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NUTRAEROBICS: Jeffrey Bland's Complete Individualized Nutrition and Fitness Program for Life After 30 by Jeffrey Bland

NUTRAEROBICS: Jeffrey Bland's Complete Individualized Nutrition and Fitness Program for Life After 30

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Pub Date: Dec. 7th, 1983
Publisher: Harper & Row

How to improve your health through optimal nutrition: a premature plan that can't, however, do you any harm. Bland, professor of nutritional biochemistry at the U. of Puget Sound and author of Your Health Under Siege, bases his program on two reasonable points. First, after the age of 30, we all suffer from some ""vertical diseases""--fatigue, headaches, muscle weakness, digestive and skin disorders, insomnia, depression--which lower the quality of life and will eventually lead to ""horizontal diseases"" (that lay us out flat in bed). Second, though science still has a very incomplete understanding of minimum and optimal nutrition needs, recent studies have begun to indicate areas for both prevention and treatment of disease. Putting this all together, Bland first lays out an extensive self-assessment program--involving hereditary, physical, emotional, and nutritional profiles. He then covers ten particular areas where research has begun to indicate that nutrient intake can significantly affect health: physical and mental aging (the B vitamins may have a protective role); stress and fatigue; weight disorders; heart disease, cancer; ""Male and Female Problems""; bone and tooth weakness; the immune system (manifested by arthritis, headaches, intestinal problems); pregnancy; children's health. Readers can then match their profiles with Bland's suggestions for increasing the intake of various nutrients. He readily admits that, in most of these cases, no positive correlations have been proven between higher specific nutrient intake and lower disease incidence--the research only indicates some kind of relationship. And he does caution against doses of any nutrient that might be toxic. The book would be best used, however, as an overview of what nutritional science may soon be able to offer--not as a down-the-line guide.