David Cox is a science and health writer based in the UK. He has a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Cambridge and has written for newspapers and broadcasters worldwide including BBC News, the New York Times, and the Guardian. You can follow him on Twitter @DrDavidACox.
Rejuvenate: The New Science of Eating Well, and Living Longer
We are living unhealthier lives, and unleashing planetary devastation in our wake. These two crises are marching inexorably onward, hand-in-hand. But can science help us fight back? And can we live not just better lives, bot longer ones too – just through the power of food?
Over the course of a lifetime, the average human will chomp their way through around 36 tons of food. Roughly speaking, this is the equivalent of about six whole elephants, each digested, converted into fuel, and working their way through our bodies over the course of the eight decades we can expect to spend on Earth.
The problem, however, is both the source of this food, and its content. Food production is the thin end of the wedge when it comes to the climate crisis – what we eat, and when we eat it, is going to be the most obvious short-term day-to-day change to many living in the global North, protected from the worst of the climate crisis by economic inequities. And the food we eat, in an increasingly globalised manner, is by far the largest driver of another crisis: one of health, which is impacting us all.
The same human ingenuity which has enabled our species to design vaccines and medicines to eliminate disease, and sanitation systems to vastly improve our hygiene, has also created both a land of ubiquitous processed food and an ecosystem of industrial meat production on a colossal, world-changing scale.
In Rejuvenate, science journalist David Cox takes us to the cutting edge of the technological and scientific fightback against these combined crises, and how food can make us live better, longer lives. He argues that we have reached a tipping point in the intersection between food, and our world – both our personal world, and the world we all live in – where the same creative drive, scientific advancements and rampant capitalism which has instigated many of the problems, may now be able to save us.
Through unprecedented access to the movers and shakers at the cutting edge of the food world – from the CEOs of tech start-ups, to the leaders of vast hedge funds, from Middle Eastern princes to policymakers and academics – Cox takes the reader on a journey of discovery, leading her down the rabbit hole in order to explore how the way we eat is changing, how it can make us healthier, live longer, and how perhaps it can save the planet in the process.