Drop Dead Healthy

by A. J. Jacobs

  This is Marti—eater of kale, avoider of toxins, disparager of microwaves and cell phones, a woman who ate organic food and slept on organic bedsheets. And she is the one who ends up with cancer?

  Though disinclined, she agreed to a short course of chemo at Cornell Medical Center in New York at the family’s urging. She called it “warfare medicine.” She was so committed to her peaceful worldview, she hated the metaphor of “battling cancer.” The chemo didn’t work. She’d need another round.

  I visited her. She looked surprisingly good—thinner, yes, but still with all her hair, still wearing her purple scarf. And her mood was oddly buoyant. We talked about Tina Fey’s book and Andrea Bocelli. She told me about her friend who illustrated the children’s classic Walter the Farting Dog, whom she thought my kids might want to meet. During one visit, we walked to Central Park and lay on the grass—a practice she called “earthing.”

  We traded e-mails every day about nothing of great consequence. My son wanted to know her favorite animal, and she replied “elephant, since they are matriarchal, mourn the loss of their own kind, and are vegetarian.” She scolded me for wearing my sunglasses all day long when my glasses were broken (it’d throw off my circadian rhythm). She asked me if I knew whether Paul McCartney’s new wife was vegetarian. (I didn’t.) She signed the e-mails all the same way, “Your eccentric aunt Marti.”

  One day in late October she wrote me that she had made a decision: No second round of chemo. She never wrote, “I have chosen to die,” but that’s what I read. I showed the e-mail to Julie, who read it holding my hand tight, her chin crinkling.

  I hated Marti’s decision, but understood it. Even if the second round of chemo succeeded, there was still only a 10 percent chance she’d survive five more years.

  She said she would give alternative therapies a try. And man, did Marti know from alternative therapies. She moved to Connecticut (nearer a holistic doctor) and juiced and supplemented with abandon. She bought a machine that gave her mild electric (and allegedly cancer-fighting) shocks. A friend of hers from California gave her “healing didgeridoo therapy,” where the vibrations of the ancient aboriginal instrument played over Marti’s body were supposed to help drive out the bad cells.

  To my surprise, her alternative therapy seemed to be working. Her white blood cell count dropped steeply. She was feeling stronger than ever, full of optimism and plans for future books about animal rights.

  I was all set to visit her on a Thursday in November, but cancelled at the last minute because I had a cold and didn’t want to infect her. She e-mailed me to try oregano and garlic. “Enemas would probably knock the cold out right away, but I suspect that you don’t want to go there.” She suspected right.

  The next day my father called again. Marti had fallen in the bathroom and hit her head. Within hours, she had died at the age of sixty-three.

  We took her ashes to the cemetery and buried them next to my grandfather’s still-unmarked grave. There was some concern that Marti would want to be out in nature, not under a toxin-filled cemetery lawn, so half of the ashes were spread near her sister’s house in Vermont.

  Over vegan tomato salad, my family told stories about Marti. About how she was the most compassionate person we knew, a lover of animals who made us say “soy cheese” when we took family photos until she decided the soy industry was corrupt, a woman so concerned with suffering she wouldn’t keep houseplants because she felt guilty about constraining the roots in a flower pot.

  It’s only been two weeks since she died, and I wish I could say I have gained profound wisdom from this absurdist plot turn.

  We don’t even know the basics, such as what caused the leukemia. It could have been inherited. Could have been environmental. Marti thought the latter—she believed that despite her toxin alertness, some poisons had seeped into her bone marrow.

  For the first week, I spent most of my time thinking about the cynical but compelling Jim Fixx argument. No matter what you do, no matter how often you exercise, or eat organic cauliflower, or wear helmets, you still could die tomorrow. Or today. Or right after you read this sentence. So why bother?

  But in the past few days, I’ve forced myself instead to embrace Marti’s optimism, even if it was delusional at times, especially at the end. This was a woman who was so optimistic she believed that we could change the world, stay healthy, and be kind to all animals (including humans, who she liked to remind me are animals, too). In the name of Marti’s optimism, I’ll keep eating my plant-heavy diet and continue walking on my treadmill desk, though probably I’ll pass on didgeridoo therapy and coffee enemas.

  Marti was one of my favorite people in the world, and I spill some raw almond milk in her honor.

  Appendix A

  Guerrilla Exercise

  How to turn the world into your gym

  Six Tips for Normal People

  1. Resist the siren song of the People Mover at airports.

  2. Squat down to the level of kids when you talk to them.

  3. Park in the farthest corner of the parking lot.

  4. Embrace stairs, avoid elevators.

  5. Fidget. Or, as scientists call it, engage in Incidental Physical Activity. Even tapping your leg can help cardiovascular fitness.

  6. If you are walking in New York, cross the street by walking through the subway station, forcing you to go down and up the stairs (bonus: no waiting for red lights).

  Seven Tips for the Obsessed

  1. Run errands. As in run them. If you’re running to any work appointments, I recommend keeping a stick of deodorant and a new shirt in your bag.

  2. Have meetings like you’re a character in The West Wing, walking and talking quickly through the office corridors.

  3. Have lunch while squatting.

  4. Adjust the TV by actually getting up and pressing buttons on the console.

  5. Wear a weight vest all day (be prepared for suicide-bomber jokes).

  6. Push the stroller and/or grocery shopping cart with the brakes on.

  7. Use your children as barbells.

  Appendix B

  How to Eat Less

  The art and science of portion control

  Four Tips for Regular People

  1. Get small plates. I use my sons’ Nemo and dinosaur plates.

  2. Practice Chewdaism. Hard-core chewers recommend as many as fifty chews per mouthful. I strive for fifteen or twenty.

  3. Turn off the TV. Studies show that we eat up to 71 percent more when we’re watching TV.

  4. Put the fork down in between bites

  Six Tips for the Obsessed

  1. Bring your own tiny fork wherever you go. Or better yet, chopsticks.

  2. Repackage your pantry food (e.g., cookies, dried fruit, candy) into small Ziploc bags, so a portion is barely larger than the dime bags that pot dealers used back in the innocent eighties.

  3. Write a hundred-dollar check to the KKK. Or any other equally noxious group. Then make a deal with yourself or your friend: If you eat another Ho Ho, you will have to send that check off.

  4. Look at yourself. Research shows we eat less when we eat in front of a mirror.

  5. Respect your elder. Digitally age a photo of yourself (you can try HourFace.com). Keep it in your wallet so that your remember to eat for your future self.

  6. Consume an apple, a bowl of soup with cayenne pepper, two glasses of water, and a handful of nuts. They have all been shown to suppress the appetite. Some more details below, starting with the one I found most effective, and ending with the one I found least effective.

  • Apple: A Penn State study showed that those who ate an apple fifteen minutes before lunch consumed 187 fewer calories than those who had applesauce.

  • Nuts: Or beans. Or pretty much any protein makes you feel full longer than carbs. Which is why I force eggs on my kids in the morning.

  • Water: A Virginia Tech study found that drinking two eight-ounce glasses of water before a meal helped obese people lose weight
.

  • Cayenne pepper: Spicy foods might help us lose weight, partly by curbing our urge for sugary, salty, and fatty foods. A Perdue University study showed cayenne pepper lowered appetite.

  • Soup: Another Penn State study recommended a small bowl of clear soup, such as bouillon, before the meal. The soup eaters consumed 134 fewer calories.

  Appendix C

  Five Tips on Treadmill Desks

  by Joe Stirt, M.D., anesthesiologist, blogger, and treadmill-desk pioneer

  1. Any working treadmill will do to get started—don’t use cost as an excuse. Go to Craigslist and find one for a hundred dollars or less. Sometimes people will give you theirs free if you ask, just to get rid of it. Make sure you turn it on and walk on it before you pay for it. If it can handle 2 mph without sparking or smoking, you’re money.

  2. Don’t be fooled by websites advertising treadmill desks for hundreds or thousands of dollars. You have most of what you need in your home and shouldn’t spend more than a hundred dollars (apart from the treadmill) to get a working setup that you can tweak and modify as you go along.

  3. The basic setup requires only a stack of crates, boxes, or furniture in front of your treadmill stable enough to support a computer screen and/or TV. Make the stack tall enough that the center of the screen is around eye level as you walk on the treadmill. If you’re forced to look down all the time, your neck and eyes will get tired and you’ll quit.

  4. Now you’ll want to lay a board across the treadmill handles for your keyboard. Use books atop the board to elevate the keyboard to where it’s comfortable to type on. The mouse or track pad goes on either side of the keyboard.

  5. Start at 0.7 mph. Yes, it’s absurdly slow. But you need to get used to a whole new way of working. Gradually increase your time on the treadmill, and increase your speed in 0.1 mph increments weekly to where you can work comfortably. I’ve been at 2.0 mph for years now, averaging three hours a day.

  Within one to two weeks you will start really liking your treadmill work space and likely realize you are feeling better and doing better work than when you were a desk slug. It only gets better. Not to mention that you’ll sleep better and lose weight if you stay with it. If you want more specialized tips or advice, e-mail me: bookofjoe@gmail.com.

  Appendix D

  My Five Foolproof (for Me, at Least) Methods of Stress Reduction

  1. Self-massage. The G-rated kind. I rub my shoulders, neck, and arms daily.

  2. Outsource your worry. Find someone to trade worries with you. Or you can try GetFriday.com, an outsourcing firm that will do almost anything legal.

  3. Meditate. My trick: I focus on the gently pulsating light on a MacBook in sleep mode, and try to breathe in sync with it. I’m sure Buddhist monks do the same.

  4. Get a dog or cat. A State University of New York–Buffalo study found that having pets present lowered stress during stressful tasks such as doing hard math problems or submerging the hand in ice water. Thankfully, my family and I are the occasional foster parents to Daisy, a very cute and drooly basset hound owned by our friends Candice and Ben.

  5. Put the serenity prayer to work. I’ve long known the prayer (God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change/Courage to change the things I can/And wisdom to know the difference). But this year, at the suggestion of several stress books, I wrote down all of my worries, and sorted them into Category A (things I can control) and Category B (things out of my control). My Category-B list was an astoundingly long one, ranging from fear of the super-volcano hiding underneath the surface of Wyoming, which may explode any day now and plunge planet Earth into an era of darkness, to the worry that my sons won’t find their soul mates, to the concern that the super-volcano might kill my sons’ soul mates.

  Appendix E

  The Ten Best Pieces of Food Advice I’ve Gotten All Year

  “Just eat a goddamn vegetable.”

  —The Onion newspaper

  In an enlightening 2011 article, The Onion quoted an FDA spokesman who said, “Just buy a bag of f*cking carrots and eat them the way you’d normally eat a hot dog. You stand in front of a cold fridge stuffing the hot dogs in your fat face, just do that with a carrot. It’s that simple.” Well said.

  “Don’t eat white stuff unless you want to get fatter.”

  —Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body

  I’m not opposed to all carbs, but white bread, white pasta, white tortillas? Ban them from your plate. And arguably potatoes as well. Ferriss—as well as more traditional experts like Walter Willett, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition—says to avoid potatoes. “The venerable baked potato increases blood sugar and insulin levels nearly as fast and as high as pure table sugar,” Willett writes in his book Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy.

  “Make it crunchy.”

  —Paul McGlothin, coauthor of The CR Way

  The junk food industry spends millions figuring out how to press our gustatory buttons. Their researchers use scary-sounding words like “bliss point” and “hedonics.” But why should they have all the fun? Why can’t healthy eaters steal their tricks? Like crunchiness. As billions of Cheetos prove, we love a crunchy food. McGlothin suggests adding sunflower seeds to salads and fish.

  “Shop the perimeter of the grocery store.”

  —Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University and author of What to Eat

  As Nestle has explained, “Supermarkets want customers to spend as much time as possible wandering the aisles because the more products they see, the more they buy. So it’s best to stay out of the maze of the center aisles, where all the junk foods are, and just shop the perimeter, where the healthier, fresh foods are.”

  She says to look down. Or up. Avoid the foods at eye level—along with anything sold at the cash registers and ends of aisles. They are generally the most high-profile, heavily-advertised packaged foods. In other words, junk.

  “If you are going to eat meat, make it a side dish.”

  —Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and founding flexitarian

  Jefferson wrote that he ate meat only “as condiment to the vegetables which constitute my principal diet.” Jefferson was also an early locavore, finding much of his food in his garden, which, according to the folks at Monticello “featured more than 250 varieties of herbs and vegetables, including those that others considered exotic or even possibly poisonous, such as the tomato.”

  “Create pause points.”

  —Brian Wansink, Ph.D., Cornell psychology professor and author of Mindless Eating

  Unless we are given a cue, we’ll just keep troweling food into our mouths. (Remember the experiment with the secretly refilled tomato soups?) This is why Wansink suggests creating “pause points,” visual cues that slow us down. Instead of eating “directly out of a package or box, put your snack in a separate dish and leave the box in the kitchen.” Or else, repackage treats into little plastic bags. Even distance can create a pause point. When you’re at your desk, make sure all food is out of reach. The thought of hoisting yourself out of the chair is a compelling pause point.

  “Protein and fats for breakfast”

  —Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat

  If I were to round up the people who caused the obesity epidemic, I’d start with nineteenth-century health guru John Harvey Kellogg. Along with his other questionable cures (e.g., yogurt enemas), Kellogg believed protein was the devil’s food. So he crusaded to have America’s traditional protein-heavy breakfast replaced with his cereals. Which is why millions of Americans eat bowls full of gut-expanding simple carbs every morning.

  Instead, Taubes and others advise, eat some protein. It will keep you satiated much longer and prevent your blood sugar from spiking. My own breakfast often includes the white of a hard-boiled egg and a handful of walnuts.

  “Eat your colors”

  —Michael Pollan, Food Rules

  Not to be confused with “taste the rainbow,” the off
icial slogan of the Skittles Diet. The idea is to eat vegetables of all different hues—red peppers, yellow tomatoes, green spinach—to ensure you’re getting a variety of antioxidants.

  “Buy a steamer.”

  —Ellen Jacobs, my mom

  Thank you, Mom. You saved me from consuming thousands of calories.

  “Don’t be so obsessed with healthy food that you end up sitting alone in the corner eating organic kale and silently judging your friends.”

  —Steven Bratman, M.D., coauthor of Health Food Junkies

  That’s a paraphrase, but the sentiment is from Bratman—the man who coined the term “orthorexia,” meaning an unhealthy obsession with healthy foods.

  Appendix F

  How to Live the Quiet Life

  Three Tips from Les Blomberg of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse

  • Buy electronic lawnmowers and hedge trimmers instead of gas-powered ones. Electric devices tend to be about half as loud.

  • I know it’s ironic, but throw a party for your neighbors. Become friendly with them. It’s hard to noise-pollute someone you care about.

  • For cooling your house: Central air is the quietest option (and Lenox is one of the quietest brands of central air). After that, try a “mini-split.” These ACs have two parts—one in the window, a noisier section out on the balcony.

  If you’ve got the sufficient levels of money and noisephobia, try buying two smaller window units, which are usually quieter than a big one (especially if you turn one off).