SMCMA Physician

KILLER DISEASES, MODERN-DAY EPIDEMICS: Keys to Stopping Heart Disease, Diabetes, Cancer, and Obesity in Their Tracks

Review by Sharon Ann Clark, MD, FACS

Swarna Moldanado, PhD, MPH, and Alex Moldanado, MD tackle the health care issues facing our population and leading to poor middle age and older age well-being. This comprehensible book emphasizes that members of the population have to make choices for a particular lifestyle to stop the chronic diseases from threatening a healthy and fulfilling life. These two authors have meaningful years of experience in the front lines of taking care of people. Swarna followed her nursing degree by a PhD in nursing science and has tenure at San Francisco State University. Alex has devoted his life as a family practitioner and member of the San Mateo County Medical Association to the care of his patients in this community. He also has served in the U.S. Navy as a medical officer and was called back as a reservist physician to serve in 2002 for the 1st Marine Division in Iraq. These two individuals know first hand what challenges and needs emerge for people as they try to learn, to change, and to make better choices for health in the quickly changing world. Every one needs to embrace preventative measures on a daily basis as well as in the face of major stresses.

In 2001, Eric Schlosser captured the attention of the nation with Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-American meal. He points out that there is nothing surprising about the marketing, the agricultural methods, and the drive for cheap food of businesses. At the same time as every one today knows about the problems resultant from terrible choices in diet and lack of exercise, the population has even less ability to sift through the rapidly changing internet claims and publications on new fads. There is a major lack of truth in advertising relative to these topics and a devastating amount of abuse of our tastes for salt, sugar, and fat. But there is hope of change because the population is preferring and demanding healthy choices. In fact, there is now a scientific field of neurogastronomy that is working hard to examine how our sense of taste is interpreted by the brain and then in time help us choose wisely. Any one who reads this book on Killer Diseases will understand the importance of actively changing one’s tastes to try to live a healthy and productive life. This timely book aids us in seeing what really matters in our lifestyle to prevent disease from causing more progressive and irreversible damages. The authors give us sustained habits for better health. At the same time as science is making rapid strides, the relatively slow speed of diseases, so opposite to high speed internet, confuses some people as to the time course of disease progression. Many people understand less and less the latency of slowly progressing factors such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity until the speed of disease processes seems to accelerate beyond reasonable control.

This book lays out its thesis clearly by dividing the problem into three sections: “Evolution of Chronic Disease”; “The Impact of Killer Chronic Diseases on Health”; and “Keeping Chronic Diseases at Bay or Stopping Them in Their Tracks.” Each chapter has not only subdivisions but also case examples that make lasting impressions. Because of the sections, one can pick up the book and then put it down without feeling hopelessly interrupted. In this era of multiple texts and cell phone calls and emails, one’s ability to stop and to start reading anew proves invaluable for the working individual. The perfect reader to receive the biggest impact for his or her own life would be in the age group of twenty to thirty five years old in order to help avoid the onset of chronic diseases. That is a hard group to get to think about their future health when they will face middle or older age problems. The targeted readers would be those individuals as they start a family and encourage them to discuss the chapters and cases with their friends, parents, children, relatives and teachers. The intellectual framework that patients and the population as a whole will get from reading this book is a lifelong commitment to analysis of healthy life choices. This book helps to prevent the impact of false advertisements and unfounded statements about trendy health topics. The chapters offer the chance to understand the choices for activities of daily living and to try to slow and/or to stop heart disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity as these threaten to compromise and to kill our loved ones and our population. This book is a must for someone about whom you care.

Sharon Ann Clark, MD, FACS is a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon.