TOW #12 - How Not To Die (IRB)

      Is the standard American diet also standard for disease? Can eating the right foods and avoiding certain foods better, or even reverse, your health? Apparently so, as evident by Dr. Michael Gregor's "How Not To Die". Founder of nutritionfacts.org, Gregor writes this book on how to prevent the 15 most common causes of deaths through simple adjustments in one's everyday life.

      The structure of Gregor's book aids its purpose. Each chapter is titled "How to Not Die from ..." with the chapters given disease. So far, Gregor seems to order his chapters as follows: a personal anecdote on patients he has seen with this disease, statistics and facts on the popularity of this disease, a list of what foods prevent this disease, a list of what foods to avoid. The anecdote gives Gregor both credibility, as he has seen wide variety of patients as a doctor and has healed so many through his practice, and emotional appeal, as we can tell through the way he describes his patients that he really cares for their well-being and firmly believes that his take on modern medicine will help. The facts also work in tandem to show the seriousness of taking Gregor’s suggested precautions.

      Gregor is very persuasive at his argument. At a time where we put so much reliance on drugs and treatments to heal us, it’s hard to believe that such easy fixes to what we eat in a day can cause such significant outcomes. In his chapter on kidney disease, he quotes a famous retired athlete saying, “life is so much better without those medications – they made me feel so tired all the time” (164). Clearly, Gregor is not fibbing us when he says that the choices we make every day on deciding what to eat will affect us later – thus, we should look down the road 20 years from now and take control of our lives today!