Drop Dead Healthy

by A. J. Jacobs

  There are two reasons I lean this way.

  The first is because I’m biased. My lovable, eccentric aunt Marti has been drilling antimeat information into my brain since I was a kid. She’s showed me videos of the horrors of slaughterhouses. She’s told me about each and every carcinogen allegedly found in meat. She’ll make animal products as unappetizing as possible. If I’m eating ice cream, she’ll say, “Are you enjoying your mucus? Because that’s what ice cream is, essentially. Congealed mucus.” If I’m eating honey, she’ll ask, “How’s the bee vomit?”

  Her passion is hard to forget. I still remember one dinner at my grandfather’s house. The whole extended family was there, and Marti, at the time, refused to eat at the same table where flesh was being served. Half the family was fine with that. But the other half wanted chicken. The solution? We had to set up two separate tables in the dining room—a meat table and a nonmeat table. My diplomatic grandparents didn’t want to take sides, so they sat at a third table in the middle, a dietary DMZ.

  The second reason I opt for the plant-based diet is that, in technical matters, I tend to accept the beliefs of most scientists.

  This semiblind acceptance is an unfortunate result of the arcanization of scientific knowledge. If I lived in the nineteenth century, I could judge for myself whether I thought Mendel’s study on peas made sense. But can I judge whether C-reactive protein is a better predictor of heart disease than LDL levels? Not without devoting several months of my life to that single question. It’s why I believe in global warming. If a survey by the National Academy of Sciences finds that 97 percent of climate scientists believe in man-made climate change, I feel it’s wise to accept their view.

  This stance has its downsides. Science isn’t perfect, and suffers from biases, fads, and fraud. But the upsides outweigh the dangers.

  And right now the majority of scientists advocate a diet with lots of plants and reduced animal-based fats and protein. Even the USDA’s 2011 dietary guidelines inch toward the plant-based side. In the past, some nutritionists slammed the USDA Food Pyramid for being too heavily influenced by the pro-meat agriculture lobby. But the latest version took the step of recommending minimal animal protein. You can see it in the 2011 MyPlate, in which protein makes up just 20 percent of the ideal meal, with beans strongly recommended.

  But I don’t ignore Taubes’s advice. He makes a persuasive case against simple carbs, one that has altered what I put in my mouth. I’m now loath to put anything white in my mouth, not counting cauliflower and straws (the latter of which may help cut down on corrosion to the teeth, especially if they are placed in the back of the tongue).

  Shopping the Perimeters

  To help me figure out the healthiest diet, I decide I need a guided tour of the grocery. I called Marion Nestle, a professor at New York University, author of What to Eat, and a highly respected thinker in all things nutritional. She met me at Whole Foods in midtown New York.

  I chose Whole Foods not just because it’s got lots of healthy food. But also because it’s got lots of unhealthy food disguised as healthy food. Sugar and fat in antioxidant clothing. And I’m a sucker for faux health food.

  It’s been a significant portion of my diet for the past decade. I eat sweetened granola bars and organic cereal that tastes like off-brand versions of Frosted Flakes. An embarrassing confession: I used to drink VitaminWater. Look at that, I said to myself, it’s got green tea extract! If I’d been around in the nineteenth century, I’d be the first to say, Yes, Mr. Barnum, I would like to see the egress. Sounds fascinating.

  I’m aware on some level VitaminWater is gussied-up sugar water—a bottle contains 32.5 grams of sugar, nearly as much as a can of Coca-Cola Classic’s 39 grams. But I still like eating and drinking this ersatz health food. It gives me a virtuous feeling, even if that virtue is unfounded. At least I’m doing something, you know? And it says “Healthy” right there on the package.

  I meet Nestle—whose name, incidentally, is pronounced NESS-el, not like the Toll House cookie makers—at the bottom of the escalator. She’s with her boyfriend, Mal Nesheim, a well-respected (and farm-raised) Cornell University nutrition professor.

  Nestle wants to make it clear she’s pro–Whole Foods, despite its flaws. She regrets mentioning its nickname, “Whole Paycheck,” in her book. “That was trite,” she says. Yes, it can gobble up your bank account, but the fact that healthy food costs more than artery-clogging food shouldn’t be dismissed with a glib phrase. It’s a complicated issue. (For one thing, Americans spend much less of their paycheck on food than Europeans—an estimated 10 percent to 30 percent. We might have to adjust our priorities.)

  I ask her to show me the least healthy food in Whole Foods. “Oh, let’s go look at the breakfast cereals,” she says. “They’re always the most fun.”

  We walk to aisle one. And there, we find box after box of cereal with pictures of farmhouses and grain fields. She picks up a carton. She slides her glasses from atop her curly gray hair to her nose, and lasers in on the nutrition label. Nestle has spent more time reading nutrition labels than most Americans have spent reading novels (which, I suppose, isn’t saying much). And she knows how to unlock their secrets.

  “Evaporated cane juice,” she reads aloud. “Translation: sugar.”

  Really? It sounds so natural.

  “Organic molasses,” she keeps reading. “Translation: sugar.”

  It’s not better?

  “It’s got a few nutrients. But not enough to make a difference. Sugar is sugar.”

  What about agave nectar? That’s the healthy sugar, right?

  “No.”

  Some sugars are slightly better than others, but only slightly. If you eat too much, they all end up as fat and can lead to metabolic syndrome and diabetes and all sorts of other horrible maladies.

  A little farther down the aisle are all the faux-healthy protein bars. “Oh, look, it’s organic!” says Nestle, with more than a bit of sarcasm. “There’s now research that shows that when people see the word ‘organic,’ they think it has fewer calories.”

  So if high-cane-juice cereals are the least healthy, what foods are the healthiest? Nestle leads me to the produce section.

  “Here. Anything in here.”

  “Blueberries?” I say. “They’re a superfood.”

  “Yes, they’re healthy,” says Nestle. “But I don’t believe in superfoods.”

  Hold on now. What’s this?

  Nestle thinks that we have an outsize obsession with ranking our fruits and vegetables. Her argument is, in a way, similar to Bratman’s. Our reasoning is too reductive. We figure: Fruits and vegetables are good for you. Fruits and vegetables have antioxidants. Therefore it’s the antioxidants in the fruits and vegetables that are good for you.

  This type of thinking leads us to believe the idea that the fruit with the most antioxidants is the best. It makes us overlook all the nonsuperfoods—what one writer called “Clark Kent” foods—such as apples and oranges, which are perfectly healthy. Antioxidants are just one of dozens of good chemicals in food.

  Nestle says that the blueberry obsession can be traced, in part, to the clever marketing efforts of the Maine wild blueberry growers. A decade ago, the Maine blueberry industry was in trouble. In years past, blueberry promoters had tried several strategies: They attempted to market blueberries as candy. Even odder, they ran a campaign suggesting blueberries as a condiment to put on hamburgers. Nothing worked. But when a Tufts study said that wild blueberries had a high antioxidant rating, they ran with it, and blueberries have become the prototypical health food.

  We finished our Whole Foods adventure and went to lunch at a nearby café. I order the Bibb lettuce salad, dressing on the side.

  The waitress looked at Nestle and Nesheim. “Are the profiteroles good?” asks Nestle.

  “So good,” says the waitress.

  “I’ll have that.”

  Huh. I’m here with quite possibly the most knowledgeable nutritionist in the
world, and she’s having a plateful of sugar and fat.

  “You’ve got to enjoy food,” says Nestle, noticing my raised eyebrows. “It’s one of the great things in life.” She assures me that she eats plenty of fruits and veggies as well.

  I’m not a doctor, but I can say with certainty: Marion Nestle does not have orthorexia.

  Checkup: Month 6

  Weight: 160

  Average number of errands sprinted per day: 3

  Waist size: 34 (down from 35)

  Pounds lifted on squat machine: 90 (improvement!)

  Sleep per night: 6.4 hours

  Half-ounce Purell bottles used this month: 14

  Overall state: I’m feeling okay, though a little stressed out about how much of my book advance I’m spending on fitness equipment. My closets are filling up with a bizarre collection of weights, gadgets, and clothes. It’s as if I were given access to a SkyMall catalog, a cell phone, and a jug of whiskey.

  I am now the proud owner of a yoga mat and a Swiss exercise ball. I also have a compression suit from Under Armour. This skintight silver outfit is supposed to help your muscles recover more quickly postworkout by reducing swelling. I wore it to the gym one day, and got plenty of feedback from the gym staff. “Hey, Superman!” “Nanu, nanu!” And so on. But there’s something comforting and womblike about its snugness.

  I own a custom-fitted mouthpiece that is supposedly similar to the one worn by Derek Jeter. A modern spin on my eighth-grade retainer, the mouthpiece is designed to open your airways, and relax you by unclenching your jaw. It does make running easier—though I can get the same effect for free by jutting my jaw forward a half inch while running.

  Of all the gadgets that clutter my closet, the most successful has been one of the simplest: a twenty-dollar pedometer. Actually, I have two, since Julie agreed to join me in my pedometer experiment.

  Studies show that the more you pay attention to your body’s statistics, the greater the chance you’ll adopt a healthy lifestyle. This idea underpins the Quantified Self movement, in which adherents track everything from caloric output to selenium levels.

  The mere act of weighing yourself daily makes it more likely you’ll shed pounds, according to a University of Minnesota study. Keeping a food journal makes you eat fewer fatty foods, according to another study. And pedometers make you walk more.

  Julie and I wear our silver bubble-shaped pedometers clipped to our pants. Our stated goal is to rack up ten thousand steps per day—an amount that the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports considers a “reasonable goal.”

  The pedometer doesn’t just spur us to move, though it certainly does that. It changes the way we think about movement. What was once a chore becomes a game. The other day, I spent half an hour looking for Lucas’s missing stuffed elephant. Normally, that would be half an hour of frustration and snarling. Instead, I focused on the fact that I notched five hundred steps. Give me more missing stuffed animals! You got any keys I can search for? I’ll take anything on.

  My treadmill desk gets me past the ten-thousand mark most days. But Julie doesn’t go down without a fight. She marches in place while making coffee or talking on the phone.

  We were walking to the park the other day, and I noticed that she was taking quick, tiny, ballerina-size steps. “I’ve got shorter legs than you,” she said. “I’ve got to play to my strengths.”

  She’s enjoying the competition. We’re getting along so well, I figure I’ll devote the next month to another joint activity.

  Chapter 7

  The Genitals

  The Quest to Have More Sex

  IT’S A DEBATE THAT’S BEEN around almost as long as sex itself: Is the act of intercourse healthy for you? Or will it kill you?

  Weighing in on the “sex is dangerous” side were, naturally, Victorian-era experts. Not all Victorians lived up to their repressive stereotype, but others did so with enthusiasm. One of my favorite characters from the encyclopedia was the chastity-obsessed nineteenth-century health guru Sylvester Graham. Graham disapproved of lust and sex in general, with masturbation as his white whale. Touching yourself, he argued, leads inexorably to insanity, weakness, and death.

  His prescription? Logically enough, bland foods. He believed the key to lowering the nefarious sex drive was a tasteless, spiceless diet. Which is how Graham came to invent one of the first health foods: the graham cracker, a snack that was originally made with wheat germ, wheat bran, and a little honey and was intended to quell the passions in hormonal adolescent boys. (I can’t speak for the original, but the modern bran-free version doesn’t seem to work so well in this regard. At least based on the following anecdotal evidence: I ate a lot of s’mores in high school.)

  Graham was on the extreme end, but he represents a prevalent strain of sexaphobic thinking. A friend gave me a 1901 book called What a Man of Forty-five Ought to Know. It was a gag gift (I’m approaching forty-five, though not there yet), but it was a fascinating read. The book soberly warns that middle-aged men will “find that the act of coition is generally followed by a period of lassitude or weariness more pronounced and more prolonged than anything he has previously experienced. Nature is thus sounding her warnings and admonishing the individual of the importance of the utmost care in the use of a secretion which can now ill be spared, and which is of utmost importance in vitalizing every department of the physical economy.” I’m pretty sure this means stop humping.

  On the other hand, history is filled with experts who argued sex is a key to robust health. The Taoists in the eleventh century believed sex resulted in the joining of the Energy, and could even result in immortality—especially if the men didn’t ejaculate. Frankly, that seems a high price.

  Other experts have said it’s dangerous not to have an orgasm, especially for women. Physicians from the time of the ancient Greeks right on up to the 1950s believed that noxious fluids built up inside unmarried women, causing “hysteria.” The solution was a vigorous between-the-legs massage. In fact, as Mary Roach points out in her excellent book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, the earliest vibrators were sold not to women but to doctors to help relieve them of their manual labor.

  Also on the pro-sex side: noted medical theorist Ernest Borgnine. I was watching the ninety-four-year-old Poseidon Adventure actor on a morning talk show, and the host asked him the secret to his long life. He replied: “I masturbate a lot.” So there you go. QED.

  Recent science has come down on the side of sex as healthy. For the most part, that is. It has to be the right kind of sex: consensual, of course. And not so acrobatic that it results in broken body parts (penis fractures occur in about a thousand energetic men a year in the United States). And if you’re out of shape, there’s a slightly higher risk of heart attack in the hours after sex.

  But overall, frequent orgasms have multiple health benefits. Among them, according to Rutgers University researchers: lower stress, and decreased rates of heart disease, breast cancer, and endometriosis. A study in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that men who ejaculated twenty-one or more times a month had a lower prostate cancer risk.

  Also longevity. One British study concluded that two or more orgasms per week cut your risk of dying from heart disease in half. Another claims that Protestant ministers live longer than Catholic priests. Of course, it’s always best to take epidemiological studies like this with a grain of Himalayan crystal salt. (Also, no disrespect to Dr. Borgnine, but most of the data focus on two-person sex.)

  Sex almost certainly helps a relationship. When you have an orgasm, your brain pumps out the attachment chemical oxytocin, heightening feelings of closeness. In fact, semen itself contains oxytocin, which is thought to have an effect on women’s postcoital moods.

  Oh, and don’t forget about curing hiccups. In Bonk, Roach cites a report in the journal Canadian Family Physician called “Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups.” It was a case study of an Israeli man wh
ose four-day hiccup spree vanished after sex with his wife.

  And if that’s not enough, sex is just plain good exercise. There have been a handful—not a lot—of studies on the aerobic benefits of bedroom behavior. In one study, ten married couples tested out different positions. It wasn’t the most romantic of settings, unless you happen to be a fan of Mistress Roxy’s Dungeon Club. The husbands were covered with electrodes and kiss-preventing face masks to measure their breathing rates. Regardless, the conclusion was that, yes, sex does provide moderate exercise, and that the man-on-top missionary position burned the most calories for men. (The women’s exertions, unfairly enough, went unmeasured.)

  Which brings me to the practical question: In terms of optimum health, how often should I be engaging in said horizontal workout? I asked Dr. Debra Herbenick of the Kinsey Institute. She said it’s hard to say. There’s no scientific consensus.

  But it does seem that this is one area where more is almost surely better, at least up to a point.

  Julie doesn’t want me saying exactly how often we have sex. That is probably just as well. But she will let me say that it’s somewhere below the U.S. average, which, according to a 2001 survey, is 132 times per year. However, it’s above the Japanese average, which is 37 times per year. (And yet Japan has a high percentage of centenarians, so an idle libido isn’t necessarily a death sentence.)

  Early on in this project, I proposed an every-night schedule for the book, a Hail Mary that, frankly, neither of us wanted. So that went nowhere. But for the sake of health, I should at least try to nudge us up to the putative U.S. average.

  So on a Thursday night, I start Project Libido.

  I’ve been researching aphrodisiacs in an effort to enlist some chemical help and I’ve prepared a romantic meal for our special night:

  Brazil nuts

  celery and peanut butter