As promised in the title, SIMPLIFY YOUR HEALTH (A Doctor’s Practical Guide to a Healthier Life), Lucas Ramirez MD offers a straightforward strategy to extend people’s healthy life years: avoid all the main diseases that kill prematurely. “By targeting a few simple lifestyle choices, one can make a world of difference in overall health by decreasing the risks of stroke, heart attacks, cancers, and more,” writes Ramirez, a stroke neurologist. His 197-page book, which is written in a conversational but analytical style, is divided into nine chapters, which deal with smoking, obesity, alcohol, exercise, and vaccination. The inclusion of this last chapter, however, reveals that Ramirez is not being totally objective since vaccinations do not prevent any of the conditions he lists as causing premature deaths. The five leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer, pulmonary disease, stroke, and unintentional injuries, which together account for 61 percent of all fatalities.

Ramirez writes that his book is “a compilation of data and information organized and presented to teach, motivate, and inspire action” and at no point does he recommend mandates from government or other authorities to protect people from themselves. Instead, he says that he is presenting the information so that readers can make their own decisions. Unfortunately, one of his motivational techniques is to exaggerate the dangers of each risk factor. For example, he writes that “No level of smoking is safe,” but an absolute assertion like this is bound to be statistically wrong. (THE HEALTH BENEFITS OF TOBACCO by William Campbell Douglas II, MD, a book which is also against smoking, provides a more objective view.) He also uses absolute instead of relative statistical measures, writing, for instance, that “regular moderate aerobic exercise reduces the risk of stroke by 18-20%…”  But the lifetime risk of stroke is between 14 to 21 percent, so the 18-21 percent reduction is relative to this. Ramirez has a blinkered approach on his specialty, however, the inspiration for his book came from one of his mentors, who pointed out that 80 percent of strokes can be prevented if people adopt healthy lifestyle habits. So, his formula is: don’t smoke, drink only moderately, maintain a healthy weight by cutting down on processed foods and by exercising regularly, check your blood pressure every week or month, and do basic screenings for cancer and other diseases every year or three.

Written in an engaging analytical style with sound advice and guidelines, SIMPLIFY YOUR HEALTH (A Doctor’s Practical Guide to a Healthier Life), by Lucas Ramirez, MD will surely benefit most readers.

~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader