The book states that the purpose of these changes is to obtain and maintain idyllic health so that an individual can extend his or her life as long as possible. The authors believe that within the next 20 to 50 years technology will advance to the point where much of the aging process will be conquered, and degenerative diseases eliminated. The book is peppered with side notes on these futuristic topics, showing how current research is leading us toward life extension, and explaining how future technologies such as nanotechnology and bioengineering might change the way humans live their lives. Ray Kurzweil discusses these topics at further length in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near.
A follow-up on Fantastic Voyage, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, was released on April 28, 2009.
Organization
Chapter 1: You can live long enough to live forever
Chapter 2: The bridges to come
Chapter 3: Our personal journeys
Chapter 4: Food and water
Chapter 5: Carbohydrates and the glycemic load
Chapter 6: Fat and protein
Chapter 7: You are what you digest
Chapter 8: Change your weight for life in one day
Chapter 9: The problem with sugar (and insulin)
Chapter 10: Ray's personal program
Chapter 11: The promise of genomics
Chapter 12: Inflammation—the latest "smoking gun"
Chapter 13: Methylation—critically important to your health
Chapter 14: Cleaning up the mess: Toxins and detoxification
Chapter 15: The real cause of heart disease and how to prevent it
Chapter 16: The prevention and early detection of cancer
Chapter 17: Terry's personal program
Chapter 18: Your brain: The power of thinking...and of ideas
Chapter 19: Hormones and aging, hormones of youth
Chapter 20: Other hormones of youth: Sex hormones
Chapter 21: Aggressive supplementation
Chapter 22: Keep moving: The power of exercise
Chapter 23: Stress and balance
Epilogue
Criticisms
One claim in the book has been called pseudoscientific. Dr. Stephen Lower, retired Professor of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University, disputes some of the book's statements about alkaline water, claiming that "Ionized water" is nothing more than sales fiction; the term is meaningless to chemists."[5] Kurzweil and Grossman counter this specific criticism directly in their Reader Q&A.[6]
^Tracee Cornforth (19 May 2005). "Guidelines for Calorie Restriction". About.com. Archived from the original on 3 December 2010. The following is an excerpt from the book Fantastic Voyage by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D.
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