Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Dr Norman Swan, Hachette Australia, $39.99.
Holidays are the time to seek out some books which you’ve missed reading. Even though this one was updated last year, the earlier version makes for an interesting read as well.
We all want to be healthier, and reading about what’s really good for you does not go to waste. Enlightening, available and easy to comprehend, it includes everything you need to know about health and wellbeing, delivered with Dr Swan’s trademark clarity and wit. He investigates the evidence for common assumptions we make about what is and isn’t good for our health.
Part memoir, part handbook, it ranges across 160 topics organised into six parts. We get a deeper insight into his motivation as a health educator. Swan’s revelations concerning his family background and early life influences are an eye-opener.
At medical school he learned that Glasgow had the world record for heart disease and the life expectancy gap between its rich and poor suburbs was around 25 years.
That’s the driver of this book. What drove this lifestyle was lack of knowledge, lack of money, conformity to the norm, and a swirl of lives where people didn’t feel they had much control over their destiny. “I was desperate to escape and gain that control.”
For more than three decades, Dr Norman Swan has been delivering straight, honest, common-sense health information to Australians as both a physician and broadcaster. He wants us to trust the information he given us – and to feel free to question it.
This ultimate health guide from Australia’s ‘most trusted doctor’, can be described as ‘a health compendium for busy people’. This one-stop handbook will settle fruitless anxieties and allow people to focus on what matters to them. Replace medical myths, half-truths and misconceptions with the information you need to make better decisions about how to eat and how to live to put your mind at ease and ensure you and your family’s health is the best it can be.
