After being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-seven and not getting answers from her physicians, Ruth Heidrich began her journey to fitness and over two decades without a recurrence of symptoms—a story she writes about in her extraordinary and inspirational A Race for Life.

"[I learned] I was responsible for my own health care," she reports. Heidrich went on to receive her PhD in Health Management. Affectionately known as "the other Dr. Ruth," Heidrich is sharing what she has learned and changing the way people view their senior years. In Senior Fitness, Ruth shows how to maintain and even increase physical and sexual fitness at any age, as well as how to reduce the risks of prostate cancer, varicose veins, osteoporosis, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, Alzheimer's, and a host of other ailments associated with aging. Since her diagnoses of cancer, Ruth Heidrich has gone on to win more than nine hundred athletic trophies and metals. She has been cancer-free for more than twenty years.

Two other books that talk about getting fit are The Joy of Weight Loss and The Love-Powered Diet, both of which encourage you to lose weight by feeling good about yourself rather than forcing yourself onto a restrictive diet and demanding that you suffer for your sins. In the former, Norris Chumley lost over 180 pounds, and kept it off, by learning to love himself and enjoy movement, and this is his secret to shedding the pounds. In the latter, Victoria learned that her dieting was only leading her to binge, and that a crucial step to a healthy body was to nurture a healthy attitude toward food.

Ever needed a detailed guide to sprouting microgreens? Mark Braunstein, author of Radical Vegetarianism, comes to the rescue with his detailed microgreens online resource.

Illnesses in childhood can be particularly devastating because they are both incomprehensible to the child and seem so unfair. Yet children can also be incredibly resilient and hopeful.

A particular example of this is found in the book How I Feel, the true story of a little boy called Steven who became ill with diabetes and how he managed to cope with it. Written and illustrated by his older brother Michael, the book is filled with fun and very immediate, kid’s-eye view cartoons of Steven’s adventures through his illness and healing, and provides an invaluable resource for children, parents, family members, teachers, and caregivers.

Another much misunderstood and previously undiagnosed disease is childhood obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). A Thought Is Just a Thought is the first storybook of its kind: the compelling and sympathetic story of Jenny, who suffers from OCD. The kind Dr. Mike helps Jenny overcome her fears by showing her how to rethink the bad thoughts, and eventually she stops dwelling on the thought and its irrational consequences, realizing that, after all, a thought is just a thought. This unique work, with a foreword by the medical director of the OCD Institute in Belmont, MA, will enable parents and doctors to understand how best to help children deal with suffering from this debilitating psychological illness.

Although Lorie Eve Dechar's Five Spirits is ostensibly a book about acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, it is at its heart a book about human consciousness.

The book explores the question of how human beings create reality and how our creation of reality affects not only our health but also the way we feel, live, and interact with our environment. By melding the wisdom of the ancient Chinese with the insights of modern Western depth psychology and the understanding of Taoist and European alchemy, the book aims to help readers discover a new, more efficient, and integrated consciousness. Through this discovery, we will find not only new ways to heal psychosomatic, psychological, and spiritual distress but also new possibilities for living, and new ways to relate to our bodies, our families, and communities, as well as to our planet.

One important key to this new consciousness is a revised relationship to the yin, or what the ancient Taoists referred to as the Mysterious Feminine. This attitude views the the divine not only as an invisible, unknowable mystery (up there and far away in heaven) but also as a knowable, embodied experience, a sacred illumination that exists here and now, as the life force that flows through our bodies, through nature and all of creation.

Five Spirits is subtitled "Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing" in order to distinquish it from TCM or Traditional Chinese Medicine, the more medical, symptom-focused acupuncture that it is currently being practiced in Mainland China and most parts of the Western world. Alchemy is the ancient art of transformation, not only the transformation of lead into gold as is most commonly understood, but the transformation of the lead of human suffering into the gold of wisdom, the transformation of an ordinary human being into a sage. The focus of "Alchemical Acupuncture" is not the curing of superficial symptoms and the restoration of old, outmoded ways of living but rather on transformation, on the discovery of new, more exciting and potent ways of living and being on the planet.

Alchemical Acupuncture seeks to find the treasure in the trash, the meaning and the possibilities for spiritual transformation hidden in our painful physical symptoms and psychological distress. This spiritual attitude is found in the earliest Chinese medical texts, written over two thousand years ago. These texts were strongly influenced by Taoist
alchemy, but this attitude has gradually been buried as acupuncture has been taken up by the more materialistic, modern world. It is the premise of this book that in order to tap the deepest potential of Chinese medicine, we must understand the alchemical principles at its core. But an understanding of these principles can also help us to solve problems and resolve insoluble dilemmas that go beyond the scope of of acupuncture.

Humane Education is more than just teaching children to be kind to their pets. It's teaching them to do what they can to make the world a less violent place.

This is the message of Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs by humane educator and president of the Institute for Humane Education, Zoe Weil. Claude and Medea are two children who attend the same school, but come from very different backgrounds. They share, however, a couple of things in common. They are both inspired by a substitute teacher, the very odd Mrs. Rattlebee, who comes to their school after their regular teacher is injured; and they are both moved to act upon that inspiration when they stumble across a dog-napping ring in Manhattan, where they both live.

This charming story for nine- to twelve-year-olds offers a case study in making connections between caring for animals and caring for people, and will introduce the issues of humane education to young people in an accessible and enjoyable way.

For more about the International Day of the African Child, click here.

Dr. Michael Greger is the author of Bird Flu, and an expert on how extreme animal confinement is a big cause of the growth of pandemic disease. We received this note from Dr. Greger today:

Me Against the Mob

My four-against-one debate at the Congressional Quarterly forum on zoonotic disease was just posted on the website of the Animal Health Institute, the industry trade group spearheading the fight to maintain the status quos on antibiotic use in farm animals. Should I be surprised that they edited out a number of my comments (and as far as I can tell none of anyone else’s)?

I was able to splice in audio of some of the sections they removed, though, into a compilation video I put together of my participation in the forum. You can download my 20 minute video at http://bit.ly/gregerantibiotics.

The 3 hour (but doctored) video can be found on Healthy Animals.

Holistic medicine offers a paradigm of wellness that differs from the trauma and severe deficiencies of our current "sickness care" system.

One aspect of this system that demands attention is the issue of vaccination. In their first five years of life, children are expected to undergo an extraordinary thirty-seven doses of eleven different vaccines, yet relatively few parents are aware of the risks involved. As the writers in The Vaccination Dilemma indicate, a growing body of research has linked immunization with autism, seizures, asthma, arthritis, Crohn’s disease, hyperactivity, and learning disabilities. Balanced and thoughtful, this book clearly describes the immune system, its workings (and what science does and does not know about them), and helps parents make educated decisions on behalf of their children.

Will Tuttle's #1 Amazon Bestseller, The World Peace Diet, is reviewed and excerpted in the May/June issue of Macrobiotics Today.

Read an interview with Will Tuttle, and check out Will's event schedule.

Bitch Magazine reviews Sistah Vegan: "Go grab a copy of the book to support awesome intersectional work that explores everything from the environment to animal welfare to racism."

Sistah Vegan editor Breeze Harper and some of the book's contributors were interviewed on a call-in show at Howard University.

It took a while to get going in the first half, since Breeze had to describe what vegan meant, insist that there really are Black women who eat/live this way, and address the fact that it is possible to eat vegetarian and still be overweight. Apparently Sistah Vegan is sorely needed!

On the second evening, with Breeze joined by Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, Angelique Surya Shofar, and a medical doctor all crowded into the studio, there was a lively discussion of Black women's reproductive health (specifically the all-too-common fibroids), about being in touch with one's body, the erotic side of food, and much more.

The shows are worth a listen!
Part 1 | Part 2

Too often we celebrate the mind and the spirit and forget that we are incarnate beings, merely but magnificently mortal. While it's true that our flesh will ultimately fail and die, our passage on this earth is nevertheless contained within what the Anglo-Saxons accurately and evocatively called the "bone house," which in spite of how much we ignore it, abuse it, or forget we have it, remains incredibly resilient and resourceful for much of our lives. That's why we need to protect and cherish it, and that's why Lantern Books publishes titles that can help you do just that.

In Condom Sense, Dr. Monica Sweeney, Assistant Clinical Professor of Preventive Medicine SUNY Health Science Center of Brooklyn and a member of the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, makes it clear that the AIDS epidemic is not over, not only in Africa and Asia, but in North America and Europe, where a new generation of young men and women are returning to sex without condoms, resulting in a dramatic increase in HIV cases after years of decline. Her message is clear and strong: The best protection is prevention, with latex condoms. Condom Sense uncompromisingly focuses on the reality of human lives and tells you how to stay safe.

Will Tuttle's World Peace Diet has leapt to Number 9 on Amazon.com's bestseller list—an increase (as of 3:53 pm EST today) of 156,000 percent! They say one person can make a difference, but this exponential leap suggests that a lot of people acting in concert can also be very handy. Thanks to everyone who made this possible by clicking through to Amazon.

Mark Braunstein, author of Radical Vegetarianism, is passionate about a few things. Well, vegetarianism, for one. I daresay he loves language too, and is always playing with words. He's an arts academic and a photographer, and he smokes pot.

Mark is an incomplete paraplegic, and asserts that marijuana is what has kept him productive for the last twenty years. He "unabashedly smoke[s] medical marijuana, medicinally for below the waist, and recreationally for above."

Watch for the April issue of New Mobility magazine, which profiles Mark's fight to legalize marijuana, and features he and his artwork.

While promoting the excellent DVD Food, Inc. on Oprah on January 24, Michael Pollan made the following statement: "The Inuit in Greenland you were referring to [have a] 75% fat diet — no type II diabetes, no heart disease."

The implication that the Inuit's high-meat diet is healthful is almost certainly wrong. The Inuit have a reduced life expectancy, and indigenous people on a similar diet in Alaska suffer from rampant osteoporosis. Moreover, the "Inuit" diet — huge amounts of animal products — seems to contradict Pollan's principle of "mostly plants." The most recent incarnation of the high-meat diet, the Atkins diet, is now universally discredited.

Is this just an isolated slip in an otherwise creditable presentation? Alas, I'm not sure.

A Practical Peacemaker Ponders . . .

I've been noticing the increase in noise level in our public space for some time--have you? I've mostly been grousing about it privately, but now we need to speak up, because it is leading to a greater incidence of hearing loss, particularly among children, teens, and young adults.