Despite an ongoing focus on the coveted millennial readership, health publishers haven’t lost sight of the fact that 34% of Americans are over age 50; over the next two decades, more than 27.7 million people in the U.S. will join their ranks. This aging population is contending with a distinct set of wellness challenges, if not in themselves, then in the even older relatives in their care. Here, we round up titles addressing ways to boost readers’ bodies, minds, and hormones as they enter their less limber years.
Exercise is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging
Calling exercise the “closest thing there is to a magic bullet for preventing disease and disability, maximizing health and prolonging life,” the author, a biologist, presents the evidence then offers specifics. Want to stay sharp? Exercise more than usual. Feeling blue? Try running. And cartwheeling helps keep bones strong—though, alas, it’s better if you started as a teen.
Fitness Hacks for Over 50
Fetters, a trainer and fitness writer for publications including U.S. News & World Report, offers simple movements and activities, meant to be done for just a few minutes a day, that she sees as key to better sleep, increased strength and balance, and an amped-up sex life in midlife and beyond.
The Good News About Estrogen
The essential hormone can start to wane for a number of reasons covered in this book, and the process is inevitable as women age. Reiss, a Beverly Hills anti-aging ob-gyn with a pro–replacement therapy stance, speaks to “an audience that isn’t settling for not feeling 100 percent,” says St. Martin’s executive editor Elizabeth Beier.
Is It Alzheimer’s?
Addressing an ailment afflicting almost six million Americans, Rabins, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, answers 101 of the most common questions he hears in his practice, addressing root causes of the disease and how to lower the risk of contracting it.
The M Word
Australian GP and morning TV doctor Mansberg covers many of the challenges faced by menopausal women, and delves into the science behind the change and new thinking on hormone therapy, all with a nudge and a wink. For instance, chapter four, “Where’s My Vagina Gone?,” discusses, among other topics, what Mansberg calls “the tantalizingly named genitourinary syndrome of menopause.”
Why Did I Come into This Room?
The former Good Morning America cohost, who has since turned her professional attention to various wellness topics, here starts what the subtitle calls “A Candid Conversation About Aging.” For our q&a with Lunden, see “Appreciation and Resilience.”
The XX Brain
The director of the Women’s Brain Initiative at Weill Cornell Medical College gives readers her take on why and how “women’s health is in deep jeopardy,” she writes in the book’s introduction. The medical establishment, she says, overlooks the challenges women in particular face in terms of brain health, and their higher likelihood than men to suffer from anxiety and depression, autoimmune disorders, brain tumors, and strokes.
