by A. J. Jacobs
He didn’t even have time to get his shots, so he took a syringe and a bottle of refrigerated medicine with him on the plane. He later forgot the medicine in the Nairobi hotel fridge. “I think it’s still there today,” he says, every time he tells the story.
He bounced across unpaved roads in a Jeep to spread the word to Kenyan villages. He became the proud owner of a goat in a local auction—which he then donated to the cause.
My grandfather wrote back home that the experience was “as inspiring as anything I have ever seen. Words cannot do justice to the reverence these people showed for education.”
My grandfather and his partners raised enough cash to charter planes that carried eight hundred students from Nairobi to New York. One of those students lived at my grandparents’ house in Riverdale for a year while he studied economics at Columbia.
More students longed to study in America than could fit on the planes. So the foundation provided scholarships to several other Kenyans. One of those students ended up at the University of Hawaii. His name was Barack Obama Sr.
My grandfather—a lifelong Democrat—still gets misty-eyed when Barack Obama Jr. gives a speech on TV. What a feeling that must be, to be so enmeshed in history. In 2009, an author named Tom Shachtman wrote a book called Airlift to America. My grandfather keeps it on the living room coffee table.
It might be pushing it, but I wonder if the Africa trip—and his other charity work—is one secret to my grandfather’s longevity. Several studies argue that charity is good for your health. One MRI study showed that giving to charity lights up the pleasure centers of the brain. It’s been called “helper’s high.” A 2004 Johns Hopkins study concluded that volunteering slows mental and physical aging. You’re more engaged, more challenged physically and cognitively.
After my grandfather finishes the Obama story, I check my cell-phone clock. I have to leave.
“Can you give me a ride?” asks my grandfather.
“Where are you going?” Jane asks him.
He pauses. “Where I was before.”
“You’ve been here all day,” she says. “This is your home.”
“Oh,” my grandfather says. “Right.”
The mist seems to clear, at least momentarily, and he gives me another raised-fist salute.
Checkup: Month 11
I went to EHE for a checkup. I figure I’m about at the halfway point of Project Health—I always pictured it as a two-year venture (my body is a fixer-upper). Here are the results:
My weight: 157 pounds, down from 171.8. Almost fifteen pounds. Not bad.
Total cholesterol, dropped from 134 to 129.
HDL (the so-called good cholesterol) spiked from 41 from 45.
LDL (bad cholesterol) sank from 77 to 68.
My iron-binding capacity is down to normal range.
Blood pressure is down to 98/68 (it was previously at 110/70).
My body fat percentage took a crazy tumble: down from 18.4 percent to 8.0 percent. Nice.
Pulse down from 64 to 55.
On the downside, I have a mild hernia, and my doctor—a sweet-natured Indian woman—tells me that I shouldn’t lift heavy weights. A serious problem since I’m trying to bulk up.
Overall, I’m getting healthier, which is good. I’m bucking the pull of gravity and entropy.
But I don’t think I’m the healthiest person alive. Not yet. My body has lost some of its marshmallowness and gained some sharp lines, but it’s still wiry. My pecs wouldn’t measure up at your average beach, even those far from the Jersey Shore.
But more troubling, I have hundreds of things left on my fifty-three-page to-do list—which has now grown to seventy pages. I’m worried I’ll never come close to finishing. Many body parts remain: my back, my feet, my skin.
Not to mention my surroundings. From what I’ve been reading, there’s the distinct possibility that my apartment might be slowly murdering me and my family. Marti’s coming to town. Maybe she can detoxify our living quarters.
Chapter 12
The Endocrine System
The Quest for a Nontoxic Home
I HONESTLY DON’T KNOW WHAT to think about the toxins issue. One day I’ll read books with horrifying titles like Slow Death by Rubber Duck, which argue that toys are made from endocrine-disrupting plastics that will cause my boys to grow breasts the size of Katy Perry’s when they’re twelve. These books warn my food will poison me, and my shampoo will give me scalp cancer.
The next day, I’ll read that these fears are overblown, and that science has proved nothing of the sort. I need to figure out the truth.
To represent the anti–rubber duck side, I’ve called in my aunt Marti. Marti has a few opinions about health—and one of her main causes is toxic chemicals. She’s in town to visit my grandfather and I ask her to do a sweep of our apartment. She agrees.
Marti arrives on a Thursday morning wearing her trademark purple scarf and a backpack.
“How was your flight?” I ask.
“Not bad, considering,” she says.
Airplanes are always a challenge. She needs to carry her raw organic vegetables with her, but the TSA tried to confiscate the ice pack. She won’t go near scanners, and she comes armed with a newspaper clipping to show the officers that they might cause cancer. Also, the flight attendant’s cologne made her gag.
Marti acknowledges she’s a character. She signs her e-mails “Your eccentric aunt Marti.” But I don’t want to dismiss her as a whack job. Well, sometimes she’s a whack job, like when she went through a phase called “solar gazing,” which is basically looking at the sun every day for thirty seconds to absorb some of its good energy. Staring at the sun. With your eyes.
But other times, she’s years—and even decades—ahead of the curve. She warned us all about secondhand smoke when most dismissed it as alarmist babble. She’s been promoting the health benefits of vegetarianism long before mainstream nutritionists started advocating a plant-based diet. Plus, she looks about twenty years younger than her sixty-two years. And she hasn’t gotten sick in eight years.
Okay, let’s go to work.
We start in the kitchen. Our sink has a bottle of strawberry-scented antibacterial soap.
“No, no, no,” says Marti. “Anything that says ‘antibacterial’ is a poison. Just conceptualize skull and bones on it.” Many believe triclosan in antibacterials is an endocrine disrupter and allergen. Marti says we need to buy organic vegetable-based soap.
We move on to the cleaning fluids under the sink. She picks up Mr. Clean Bath Cleaner and takes a sniff. She recoils like she’s smelled a rotting corpse. “Let me get out my oregano.” She keeps a vial of organic oregano oil in her backpack, which she dabs onto her wrists to counteract the Mr. Clean nasal assault. I should be cleaning with vinegar and organic baking soda.
And on it goes for another forty-five minutes.
My sunscreen and deodorant are tainted. They have parabens, which cause endocrine disruptions and cancer.
My store-bought clothes have been treated with chemicals, and need to be replaced with hemp, bamboo, or organic cotton fibers.
The plastic Keith Haring shower curtain with its abundance of phthalates elicits a shriek. There might be a link to liver cancer and lowered sperm production.
Having a microwave is like keeping a loaded gun under my kids’ pillow.
And my refrigerator is like a Superfund site. “Oh my God! This is child abuse,” she gasps, when she spots our chemical-laced American cheese.
She opens a drawer to find nonorganic cucumbers and blueberries. Pesticides used in nonorganic farming can cause everything from cancer to ADHD.
“You don’t have Wi-Fi, do you?”
I sheepishly acknowledge we do.
“That’s like having a mini cell tower in your house!”
She says that a Canadian study showed that Wi-Fi distorted the growth of Dutch ash trees. Marti thinks electromagnetic pollution is an underappreciated health hazard. Wi-Fi is terrible, but even
old-fashioned wires emit harmful rays. In her own home, she hired a worker to put all her wires—computer, phone, printer—behind a wall.
We move onto the living room. She peeks under our Pottery Barn lamp. As she expected, one of those fusilli-like CFL light bulbs. “This gives off a small vapor of mercury. You need to take it to the toxic waste dump.”
“I thought I was being environmentally responsible.”
“You need to get an LED lightbulb.”
She points to a small arrangement of roses I’d gotten Julie for our anniversary.
“Those are toxic. Commercial flowers are sprayed with all kinds of chemicals.”
“Doesn’t the FDA protect us?” I ask.
“They’re years behind. Remember when the government said tobacco was just fine for you? They said it soothed the nerves.”
Julie comes into the kitchen to get some coffee.
“I just hope he doesn’t have to get rid of me.”
“Do you have metal fillings?” Marti asks Julie. “Because assuming you and A.J. are still intimate, you’re sharing the toxins in your mouth.”
Julie has only one filling, and it isn’t metal.
“She’s probably okay, then,” Marti says to me, smiling.
I’m also lucky I don’t have a car. The upholstery on car seats is on Marti’s list of hazardous substances. Many have the flame retardant Deca, which has been linked to learning deficits. In fact, here’s how committed Marti is to living a toxin-free life: When she bought her Toyota Corolla, she left the car on the street with the window open for six months before she drove it. Six months to let the upholstery emit its noxious gases.
After a raw food lunch, Marti goes to visit grandpa, and detoxify his house. I hug her good-bye, even though I probably transferred all sorts of chemicals onto her.
Better Living Through Chemistry
For equal time, I decide to have lunch with the anti-Marti. A couple of weeks ago, a mutual friend introduced me to a man named Todd Seavey. He works for an organization called the American Council on Science and Health (a job he would later leave to work at Fox Business Network). The ACSH is a libertarian-leaning group that battles against what its members see as irrational fear of chemicals.
I’m already seated at an Italian restaurant when Todd arrives.
“How are you doing?” I ask as he pulls in his chair.
I was expecting some variation on “fine” or “pretty good.” Instead, I got a three-minute mindspew about his horrible morning: A scientific journal has announced that it won’t print studies funded by tobacco, which Seavey sees as a dangerous precedent, one that will grind science to a halt, not to mention that Big Pharma has been unfairly maligned even though they have been the main engine boosting life spans during the last fifty years. “I used to think Ayn Rand was describing a worst-case scenario. But it’s coming true. They’re regulating businesses out of existence.” He lifts up his water glass. “Here’s to the slow death of civilization.”
I raise my glass tentatively, not sure what else to do.
Seavey—thin, dirty-blond hair, looks a bit like the actor Eric Stoltz—has worked for the ACSH for seven years. It’s clearly a pro-industry group. But I don’t want to caricature them as apologists for corporate America. For instance, they also take a strong antitobacco stance.
They claim that they just want to bring perspective to public health—to focus on real dangers, not imagined ones. Smoking kills 440,000 people a year in the United States alone, far more than any alleged toxin. They also make the controversial argument that millions worldwide have died of malaria because of the ban on the mosquito pesticide DDT. So DDT—which they claim poses a minimal threat to humans—should never have been outlawed.
“The chances of being sickened by any toxin is extremely slight,” Seavey says. “There’s no real risk, if any. It’s a counterintuitive notion—the idea that something very bad for you could be harmless in small doses.”
So why the obsession with toxins?
“It probably comes from our primitive caveman minds. We divide everything into either food or poison.”
I agree with Seavey on that point. Putting aside which toxins are actually toxic, there’s almost a religious element to the quest for purity from unnatural compounds. Toxin obsession reminds me of the intricate rules on kosher eating that I learned when living by the Bible. Organic eaters look at chemicals the same way Orthodox Jews look at pork—as impure, almost repulsive.
There’s this mistaken idea that natural is good, says Seavey. But arsenic and hemlock are natural. Likewise, there’s the fallacious idea that natural products don’t have chemicals. But they do. The ACSH claims on its website that “of the chemicals people eat, 99.99 percent are natural.” Or as a wiseacre blogger wrote, “Even Rachel Carson was made of chemicals.”
The Toxin-Free Life
Marti has e-mailed me a list of do’s and don’ts for living a toxin-free life, and I vow to spend the week following her path. Here are my notes for the first day:
9 a.m.: Trip to Whole Foods to buy organic strawberries and organic raspberries (price: $4.75). I can’t listen to my iPhone, per Marti, since she says it’s linked to brain cancer and low sperm production. I’m bored out of my mind.
10 a.m.: Morning ablutions. For my shower soap, I’m using olive oil mixed with mineral salts (got the recipe off an organic website). Felt very ancient Roman. For shampoo, baking soda and apple-cider vinegar. Took forever to wash it out, but my hair feels supersoft and now has Einstein-like antigravity properties. Underarm deodorant is cornstarch and baking soda. Unpleasantly sticky.
11 a.m.: I cover Deca-laden upholstery on the couch with organic cotton sheet.
Noon: Go on a BPA hunt in the kitchen, searching for the recycling code on the bottom of all plastic containers. Recite the classic BPA poem: “Four, five, one, and two/All the rest are bad for you.”
1 p.m.: Explain to Julie why the couch is covered with organic cotton sheet. Wait as she rolls her eyes.
2 p.m.: Meet friend Roger for a late lunch. He e-mails to ask for my cell. “I’m not carrying one these days. You can call the restaurant.” He responds, “I’ll send a Telex.” Ha.
3 p.m.: Clean up spilled red wine in living room with vinegar and baking soda. Julie says this smells worse than spilled wine.
4 p.m.: I worry if the water bowl for our pet lizard, Brownie, contains BPA and is altering her hormones. I have the same thought about the plastic watering can for my plants. Realize this might not be best use of my cerebral cortex.
In short, I can’t be as toxin-free as Marti. It’s just not physically or logistically possible with three kids and all the other health-related things I have to do. But I don’t want to glibly dismiss the dangers of toxins. There are lots of disturbing data out there. The American Cancer Society estimates that environmental toxins cause 34,000 deaths a year. In 2010, a presidential panel said that number could be “grossly underestimated.” There are 80,000 chemicals used in industrial processes, and only two hundred of them have been tested by the EPA. What’s the reasonable middle path?
I call up David Ewing Duncan, a journalist and public health advocate, who traced all the toxins in his body and wrote about it in his 2009 book Experimental Man.
How has his life changed after all the research?
“Many of the toxins I’m fatalistic about,” he says. “Nobody knows how many parts per billion are dangerous. And even if we did, there’s often nothing we can do about it. There’s no way to escape. Virtually all the major chemicals are found everywhere on earth, from polar bears in the North Pole to penguins in the South Pole.”
Are there things he does differently now that he’s studied the issue for years?
“There are two behaviors I’ve changed.”
First, he’s much more careful about mercury in fish. He only eats sea creatures low on the food chain—crab and shrimp, for instance—which absorb less than the big predators, such as tuna and marlin.
Second, he says he’ll never microwave anything in plastic again.
“But you could say I’m part of the problem, not the solution. There need to be people who are vigilant, like your aunt. We need to pay more attention before we add new chemicals.”
It’s all about weighing costs and benefits. To be totally safe, I could avoid cell phones. But the stress of living a cell-phone-free life? That might put me in an early grave. You have to choose your toxic battles.
I’ve made up a list for myself based on advice from toxicologists and the best available evidence, which I’m putting in the appendix.
Checkup: Month 12
Weight: 159 (how did it go up?)
Blood pressure: 100/69
Trips to gym this month: 15
Bottles of red wine consumed this year so far: 87
Bottles of dark red, antioxidant-rich Sardinian wine, which supposedly helps the Sardinians’ long life expectancy: 1
My current state of mind: self-righteous. I feared this would happen. I try to fight it, but I can feel it taking hold: I’m becoming a health fundamentalist.
I had the same experience when I lived by the Bible. After a few months, I became holier than thou, appalled by the sinfulness of the secular world. I’d flip through an Us Weekly, and curl my lip in disgust at all the coveting and greed and harlotry therein.
And now here I am, healthier than thou. I spend way too much time judging others. I know it’s obnoxious, and probably unhealthy, but in my defense, I’m surrounded by some massive transgressions against the gods of health.
The other day, I watched a man on the street open a bag of Doritos. Apparently, he decided it would be too much effort to use his fingers to lift the triangular foodlike chips to his mouth. So he just shoved his face in the bag and started chomping away, like a horse with a feed bag. A while later, he came up for air, his cheeks coated with glow-in-the-dark orange powder. I had to avert my eyes.