Library Video of the Week, March 11, 2013.

Forks over Knives, a documentary written and directed by Lee Fulkerson.

Library Call Number: RA645.N87F67 2011

Synopsis excerpts from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB):
            What has happened to us? Despite the most advanced medical technology in the world, we are sicker than ever by nearly every measure. Cases of diabetes are exploding…half of us are taking at least one prescription drug and major medical operations have become routine. Heart disease, cancer and stroke are the country's three leading causes of death...Millions suffer from…degenerative diseases. Could it be there's a…solution so comprehensive…that it's mind-boggling that more of us haven't taken it seriously?  
          FORKS OVER KNIVES examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the so-called "diseases of affluence" that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods. …The film traces the personal journeys [of two eminent researchers]…Inspired by remarkable discoveries in their young careers... Their research separately and independently led them to the same startling conclusion: degenerative diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and even several forms of cancer, could almost always be prevented-and in many cases reversed-by adopting a whole foods, plant-based diet. Despite the profound implications of their findings, their work has remained relatively unknown to the public. Written by Brian L. Wendel

Browsing Area Book of the Week, September 4, 2012..

The Battle over Health Care: What Obama’s reform means for America’s future by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh.  Library Call Number: RA395.A3G45 2012.
          From Publisher’s Weekly:  “Health care expert Gibson and World Bank economist Singh (coauthors of Wall of Silence) present a well-argued view that the heralded Obama health care reforms may be adverse to the public interest, since by ‘plowing even more funding into health care, the reform law cements inefficiency in the system.’ The reforms increase insurers’ market share, giving them access to 16 million new customers beginning in 2014, but proposed subsidies for individual insurance policies simply foster greater demand, enabling continuing cost increases.
          By 2030, the authors estimate that health care will consume 25 percent of the country’s income, and comprehensive insurance will be unaffordable, even with subsidies. In passionate language, they prescribe possible remedies, but many are the usual suspects, for example, tackling fraud in health care spending. Meanwhile, the prognosis that the baby boomers will overwhelm Medicare might induce the despairing reader to take two aspirins. But don’t call the doctor in the morning; a conservative estimate is that 225,000 people die every year from preventable harm in the health care system. As one observer says: ‘They harm you and they bill you for it.’”

June 2012 Browsing Books---Finding the Feasts

Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers and One Picky Kid by Melanie Rehak

Library Call Number: TX633.R45 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor) 

Author Rehak begins a year-long search as a thoughtful eater and new mother into the food choices of today’s world, trying to understand how to choose the right foods, do the right thing, eat the best meals possible and “make peace with our food,” even if it means her child will occasionally hit the Burger King later on.

American Terroir: Savoring the Pleasures of our Woods, Waters and Fields by Rowan Jacobson.

Library Call Number: TX631.J335 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)

 

Terroir means “taste of place,” the local soil, air and water that gives many of our foods, from apples to maple syrup, chocolate to oysters, a distinct and local flavor. Like a Michigan apple grower who can bite into a local apple and tell you whose orchard it came from, Jacobson’s book explores the “flavor landscapes of America…where our great foods live.”  With recipes.

Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens by Andrew Beahrs 

Library Call Number: TX633.B393 2010

Library Location: Browsing Area (4th Floor)

Adapted from the dust jacket:  In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. Desperately sick of European hotel cooking, his menu included some 80 regional specialties, a true love letter to American food: Lake Trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Canvasback-duck, from Baltimore. Black-bass, from the Mississippi.  Beahrs’ book sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten regional specialties can still be found on American tables. The menu, it turns out, was also a memoir and a map. The dishes he yearned for were all connected to cherished moments in his life-from the New Orleans croakers he loved as a young man on the Mississippi to the maple syrup he savored in Connecticut, with his family, during his final, lonely years

Browsing books for July-American Health

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker. Call Number: RC443.W437 2010.
Getting What We deserve: Health & Medical Care in America by Alfred Sommer, MD, MHS. Call Number: RA445.S66 2009.
Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical exposure in the United States by Steve Lerner. Call Number: RA1226.L47 2010.
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Call Number: QP360.C3667 2010.
          Four controversial books on health make the reading list for July. In Anatomy of an Epidemic, Whitaker looks at the studies which evaluate the long-term use of psychiatric drugs and finds the benefits of use often misstated and patients suffering, while innovative programs are being developed which may offer far more effective alternatives.
          In the slim Getting What We Deserve, Dr. Sommer, a former Dean at Johns Hopkins, uses charts, graphs and innumerable statistics to show what we already should know: we spend more on health care than any other developed country and still aren’t better off than most of them. With sometimes acid humor, Dr. Sommer shows why.
          Sacrifice Zones spotlights an all-too-often ignored outcome of poverty: lower income communities are much more likely to be in proximity to—even surrounded by—toxic zones of industrial pollution. As jobs become critical, towns will gamble their health and the future of their children, in order to earn a living. From Alaska to Florida, from dioxin to PCBs from an old military base, the poor are often living in deadly environments.
          In The Shallows, author Carr expands on a past Atlantic article: that the Internet is making it harder for humans to think deeply and concentrate fully. Blending recent neuroscience and cultural critiques, he makes a strong case for e-moderation.

Browsing Area Book of the Week, April 4, 2011.

The Subtle Body: the story of yoga in America, by Stefanie Syman.
Library Call Number: B132.Y6S96 2010.
          A spiritual discipline which has become a multimillion dollar American business is examined in this scholarly work on yoga.
          “Yoga’s history in America is longer and richer than even its most devoted practitioners realize. It was present in Emerson’s New England, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was fashionable among the leisure class. And yet when Americans first learned about yoga, what they learned was that it was a dangerous, alien practice that would corrupt body and soul. A century later, you can find yoga in gyms, malls, and even hospitals, and the arrival of a yoga studio in a neighborhood is a signal of cosmopolitanism. How did it happen? It did so, Syman explains, through a succession of charismatic yoga teachers, who risked charges of charlatanism as they promoted yoga in America, and through generations of yoga students, who were deemed unbalanced or even insane for their efforts. “ --from the dust jacket.