by A. J. Jacobs
Accidents are the fifth leading cause of death in America (following heart disease, cancer, stroke, and lower respiratory diseases). Home accidents alone account for 21 million medical visits a year.
Safety’s not the sexiest part of the wellness industry, so accident prevention doesn’t get a lot of play in the media. I’m guessing Men’s Health wouldn’t sell a lot of copies with cover lines like WALK THIS WAY: 10 HOT NEW WAYS TO AVOID SLIPPING AND FALLING. But if you want to live a long life—a crucial part of the definition of health—you have to keep safety in mind.
The losing-my-sons incident was the catalyst for a month of safety. I’ve become obsessed with safety. Which is saying something, since I was pretty overprotective before.
When my first son was born, I bought the electric-outlet covers and the foam corners for the tables. As Julie will attest, I got a little carried away. I spent some time on the Internet researching whether you could buy helmets for babies. I didn’t buy the helmets, but I looked. They’ve got such soft heads, you know? Julie mocked me hard for that one. She also mocked me for not wanting to read them The Cat in the Hat. But I stand by that one: Here’s a boy and a girl, left alone, and what do they do? They let a smooth-talking stranger into the house. Then they try to keep the whole incident secret from their parents.
Point is, I thought I was on top of things, safetywise. It turns out I’m an accident-prevention slacker. My harmless-seeming apartment is a death trap. At least according to those who obsess about this stuff even more than I did.
I invited over Meri-K Appy, head of the nonprofit organizations Home Safety Council and Safe Kids USA. Just as my aunt Marti inspected my home for toxins, Appy would scrutinize our apartment for safety violations.
When I answer the door, Appy is scanning the ceiling in the hallway.
“I was just checking to see if you have sprinklers in this building.”
We don’t. Strike one.
As you’d hope with a safety expert, Appy is well put together, her brown hair in a neat bob, her wardrobe a crisp blue blazer and black shirt. I was worried she’d be Nurse Ratched–severe, but she’s warm and funny, prefacing some of her more hard-core suggestions with the phrase “okay, nerd alert here.”
She’s taken aback by how blasé we are as a society about safety. So many of us view fire alarms as a slightly less annoying version of Muzak, background noise we can freely ignore. Appy was recently having dinner at a Chinese restaurant when a fire alarm started honking, and everyone but her family kept happily eating their wonton soups. She couldn’t resist scolding one of the alarm-flouting families on the way out.
“My feeling is that there are so many horrible, terrible ways to die that you can’t do anything about. So why wouldn’t you do something about the ones you can prevent?”
We start in the kitchen. This room is packed with violations. The knives are too accessible. The oven mitts are too close to the stove.
We have a smoke alarm, which is a good start. But in the kitchen? Sometimes people disable kitchen smoke alarms because they go off during cooking.
I swear I haven’t. But I’m not off the hook: The smoke alarm is too old (ten years is the maximum). I need to change the batteries every year. And to be safe, I should sync this smoke alarm with the others in the house.
“Also, you should take a light vacuum and get the dust out of the smoke alarm once a month,” she says. Too much dust desensitizes them.
Oh, and look into getting those sprinklers.
“I’m feeling overwhelmed,” I say.
“I know it’s a lot. But I’m giving you everything, and then you can do the most important.”
Even Appy—the queen of safety herself—can’t do it all. She admits she cooks on her stove’s front burners, even though back ones are ideal from a safety perspective.
Among our many other violations: A pail left in the hallway is a tripping hazard.
Our tub has no slip-resistant decals or grab bars.
Appliances are still plugged in even when not in use.
There’s a glass bowl up on a top shelf.
One saving grace: Our hot water isn’t that hot, far below the 110-degree danger mark. Appy says accidental scaldings are the most underestimated home hazard, responsible for more than one hundred thousand injuries a year.
She notes the candles on our dining room table. I might want to consider flameless, electric candles.
“I use them myself,” she says. “There’s even one with a very subtle vanilla scent.”
I check to make sure Julie’s not listening, since I know this would be an eye roller.
“Sometimes I worry about Hanukkah candles,” I say. “Especially if we have to leave the room and they’re still burning.”
She nods, understandingly. She tells me she has a colleague who worked with Orthodox Jews. And he recommended putting ritual candles in the sink if they are left to burn overnight.
“And what about birthday candles?” I ask.
“I’m torn,” she admits. “Because I love birthdays. But children close to an open flame? What are we teaching our kids with that? You might want to have the kids blow from far away. Some of my friends in fire safety don’t have candles on the cake. They have other things, like flowers.”
Julie returns and I can start speaking in a normal voice again.
“So how’d we do?” I ask.
“You didn’t do too badly,” she says. “I definitely give you a B or B-minus. Luckily, your kids are a little older. Otherwise, you’d get a C-minus.”
The Helmet Experiment
After Appy leaves, I decide my final miniproject will be the Week of Maximum Safety.
I want to get us up to an A-plus apartment. The next morning, I spend an hour on the Internet browsing new smoke alarms and flameless candles. (I decide against the one with fake molten wax dripping down the side. It’s trying too hard.) I take all the glass bowls down from the shelves. I get foot-shaped slip-resistant decals.
I also decide that to be truly, totally safe, I should investigate the idea for which Julie once ridiculed me: the helmet. Not just a helmet for biking or riding go-karts, but a helmet for walking around the city.
Strange as it sounds, I’m not the only one who has considered walking helmets. Over in Denmark in 2009, they launched a campaign that promotes helmets for pedestrians.
The Danish Road Safety Council printed posters featuring stick figures in various situations—shopping, taking the escalator, throwing out trash—all adorned with multicolored helmets. The slogan reads: “A walking helmet is a good helmet. Traffic safety isn’t just for cyclists. The pedestrians of Denmark actually have a higher risk of head injury.”
This was not a prank or an Onion story. I checked.
And what about car helmets? I’m not talking about helmets for NASCAR drivers, but helmets for your average taxi rider or suburban commuter in a Honda. Again, there have been sporadic attempts to get those in the mainstream, to little effect.
So as an experiment, I’ve been wearing my blue bike helmet as I run my errands. It’s not so bad. I’m not getting as many quizzical stares as I predicted; passersby no doubt assume my bike or moped is locked up nearby. And there is a feeling of security. Especially when I run under New York’s omnipresent scaffolding, which I’ve always feared.
I tried it out in the apartment as well. Tonight, I wore it while bringing the boys their plates of pasta. Julie refused to comment, but Lucas admired it so much he ran and put on his bike helmet. His has a pirate on it and thus upstaged my plain-Jane helmet.
After a couple of days, I retire my walking helmet. Partly because I can’t fit both my noise-canceling earphones and my helmet on my head. I had to choose.
Now, helmets for walking and driving are about as likely to take hold as capri pants for men (a very brief fashion trend I once wrote about at Esquire). It’s just never going to happen, even in Denmark. Libertarians would go bonkers. Walking helmets are just too dorky, even for me.
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But step back for a minute. Pretend you’re from Mars. From a coldly rational point of view, pedestrian helmets aren’t a crazy idea. As Freakonomics points out, on a per-mile basis, more people die from drunk walking than drunk driving. Pedestrian accidents in general injure sixty thousand people a year and kill more than four thousand.
The reason I even brought up helmets is to illustrate an important point: The way we think about danger is illogical. We cannot do risk assessment to save our life. As Richard Thaler—a professor at the University of Chicago and one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics—told me, “People are terrible at knowing what is really dangerous and what isn’t.” We focus on the wrong dangers, the ones that get the splashy headlines, not the ones that are common or abstract.
Lisa Belkin wrote a provocative article about this topic in The New York Times. As she points out, the five things that cause the most injuries to children eighteen and under are car accidents, homicide (usually by someone they know), child abuse, suicide, and drowning. And the top-five things that parents are most concerned about, according to Mayo Clinic research: kidnapping, school snipers, terrorists, dangerous strangers, and drugs.
Belkin points out that we drive to the store to get “organic veggies (there is no actual data proving that organic foods increase longevity) . . . then check our email at the next red light (2,600 traffic deaths a year are caused by drivers using cell phones, according to a Harvard study).”
Even ten years after 9/11, I’m still jittery about taking the subway. I’m afraid some lunatic is going to blow up the C line. Often I’ll either walk or take a cab instead. Which makes no logical sense. The chance of getting hurt in a taxi accident is much higher than that of a subway bombing.
So what’s a semirational person to do? I’ve drawn up some rules of thumb. Worry about cars, not planes. Worry about fire, not abductions. Exercise, but not so much that it interferes with spending time with your family.
And maybe, just maybe, buy a helmet.
Chapter 27
The Finish Line
I GET A WEIRD JOLT every time I log onto Skype nowadays. The address book pops up, and there, on the front page, is “Grandpa Ted.” Even odder, his number has a green circle next to it, meaning that he’s somehow logged in, as if they have Wi-Fi in the afterlife.
I always think of clicking on it but decide it’d be too depressing when he never picks up.
I’m noticing these cues more and more, not just on my computer, and not just for my grandfather. As I get older, the city is filling up with morbid little landmarks of dead friends and family.
I’ll walk by Nick & Toni’s, an Italian joint, and think about how I ate ravioli there with an ex-girlfriend fifteen years ago. She suffered from depression and committed suicide last year in her “Obama mama” T-shirt.
There on the corner, that’s the deli where I chatted with Bob, the tech guy at Esquire, who died of a heart attack at fifty-one. I could do a macabre walking tour of Manhattan.
Today, I’m taking a trip into the center of it, my grandfather’s old apartment on Sixty-first Street. All the grandkids are encouraged to stop by to see if there’s a keepsake they want before it’s all sold or stored or given away.
My mother unlocks the door of 11-F, and I smell the familiar Grandpa odor: a mix of mustiness and Johnson’s baby powder. He used to pour it into his shoes every day like it was milk in cereal.
In some ways it looks like he just went out for a roast beef sandwich. The black rectangular magnifying glass he used to read with, it’s lying on the living room table. The plastic chess set with see-through cubic pieces is all set up, ready for him to make an opening gambit. His Dell computer with the huge keyboard is waiting for him to start tapping out e-mails.
As we walk to the bedroom, I step on a plastic chicken drumstick that one of his great-grandkids left under the kitchen table.
In the bedroom, large cardboard boxes cover the bed. One of his daughters had labeled each box with a black Sharpie: “Books 1,” “Books 2,” “Photos 1,” and so on. Occasionally the label has some charming editorializing, like the box that said “New York: The City That He Loved,” filled with a biography of city planner Robert Moses and an award from the Urban League.
I’d come in search of one item: the suit my grandfather had worn to Julie’s and my wedding. It was no ordinary suit. It was a red gingham jacket and pants, and it was bold and awesome and reminded me of something Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin’s Czech brothers would have in their closet. I don’t know if I’d ever have the courage to wear it in public, but I liked the idea of it in my apartment. It would be a checkerboard-patterned reminder of a life lived fully.
I swing open the closet door. There’s lots of eye-squintingly bright clothes, but no sign of the suit.
“I think it was so worn out that somebody threw it away,” says my mom apologetically.
“What about this?” She pulls out a hanger with a blue-and-red flower-print shirt. It’s no gingham suit, but it’ll suffice.
There are dozens of things left on my healthy to-do list. I haven’t joined a chorus (which has been linked to reduced heart disease). I haven’t eaten Japanese daikon radish or geranium extract, which is supposedly anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antibacterial, anti-everything-bad-in-the-world. I haven’t returned to the Sleep Clinic for my follow-up CPAP exam.
And the body parts. What about the spleen? And the liver? And the esophagus? I haven’t devoted a month to any of those.
But in the name of mental health, I have to put an end to full-time, nonstop healthy living. I promised my sons. They’ve been waiting patiently for two years to share cupcakes with me during birthday parties.
Am I the healthiest man alive? I’m certainly a lot healthier than I was two years ago. I went for my final exam at EHE and found out I’d lost another half pound, ending at 156.5 (total weight loss: 16 pounds). I’d gone down two belt sizes. Dr. Harry Fisch told me that my lipid panel numbers “are so good, they’ll give you a heart attack” (HDL: 48, LDL: 62). I more than halved my body fat percentage. I can now run a mile in less than seven minutes as opposed to not at all. I have a visible chest.
I’ve hopefully boosted my longevity, despite my stubborn refusal to move to Okinawa or Sardinia. I’ll let you know in a few decades.
But the healthiest in the world? Who knows. Probably not. For one thing, I’ve been so busy with food and exercise, my life has teetered out of balance. I’ve skipped movie nights with my wife and missed pre-K presentations.
Dr. Bratman would say I’ve contracted a bit of orthorexia. Lately, I’ve been avoiding most fruits, except the bitterest one, grapefruit, afraid they are too highly glycemic.
So that’s it: My days of full-throttle healthy living are over. Instead, I’ll be switching to a healthier approach to health.
I’ll incorporate much of what I learned.
I’ll chew more. I’ll walk more, and hum and pet dogs. I’ll wear my noise-canceling earphones. I’ll stop to smell the almonds. I’ll write e-mails on my treadmill and run my errands. I’ll reframe life’s horrible situations and outsource my worries.
I’ll floss my teeth and breathe from my stomach. I’ll eat my Swiss chard and quinoa. I’ll drink ice water, meditate, and give abundant thanks.
I’ll try to stay married and have not-too-infrequent sex. When I exercise, I’ll do High-Intensity Interval Training, alternating between sprinting and walking every minute. I’ll avoid blue light before bedtime.
I’ll follow fitness expert Oscar Wilde’s advice: Be moderate in all things, including moderation. There’s room for immoderation. Celebratory feasts can be healthy, and the occasional triathlon as well.
And I will try to have more days like June 19, the final day of my project, when Julie and I schlep the boys to Brooklyn to see a minor league baseball game featuring our local team, the Cyclones. I’ve walked 8,304 steps so far, many of them to get to the stadium. I’m in the open air, breathing in thos
e phytoncides. I’m getting just a little sun exposure for my vitamin D. I’m watching baseball, which may lower blood pressure.
I’ve done some aerobic activity, including tossing a ball in a booth near the stadium. A radar gun tells you how fast you pitched.
The whole family tried it out. The radar malfunctioned when Zane lobbed his ball, and registered that he threw at ninety-four miles per hour. “Get that kid a contract with the Mets!” said the guy running the booth.
And right now I’m walking back to our seats, holding the little hand of my pitching prodigy, his touch suppressing my level of the stress hormone cortisol. Zane’s hand is sticky, since he’s currently at work on his one permitted treat for the day, a stick of blue cotton candy.
“Do you want a taste, Daddy?” he asks. He holds it aloft for me to see, a bright Q-tip of spun sugar.
I hesitate. Yes. I guess I do. Just a taste.
Epilogue
ON A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN September, a few months after my project ended, I was strolling on my treadmill desk, finishing final revisions on my book, when my father called my cell phone. My aunt Marti had fainted.
I wasn’t too concerned, and neither was Marti. She probably had an excess of Brazil nuts in her diet and not enough hemp seeds. Or vice versa. In no time, she’d be up and about and railing against factory farms or horizontal hydrofracking, as always.
On the insistence of her holistic doctor, Marti reluctantly went to see a regular old western-style, test-giving, pharmaceutical-prescribing doctor.
Two days later the results came back. I was wrong. It wasn’t a lack of hemp seeds. It was cancer. Acute myeloid leukemia, a particularly nasty bully of a cancer that causes the bone marrow to pump out so many white blood cells that they choke the system.
Marti didn’t believe in God. If anything, she believed in a vague, benevolent Earth Mother–type goddess. But it was clear that whatever divine or nondivine force driving these events had a particularly cruel sense of irony.
