Good Health For African Americans - Hardcover

Dixon, Barbara M.

4.25

8 ratings by Goodreads

9780517591703: Good Health For African Americans

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517591707 ISBN 13: 9780517591703

Publisher: Crown, 1993

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"Dixon supplies a fascinating historical explanation as to why disease and mortality rates differ between blacks and other Americans...these are potentially political issues, and Dixon handles them with grace and sensitivity while mapping lifestyle changes needed for improved health."--Publishers Weekly.

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From Publishers Weekly:

African Americans have the highest mortality rates for the nation's six leading killers: heart disease, cancer, stroke, liver disease, infant mortality and accidental deaths and homicides. African Americans can also expect to live, in general, six years fewer than the national average age. Dixon, a nutritionist and monthly columnist for the NAACP's publication, the Crisis , analyzes the health risk factors for African Americans and suggests feasible means of prevention and treatment. She proposes a 24-week plan, called the Sankofa program (from an African proverb about "learning from the past, building the future"). Because the author's approach to nutrition, weight loss and stress management doesn't contribute anything that couldn't be found in other self-help books, there is nothing intrinsically new about the Sankofa program. But Dixon supplies a fascinating historical explanation as to why disease and mortality rates differ between blacks and other Americans. (The sickle-cell gene, she says, was most likely a defense against malaria.) She chronicles the elements which influence the health of African Americans: traditions that influence diet, damaging habits (cigarettes, alcohol, drugs), stress--such as subdued rage caused by adversity and prejudice--and genetics (which may account for the salt sensitivity among blacks which often leads to high blood pressure). These are potentially political issues, and Dixon handles them with grace and sensitivity while mapping lifestyle changes needed for improved health.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

In this fine example of a good idea excellently executed, African American nutritionist Dixon (Wilson is apparently only her literary assistant) first sets black Americans' health challenges and their solutions in historical context. She introduces the sound advice that makes up the far greater number of her book's pages with three succinct chapters on how the ways black Africans arrived in North America, their subsequent treatment when they got here, and their descendants' fortunes influenced and continue to affect African Americans' particular health problems and how they deal--and fail to deal--with them. Dixon keeps history and traditional habits in mind throughout her counsel on improving lifestyle, improving health-care provision to black Americans, and addressing such persistent black health threats as diabetes and such newly burgeoning ones as AIDS. The centerpiece of her effort is--not surprisingly for a nutritionist--the well-explained 24-week diet and lifestyle scheme she calls the Sankofa Program, and its conclusion is a discussion of pregnancy and childbirth. Ray Olson

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