A book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, from 2009, about keeping a good health and extending your expected lifetime.
Modern healthcare is becoming more and more infused and boosted by the information technology, or, in some sense, it IS becoming an information technology itself by moving from the phase of trial-and-error to the phase of data- and simulation-based design of interventions. Ray and Terry believe that this will lead the healthcare to follow the same kind of exponential growth as various areas of IT have enjoyed, which in turn will lead to radically more efficient health maintenance and healing methods already within a few next decades (new efficient drugs, RNA interference, gene addition, pluripotent stem cell based therapies, later also medical nanobots). Their idea is that during the next few decades you could look at your life as being either behind or in front of a moving frontier of extreme longevity -- if you keep yourself in good enough health until the next level of healthcare arrives in around 10-15 years, then your health and expected lifetime will be boosted enough by the new methods of that level to reach the yet another level of healthcare arriving in the 2030-ies, where it will be boosted again, and so on. This book is intended to help you cross the "Bridge One".
Regardless of whether Ray's and Terry's predictions turn out to be correct or not, the book "Transcend" is packed with useful information about living a healthier life. The suggestions are so numerous and detailed that it is difficult to summarize them here, but, broadly speaking, the main topics are:
- Assessing your state frequently and thoroughly enough -- self-assessments, medical examinations, lab tests -- and using this information to adjust your lifestyle, eating, etc.
- Keeping the stress under control.
- Paying attention to what and how much you eat.
- Taking appropriate supplements.
- Exercising regularly: aerobical, strength, and stretching.
- Minimizing toxin contact / intake.
All these are explained with plenty of details and guidelines, based on the very latest scientific knowledge they had at hand. The latter means, however, that not all the suggestions are based on long-term human experiments, and they do acknowledge themselves that some viewpoints might change in time and that some of their suggestions, especially with regard to supplements, are considerably different from the common FDA approved ones. But they do promise to keep interested readers up to date with latest developments and research results via an electronic newsletter (that anybody can subscribe to at http://www.kurzweilai.net/).
A possible conflict of interests can be found in the fact that Ray and Terry also have a supplement-selling business where you can buy the supplements they suggest in the book, but knowing a bit about Ray's background I would rather assume that their idea was not to make a lot of money by suggesting the supplements, but he just wanted to have a reliable source of those at hand, both for himself and for the people they are advising (I haven't bought anything from there so far, though, in case you're wondering).
All in all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in maintaining a good health AND who does not freak out when seeing occasional complex-sounding words and phrases like gamma-tocopherol, prostaglandin-E3 or single photon emission computed tomography, AND who has enough education and critical mind to understand that not all suggestions can be taken as the ultimate truth, but just as interpretations of the current state of scientific knowledge.
More info at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1605299561
and at Ray's and Terry's site: http://www.rayandterry.com/TRANSCEND/
