Drop Dead Healthy

by A. J. Jacobs

  I kept flashing back to the Execusiser in Woody Allen’s Bananas. It was a brilliant invention: a desk combined with a workout station. The phone receiver was hooked up to elastic bands, so answering a call resulted in a biceps curl. That kind of thing.

  I couldn’t find any real-life Execusisers online. So I found the next best thing: an idea from Dr. James Levine, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic. He thinks we should all have our desks in front of treadmills. We should all walk as we work. Levine has gained a small but loyal following of treadmill desk jockeys. They trade tips and stories on the websites, and coin terms like “deskercise” and “iPlod.”

  You can buy professionally made treadmill desks for four hundred dollars. Or you can jury-rig your own. I chose the latter.

  I did so because I already have a treadmill—the one lying fallow thanks to the complaints of my neighbors below. If I walk on my treadmill, my neighbors can’t protest. It’s so civilized, so quiet. I stroll at barely one mile per hour.

  I balanced my laptop on top of a wooden box, and I slung a long pole across my treadmill to rest my elbows. This arrangement, by the way, came after about a half-dozen collapsed versions involving dictionaries, filing cabinets, and masking tape. But it works.

  I’m on it right now. This chapter has taken about 1.5 miles to write. I want this book to be the first book written mostly on a treadmill.

  There are some skeptics. My aunt Marti chided me. She said it’s multitasking. She told me I’m not in the moment. Very un-Buddhist. Julie asked me, “Isn’t it distracting to type and walk?”

  But overall, I’m liking it. In the beginning, it was a little odd. You have to get over the initial hump, that siren call of the chair. But now I found walking while working actually helps hone my focus. When I’m sitting, I’m fidgety. I’m always tempted to stand up and get a snack, use the bathroom, water the plants—anything to avoid working. With my treadmill desk, I’m getting rid of all my nervous energy. Plus, when you’re walking, you can’t fall asleep. No small thing.

  I wonder if the Tread-desk has changed my writing style. Are my sentences more energetic? I can’t tell. I do know that I feel more confident and positive when I’m striding along, more likely to answer e-mails with an emphatic “Yes! I would love to go mountain biking in Connecticut, despite the forecast of thunderstorms.” So I have to be careful.

  Standing in the Presence of the Elderly

  I spent some time standing at my grandfather’s apartment today. It felt almost natural not to sit. The Old Testament commands us to stand in the presence of the elderly, so it was a nice callback to my days of living biblically. I stand behind my grandfather’s cushy brown recliner.

  I’m visiting on movie day. My grandfather’s former colleague is over, and wants to see a documentary in which my grandfather appeared. My aunt Jane—a lawyer visiting from Maryland—slides in the DVD and presses play. The documentary is about the artist Christo and his Central Park Gates. These, as you might remember, consisted of a forest of metal poles draped in orange fabric that appeared in the park in 2005. My grandfather was Christo’s lawyer.

  I’ve seen the movie before. But it’s a joy to watch it with him. He gets such a kick out of his younger, brasher self.

  The movie opens with my grandfather and Christo’s first meeting more than thirty years ago. You hear the comically loud clacking of typewriters, and watch as Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, enter my grandfather’s office. He’s on the phone sounding important (“Good,” “Okay” “Let’s make sure the record is correct”) and nods at the artists as they settle into chairs.

  Eventually he hangs up, puts his index finger on his temple, and listens as this stringy-haired eccentric Bulgarian and his French wife tell him their zany plans. They want to install eighteen thousand gates in Central Park.

  My 1979 grandfather practically does a spit take. My 2010 grandfather, watching in his recliner, laughs. “I had never met them before,” he says. “I’d barely heard of them. I thought they were nuts.”

  At meeting’s end, he agrees to be their lawyer. He tells them the next step is to petition the Parks Department. My grandfather says, “You’ve got to think like [the Parks Department]. They’re thinking what can go wrong. What’ll the Jews say, what’ll the Irish say, what’ll the Poles say?”

  My grandfather worked with the Christos for twenty-six years, seeing them through hundreds of meetings, committees, briefs, and fund-raising events. “I know it’ll happen one day,” he always said. And then, finally, there it was, this bizarre but beautiful ocean of tangerine-colored fabric in Central Park.

  The documentary ends with the 2005 unveiling of The Gates. You can see my grandfather sitting between the Christos in the backseat of a car, touring Central Park. He’s more stooped than his 1979 self, less stooped than his 2010 version, but he still has the ever-present childlike wonder: “Wow. Wow. Wow,” he says as they pass by The Gates.

  My 2010 grandfather smiles and says, “It only took twenty-six years.” It really is a remarkable statistic. It’s a real lesson in fortitude, optimism, and persistence. The Little Conceptual Art Project That Could.

  I’ve often wondered if my grandfather’s unflagging determination and optimism is a key to his longevity. Some studies point to yes: A fifteen-year-long Duke study found that optimistic heart patients had a 30 percent higher chance of survival. Another fifteen-year study of three thousand heart disease sufferers showed that the optimistic patients lived 20 percent longer. Other studies say there’s no difference. The evidence is especially weak linking optimism and recovery from cancer. Despite the claims of pop psychologists and books like The Secret, you can’t think your way out of cancer with a positive attitude (more on that later).

  Just as important, overoptimism is probably harmful. You have to be neurotic and realistic enough to go for regular checkups and take your meds. You need enough determination to attend to the details. A ninety-year longevity study by Howard Friedman, a University of California–Riverside psychology professor, found that a low but persistent level of worry about your health is correlated with longer lives.

  So that’s what I’ll adopt: moderate optimism with a soupçon of anxiety. I can handle that.

  As I leave, my grandfather plants his hands on the arms of his recliner and hoists himself up, over my protestations. He grabs Jane’s shoulder to steady himself. He’s bent over, his spine at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, his legs wobbly. “We will see you soon?” he asks.

  “Absolutely,” I say.

  Checkup: Month 4

  Weight: 165

  Miles walked writing this book thus far: 85 (My goal is to make this a thousand-mile book.)

  Number of walnuts eaten this month: 790

  Pounds lifted on squat machine (3 sets, 15 reps): 40

  Glasses of goat’s milk drunk: 10 (Many of the longest-lived civilizations drink goat’s milk, according to The Blue Zones.)

  Overall health: not good. I got a cold. Despite devoting most of my waking hours to being healthy, I got a cold.

  Jennifer Ackerman’s book Ah-Choo!, a history of colds, has a great quote about colds from the nineteenth-century poet Charles Lamb. “If you told me the world will be at an end tomorrow, I should just say, ‘Will it?’ . . . My skull is a Grub Street attic to let.”

  My skull is definitely atticlike. I can’t find any coherent thoughts in there. But unlike Lamb, I’m more annoyed than apathetic. How could my body betray me?

  Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. My immune system has always been overly welcoming of germs. It’s far too polite, the biological equivalent of a southern hostess inviting y’all nice microbes to stay awhile and have some artichoke dip. I get a half-dozen colds per year. Julie, on the other hand, rarely gets sick. My kids should thank me for marrying up the immune system ladder.

  For this cold, I’ve tried all the cures and treatments with any half-reliable evidence behind them. Zinc supplements, gargling with salt water, sleep, and using a n
eti pot. (All the others—echinacea, Airborne, megadoses of vitamin C, hot-water bottles on your head—have, sadly, little scientific support.)

  The neti pot was the one that surprised me most. In case you’ve never seen it, it looks like a teapot, but instead of pouring raspberry zinger into a cup, you pour salt water into your nostril. The water gushes up to the sinus, splashes around a bit, then streams out the other nostril. The idea behind it is nasal irrigation, which thins the mucus, making it easier to expel.

  It’s a profoundly unnatural feeling, this meandering river inside the cranium. I coughed. I sputtered. I suppressed terror. I tilted my head in anatomically unsound angles. But in the end, it was far better than expected. It opened up my sinuses and cleared out the gunk. The inside of my head felt big and clear, a skull-size version of Montana. I plan to use my neti pot every day.

  Julie used it, too. The next morning, not knowing what it was, she used it as a holder for Lucas’s soft-boiled egg. I was horrified. She shrugged. Which brings me to . . .

  Chapter 5

  The Immune System

  The Quest to Conquer Germs

  THANKS TO MY COLD, I’ve decided to devote this month to germs. It’s a topic of great passion for me.

  For years, I’ve been a huge consumer of germ porn. Perhaps you’re familiar with the genre. I’m talking about those news segments that warn you that there are more germs on your remote control than on your toilet seat. Your sponge is a hot zone, and your wallet should be handled with a biohazard suit.

  The news will cut to footage of unwashed hands under black light, all Jackson Pollocked with glowing purple germ splotches.

  I love the elaborate metaphors they use to convey the unimaginable number of germs. You have more germs in your gut right now than humans that ever lived on earth. (This is true.) If the germs on your hand were turned into drops of water, they’d fill an Olympic swimming pool (also true). If the germs in your door handle were turned into letters on a page, the resulting document would be longer than the collected works of Joyce Carol Oates, and that includes her young adult fiction and boxing essays (probably true).

  I love when they do a close-up on a particularly menacing-looking Aspergillus or a Clostridium. Check out those flagella! So titillating.

  Germ porn probably isn’t good for me, but it provides a perverse masochistic pleasure. It feeds into my germaphobia, a condition I’ve been struggling with for years, long before it became a familiar trope for TV detectives. (A couple of random examples: I prefer the air shake to the handshake. I don’t like to clink wineglasses during a toast, unless I can clink the bottom of the glass, where the germ colonies are presumably sparser. And so on.)

  Julie hates when I watch germ reports. She’s on the opposite end of the spectrum. Our society is too hygiene obsessed, she says, and it’s turning us into immunological pansies. Go ahead, she’ll tell the boys, play in the sandbox, despite what Daddy says about residual fecal matter. Drink from that water fountain. A few months ago, Zane was eating an ice-cream cone from the overpriced ice cream shop in our neighborhood. Then his scoop fell on the sidewalk. Amazingly, he didn’t get upset. Instead, he got down on all fours and started licking it off the pavement like a golden retriever. A woman walking behind him gasped, “Oh my God.” But Julie? She had no problem with it. New York is one big dinner plate.

  Which is why she’s even less happy about the visit I’m about to make. I am meeting with the Ron Jeremy of microbial fetish videos: Dr. Philip Tierno, the director of clinical microbiology and immunology at New York University Langone Medical Center. Also known as Dr. Germ. You might recognize Tierno from his segments on the Today show. The one on pillows featured millions of skin-eating dust mites, and has made me lose at least a week of sleep. He’s the expert of experts.

  “He’s an enabler,” Julie says. She might have a point.

  But if my goal is to be the healthiest person alive, I have to figure out the best way to conquer these germs.

  I arrive at Tierno’s midtown lab, where I find him studying a slide of toxic bacilli. He’s bald, with a neat white beard and round wire-rim glasses. He sticks out his hand to greet me.

  What? Dr. Germ wants to shake hands? That makes no sense at all. I respond by offering him my elbow for an elbow bump.

  “Ah, this guy knows what he’s doing,” says Tierno. I beam. We go back to his cluttered office, filled with a microscope, eleven bottles of cleaning fluids, and two thousand biology books stacked in towering piles. Bach plays in the background.

  First, Tierno wants me to know that germs suffer from some bad PR. Most bacteria are harmless. In fact, human beings are mostly germs. We are walking around with 90 percent germ cells, and just 10 percent human cells with our DNA. Germs are in our gut, in our mouth, in our eyebrows.

  We came from germs. The oldest sign of life on earth is a fossilized germ cell found in Australia from 3.5 billion years ago.

  “There are 156,000 categories of germs around, but only a small percentage are pathogenic. Maybe two thousand of these.”

  Ah, but those two thousand—you don’t want them anywhere near you. Consider that infectious disease is the second leading cause of death in the world after cardiovascular disease. Here’s a disturbing statistic: Every year, a hundred thousand people in the United States die because of infections they got at the hospital (they are called nosocomial infections). Another one: Every year, germs in food sicken an astounding 76 million people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

  Dr. Tierno started his road to germ whisperer when he was in eighth grade and read a biography of Louis Pasteur. I mention I’m a fan of Joseph Lister, the British surgeon who first developed the idea of sterile surgery.

  “Semmelweis was an even bigger hero,” says Tierno, of the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. “He used to wash his hands after dealing with pregnant women, whereas most obstetricians just wiped their hands on their smocks, and killed patients by passing an infection from one woman to the other.”

  Hand washing is one of Dr. Tierno’s passions. He thinks America needs a massive public education campaign on it, along the lines of our antismoking PR blitz. “It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health,” he says. “Eighty percent of all infections are transmitted by direct or indirect contact.”

  The key is to do it well, which few of us do. Most of us are hardly better than the French aristocrats in the court of Louis XIV. Back then, says Tierno, doctors advised washing only the tips of the fingers, for fear that water transmitted disease.

  Tierno—who says he hasn’t had a cold in four years—walks me down the hall to the bathroom for a hand-washing demo. He splashes water on his hands, squirts the liquid soap, and lathers up for thirty seconds before returning his hands under the water.

  “Around the wrists. In between the fingers. Getting each nail.”

  He squishes and slides his palms together. He digs under his nails with his thumb and flicks his wrist. It’s a virtuoso performance, like Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello or Al Pacino screaming obscenities. It’s a long way from the average person’s five-second dunk.

  “Happy Birthday, Philly Boy,” he sings as he finishes up. “Happy birthday to you.” (For those who don’t know, you’re supposed to sing the entire birthday song during washing, to make sure you take your time.)

  When we get back to his office, I grill him on the questions he gets from every John Q. Germaphobe:

  Do Purell and other hand sanitizers work?

  Yes. “You need to make sure you use enough. A quarter-size dollop.” Tierno, along with the CDC, recommends alcohol-based gels if you can’t wash your hands.

  “I love it, but my wife hates the smell,” I tell him.

  Dr. Tierno sniffs his hands. “What’s to hate? Tell her it’s like vodka.”

  Incidentally, I spent some time on the Purell website, where you can find a list of ninety-nine places germs lurk (in-flight magazines, movie tickets, gas-pum
p keypads, hotel room a/c controls, and on and on). It’s hilarious and terrifying. The only place they don’t mention is the Purell dispensers themselves. You know they’re coated with germs. It’s one of health’s cruelest catch-22s.

  Do Purell and antibacterial soap create supergerms? Like MRSA?

  “No. Germs don’t develop a resistance to alcohol or antibiotic soaps. They can develop a resistance to antibiotics.” Tierno recommends against popping antibiotics every time you get a cold. But at least in Tierno’s view, Purell and antibacterial soaps don’t cause supergerms.

  Should I use antibacterial soap?

  “Ordinarily, you don’t need antibacterial soap. You can get along with regular soap and warm water.” The exception is when you’re cooking foods, especially meat. Incidentally Tierno doesn’t believe that triclosan, a controversial chemical in many antibacterial soaps, poses any danger (more on toxins later).

  What about a face mask?

  He wears them on planes. “One time I was going to France, and I had a lady coughing right in back of me. And I asked the stewardess to have her moved to another seat because she was very sick. And the stewardess said, ‘The plane is full, I can’t.’ I didn’t have my mask, and I caught a cold three days after that.” He won’t let that happen again.

  As I leave, I give him a copy of my Bible book. He thanks me, though he admits he’ll wipe it down before reading.

  I walk out feeling both exhilarated and stressed out. Julie’s right. He is an enabler.

  The Hygiene Hypothesis

  In the interest of equal time, I decide to look into those on Julie’s side of the germ fence. Many scientists agree with her.

  They’ve named their theory the Hygiene Hypothesis. The idea is that children in modern first-world countries aren’t exposed to enough germs, a situation that throws off the development of the immune system. Our immune cells don’t get the chance to learn to recognize and assassinate the bad guys. Our overly sanitized world could be responsible for the dramatic rise in allergies and asthma.