in the park. Besides amassing scientifically supported facts about all varieties of health topics, Edell's book has a serious mission--to teach you to demand proof before you swallow a health fad, put yourself on a trendy diet, take your illness to the nearest alternative guru, or get spooked by media-induced or Internet-spread health scares.

Edell's main theme, as the title implies, is to enjoy life and not let the health cops control all your lifestyle choices--especially when they're usually wrong. --Joan Price


From Publishers Weekly
Can this book possibly live up to its subtitle? After all, Edell hosts a national health-related radio talk show and is himself an acknowledged "health expert." Edell does not shatter conventional medical wisdom, but his engaging style and common sense make this an excellent overview of the keys to healthy living. Some of his recommendationsAthat fad diets don't work or that communication is the key to good sexAwon't come as revelations. But he covers an impressive number of bases, including nutrition, fitness, food safety, drugs, alternative medicine, even the quest for happiness. Edell backs up his recommendations with university studies and his personal experiences as a physician. Most chapters include summaries and checklists of the most important information. The result is a book that is both authoritative and user-friendly, mixed with a good dose of humor (the chapter on why sex is good for your health is called "There is a Santa Claus"). In the end, Edell may not prove all the health experts wrong, but he does deliver what he promises in his introduction: "common sense choices and options... always based on science." Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
" Dr. Dean" and his health news stories are familiar to millions of TV viewers. Not your usual physician, he is a former hippie and wanderer with experiences that have given him a broad, understanding outlook. In contrast, most other physicians have spent years getting educated but have little exposure to people until they hang out their shingles. Edell advises people listening to media health news to attend more to the science than to the hype. Watch out for distortion, misleading information, and ax-grinding, he says, and raise the red flag whenever anyone announces a breakthrough. Remember that a scientific study should involve more than three patients and should be announced in a medical journal rather than a newspaper, whose reporters go for the "startle effect" and usually aren't as eager to follow up with corrections and retractions. Edell is liberal toward alcohol, drugs, and sex--but not tobacco--which may bother some. He also corrects, clearly and often humorously, myths about beta-carotene, exercise, and, especially, diets. Lives, he believes, should be lived and enjoyed. William Beatty


Book Description
No wonder. How often have you felt whipsawed by the experts, confused by conflicting advice, or torn with guilt over what you eat, drink, think? Prepare yourself for a shock: You can relax, enjoy life, and still be healthy.Renowned for candid straight talk on radio and television, Dr. Dean Edell applies his unique common-sense perspective to America's growing obsession with health. Frank and iconoclastic, Dr. Edell walks readers through a lifetime of experience from deep inside twin worlds of media and medicine. As one of the first media doctors, he knows better than anyone the dangers of distorted medical reporting. With colorful detail, he shows how medical consumers are made neurotic at a time when people are healthier than ever before. Dr. Edell sorts through the morass of research, distinguishing documentable fact from panic-inducing fiction. With trademark humor, grace, and style, he shares with us the essential reassuring facts about our health: you can be fatter than you think; too much exercise might kill you; and yes, sex will add years to your life!Did You Know That...People who crave ice chips may have a nutritional deficiency?Saturated fat may reduce the risk of stroke?Dementia appears to be less common among those who eat more fish?You can lose weight by fidgeting, chewing on a pencil, or drinking coffee?Sex can cure headaches?Playing an instrument is not only good for your mental health, it burns 160 calories an hour?


About the Author
Dean Edell, M.D., is a hugely popular radio and television personality whose daily broadcasts are heard and seen by more than twenty million fans each week. A graduate of Cornell University Medical College, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.


Excerpted from Eat, Drink, and Be Merry : America's Doctor Tells You Why the Health Experts Are Wrong by David Schrieberg, Dean Edell. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Trust the Media at Your Peril(It's Your Health, Not Theirs)Let's start at the bottom line. Americans enjoy the best health and longest life spans in our history. Yet medical advances aside, we worry more about our health than ever before. We have become obsessed and neurotic to the point where we bounce like pinballs from one health-related anxiety and scare to another. Be honest -- that's really why you bought this book (fortunately, you are that anxious). Rather than basking in triumph over the scourges of our ancestors and enjoying our good health, we live in fear and paranoia. Relax. Things are better than you think. Give me 325 pages or so, and I'll prove it to you.Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying for a second that life is risk-free or comes with any guarantees. But from the start of this century in particular, medical science has advanced with extraordinary speed. In 1928 we had effective treatments for at most only 10 percent of the 360 most serious diseases. Nowadays we can handle most of them. Consider these numbers, culled by Harvard psychiatrist Arthur Barsky from government and other sources. If you were born in 1900, you were expected to live to age forty-seven. Through the century, life expectancy has rocketed. After the millennium, it will be over eighty. A child born today is likely to live longer than at any time since we started tap dancing onto the planet.Isn't it strange that as things get better, we feel worse? If we're not semistarving ourselves to a slimmer body, or trudging up StairMasters to nowhere, we feel guilty that we're not doing what we should do, whatever that is. When the wonders of modern medicine aren't perfect, we whine and complain and sue and turn back to witch-doctor wannabes in disguise and other quacks. Barsky calls this "the paradox of health." Our concept of healthiness, he found, has not kept pace with medicine's overall gains. Although methodologies differ among several surveys, all report similar trends. In the 1920s, the average American reported having a serious, acute, or disabling illness every sixteen months. What do you think that same survey found in the 1980s? More than two a year, with each episode lasting longer than in the 1920s.Another survey compared public concern with health between the 1950s and the 1970s. Folks were asked about specific symptoms, like breathing trouble, rapid heartbeats, palpitations, and pain. They complained of more poor health in the 1970s, and fewer people reported being symptom-free. Comparing the 1970s and 1980s, people said they were less satisfied with their health as time went on. So much for the comforts of science.We report being sick more. We report illnesses as recurring. We report each episode as lasting longer. Yet in reality, we are not sick more. We don't have more recurring illnesses. And we are not sick longer.The truth is that as a population, we seem less able to tolerate even slight discomforts. In fact, we view such discomforts as real pathology. We are faster to consider ourselves sick and run faster to doctors for everything from our stuffed sinuses to our stiff joints. The logical question, then, is have we become a hypochondriacal culture? Hypochondriacs, contrary to what many think, do not imagine their pain. But they do overreact to a multitude of common little aches and discomforts. All the attention to fitness, diets, and exercise simply means we spend more time thinking about our bodies. That's not necessarily a healthy trend.In the two decades I've been a media doctor, I've noticed a change on my radio call-in show. Early on, the calls seemed more substantive. There were real symptoms needing real advice. Nowadays there are more calls about vague and what I judge to be innocuous symptoms. "Dr. Edell, I have this funny tingling sensation in my tummy," or pelvis, or legs. "Could it be multiple sclerosis?" Headaches are quickly presumed to be brain tumors. Chest discomfort? Must be heart disease. Routine dryness of the skin? The heartbreak of psoriasis. Normal vaginal secretions? Infection, definitely. I have never gotten so many calls from men concerned about the clumpiness or textural qualities of their semen. Even routine forgetfulness, stuff our forefathers forgot to worry about, must be early Alzheimer's. Sore muscles? Trot down to the clinic. Got a cold? Off to the doctor, even though you must know that colds taper off in a week if you go to the doctor -- and in seven days if you don't.It's understandable, considering how everyone is pummeled with diagnostic nightmares by the media. It's human nature. How can you ignore indigestion after television's ER features a character whose presumed heartburn turns out to be a heart attack? News of an obscure disease convinces you that you may be a victim. This isn't new. In the 1950s, my father brought home a copy of the Merck Manual, a single-volume compendium of the main diseases known to man. After a few months of looking up all our symptoms and convincing themselves we all had every disease in the book, my parents came to their senses and chucked the book.After the first media reports on HIV in the early 1980s, my show was inundated by panicked callers. Some had engaged in unprotected sex, others were worried about oral sex or kissing. One woman anguished about her adult son who had gone to a topless bar where a lactating dancer had sprayed the audience with breast milk. He got splattered, his mother cried, and what of those stories about AIDS in breast milk? Then there was the frantic couple who slept all night in a hotel room only to find a used condom suspended in a lamp. Had HIV vapors attacked them overnight?

FROM THE PUBLISHER