Subtitle: How the Media and Environmentalists Turned America into a Nation of Hypochondriacs
Author: Melvin A. Benarde
Subject: Public Health/Media anc Communication
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3050-4
Pages: 304 pp., 16 b&w illus.
Description: A look at the ways that exaggerated media reports are turning Americans into hypochondriacs.
View the table of contents for You've Been Had!
Read an excerpt from You've Been Had!
With all of the negative media about environmental threats over the last four decades, is it any wonder that most people believe disaster is just around the corner? But despite what the media would lead us to believe, annual reports from the Surgeons General show that Americans are the healthiest they have ever been, are becoming healthier, and are, in fact, the healthiest people on the planet. In Youve Been Had! Melvin Benarde aims to set the record straight and to counteract the culture of complaint and worry with an unbiased account of the scientific factsfacts that suggest we are anxious and frightened about the wrong things. Contrary to media reports, he argues, the environmental factors that most adversely affect our health are those that are within our power to alter, such as smoking, diet, drugs, stress, guns, speed, and our sedentary lifestyle.
Topics covered include: carcinogens and anticarcinogens; dietary supplements, neutraceuticals, and food for illness prevention; food irradiation and genetically modified foods; microbial threats to health; asthma and allergies; hazardous and toxic waste; radiation and energy from the atom; global warming; risk-taking; obesity; and violence. Benarde also looks at the ways the media reports scientific studies, shows readers how to interpret these reports, and offers reasonable ways to eradicate our widespread hypochondria.
Melvin A. Benarde is the author of nine books, including Our Precarious Habitat and Global Warning/Global Warming. He is the former director of the Asbestos/Lead Center at Temple University and former associate director of the Environmental Studies Institute at Drexel University.
Praise for Youve Been Had!
"Many people are frustrated by the distortions disseminated by self-appointed citizens groups and slavishly repeated in the media, in spite of very minimal scientific competence. In confronting these views and exposing their inadequacies, Youve Been Had! performs an important public service."Bernard L. Cohen, professor of physics, University of Pittsburgh
Excerpt from Youve Been Had!
"Years of reading and hearing about illness and adverse environmental effects on health have convinced far too many of us that everything is harmful and dangerous, and were at risk for one dread disease or another. Thats twentieth-century thinking. Indeed, through the decades of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, we were made to believe that we were sick, or about to be; that environmental pollution had exacted a devilish toll; that AIDS was the numero uno killer; and that cancer was of epidemic proportions and rocketing out of control. None of this is true. It never has been. Does thinking make it so?"
