Customer Reviews

The Cure for Everything!: Untangling the Twisted Messages About Health, Fitness and Happiness

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Caulfield strips away all of the hype and promotion around fitness, diet and genetics to give the reader a few key messages about what we can really do to be more healthy. He wades through the science and talks to the experts to tease out a few central truths that can be supported by clear evidence. While he is hard on alternative medicine he is equally critical of many aspects of modern healthcare, especially the role of the pharmaceutical industry. Caulfield weaves in his personal journey through his research which lightens the message and provides a few laughs. Beware - if you justify your eating habits by exercising you might not want to read the sections on exercise and diet.

There are a few pearls in Timothy Caulfield's "A Cure for Everything" but it is a slog through some very narcissistic ramblings to weed them out. The chapters on Fitness and Diet are very good and insightful, but the Remedies and Magic chapters less so and more of a rant againts big Pharma and Naturopathic remedies. Not that they both don't deserve some nocks but this is a little over the top.
As for his narcissistic style, it becomes painful fromt he start. He is as interested in telling stories of his personal travels aaround the work and how important he is as a lecturer as he is teaching us about the premise of the book. He even manages to work in details about a cruies he and his family went on.....please. He writes a book supposedly based on science and then makes a foolish statement about his wife, who is a GP, being one of the best doctors in Canada and perhaps the world. Now where is the science in that self gratifying statement ? And how the last paragraph got past the editor is beyond me, describing how much he enjoyed his son's birthday party, what does that have to do with the premise of the book?
It seems as if he could not decide whether to write an autobiography or a book on the ailments and their scientific cures or myths so just combined the two.
As stated, there are some areas of interest but be prepared to hear all about
Timothy Caulfield along the way!

This was a interesting examination of the hype surrounding basic health related recommendations and behaviours. The author included personal experience and a sound examination of the science behind healthy diet, exercise, genetics, alternative medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. The take home message is that there are simple health related behaviours that we should all follow (e.g., high intensity exercise, no junk food and lots of fruits and veg). He goes on to demonstrate that, although the message is simple, actually doing this is difficult. There is no magic or easy way to quickly and permanently lose weight. It takes hard and persistent work. Although this may not be what we want to hear, the simplicity of the message means we can ignore the mixed messages that tell us to do a certain program or use a particular supplement or weight loss 'cure'.

By taking a simple approach to healthy living based on sound scientific evidence, I now feel I can better ignore the hype around weight loss, exercise programs and so on. Instead, I can focus my time and efforts (and money) on actually doing the work of healthy living. The message that this is very hard work and most of us fail was difficult to take at first. However, I think that it has helped me come to the point of accepting I have to be persistent about diet and exercise and understand that there will be times that they are not the best. This is not a reason to give up.

Although this book is science based, the author has made it a good read for the average person by providing good explanations as well as his (often humorous) personal experience related to each section of the book

The book gives an excellent insight as well as information on diet. It is gifted with personality as well as fact.
While the above is true for the first half of the book, dealing as it does with an individual's efforts, the second
part falls into generalized discussion about what society needs, rather than one person's individual need.

This author makes some good points about the diet, fitness and pharma industries so it is worth a read for that reason. However, he also engages in some of the very weak rationalizations that he criticizes those industries for and for that reason I say take his advice about considering what you read, hear, think about any health item with great care and consider whether the source is credible. For this book, I will say that he misses the mark on several key points and his emphatic commentary that there is only one way to be healthy is wrongheaded. His outright dismissal of Pilates based on an erroneous belief is bizarre for a professor of his experience and suggests to me that he did not spend more than a minute thinking about what he wrote. In addition all the 'experts' he talked to (including himself) make their living from some form of health related product, service, research, consultation. It isn't possible to claim they do not each have their own bias. I think at the end of the day that each person must decide what health/fitness means to them and determine how they will achieve it based on what works for them. Mr. Caulfield refers to the awareness that marketing/advertising and the human desire to be attractive make us prey to junk science but in my opinion he completely misses the mark by assuming that we are not aware of this. Some people are naive and some people want to believe in the easy or magic fix, but most people sooner or later figure out what is pure bunk and what might make a difference. His proposal that the placebo effect is a primary driver of why people believe certain things work is overhyped - and feeds his overall tone that most people are imagining the aid given. And let us not deride the value of the placebo effect even when that is the real action in an intervention-if it works-use it; caveat to that of course is don't charge mega dollars for it :-)

Overall I was disappointed that a professor would fall prey to authoring a book that mimics the hype he is trying to unveil; but hey, I bet lots of people will read it. And no, I don't work in any health/fitness/diet industry so my perspective is not skewed by my income source.

Well written and well researched Caulfield strips away the notions related to diet, exercise and alternative health care. I read the book on recommendation of a friend who had it recommended to him and I recommended it to another friend. I really enjoyed the witty tone of the book too.