by A. J. Jacobs
The key is to let the noise glide through your brain without stopping to interpret it. Don’t try to block out the sound waves. Just notice them as they float by, and say, “Isn’t that interesting.” The website tells us not to ponder the sounds’ origins. Instead focus on the tones and vibrations. “Mo-ther-coo-ler. Mo-ther-coo-ler.”
That’s quite a sound. But it doesn’t bother me. It was the most relaxing MRI of my life.
A Breath of Fresh Air
On a Wednesday for lunch, Julie and I go to visit my grandfather. He is, no surprise, stretched out on the recliner, wearing a red shirt with long sleeves. He looks older. His wrists are as thin as broomstick handles, his eyes rheumy. His breathing is labored. Which is understandable. As you age, the lungs deteriorate. They lose the air sacs and capillaries, the diaphragm weakens, the muscles get less elastic.
Julie leans down to kiss him.
“Hi, dear,” he says, in between breaths.
He asks about my boys, but I can tell he can’t remember their names.
“What are you working on, A.J.?” he asks.
I tell him I am writing about lungs. “You know, you helped New Yorkers’ lungs,” I say.
“Oh?” he says.
“All the mass transit projects you worked on. You helped cut down on pollution.”
“Oh, yes?”
He seems pleased, but confused. I remind him of his bold idea. Long a booster of the subway and bus system, my grandfather decided a couple of years ago that mass transit should be free, like water or radio. The result would be fewer people driving cars, less smog, more efficiency. He funded a study and lobbied the mayor.
“That’s going to happen soon,” he says. Typical optimism, perhaps delusional.
“Hope so,” I say.
New York’s air pollution is bad, but it could be much worse. The American Lung Association recently found it to be the seventeenth worst city for ozone pollution (Los Angeles got first) and the twenty-first for particle pollution (Bakersfield, California, won the title).
Air pollution causes all sorts of problems, including emphysema, asthma, and cardiac diseases. The World Health Organization estimates that 2.1 million people die from air-pollution-related diseases every year. But that’s just a rough guess. It’s unclear how many New Yorkers succumb.
The best you can do is try to keep your house’s air clean. Don’t use scented candles or products. Clean the air conditioner every year. Some doctors say you should open the windows for fifteen minutes a day, because indoor air tends to be dirtier than outdoor air. If you have lung problems, buy a HEPA filter. Don’t bike or jog on busy roads, because the car fumes do more damage when you’re breathing heavily. And if you’re really committed, buy an N95 surgical mask, a special kind that screens out particles. I tested one out while walking on my smelly, rubber-burning treadmill. It was rain-forest hot to breathe into it.
“You seem to have survived the pollution, Grandpa,” Julie points out.
“Still hanging in there,” he replies, smiling.
“Actually, you picked a good place to live, Grandpa,” I say.
I tell him that despite the pollution, New York has a surprisingly high life expectancy: 78.6 as opposed to the national average of 77.8. Why? Theories vary, but most agree that a lot of it has to do with the amount New Yorkers walk. As the city’s former commissioner of public health told New York magazine, our metropolis is like one big gym.
“Though you could have done a little better,” I say. “Like Okinawa.”
The southern Japanese prefecture has the highest number of centenarians, thanks to a mix of factors (steep hills for walking, lots of manual labor even among the elderly, a low-fat, low-sugar diet, etc.).
“Or you could have been a Seventh-day Adventist in San Diego.” Another cluster of extremely long-lived people, thanks in part to close family ties and a strict no-meat diet.
“The what now?” he says.
“Seventh-day Adventists. They’re a religious group. You could join.”
“I think it’s too late.”
Checkup: Month 15
Weight: 158
Packs of gum chewed since tooth chapter: 48
Minutes spent meditating per day: 10
Minutes of that when actually meditating as opposed to thinking of something trivial: 2
My sedentary behavior is down to about four hours a day. Have I mentioned how much I love walking on the treadmill? I type on it, brush my teeth on it, take my fish-oil supplements on it. It gives me a sense of accomplishment, as odd as that may sound for something designed to keep you in place. I’ve now been working on this book for 880 miles. I’m hoping to break a thousand by the end.
I often wonder what the previous me would think of the me that I’ve become. I’m now the guy who wears bike shorts even when not biking. I’m the only one at parties who actually eats the crudités. At restaurants, I ask if the salmon is farm-raised or wild. And that it not be blackened (blackening has been linked to cancer). And that there be no starch on the plate when it is served.
I think the previous me would not return my e-mails.
Chapter 16
The Stomach, Revisited
The Continued Quest for the Perfect Diet
I’M EATING A LOT OF the same foods every day, which I’m not sure is such a good idea. Here’s my daily menu for the last month or so:
Breakfast: two scrambled egg whites in canola oil, a handful of walnuts, a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal topped with organic blueberries, strawberries, and flaxseed oil.
Lunch: chopped salad of spinach, broccoli, red cabbage, mixed peppers, peas, tomatoes, avocado, artichoke hearts, beets, and (sometimes) sunflower seeds. No dressing.
Afternoon snack: fat-free Greek yogurt with cantaloupe and grapes. Three spoonfuls of hummus.
Dinner: quinoa, steamed asparagus, Dr. Praeger’s spinach pancake. And three times a week, grilled wild salmon with lemon juice (sorry, Marti). Glass of red wine. Maybe two.
It’s basically a modified Mediterranean diet, the diet that is perhaps supported by the most studies. I don’t mind the sameness. It’s my comfort food. But for the sake of health, I should probably mix it up more. Do something crazy, like substitute bulgur for quinoa.
And for the sake of self-experimentation, I should go to the extremes. I should road-test some of the diets I’ve been reading about. For the next few weeks, I pledge to sample the two poles of the nutrition world: the raw-food vegan diet and the Paleo-Atkins-type diet.
Raw Food
My aunt Marti is in town, and we meet at a vegan restaurant on the East Side called Candle 79. I’ve asked Marti to give me a personal Idiot’s Guide to raw foodism.
We sit down in the back corner. Marti doesn’t like the toxins emitted by the eponymous candles. She asks that the one on our table be removed.
“It’s not a real candle,” says the waitress. “It’s electric.”
“I’d still like it taken away—the electromagnetic pollution.”
With the candle gone, I ask Marti’s advice on going raw. “You’re going to have to get over your aversion to making your own food,” she tells me.
I need to get: a blender, a slicer, a spiralizer, a dehydrator, spirulina powder, blue-green algae crystals, and Himalayan or Celtic sea salt. I need a juicer, but not just any juicer—I need it with an auger gear, not a centrifuge, since the blades oxidize the food and lower its nutritional value.
Oh man. As I scribble my notes, I feel my book advance slowly slipping away.
My auger-geared juicer arrived a couple of days later. Within an hour I had baptized it in blood from my ring finger, which I accidentally sliced while fitting the parts together.
I took out my plastic bags of organic cucumbers, kale, carrots, beets, Swiss chard, and zucchini. I put the zucchini into the juicer and pushed down. Nothing. I pushed harder. A whirring and thumping as the juicer devoured the zucchini and drooled out a weak green stream on the other end. That’s right. I’m juici
ng!
After decimating several vegetables, I decide juicing is my favorite form of food preparation. There’s something perversely appealing about subjecting an innocent plant to that much violence. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to gutting a fish or field dressing a deer.
The juicing takes forty-five minutes, much of that time devoted to rinsing the myriad parts. As Marti warned, raw food is astoundingly time-consuming. You’d think not cooking would be a time-saver. You would be wrong.
And juicing is microwave-quick compared to another noncooking technique: dehydrating. My dehydrator was delivered the other day—an air conditioner–size black box with removable shelves. In raw food circles, you’re forbidden from using heat higher than 104°F because it supposedly destroys the living enzymes. So the dehydrator blows warm air on your food for hours, sometimes days. It reminds me of the temperature and intensity of dog’s breath. So imagine a German shepherd exhaling on your fruit for a weekend. I dried apples, oranges, carrots, strawberries, and blueberries into chewy leathery slices. Not bad, the family agreed. Dehydrating is glacial, but at least it’s hard to screw up.
After two weeks of juicing and dehydrating, here’s my assessment:
Positive: I feel lighter and cleaner. And I discovered that raw food, if prepared properly, can be tasty. I’ve spent hours on raw food websites downloading recipes (and studying raw food humor: “You know you are a raw vegan when your pots and pans are the new fruit baskets). The avocado-and-mango salad? Zesty goodness.
Negative: I am hungry all the time, and I started to look gaunt. “What’s with the manorexic look?” my friend asked. By the end, I’d lost three pounds. (So, if weight loss is your goal, and you have impressive self-control, raw food is something to consider.) In other news, it made me feel light-headed and spacey. Also, since you asked, it was the most flatulent two weeks of my life. I was tempted to call Dr. Gottesman for some surgery.
Marti will kill me for saying so, but the mainstream scientific evidence for the raw food diet isn’t overly strong. There’s lots of evidence in favor of a plant-based diet, but the notion that uncooked plants are healthier than cooked plants remains unproven. If done properly, with enough protein and B12 supplements, raw foodism is certainly better than the Standard American Diet. (Then again, eating nothing but asbestos sandwiches is probably better than the Standard American Diet.)
The War on Carbs
On the other side of the spectrum we find the low-carb, high-protein diets, such as the Atkins and the Paleo regimes. Before embarking on one, I asked John Durant—the reasonable caveman from the wilderness workout—if he’d answer my questions. He suggested we meet at a Korean barbecue restaurant in midtown.
At a Korean barbecue, in case you’ve never been, you get to cook your own food over a Frisbee-size grill in the middle of your table. Fire and meat. It’s all quite Stone Age, except for the waiters, sparkling water, and gender-separated bathrooms.
Durant is a good-looking caveman, with long hair he sometimes ties in a ponytail and a tidily trimmed beard. Durant works at an Internet start-up, a job he will later quit to become, as he put it, a “professional caveman,” and devote his time to writing a book.
He appeared on The Colbert Report, where he joked that his ideal girlfriend would have celiac disease and be unable to eat grains. Several women with grain allergies e-mailed him after the show.
The waiter approaches. Durant orders some cow intestine. I go with the fish and vegetables.
I ask him if he ever eats raw meat, like Vlad does.
“I eat raw meat in socially acceptable ways,” Durant says. “There are a surprising number of ways—sushi, sashimi, steak tartare.”
At home, Durant has a waist-high refrigerated meat locker that holds deer ribs, beef, and organ meats. But that’s only part of his diet.
“There’s a misconception that we only eat meat off rib bones. We eat a lot of vegetables and eggs and some nuts.” The idea is to avoid dairy, grass seeds, potatoes, and grain, which were developed only in the last ten thousand years.
How does the Paleo diet make him feel?
“Much better. My complexion is better. I don’t get mood spikes like I used to. I’ve lost twenty to twenty-five pounds.”
The Paleo diet made me feel amazingly full. Protein and fats are the most satiating types of food. This why the low-carb diets can be so effective when it comes to weight loss—your body produces less insulin, which often translates to dampened hunger.
I must confess, Durant might not have approved of some of my choices. The first night, I tried veal, but it was like a drone strike in my stomach. Plus, my aunt Marti’s decades-long campaign instills guilt in me when I eat mammals. I switched my protein intake to eggs, fish, and nuts. Still, I noticed a jump in energy, much less of my usual afternoon lethargy.
As with raw food, the evidence for the Paleo diet is still inconclusive. It probably helps you lose weight if you’re obese, as do most carb-restricting diets. But it’s not clear what effect the diet has on heart disease. We also don’t know if this is actually the diet that our ancestors ate. Paleo skeptics—such as Marion Nestle—argue that plants from prehistoric kitchens wouldn’t leave fossils.
The Not So Dolce Vita
I conduct one other dietary experiment: living a sugar-free life.
Sugar has never been a favorite of dieticians, parents, or dentists. But now its reputation is in a steep descent, challenging tobacco as Public Health Enemy number one. The sugar-is-toxic movement has taken wing thanks to two convincing publicizers, Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at UCSF, and Gary Taubes, the science writer. The argument is that sugar in any form—white table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice—isn’t just empty calories. Sugar ravages your liver and pancreas, and makes cells resistant to insulin, which leads to diabetes and obesity.
There are plenty of sugar defenders out there. Sugar is fine in moderation, they say. One doctor, David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center, points out that sugar is the hummingbird’s sole source of energy: “How evil can hummingbird fuel be?”
Pretty evil, the hard-core sugar haters say. They advise avoiding fruit high on the sweetness scale (pineapple and watermelon, for instance), and even suggest drinking low-sugar wine like Sauvignon Blanc instead of Chardonnay. They point out studies that show that sugar is addictive. It has the same effect on the brain as cocaine.
My favorite depressing fact is that just thinking about sugar might be bad for you. Taubes writes that the sweet thoughts trigger a Pavlovian response that includes saliva, gastric juices, and, most unhealthily, the release of insulin. So to be truly healthy, I should refuse to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with my kids.
As always in nutrition, the sugar debate is a big old murky mess of evidence. But I do think there’s a good chance that sugar is a lot worse than we’ve long thought. So I’m going to give it up for at least two weeks. No juices, no granola, nothing with the dreaded suffix “ose.”
This self-imposed Lent will be hard. When I talk to Taubes, he suggests the out-of-sight-out-of-mind strategy is probably best. Remove all sweets from the house. “Total abstention from refined carbs and sweets—losing your sweet tooth—may be ultimately easier than trying to eat them in moderation.” But Taubes has young kids, so that won’t be happening in his life. Nor mine.
Consider dried mangoes. My kids are allowed to eat a couple of slices after lunch. But I’m addicted to them as well, polishing off as many as twenty in a day.
Dried mangoes have the veneer of healthiness—which is why I originally chose them as our treat of choice. But really, they’re just Snickers that happen to grow on trees. Those mango slices are delivering sixty grams of sugar to my blood each day—the equivalent of fifteen teaspoons of white sugar.
My willpower is failing me here. I’ve tried several strategies to kick this mango habit. I put them as far away from eye level as possible, tucking them behind a tray on the top shelf. Guess wh
at? I found them.
I repackaged the mango slices, dropping each of them in its own individual wallet-size plastic bag. The strategy worked for a while. I felt guilty about unzipping fifteen bags to have fifteen portions a day. But it became too time-consuming to prepare, not to mention plastic-bag-consuming.
Sometimes, before padding out to the kitchen, I’d look at the digitally aged picture of Old A.J. Should I do this to him? Well, I think he’d forgive me. I’ve found Old A.J. is better for motivating me to take action—go to the gym, hop on the treadmill, have a cucumber—than he is at stopping my vices.
The other day, though, I had a breakthrough. I listened to a segment on the great science show Radiolab about bad habits. It featured an interview with Thomas Schelling—the Nobel Prize–winning economist who came up with now-self-vs.-future-self concept of egonomics.
He talked about an antismoking strategy that sounded intriguing. Perhaps I could apply it to my sugar habit.
When Julie got home, I asked her for a favor.
“If I have another dried mango this month, I want you to donate a thousand dollars of my money to the American Nazi Party.”
“The Nazi Party? Why not Oxfam?”
“That’s not enough of a disincentive. I want something that will make me sick to my stomach.”
“Ah, right,” said Julie.
She quickly got into the spirit. She filled out a check to the Nazi Party, signed it, and wrote “Courtesy of A.J. Jacobs” in the memo space. She waved it in front of me. “Don’t eat any of those dried mangoes—as delicious they may be.”
