Vigorous, accessible advocacy for nutritional therapy and a possible method to achieve optimal health outcomes.
A guide touts the controversial medical benefits of bovine colostrum.
In this book’s opening statement, Wyatt asserts that modern medicine is due for some fundamental changes in the way it’s taught and practiced in America. He writes that the misuse and overuse of medications lead to drug abuse and that a “return to basics and common sense” is very much in order. The author believes in the power of the “living, breathing pharmaceutical factory” known as the cow to deliver the lifesaving antibacterial and antiviral properties found in bovine colostrum, a unique, bioactive dairy secretion from the animal’s udders during the first few days after giving birth. Throughout his narrative, Wyatt references his wife, Kaye, who suffered from immune dysfunction for most of her life as a result of biological imbalances and chronic immunodeficiency. In a series of intriguing chapters discussing colostrum’s ancient history as an Egyptian “elixir of metamorphosis” and statistical data and clinical trials that demonstrate its anti-inflammatory, regenerative, and microbiome rebalancing properties, Wyatt explores how passive immunity can be obtained from nutrients and antibodies found in the secretion. He also details the arduous process of bringing colostrum in some form to the retail market. First introduced to its purported benefits by a colleague, the author vividly describes the dramatic effects the supplement had once his wife began ingesting it and how both were enchanted by this unorthodox remedy. The book chronicles Wyatt’s inspired, yearslong determination to heal his wife with colostrum. He considers himself and Kaye to be “pioneers of colostrum”; they established a nonprofit research organization on its behalf. Despite Kaye’s death, the author continues to promote what he claims is a key factor in human immune system resiliency. A military veteran, son of an herbalist, and grandson of an Idaho cattle rancher, Wyatt has no medical training or clinical experience. But the author’s thorough, clinically supported research and passionate treatment of what he calls an “ancient health remedy” will snag readers’ attention from the first page. With a section of informative guides, lists of bioactive components, and even recipes using powdered colostrum, his book will certainly inspire interest in further research by readers inclined to know more about this radical dietary supplement.
Vigorous, accessible advocacy for nutritional therapy and a possible method to achieve optimal health outcomes.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-736322-1-9
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Vibrant Life Institute
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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