Recommended Reading: Always Protect Yourself!

Continuous learning is a key factor in keeping your health. Today, we suggest two fascinating books for your summer quarantine reading. They focus on the theme of “Always Protect Yourself.” One of these books might save your life and even “apologizes in advance if it doesn’t.”

• Did you know that 10,000 people are sent to the emergency room each year because of escalator accidents?
• Is reading on the toilet actually dangerous?
• Is Santa Claus a public health pariah? During a typical day, mall Santas are sneezed or coughed on up to 10 times. Sick Santa is a contract tracer’s nightmare.
• How to survive to 100 years old? Hint. Eat more kelp.
• How to survive retirement? Hint. Dance every day! It lowers your risk of dementia by 76%, staves off heart problems and the physical contact boosts hormones which make you happier.

Each book will change the way you think about the world and yourself. The authors write with wit and lively style. Despite what you may think from the titles, these are easy to read and hard to put down once you start. They can be read safely in small increments on the toilet.

Encyclopedia Paranoiaca: The Indispensable Guide to Everything You Should be Afraid of or Worried About by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf (2012)

Satirists Beard and Cerf from the National Lampoon parody a long list of seemingly healthy and innocuous items which pose life-threatening dangers. If you want things to worry about other than COVID-19, this is the right book for you! Within their parody, they raise numerous legitimate issues that we rarely think about:

• Which is more dangerous? New carpeting or old carpeting? 
• Does your dishwasher contain pathogenic fungi which withstands blistering heat, high salt concentrations and aggressive detergents?
• Does drinking from a straw regularly cause patterns of wrinkles to form on your face?
• Why does the weight of your mattress double in ten years? 
• Are rubber duckies safe or the most hazardous of the tubby toys?

How to Survive Anything: A Visual Guide to Laughing in the Face of Adversity by Lonely Planet (2015)

The Lonely Planet has compiled a guide for a mixture of over 75 serious and less serious “life-saving” scenarios. The serious side includes thought-provoking useful suggestions for actions to survive:

• Being lost in the woods without a GPS
• A gunshot wound
• An earthquake
• An avalanche
• A rip current

The less serious side includes:

• A toddler’s tantrum
• A spaghetti supper without the splatters
• Superglue accidents
• Waking up with a new tattoo
• and….A zombie attack!

This concludes this article. As your reward for reading, we recommend ordering the above books and others from our prior recommended reading books. 

1. Recommended Reading: Our Bodies
2. Recommended Reading: Increasing Healthspan and Lifespan
3. Recommended Reading: The Past, Present and Future of Human Health