Excerpt: 'YOU: The Owner's Manual'

May 9, 2005 — -- In the book, "YOU: The Owner's Manual," anti-aging guru Dr. Michael F. Roizen and heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz take readers on a journey through their bodies to help them become better acquainted with how they function both physically and mentally.

Believing readers know very little about their own bodies, the authors focus each chapter on a different organ or system and outline diseases attributed to each one. They also show how lifestyle choices influence the aging process of each organ or system and give advice on what readers can do to avoid these illnesses and slow the aging process.

You can read a chapter from the book below.

Your Body, Your Home: Super Health

Beautiful bodies sell magazines. Tattooed bodies attract gawkers. Well-trained bodies win championships (and lucrative endorsement contracts). Celebrity bodies get stalked by paparazzi, chronicled by tabloids, and lampooned by late-night talk-show hosts. Infomercials promise better bodies (Lose 700 pounds with this revolutionary belly button cream!). And now, even so-called flawed bodies star as the protagonists in one form of pop culture: plastic-surgery reality shows.

There's no doubt that corporate America has capitalized on the fact that a beautiful body stimulates the economy as well as the hormones. We're all for admiring the body for its curves, angles, and ability to make Nielsen ratings soar. But maybe our obsession with skin belies the importance of everything that chugs, churns, and pounds underneath it. Because many people have developed a view of the human body that's more superficial than a paper cut, we want to step back and look deeper -- into places where only surgeons, MRI machines, and the occasional tapeworm can see:

Inside your body.

Why? Because what goes on inside of your body is what gives you the ability to see, run, smell, have wild sex on the beach, feed babies, create dinosaurs out of Legos, surf, solve algebra problems, tie shoelaces, hum "Margaritaville," and do the thousands of different things you do every day. Your body gives you life. Your body is life.