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The Chicago Tribune
Health Books story
Chicago Tribune
Debra Gordon
10-18-2000 (published 12-3-00)
Forget Harry Potter and Danielle Steel. The hot books these days have more to do with weight loss, bodybuilding,
and menopause than wizards and heaving bosoms.
With the aging of the baby boomers, a growing interest in alternative health, and the demise of the doctor-as-God
paradigm, consumers are snapping up health and fitness books quicker than a dieter gobbles a forbidden chocolate
bar.
Between 1991 and 1998, sales of books in the "psychology/recovery category," which includes diet, health
and exercise, increased 65.5 percent, according to the American Booksellers Association. And, with over 100,000
health-related titles, they're one of the top five sales categories for Amazon.com.
"The simple explanation is that people are looking for ways to improve their lives," says Paul Bogaards,
executive director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., publisher of the hugely popular books by integrative
medicine guru Andrew Weil, M.D.
Especially since the largest book buying demographic, the baby boomers, are getting older. With age comes aches,
pains and illnesses, and this generation, raised to question authority, isn't going to just sit back and let the
doctors of the managed care world tell them what to do.
Even if they did, notes Erica Jorgensen, health, mind and body editor for Amazon.com, how much information can
you get during a typical seven-minute office visit? "So especially for chronic conditions, like diabetes,
you need to do some research on your own, both for peace of mind and to find the best treatment."
If sales figures are any indication, however, consumers are most often looking for ways to lose weight, snatching
up hundreds of thousands of copies of such titles as Sugar Busters, The Zone, and Eat Right for Your Type. Yet
somehow there's a disconnect. For even as diet books have never been more popular, Americans have never weighed
more.
No disconnect, say industry pundits. The obesity epidemic is exactly what's driving sales.
"Consumers will continue to buy diet books until they get the one that is the 100 percent chocolate diet,
eat all you want and still lose weight," says Elizabeth Rapoport, executive editor at Crown Books, a division
of Random House, which published Suzanne Somers' Eat Great, Lose Weight. She's even had an agent try to sell her
a champagne and caviar diet book.
"People don't want to hear that calories do count," she said. "Deep down everyone knows they're
supposed to be eating less and exercising more, but that's an impossibly dull message. Every time we publish a
respectable diet book it doesn't sell."
"People in our culture now seem to have a quick-fix mentality," says Tami Booth, executive editor at
health publisher Rodale, Inc., which had its first-ever bestsellers this year with Dr. Shapiro's Picture Perfect
Weight Loss and The Wrinkle Cure.
The typical reader, says Rapoport, has a short attention span and is "distracted by shiny objects." And
that's where the celebrity health book, like Somers' book and Marilu Henner's Total Health Makeover, come in.
"It's icon identification," says Roslyn Siegel, senior editor at Rodale, who has been editing health
books for various publishers for the past 15 years. "People identify with them and want to look like them
and think if they go on the programs they will."
But there's more, says Rapoport, "Suzanne Somers is a grandma and she managed to stay really fit and write
this very chatty, personal, warm book that acknowledges she has to deal with (weight issues), too," she says.
"It's like talking to your girlfriends."
When it comes to physical or mental health, however, readers want to hear from someone they can trust, a brand
like the American Medical Association, Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic . . . or Andrew Weil.
Weil, like Robert C. Atkins and Dean Ornish, represents the pinnacle of the growing trend of doctors-author-turned-celebrity.
But it's not something just anyone with a medical degree can do. You have to combine the credentials with the charisma,
says Rapoport.
Weil, for instance, garners so much respect for his alternative medicine philosophy in part because of his Harvard
Medical School degree. Nicolas Perricone, M.D.'s Wrinkle Cure works, says Rapoport, because he's on the faculty
at Yale University Medical School. If anyone with less authority had written it, the book might have come off as
an infomercial.
Dr. Weil also managed to catch the complementary health wave just when it began building. In 1997, an article in
the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that Americans made 629 million visits to alternative
healthcare practitioners-more than the number of visits to primary care physicians-representing $21.2 billion in
revenues. In fact, these days we spend more out-of-pocket on alternative health, including vitamins and herbal
supplements, than we do on traditional healthcare.
"There is a growing distrust people seem to have in conventional medicine," says Siegel. Particularly
for chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, and arthritis, she says, "people feel they need to to beyond
what their doctors ordered." So they turn to chiropractic, acupuncture, massage therapy, and herbal supplements.
Areas most traditional medical doctors still know very little about.
Enter the book publishing industry.
The trend towards publishing books on complementary medicine began with small niche publishers, such as Long Island
Avery Publishing Group, which produced books espousing the benefits of ginkgo biloba, green tea and St. John's
Wort years before the popular press picked up on them. Its 1990 release, "Prescriptions for Natural Healing,"
sold over 2 million copies. Now Avery is owned by publishing giant Penguin, and nearly every publisher worth its
backlist has at least one "alternative health" title, many starting their own imprints for the topic.
"Part of it has to do with new breakthroughs, like those in nutrition," says Siegel. "Doctors
were never trained in nutrition, and suddenly science is finding an enormous connection between nutrition and general
health. So this is something people can do for themselves. They don't have to wait for the doctor; they can learn
these things on their own."
But they don't rely just on books. Increasingly, they're turning to the Internet for that knowledge, with numerous
studies showing that health information is one of the main reasons consumers turn to the Web. Book sellers aren't
worried about the competition, however, instead viewing the Internet as a way to fuel sales.
"In general, I think the Internet leaves people in many cases more confused because there's hordes of information
and it's overwhelming," says Booth. Plus, you never know what sites to trust, nor does the 'Net offer the
kind of perspective a book can.
Booth puts the Internet in a category with the increasing coverage of health news by newspapers, magazines and
broadcast outlets, and the growth of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.
"The more information that's out there, the more people need a reliable source to pull it all together."
And that, she says, is where health books come in.
SIDEBAR:
Writing a Health Book
It's one thing to write about health books; it's quite another to actually write such a book. Yet that's precisely
what I did last year as a full-time writer for Rodale, Inc., the Emmaus, Pa.,-based health publisher.
As a medical reporter for two daily newspapers during the past decade, I thought I'd written about nearly every
health topic there was. I'd spent a year following a woman as she tried to lose 100 pounds. Watched newly pregnant
women throw up for an article on morning sickness. Stayed up all night with a laboring woman and then took notes
as she leaned over a bed and, still standing, pushed her baby out.
I've seen six-egg embryos in the test tube, watched a surgeon remove a tumor from a woman's lung and then display
it to me as if it were a diamond, held my breath as a trembling third-year medical student pushed a needle into
a newborn's spine. Heck, I'd even volunteered my husband and I as guinea pigs to test the female condom when it
was in development and wrote a column about it.
But the one topic I'd managed to avoid (on purpose) was, of course, the topic of my first book. Nutrition.
Nutrition, as anyone who reads the papers knows, is notoriously difficult to figure out, let alone write about.
One day there's a study suggesting that eggs are bad for you; the next is a study saying they're not. Just when
researchers were convinced that beta-carotene protected against lung cancer, along came a study suggesting such
supplements actually increased the risk of lung cancer. Even seemingly clear-cut studies, like the ones that found
people eating a Mediterranean diet have a lower incidence of heart disease and diabetes, become murky pools of
gunk when you try to pin researchers down on exactly what it is about the diet that's responsible for the results.
We'll know in another 20 years they say, not caring that your deadline is in two days.
Heard of the French paradox? It says the reason the French can eat a diet filled with butter-laden, cream sauce-riddled
foods and still have less heart disease rate than Americans is because of all the red wine they drink. Makes you
want to invest in a vineyard until you learn that the French also have one of the highest rates of liver cancer
in the world.
Sigh.
To make matters worse, when you write a book, as opposed to a newspaper article, you're expected to take a position.
No more hiding behind safety phrases like: "On the other hand," or, "Critics say, however. . ."
No, I had to come right out (with the help of any experts I could corral) and flat out say you should eat more
garlic, soy, beans, mangoes, whatever.
I'm happy to say I survived, although my family's eating habits will never be the same. Just two weeks after I
started writing the book our pantry morphed into a mini-version of Whole Foods Market, packed with cans of beans
and boxes of whole-wheat pasta. Today, nearly a year since I wrote the final words, I still can't order French
fries or a Big Mac without surreptitiously glancing around for the Food Police.
But after thousands of newspaper bylines (which, as any reporter worth her notebook knows wind up on the bottom
of the bird cage the next day), the feeling of seeing my name on the cover for Maximum Food Power for Women was
indescribable. And the knowledge that you couldn't wrap fish in the 600-page tome extremely satisfying.
All of which, of course, is just my shameless way of getting you to buy my book which, I guarantee (wink, wink),
will change your life.
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