Think, Eat, Be Healthy

Book Review: “The End of Illness” by David B. Agus, MD

mg5440-end of illness book cover-web

“The End of Illness” by David B. Agus, MD is about what we know and do not know about health, illness and nutrition. Dr. Agus discusses how our inherited genetics provide a broad outline for our lives and also how much control we have over how those genetics play out and how very little is inevitable no matter what genes we have. The book also covers David Agus’ research specialty, proteomics, and his hope for the future of this technology in medicine.

Most of “The End of Illness” focuses on common-sense things we can all do every day to improve our health. There is not much new information here, but the arguments of a working health professional make it worth reading every word. David Agus advocates a diet of real food, the whole foods we evolved to eat, and pans the modern diet of highly processed foods, added sugar, and artificial, man-made ingredients. He argues for regular exercise and less sitting. Agus goes into great detail about why vitamin and mineral supplements hardly ever have the desired effect of making us healthier.

More pie-in-the-sky are the sections on proteomics, Dr. Agus’ field of research. Proteomics is the study of proteins, which actually control nearly all of the functions of our bodies. Agus hopes to someday, with the use of better super-computers than are currently available, be able to do complete, real-time protein surveys of the body to assess the current state of health and determine what could be done to correct problems. He has high hopes for this field of medical/biological research and has made much progress but still barely scratched the surface.

I wish him well but think his dream of decoding the protein puzzle is still many years away if even possible. Our biology is just so complicated with so many moving targets that I am not sure it is possible to understand completely. And partial knowledge in this field could be just as bad or even worse than no knowledge.

The most interesting thing about this book for me was the reasoning of a working medical research scientist. It is heartening to see someone argue for a healthy whole food diet and against supplements based on scientific research results. It is encouraging to see the arguments for living a healthy lifestyle that prevents the activation of dormant genes that have the potential to cause great harm and keeps health-promoting genes activated. It is good to see health professionals looking at alternatives to the “treat the symptoms and ignore the causes” course of mainstream modern healthcare.