Book Excerpt
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Bernadett Szabo / Reuters Can Electrically Stimulating Your Brain Make You Too Happy?
When doctors can directly access patients' cerebral reward networks, someone has to decide just how good people should feel.
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How the Clean Air Act Has Saved $22 Trillion in Health-Care Costs
Even if the entire costs associated with complying with the mandates of the Clean Air Act were to be assumed by the federal government, we would be vastly ahead financially.
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Wikimedia Commons How Vegetable Oils Replaced Animal Fats in the American Diet
In this excerpt from The Happiness Diet, discover how Procter & Gamble convinced people to forgo butter and lard for cheap, factory-made oils loaded with trans fat.
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Farming: What to Do If You Think You're Not Good at Anything
Farming is tough. Some days, maybe most days, you'll feel overwhelmed. But you'll also feel a fullness. Your life will feel different.
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The Value of Our Produce
What is a carrot worth? A bunch of kale? A handful of berries? For a bed of carrots, there are the soil amendments, the cover crop last fall, the plowing, tilling, seeding, irrigating....
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The Physicality of Farming
After bending, pulling, grabbing, twisting, lifting, squatting, tossing, and catching for days, you learn the importance of adequate sleep and eating well during the spring harvest season.
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The Kind of Stress That Doesn't Kill You, but Makes You Stronger
Digging into an eight-decade landmark study on longevity, the author finds that stress brought on by hard work can keep you happy, healthy.
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Why Calories Count: Do Some Diets Work Better Than Others?
Although some diets may be easier for you to stick to or be more satiating, the bottom line is that you need to eat less to reduce body weight.
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Why Calories Count: The Problem With Dietary-Intake Studies
We know from the USDA's Beltsville study that no matter how hard we try, almost all of us are unable to accurately report how much we eat.
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Why Calories Count: The Cause of Public Health Nutrition Problems
Despite concerns about the consequences of obesity, correcting calorie imbalances presents challenges few countries are prepared to meet.
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Overhauling the Farm Bill: Planting for the Future With Perennials
In response to concerns that our industrial, soil depleting food system will eventually collapse, a new vision for agriculture is emerging.
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Overhauling the Farm Bill: The Real Beneficiaries of Subsidies
It's one thing to support a family farmer. It's another to subsidize a mega farm expansion that puts family farmers out of business.
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Overhauling the Farm Bill: Political Wedge Issues Slowing Reform
Government deficits, energy, health care: Any one of these issues could lead to a policy fight that keeps much-needed reform off the table.
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The Surprise Question: Would Your Doctor Be Shocked If You Died?
With studies showing an answer to the question is a significant prognostic indicator, it's a simple way of screening for palliative care eligibility.
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Transforming the Way We Die
Our cultural tendency is to avoid serious conversations about end of life, and mortality has become politically polarized, but the longer we wait, the harder it will be to avoid disaster.
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'The American Way of Eating': What It's Like Picking Fruit as a Laborer
Tracie McMillan went undercover as a farm hand to find out about the difficulties involved in getting our food from plant to plate.
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Making the Best of What Is Often the Very Worst Time of Our Lives
Though death is the most inevitable fact of life, our social systems are broken when it comes to caring for people with advanced illnesses.
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How Freud Canonized Himself
The censorship of Freud's correspondences, sequestering of documents and reminiscences in sealed boxed, and more was a systemic and concerted enterprise to consolidate the legend.
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Access to Good, Healthy Food Should Be a Basic Human Right
In an afterword to Prince Charles' speech on the future of food, Eric Schlosser and Will Allen make the case for a new, diverse food system.
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Reward Good Food: Prince Charles on Healthy, Sustainable Farming
Questioning conventional wisdom can be a risky business, but the Prince of Wales does it by calling for an overhaul of our food system.
