Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to be a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, has published a new book, Ballerina Body: Dancing and Eating Your Way to a Leaner, Stronger, and More Graceful You (Hachette/Grand Central Life & Style; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

It is rising on Amazon’s rankings thanks to an appearance on CBS This Morning, jumping from #920 to #36.

A clearly admiring panel of hosts talked with Copeland about the mental and emotional strength it takes to be a star athlete and dancer, calling the book “inspiring.”

It is Copeland’s third book, after her memoir Life In Motion and the children’s book Firebird. This time she stresses understanding health as a long journey, discovering what works for each person, and creating an individual version of a healthy image.

This week, CBS Sunday Morning focuses on one of the most dreaded diseases, cancer, reporting on its history, treatments, and survivors.

Two of the stories have book connections, and are included in a lengthy web resources page.

The best-known title is Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (S&S/Scribner, 2010; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Mukherjee is featured in one of the segments. He says one of the earliest cures, surgery, was made possible because of the development of anesthesia.

A piece about nutrition features Margaret I. Cuomo, MD, author of
A World without Cancer: The Making of a New Cure and the Real Promise of Prevention, (Macmillan/Rodale, 2012; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample).

A book about the toxic effects of sugar is taking off in libraries, The Case Against Sugar, Gary Taubes (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample). Holds queues top 5:1 ratios in most libraries we checked.

In addition to examining scientific studies that show sugar increases many health risks, the book also makes the case that powerful lobbies try to obscure that growing evidence, making sugar, as the publisher puts it, “the tobacco of the new millennium.”

Calling the book “hard-charging” and “game-changing,” NYT, in a review featured on last week’s cover, writes “Here is a book on sugar that sugarcoats nothing. The stuff kills. … [Taubes] implicates scientists, nutritionists and especially the sugar industry in what he claims amounts to a major cover-up.”

The Atlantic says it is “a prosecutor’s brief … fleshed out with four decades’ worth of extra science” and that “Taubes is a clear-eyed zealot for his cause, acknowledging his bias and pressing on for better science.”

Taubes was interviewed yesterday on NPR’s On Point.

At this time of the year, with all the new titles released on health and fitness, some of which are based on questionable information, it’s refreshing to learn about one  by a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and a health psychologist. Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel appeared on CBS This Morning yesterday to discuss their new book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer (Hachette/Grand Central; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample).

As a result, the book is racing up the Amazon charts, jumping from #3,292 to #10.

A telomere is like the cap end of a shoelace that keeps it from fraying. Telomeres protect chromosomes and “can help reduce chronic disease and improve wellbeing, all the way down to our cells and all the way through our lives.”

The authors say that specific lifestyle changes, such as eating better, sleeping a bit more, getting exercise, and having a good frame of mind strengthens telomeres. Certain styles of thinking, such as pessimism and hostility, weaken them by exaggerating stress responses.  “Telomeres are listening to your thoughts” and are responding in kind, they say. All manner of toxic situations impact telomeres, from suffering discrimination to exposure to toxic chemicals.

Demand in libraries has not yet caught up with Amazon and holds are generally under a 3:1 ratio.

On Late Night Wednesday, Seth Meyers delved into the science of health with Dr. David Agus

Angus’s latest book is
The Lucky Years : How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health, (S&S; S&S Audio)

A new book exploring the scientific evidence of mind/body healing (using such practices as meditation, biofeedback, placebos, and more) is getting a great deal of attention and is rising on Amazon as a result, jumping from #1,177 up to #37.

Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body, Jo Marchant (PRH/Crown; OverDrive Sample) was the subject of yesterday’s Fresh Air conversation with Terry Gross. On Monday, it as reviewed in the NYT’. Even Scientific American is getting in on the topic, posting an interview with Marchant.

Gross is clearly fascinated in the topic, especially the biological process of mental healing, the effects of stress, and the ethics of alternative therapies.

NYT’s nonfiction reviewer, Jennifer Senior, is a bit less engaged. She takes issue with some of the topics, saying little of this book is new, but praises Marchant’s writing ability, her solid approach (she says Marchant is “a scientist to her bones”), and her well-chosen subjects – “very moving characters to show us the importance of the research she discusses.”

Libraries we checked generally bought few copies. As a result, holds ratios are high, even though the overall numbers are modest.

A new book overturns dieters’ ages-long focus on calories. By an endocrinologist with impressive credentials (he’s a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, among other positions), it debuts on the #3 spot on the 1/24/16 NYT Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous list.

Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently (Hachette/Grand Central Life & Style; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample) tells dieters to re-think their approach.

Rather than a calories in/calories out model, Ludwig says processed carbohydrates and added sugars are the real problem, creating a chemical state in the body that makes gaining weight easy and losing it difficult.

His message, perfectly timed for the resolution season, is getting plenty of play in print media, from a piece in the NYT’s “Well” blog, to Forbes, Boston Magazine, Runner’s World, and to a post on NPR’s The Salt.

Palliative care nurse (and former English professor) Theresa Brown talked with Terry Gross yesterday on NPR, discussing her new book tracing the fates of four patients over 12 hours in a cancer ward.

The Shift: One Nurse, Twelve Hours, Four Patients’ Lives (Workman/Algonquin) is a moving and riveting medical account of struggle, hope, fear, and the daily demands of nursing.

Holds are heavy in some libraries and the book is on the verge of breaking into Amazon’s top 100.

Brown previously worked in a hospital’s oncology unit but now spends her time in home-based hospice care. Her first book, Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between (Harper) was highly regarded and has been adopted as a textbook in nursing schools.

Brown and Gross discuss the challenges of nursing, the stress of time and work pressures that cost patients the care they need, the desire for honesty in diagnosis, and the experience of home care.

Describing the major developments in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment over recent years, Dr. Elisa Port, a surgeon who specializes in the disease, talked to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air this week.

Her book, The New Generation Breast Cancer Book: How to Navigate Your Diagnosis and Treatment Options-and Remain Optimistic-in an Age of Information Overload (RH/Ballantine; OverDrive Sample) is getting widespread attention from sources as diverse as InStyle magazine and Woman’s Day and is likely to get more as Breast Cancer Awareness Month begins in October.

Port discusses new treatments, drugs, and care routines for those diagnosed with the disease as well as some of the current hot topic issues such as genetic testing and 3-D mammograms.

She tells Gross she wrote the book due to the amazing change in access to information for patients:

Thirty years ago no one even used the words “breast cancer” in public. Twenty years ago you couldn’t even find an advertisement with the word “breast” in it, and you flash forward to times like today, where there’s absolutely no shortage of information out there and the problem no longer is lack of information, it’s actually too much information.  [Patients] were coming [into my office] inundated, defeated, completely perplexed by all the information out there and how to navigate it, whether it was emails from friends, whether it was websites they needed to read. I thought there was a need for a new type of book, a new generation of book for a new generation — the age of information overload.

A book on an unglamorous subject, how to make use of items that might ordinarily go right into the garbage, like sour milk, is rising on Amazon sales rankings. 

The ideas behind Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money By Wasting Less Food by Dana Gunders (Chronicle Books; OverDrive Sample) got a big boast from the PBS News Hour‘s occasional series “Food Glorious Food” which featured a Michelin star chef who is making “garbage to plate” palatable. NPR.org posted the video on their food site, The Salt.referring to Gunders’s book for those who want apply the principles at home.

Claiming that “The typical American family tosses out about $1,500 of food yearly. All this wasted food is the largest component of solid waste in our landfills, and when it rots, it emits methane — a potent greenhouse gas linked to climate change, ” author Gunders is out to change that with a handbook that offers readers easy methods to keep food longer and to use it all.

Libraries that own the book show holds ratios of  3:1.

You may think of Jon Stewart as a city person, but on last night’s Daily Show, he reveals that he owns a couple of pigs, during an interview with Gene Baur, author of Living the Farm Sanctuary Life: The Ultimate Guide to Eating Mindfully, Living Longer, and Feeling Better Every Day, (Rodale, 4/7/15).

Stewart uttered the magic words, “It’s a terrific book … Get it!” causing it to jump to #68 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Mark Zuckerberg is being credited by the Guardian with having “tapped into an area of growing social anxiety with his fourth book club choice.”

Announced yesterday, the title is On Immunity: An Inoculation, (Graywolf Press; HighBridge Audio) by Eula Biss, a book that looks into the fears about vaccination. It was picked as a best book of 2014 by several sources, including the New York Times Book Review‘s top ten. (our downloadable spreadsheet of all the 2014 nonfiction picks is here).

As we predicted, Emily Oster’s claims in her forthcoming book,  Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong – and What You Really Need to Know (Penguin Press, 8/20; Blackstone Audio) is drawing controversy.

This morning, the book was featured on ABC’s Good Morning America. Senior Medical contributor, Jennifer Ashton, attacked Oster’s reasoning. She said “obstetricians and midwives all over the place are going to be doing damage control” over the assertion that a pregnant woman can have up to one drink a day. In fact, says, Ashton, one drink a day is “a lot for any woman, pregnant or not.”

The New York Post also weighs in on the subject.

More is coming. A live interview with the author is scheduled for Fox & Friends tomorrow.

Still at #1 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list after 4 weeks, Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In (Random House) urges women to seek egalitarian marriages. Promoting a different approach, 90’s pro volleyball star Gabrielle Reece appeared on NBC’s Today Show and Rock Center on Friday to say that she rescued her marriage to pro surfer Laird Hamilton by becoming “submissive.”

Her book, My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper, (S&S/Scribner), which also outlines Reese’s views on fitness and parenting, arrives tomorrow. It’s now at #53 on Amazon sales rankings. Holds are heavy on light ordering in several libraries.

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It seems the U.S. isn’t the only country obsessed with quick-fix diets. In the U.K., the “Fast Diet” is the talk of the country, according to the New York Times. The book that started the craze has been #1 on Amazon UK since it came out in January. It’s poised to be a hit here as well. Libraries are showing holds on the U.S. edition, which arrived last week, and it is currently #1 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Also called the 5:2 diet, it recommends two days of “fasting” (consuming just 500 calories) for every five of eating normally.

The FastDiet Michael Mosley, Mimi Spencer Retail Price  $24.00 Hardcover 224 pages Publisher: S&S/Atria Books – (2013-02-26) ISBN / EAN: 9781476734941, 1476734941

Get ready for more. The article notes that a “slew of fasting diet books” have come out in the U.K. in the recent weeks.