Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-Term Health
I have spent 30+ years in the practice of internal medicine
attempting different strategies to change behavior when bad habits happen to
good people. Too often, lifestyle
epiphanies occur after major shake-ups such as the diagnoses of diabetes or
other serious conditions. I particularly
like the ‘bibliotherapy’ approach, and I’m always on the lookout for good
self-help book recommendations to add to my short list of those that truly
effect change.
I am pleased to report here that “The Good Gut” is just such
a book, well-written in a way that makes it one of those notable non-fiction
works that you’ll read cover to cover, not losing interest or comprehension
somewhere between a paragraph’s start and finish (no flipping ahead to see how
much longer this chapter!). The Drs.
Sonnenburg do not tediously repeat and overstate the standard health caveats to
avoid sugar, lose weight, and exercise, but rather expand on their primary
point, namely the importance, care, and feeding of our fellow life bacterial
travelers.
As a regular reader of the latest medical literature, much
of the content herein was not news to me.
The presentation, however, in everyday layperson language, was
personally compelling in ways that the New England Journal of Medicine is not. A recent search on the NEJM web-site for ‘gut
microbiota’ returned 28 articles, not one of which with a title so compelling
as to change my diet for life. Oh right,
I’ve already done that, changing out breakfast foods long before the
Sonnenburgs’ book and the rest of menu as a result of this read.
I will be recommending this book to my patients, and I also
commend it to you. This book will be released 4/21/15.
