New Today: The Healthy Skeptic by Robert J. Davis

If you are complacent about your health and feel good about the way health care is administered in your life, you probably don’t need The Healthy Skeptic: Cutitng Through the Hype About Your Health (University of California Press). But if, like a growing number of people, you suspect there’s more to a lot of what you’ve heard than… well… what you’ve heard, you might find this to be a journey worth taking.

Author Robert J. Davis is just the pen you want to find behind a book like this. As a medical journalist, he is award-winning and he holds a masters degree in public health from Emory, where he also teaches, and a PhD in health policy from Brandeis.

Long story short: he understands these issues fully. It is, in a sense, his business to know this stuff. In The Healthy Skeptic, he exposes several health-related myths, while scratching bare the infrastructure that not only made them possible in the first place, but -- in some cases -- created them. Cholesterol. Super foods. Dieting. Anti-aging drugs. Davis looks at all of these things, and many more, and cuts the myth from the reality. More importantly, he helps us sort through the information available so that, in future, we might be able to sort the wheat from the chaff on our own.