A fascinating deep dive into how our hormones impact pretty much every aspect of our lives.

I love learning and I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of reading non-fiction. Lately, I’ve been especially interested in books about health and the way our bodies work. I find it endlessly interesting to learn about the complex and integrated systems we carry around each day.

This book was a great read. If you are interested in learning about hormones, this book is a great choice. It is easy to follow, Max breaks down complex ideas into easy to understand language. I learned so much. Did you know that we experience a surge of hormones as babies that is similar to what we experience as teenagers?

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on gender and hormones. Max breaks down a lot of myths about what is happening in our bodies biologically that impacts how we experience gender. And the chapter on hunger and hormones gave me great insight into how our digestive system works and why obesity is such a problem. Perhaps my favourite chapter though, was the one on menopause and ADAM (the newer term for male menopause that stands for androgen deficiency in the aging male; and yes, it’s a thing). Our knowledge on this process has come a long way, enabling us to do many incredible things like fertility treatments, but it poses some interesting moral questions. How old is too old to receive such treatments? And of course, like with any scientific research, there is still so much we don’t know. Why has the age of menopause in women remained largely unchanged for all of human history?

The book is written in such a neat way. Each chapter tackles a different topic and Max fills us in on the history of medical discovery with that topic, tells us a story about a patient from his own practice and what that taught him about the topic, and then breaks down the latest knowledge and research. This format makes the book much more entertaining to read.

If you are interested in learning more about how our hormones impact all of our systems and our everyday lives, give this book a try.