Dr. Michael Roizen Wellness Coach

In 'YOU: The Owner's Manual: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger,' Michael F. Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., have managed to squeeze everything you ever needed to know about your body into 400 pages of fun. It’s full of slapstick humor, not exactly what you’d expect from a consumer health book that covers cancer, aging arteries and hemorrhoids. O.K. sometimes it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek like the chapter titled “This Gland is Your Gland.” But you’ve got to crack a smile at the illustration of a diaphragm labeled Howard’s Sternum or lines like “Your digestive system is a dirty as George Carlin’s jokes, especially when you start throwing around words like colon, rectum, and feces.” Hmm. Maybe health really is hip.

Dr. Roizen, best known for his RealAge books, continues the anti-aging concept here with Dr. Oz, who has been featured on the Discovery channel. These doctors not only tell you how your body functions but how to keep it functioning younger than your chronological age. Follow their exercise recommendations, they say, and you’ll live eight years younger if you’re a man and nine years younger if you’re a woman. Snooze for at least seven hours a night, and you’ll live three years younger. The 50-question BQ (body quotient) quiz at the beginning of the book will make you realize just how little you know about the body you own.

This book is, quite simply, full of surprises such as the correct way to pop a pimple. There is one? And that loving spouse, who waits on you hand and foot when you throw your back out, could actually be hindering your recovery. Some information you’ve heard before. Don’t smoke, reduce stress, avoid saturated fats. But just as you begin to get lulled into a sense of certainty that you know you body, wham! Another surprise. Of course, aspirin can lower your risk of heart disease, but did you ever think to take two baby aspirin before a long plane trip to prevent dangerous blood clots from forming in your legs?

In between the chuckles and aha! moments, you’ll probably wonder why you never bothered to learn the anatomical workings of your body before now. Probably because there was never such a user-friendly book as this one to make it all so easy to swallow.

1. Buy 'You: The Owner's Manual'