Diet and the Disease of Civilization

Diet and the Disease of Civilization PDF Author: Adrienne Rose Bitar
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813589665
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don’t just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live. Diet and the Disease of Civilization interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it’s not calories—but concepts—that should be counted? Cultural critic Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the “Fall of Man” as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. Bitar reads each diet—the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet—as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health. Diet and the Disease of Civilization unearths the ways in which diet books are actually utopian manifestos not just for better bodies, but also for a healthier society and a more perfect world.

Diet and the Disease of Civilization

Diet and the Disease of Civilization PDF Author: Adrienne Rose Bitar
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813589665
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book Here

Book Description
Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don’t just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live. Diet and the Disease of Civilization interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it’s not calories—but concepts—that should be counted? Cultural critic Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the “Fall of Man” as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. Bitar reads each diet—the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet—as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health. Diet and the Disease of Civilization unearths the ways in which diet books are actually utopian manifestos not just for better bodies, but also for a healthier society and a more perfect world.

Civilization and Disease

Civilization and Disease PDF Author: Henry Ernest Sigerist
Publisher: Ayer Publishing
ISBN: 9780843400939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description


Cancer: disease of civilization?

Cancer: disease of civilization? PDF Author: Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Publisher: David De Angelis
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Vilhjalmur Stefansson has had the extraordinary privilege and the rare merit to know intimately certain segments of the world which will always be strange to most of us. He has had the alertness to note details, to make correlations which would have escaped others. He has been unhampered by professional or even by lay prejudices. And he has a gift for expressing the ideas which his observations have evoked. The story which he presents in this book is a fascinating one. Here is the sort of thing we call basic research, just as much so as if it were being conducted in the latest of laboratories. Here are the data from a series of experiments which Nature has performed for us—in the Arctic northland, in the tropic forests of Gabon, and in the temperate valley of Hunzaland. She has varied a series of environmental factors yet come up with a like result in the three places, and a result which she has produced, so far as we know, only in those three special combinations of environments, not in any other of her myriads of combinations elsewhere. What have these three in common, that they produce this result, so important to us? Nature will not repeat those experiments. And we will not have another Stefansson to read the data and present them to us. I hope, therefore, that what he has to say will be read carefully and pondered deeply.

Dirty Electricity

Dirty Electricity PDF Author: Samuel Milham MD MPH
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1938908198
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 131

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Book Description
When Thomas Edison began wiring New York City with a direct current electricity distribution system in the 1880s, he gave humankind the magic of electric light, heat, and power; in the process, though, he inadvertently opened a Pandoras Box of unimaginable illness and death. Dirty Electricity tells the story of Dr. Samuel Milham, the scientist who first alerted the world about the frightening link between occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields and human disease. Milham takes readers through his early years and education, following the twisting path that led to his discovery that most of the twentieth century diseases of civilization, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and suicide, are caused by electromagnetic field exposure. In the second edition, he explains how electrical exposure does its damage, and how electricity is causing our current epidemics of asthma, diabetes and obesity. Dr. Milham warns that because of the recent proliferation of radio frequency radiation from cell phones and towers, terrestrial antennas, Wi-Fi and Wi-max systems, broadband internet over power lines, and personal electronic equipment, we may be facing a looming epidemic of morbidity and mortality. In Dirty Electricity, he reveals the steps we must take, personally and as a society, to coexist with this marvelous but dangerous technology.

The Diseases of Civilization

The Diseases of Civilization PDF Author: Brian Inglis
Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description


A History of Disease in Ancient Times

A History of Disease in Ancient Times PDF Author: Philip Norrie
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319289373
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
This book shows how bubonic plague and smallpox helped end the Hittite Empire, the Bronze Age in the Near East and later the Carthaginian Empire. The book will examine all the possible infectious diseases present in ancient times and show that life was a daily struggle for survival either avoiding or fighting against these infectious disease epidemics. The book will argue that infectious disease epidemics are a critical link in the chain of causation for the demise of most civilizations in the ancient world and that ancient historians should no longer ignore them, as is currently the case.

Health and the Rise of Civilization

Health and the Rise of Civilization PDF Author: Mark Nathan Cohen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300050233
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Civilized nations popularly assume that "primitive" societies are poor, ill, and malnourished and that progress through civilization automatically implies improved health. In this provocative new book, Mark Nathan Cohen challenges this belief. Using evidence from epidemiology, anthropology, and archaeology, Cohen provides fascinating evidence about the actual effects of civilization on health, suggesting that some aspects of civilization create as many health problems as they prevent or cure. " This book] is certain to become a classic-a prominent and respected source on this subject for years into the future. . . . If you want to read something that will make you think, reflect and reconsider, Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civilization is for you."-S. Boyd Eaton, Los Angeles Times Book Review "A major accomplishment. Cohen is a broad and original thinker who states his views in direct and accessible prose. . . . This is a book that should be read by everyone interested in disease, civilization, and the human condition."-David Courtwright, Journal of the History of Medicine "Deserves to be read by anthropologists concerned with health, medical personnel responsible for communities, and any medical anthropologists whose minds are not too case-hardened. Indeed, it could provide great profit and entertainment to the general reader."-George T. Nurse, Current Anthropology "Cohen has done his homework extraordinarily well, and the coverage of the biomedical, nutritional, demographic, and ethnographic literature about foragers and low energy agriculturists is excellent. The subject of culture and health is near the core of a lot of areas of archaeology and ethnology as well as demography, development economics, and so on. The book deserves a wide readership and a central place in our professional libraries. As a scholarly summary it is without parallel."-Henry Harpending, American Ethnologist

The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization

The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization PDF Author: Kieran Keohane
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317015630
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization explores the nature of contemporary malaises, diseases, illnesses and psychosomatic syndromes, examining the manner in which they are related to cultural pathologies of the social body. Multi-disciplinary in approach, the book is concerned with questions of how these conditions are not only manifest at the level of individual patients' bodies, but also how the social 'bodies politic' are related to the hegemony of reductive biomedical and individual-psychologistic perspectives. Rejecting a reductive, biomedical and individualistic diagnosis of contemporary problems of health and well-being, The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization contends that many such problems are to be understood in the light of radical changes in social structures and institutions, extending to deep crises in our civilization as a whole. Rather than considering such conditions in isolation - both from one another and from broader contexts - this book argues that health and well-being are not just located at the level of the individual body, the integral human person, or even collective social bodies; rather, they encompass the health of humanity as a whole and our relationship with Nature. A ground-breaking analysis of social malaise and the health of civilization, this book will be of interest to scholars of sociology, social theory, social psychology, philosophy and anthropology.

The Changing Era of Diseases

The Changing Era of Diseases PDF Author: Yun-Chul Hong
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128165812
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The Changing Era of Diseases not only explores how to end humanity's suffering from illness, but also attempts to explain the challenging problems that may arise from the control of future disease. It provides a novel perspective on how to understand the changing patterns of disease, disease development, and defense from an evolutionary point-of-view in an effort to ally the life sciences and historical approaches. Topics cover the origin of disease, its pandemic infectious manifestation, chronic and late chronic diseases, strategies of the human body to fight diseases, methods of ending diseases, and future medical systems are featured. The book is a valuable source for researchers interested in systematic approaches to disease and students who are interested in understanding the evolution of diseases and how we have succeeded in fighting them. - Presents the concept of disease by demonstrating the transition of disease, from hunter-gatherers, to chronic diseases in the modern society - Demonstrates how the concept of mechanistic causality does not allow us to properly understand chronic diseases - Discusses the role that science and technology play in prolonging human life spans – and how that will lead to new healthcare challenges in the future

Civilization and Its Discontents

Civilization and Its Discontents PDF Author: Sigmund Freud
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486282538
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description
(Dover thrift editions).