Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A.J. Jacobs is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, and The Guinea Pig Diaries. He is the editor at large of Esquire magazine, a contributor to NPR, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City with his wife and kids. Visit him at AJJacobs.com.

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Drop Dead Healthy

Chapter 1

The Stomach

The Quest to Eat Right

I’VE MADE A LIST of more than a hundred diets. The Mediterranean diet. The USDA diet. The Michael Pollan eat-what-your-grandparents-ate diet. The Blood-type diet. The Paleo diet. The Okinawa diet. Veganism. Raw foodism. Not to mention the more outré ones, like The Cookie Diet. The Rastafarian diet. The Master-Cleanse diet.

I want to try them all. Well, maybe not The Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet (it exists). But most of the others. Eventually, that is. The thing is, studies show that if you switch habits too rapidly, the changes don’t stick. So my plan is to wade into my new diets slowly, like my five-year-old son entering a chilly pool.

Which is how I’ve decided on my first dietary reforms: more chocolate, booze, and coffee.

“Salud,” I say to Julie as I pour a cup of Starbucks Gold Coast on my first morning.

That night, our friends Paul and Lisa—who are visiting New York from D.C.—come over for an informal Thai dinner. Before the meal, as we wait for the delivery guy, I hand out glasses of Pinot Noir, and dig out a Toblerone bar from the fridge.

“So when does your health thing start?” Paul asks.

“It started today,” I say, breaking off a triangular chunk.

Paul gives me a questioning look.

“He also had two cups of coffee this morning,” says Julie. “That’s his new health plan: chocolate, coffee, and wine.”

“All very good for you,” I say.

“Huh. Sounds like you’re really committing yourself to this project,” says Paul.

“How about heroin?” asks Lisa. “I hear that it’s loaded with antioxidants.”

Everyone has a good laugh.

Clever. But Paul and Lisa have to acknowledge, science is on my side. Consider:

• As the Mars Corporation gleefully and regularly points out, dark chocolate is, in fact, loaded with antioxidants and has been shown to cut the risk of heart disease and stroke. It also might be good for the eyes: According to at least one study, chocolate improves contrast sensitivity.

• A bunch of studies has shown that alcohol is good for your heart in judicious amounts (one glass per day for women, one to two for men) and that moderate drinkers live longer than both teetotalers and heavy drinkers. That includes drinkers of beer or liquor, not just the highly trumpeted red wine, though red wine does contain the much beloved resveratrol, which might have age-resistant effects.

• Coffee lowers the odds of several types of cancer (bladder, breast, prostate, and liver) as well as Alzheimer’s. It has some downsides (more than two cups can cause sleeplessness and raise cholesterol), and isn’t quite as healthy as its cousin green tea, but drunk in moderation, coffee’s benefits outweigh the risks.

Sadly, I do understand my Vice Diet won’t lead me to everlasting health. Chocolate, alcohol, and coffee are outliers. In general, food that tastes good is bad for the body. As Jack LaLanne liked to say: “If it tastes good, spit it out.”

Which is a bizarre situation. Evolution has betrayed us here. The human body—as miraculous as it can be—is in many ways a malfunctioning machine, a biological version of a 1978 Ford Pinto.

If evolution worked perfectly, healthy food would taste delicious and unhealthy food would make us gag. On Halloween, kids would fill their pails with quinoa and cauliflower. Dairy Queen would sell millions of bok choy Blizzards.

The problem is, we live in a modern world, but we’re stuck with caveman taste buds. When our ancestors roamed the plains, our preferences actually did make sense: Our tastes aligned with healthy foods. We evolved to like sugar because it’s in fruit. And fruit—which is rare in the wild—is high in nutrients, fiber, and calories. We evolved to like salt because the body needs salt to retain water. Salt—also rare in the wild—was an occasional lifesaving treat.

But then we figured out how to extract sugar from plants and put it in pastries and Frappuccinos. We mined salt and stuck it in our soups and burritos and neon-orange cheese snacks. And in large quantities, sugar and salt are not so good for you at all.

We also started to live longer. We cured a lot of infectious diseases, but this presented a new problem. Foods that were healthy in the short run—like those loaded with fat to allow the caveman to survive the famine until the next kill—turned out to be damaging in the long run.

My question is, can I reprogram myself to love healthy food? And can I figure out how to prepare and buy healthy food that doesn’t taste like a roll of double-ply Bounty?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. Sort of. But not yet.

Right now I’m still comforting myself with my holy trinity of chocolate, coffee, and booze—three of the rare foods that are both tasty and healthy.

At least somewhat healthy. The more I research, the more I realize the situation is complicated. Consider chocolate. What’s really healthy is the 100 percent cacao chocolate. No sugar, no butter.

I click onto rawcacao.com and order a bag. The mouthwatering write-up says it’s “certified organic, raw, low fermentation, non-fumigated, fair traded, strict farming standards, training and equipment provided, fair wages, profit reinvestment plan, purity testing.”

My bag of certified-organic-raw-low-fermentation-etc. chocolate arrives three days later. I take a pinch of the sprinkle-size nibs and pop it in my mouth. I can taste the chocolate I know from Hershey’s Kisses, but it’s faint and muffled, like a clock radio stuffed under a heap of pillows. Mostly I taste the bitterness.

“What’s that?” Julie asks, walking into the kitchen for a snack.

“Natural chocolate,” I say.

Reflexively, I offer her the bag. She takes a handful and puts it in her mouth.

I probably should have mentioned the tastes-like-detergent part, but, well, it happened so fast. Also I was curious to see her reaction.

A second. Two seconds. There it is: the same face she made when our friend showed us an Internet video of two women violating several cultural and hygienic taboos.

Taming the Portion

In my quest for healthy eating, I know I’ll have to do better than my Vice Diet. But I still haven’t committed to veganism or Atkins yet. I’m still too overwhelmed by choices.

I do, however, notice that there’s one thing almost every nutritionist agrees on: We eat too much damn food.

We have a size problem. You can see it in the puberty-like growth spurt of portion sizes. In 1916, a bottle of Coca-Cola was 6.5 ounces. Today, it’s 20 ounces. A hamburger used to be about 300 calories. Now you can enjoy Hardees’ Monster Thickburger with 1,420 calories, not counting fries. (The average man should eat about 2,500 calories a day.)

So I’ve decided to split up my food reforms. First, I’ll deal with quantity. Then I’ll take on quality.

How to eat less? One idea is to suppress my appetite. I’ve read reputable studies saying a glass of water before a meal reduces the average number of calories people consume. Same goes for cayenne peppers. And an apple. And a handful of walnuts. So that’s my breakfast this morning: cayenne peppers, water, an apple, and walnuts.

I won’t be hungry for days! Or at least until 10 a.m. when I get...