Review by Gifty Naa Akushia -- Tips, Myths and Rips: A P...

Gifty Naa Akushia · Post by **Gifty Naa Akushia** » 01 Nov 2017, 06:20

[Following is a volunteer review of "Tips, Myths and Rips: A Physician's Advice" by Morton E.Tavel.]

3 out of 4 stars

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Health Tips, Myths and Tricks, "a physcian's advice" is a non-fiction genre written by Morton E.Tavel, M.D. a retired physician. It was published in 2015 by Brighton publishing LLC and printed in the United States of America.
The book is made up of 62 chapters, nevertheless don't be worried at all about how voluminous it's going to be, because the average number of pages for each chapter is about four pages and has 281 standard pages on the Kindle e reader excluding pages for references.
It consists of three main components as the name suggests, health tips , myths and tricks. All these parts revolve around good health and general wellbeing.

The author starts chapter one by unleashing out certain helpful "health tips" that may intrigue readers. He continues with the tips till chapter 32, the "myths"of health follows from chapter 33 and the "tricks"of health also continues from chapter 53. The writer appears to be well resourced with information this makes him talk about health issues without any fear nor favour. This is evident in how he blatantly names and shames certain foods and tells consumers about the possible consequences of such foods.

I was actually astonished about his revelations on rice. This is one food that almost everyone enjoys very well, people of all walks of life however, in chapter 19 of the book we are made to understand that rice products contain certain chemical known as arsenic which comes in two forms, organic and inorganic both being carcinogenic but the latter more.
Dr.Tavel warns pregnant women against excessive consumption of rice products to avoid arsenic exposure in order to protect the developing foetus and also advises that rice must be rinsed before cooking and boiled in a high water-to-rice ratio.
The writer also reports that brown rice as compared to white rice is more arsenic, he backs all these claims with authentic research findings and makes it clear without missing words that brown rice should be rarely consumed and even be avoided if possible.

I find this information very useful because personally, sometimes due to time constriants and may be the fine nature of the rice brand that I use, I normally would refuse to rinse my rice before cooking it.
Also I have always known that brown rice is the best as compared to white rice. After reading this book am sure to keep these health tips and embark on healthy living practices.

From the chapter 33 the writer dymystifies certain beliefs about health. For instance, in the chapter 35 he deals with some vital issue as energy drink consumption and reported that most of these energy drinks are infused with caffeine. He thus outlined some of the negative and positive effects of caffeine. He added that safe limits for caffeine are still being studied however, data suggests that most healthy adults can safely consume 400mg per day, pregnant women up to 200mg per day and children up 45 to 80mg per day depending on their weight. He therefore advised that people stick to coffee considering the caffeine limits given and also added that energy drinks should be forgotten for they are waste of money.

He concludes the book by revealing certain tricks that are used in luring consumers into buying some goods and services that may not be helpful to their health. From chapter 53 through to chapter 62, the author talked about some sensitive issues of health which he calls "tricks" for example, in chapter 61 he talks about the idea of detoxifying the body of unwanted ssubstances and terms this whole process as a blatant scam. He however warns consumers to stay away from the concept and adds that the idea is only to take away consumers money since such ideas lack scientific proof of benefit to the consumers.

The writer reports on several research findings to back his claims, most of these research findings are of American settings, thus in my opinion I think the challenge is now on other writers in other parts of the world to come up with equally good works as this one. However, since the information is about health and involves wellbeing of people, the information and knowledge acquired are still applicable to any group of people.

The book is well written however, there are some few typographical errors ranging from wrong usage of words, inappropriate use of certain definite and indefinite articles and incorrect spelling of words. Example is seen in chapter 11 page 43, second paragraph, the author used blood flood instead of blood flow. Also in chapter 26 page 107, in the third paragrah, he used NSAD instead of NSAID.
Apart From these, there were also a couple of typo errors throughout the chapters especially getting to the end of the book. As see in the page 281, there is the caption "references" however this page appears rather blank.These however do not take the shine out of the book since I still enjoyed reading it.

Dr. Tavel is a very experienced Physician who loves his job with passion, he is seen to place much emphasis on preventive rather than curative health. His love for research is exceptional, this validates his claims. As a physician specialist he really understands and practises evidence based medicine . The book is generally informative and educative touching on almost every aspect of health.

Finally, I rate this book 3 out of 4 and commend the author for a good job.I recommend it to anyone who is interested in his/her health, nonetheless people should not use this book as a tool to take their health into their own hands.

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Tips, Myths and Rips: A Physician's Advice
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