Joan Vernikos

Well-known expert in stress and healthy aging.

Dr. Joan Vernikos is a well-known expert in stress and healthy aging. Since retiring from NASA as Director of Life Sciences following a career there as both a researcher and administrator, she has committed to bringing her knowledge and insights on healthy living to the general public. Published in 2011, her book Sitting Kills, Moving Heals: How Everyday Movement Will Prevent Pain, Illness and early Death – and Exercise Alone Won’t, shows how modern sedentary lifestyles contribute to poor health, obesity, and diabetes, and how health can be dramatically improved simply with continuous, low-intensity movement that challenges the force of gravity.

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Designed to Move

The Science-Backed Program to Fight Sitting Disease and Enjoy Lifelong Health

by Dr. Joan Vernikos

Joan Vernikos studied the effects of weightlessness on health and served as Life Sciences Director at the NASA Ames Research Center. We featured another one of her earlier books: Sitting Kills, Moving Heals. This book is kinda like Part 2 of that book. The theme is the same: Sit too much and you’re going to experience the same types of negative effects that astronauts experience in the microgravity of outer space. Big Ideas we explore include the fact that gravity is our friend, why we don’t want to be active AND sedentary (are you?), some stats on the health problems caused by sitting (did you know it can be as bad as smoking or drinking heavily?), and the keys to Optimizing.

Packs:

Conquering Cancer & Movement & Productivity

Sitting Kills, Moving Heals

How Everyday Movement Will Prevent Pain, Illness, and Early Death — and Exercise Alone Won’t

by Dr. Joan Vernikos

Joan Vernikos was the former Director of NASA’s Life Sciences Division. Basically, she was responsible for understanding how to optimize the health and well-being of our astronauts. In this book, she walks us through how our sedentary lifestyles are surprisingly similar to the gravity-free lifestyles of astronauts in space. Just as an astronaut’s health rapidly deteriorates outside of gravity’s pull, OUR health erodes when we adopt a sedentary lifestyle. Big Ideas we cover include Gravity 101, why gravity is so N.E.A.T., how to build G-Habits and why your telomeres don’t like you sitting so much.