Healthy no matter what How humans are hardwired to adapt

In this competent program, physician Jadad (The Feast of Our Life) and his daughter Jadad-Garcia (Everything You Need to Know About Love ), a philosopher, offer guidance on how to use humanity's "natural gift of adaptation" to lead a healthy life. The authors encourage readers to view health as the ability to "adapt to the inevitable physical, mental, and social challenges" of life, and provide advice on how to enhance this ability. Humans are naturally adaptive, the authors contend, as exemplified by their capacity to develop language and cultures that enable communal problem-solving and the transmission of knowledge. Jadad and Jadad-Garcia suggest that the "biggest threat to adaptability" is a "toxic stress load," which refers to the physical toll taken by long-term stress. Examining studies on those with long life spans, the authors attribute longevity to regular exercise, modest portions at meals, and active social support systems. The research is robust, but the focus on adaptability sometimes leads to awkward wording that obscures the straightforwardness of the advice, as when they tout the importance of having close friends by discussing the "capacity to supercharge the adaptive potential of your personal social networks." Still, readers will appreciate the sound suggestions. (Jan.)

Introduction For thousands of years humans tried to fly by mimicking birds. They created all sorts of contraptions, most of which centered on the ability to flap wings. All along, they overlooked the other animals and plants that were gliding and floating around them without even having wings. This obsessive focus on one approach is exactly what each of us has been doing to achieve a long and healthy life. We are following the wrong assumptions, oblivious to the tools that we have right in front of us and persistent despite the repeated failures. The equivalent of flapping wings is eliminating disease. Fighting illnesses through medical interventions has been the persistent method used for millennia to achieve a healthy life. This approach has made success impossible. Even by regularly exercising, eating well, getting good sleep, and meditating, we are still only scratching the surface of the possibilities to achieve this goal. In fact, through our studies on thousands of people, we have found that 90 percent of what people need to feel healthy is actually outside of the medical system. Yet our fixation leads us to offer medical solutions to most social and emotional problems. Someone who is lonely can easily end up with a prescription for depression. Building on data and experiences from millions of people around the world, this book presents a view of what can make a healthy and long life possible, despite the presence of disease. It is a practical guide that condenses the best scientific knowledge and insights from medicine, psychology, and sociology, going from the microscopic to the colossal. We also underscore that you are equipped with the versatility and the tools to overcome practically any obstacle that prevents you from being healthy. At the core of all this is your natural gift of adaptation. It combines a kind of superpower and a defense mechanism that have evolved over billions of years through a practically infinite amount of trial and error. This book introduces you to this ability and offers pointers for how to put it into action. As you go through the book, we introduce you to your lesserknown senses and ask you questions that have a highly sophisticated predictive power, including one that could predict your prospects of living or losing 20 years of life. We also give you words to decode, describe, and deal with practically any challenge to your health in a wide range of contexts, regardless of your cultural background or socioeconomic circumstances, all based on scientific evidence. We will show you trees that heal, pills that are labeled as fake but still work, how big cities are the best places for living past 100 years old, and why making comparisons between you and your peers can kill you. You will learn that as much as the traditional medical system can save lives, it can also be a hotbed of lethal threats. Recognizing that it offers 10 percent of what you need to feel healthy, we provide evidence about whether, how, and when to use it, while showing you how to get the best possible results and avoid being harmed. We will peek behind many curtains and give you access to places that are traditionally reserved for insiders. To start, we want to bring you into an exclusive room where world leaders once gathered, unaware that they were playing a part in a greater story. Excerpted from Healthy No Matter What: How Humans Are Hardwired to Adapt by Alex Jadad, Tamen Jadad-Garcia All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.