My nutrition book sounds like a death-metal war cry

Not long ago I was in the international section of Publix and came across some tamarind bars. The package said "made with real fruit." Then I read the ingredients, and hardly any of it was the fruit. It was disturbing.

I grew up eating tamarind right out of the shell. We had to crack it open. Depending on how ripe you got it, it could be tart and sour or it could be sweet, but it was always delicious.

That distance, between real food and what's been engineered to stand in for it, is what my nonfiction book "Rivers of Poisoned Blood: Slaughtering the Enemies of Nutritional Health" is about. It looks at how heavily our food has been engineered, and not just through genetic engineering and biotechnology. There's chemistry, and there's what they call food engineering. We have food scientists, but so much of what comes out of that work is far removed from anything nutritional.

The main thing I want readers to take away is that they should be much more alert to what they're putting in their bodies, and reading food labels is one way to protect their health. A lot of people say they want to feel better and look better. One of the main ways to do that is what you put in your mouth.

Why it sounds like a war cry

I got introduced to death metal very young, and it led me into a lot of extreme metal. That's where the title comes from. I was having fun with it, and it sounds like a war cry. It's provocative on purpose: so many people want to escape and be distracted by fiction and fantasy, and I wanted a title that makes them pay attention. The fight is a little bit with the food industry, but more with the reader's own habits.

The title also pairs with the microscopic warfare, visceral imagery and body horror in my connected fiction series, "Organelle." The first book in that series is "The Hunger Engineers," a body horror science fiction story.

A river that came back

The basic premise of "Rivers of Poisoned Blood" comes from Dr. Andrew Weil's book "Eight Weeks to Optimum Health." In it, he tells a story another physician told him about a pristine river, full of life, full of flora and fauna. Then a paper company set up shop on the bank and started dumping effluents and other waste into the water, and everything died. For whatever reason, and I don't know whether people rallied against it, the company had to close and stop dumping. Without any other human intervention, the river came back to life. Weil said that's basically what can happen to your body. That's the premise of my book. I'm just telling it in a more shocking way.

There's a parallel that isn't in the book, one I wish I'd known about earlier. After the movie "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio, I heard, the beach in Thailand where it was set became so popular that tourists bombarded it. Boats were dropping anchor, and they killed almost all the coral. The Thai government banned people from visiting that area. Just like the river, the coral started coming back to life with no other human intervention except keeping people away.

Where the steps come from

The book gives concrete steps. They draw on Weil's eight-week program; on Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist who wrote "Your Drug May Be Your Problem"; and on Dr. John Kappas, whose school I attended for clinical hypnosis. Kappas talks about an eight-week hypoglycemic diet that, by controlling blood sugar, helps people become less suggestible and less prone to fears and phobias. I build on those protocols and on what I've learned about addiction and habits.

What I help people do is make incremental change. You don't have to do everything all at once, and you don't have to go cold turkey. Small changes can change the way you feel and the way you look.

You don't have to do everything all at once, and you don't have to go cold turkey.

I'm living proof. At 49, I'm doing backflips, 540 spins and tornado kicks, jumping, crawling, running, climbing, squatting and rolling with no pain, and running circles, sometimes literally, around people half my age and even 30 years younger.