Book Recommendation: A Short Guide to a Long Life

Today, I have decided to write my first blog post not about food, but about a book.

“Sometimes you have to go to war to understand peace. My work in the cancer war has taught me a lot about all things health-related, much of which goes against conventional wisdom.” - Dr. David Agus, M.D.

Written in 2014 by the preeminent expert on Cancer recovery and biomedical research, Dr. David Agus, A Short Guide to a Long Life contains a trove of information that is going to be critical to the substantiation of many claims I plan to make in this blog. As its title suggests, the book is intended to serve as a blueprint for what you need to do to be healthy throughout your time on this earth.

Dr. Agus draws from the following qualifications:

• 20 years of experience working with a variety of cancer patients
• Professor of medicine at the University of Southern California
• Cofounder of two innovative companies specializing in personalized medicine
• Author of The End of Illness, 2012
• CBS News contributor

For the above reasons, I have chosen to focus on Dr. Agus’s work when making my recommendations during food reviews and recipe creations/commentaries. You will often see me reference specific sections of his book, A Short Guide to a Long Life, which has been featured in Wired Magazine and which I encourage you to buy for your own reading.

The book is easily accessible to the layperson, because each chapter is typically shorter than 5 pages long, and written with language that a non-expert can understand. Dr. Agus saves the technical details for his earlier work, The End of Illness, and chooses instead to focus on getting straight to the point with his advice in A Short Guide.

This is a book that you will easily get through in under a day, but which you will want to keep close at hand for many years to come. Dr. Agus breaks his advice into four easy to digest sections: “The Power of Prevention,” “What to Do,” “What to Avoid,” and “Doctor’s Orders.” Each of these sections contains a variety of information relating to which foods to eat (and which to avoid), how to optimize your sleeping habits, how to care for your physical fitness, and more. I highly recommend you check it out.

A Short Guide to a Long Life can be purchased from Amazon. You may also listen to an excerpt of the audiobook version on Dr. Agus’s website.

You may also be interested in Dr. Agus’s other book, The End of Illness, available at Amazon.