Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

is correlated to a conservative, more wary-of-foreigners worldview.

When I told one of my token conservative friends this theory, he said it sounded absurd. But, he added, at least it gave him license to call liberals dirty.

Checkup: Month 5

     Weight: 164

     Push-ups till exhaustion: 36

     Dollars spent at GNC on supplements that have iffy scientific support (e.g., açaí berry, resveratrol): $127

     Avocados consumed: 1.5 per day

The big breaking news for this month is: My gym sessions are altering my body. My chest has a little curve to it, like a very gentle slope on a putting green. When I went running the other day, I could feel my pecs bounce. This experience is new and curiously exhilarating.

I’m spending an embarrassing amount of time every night studying my torso in the mirror, trying to discern the progress. I have fantasies about running into Vlad the caveman and hearing him say, “I’m sorry for those comments about your chest. Boy, how wrong I was!”

I now understand why all these reality-show stars walk around with their shirts off. If you spend that much time sculpting your body, you want to display your work of art. Otherwise, it’s like keeping a Brancusi in the garage under a sheet.

I’ve started to notice other men’s bodies as well. I have biceps envy. I look for their veins in their arms and compare them to mine. Never before have I cared about having visible blood vessels.

Or maybe I did. Looking back, I don’t think I admitted to myself how much I’ve been self-conscious about my concave chest for years. I pretended not to care. I pretended I was above such concerns. But I also hated changing in the locker room, and would keep my T-shirt on at the beach.

My new hint of muscle makes me crave more. At the suggestion of my friend Tim Ferriss—author of The 4-Hour Body—I’m taking daily doses of the supplement creatine, an acid found in skeletal muscle.

At the same time, I’m aware that this obsession with size is ridiculous. There’s only a mild correlation between what we consider healthy looking, and being healthy—especially when it comes to muscle definition. Do the Okinawans in Japan—the longest-lived people on earth—have six-packs abs? I doubt it. Not in the pictures I’ve seen.

On the food front, I’m still working on my portion control. Before each meal, I say my 80 percent prayer (this is from the Japanese proverb that you should eat until you are only four-fifths full). I’m observing my chewdaism. I’m addicted to these diabolical dried mangoes, so, at the suggestion of social psychologist Sam Sommers from Tufts University, I’ve repackaged them into a bunch of tiny Ziploc bags—one mango slice per bag. It actually works. My mind thinks that it’s getting a full portion, even if the portion is one slice. My mind, in other words, is an idiot.

But despite my limited victories with portion control, I keep coming back to the fundamental question: What the heck should I put in those portions? What should I eat? Which of America’s ten thousand nutrition experts should I listen to? I pledge to make answering this question my next month’s mission.

Chapter 6

The Stomach, Revisited

The Quest for the Perfect Meal

A FEW DAYS AGO, I stumbled across what sounded like an interesting perspective: a Colorado-based doctor named Steven Bratman who has discovered what he calls a new eating disorder: “orthorexia nervosa.” He defines “orthorexia” as an unhealthy obsession with healthy foods.

The idea is that if you are unduly fixated on eating healthfully, you’ll stress yourself out—so much so that the damage from the stress outweighs any potential benefits of the good food. It’s an intriguing idea, so I e-mail Bratman to request an interview.

He agrees, responding that he has “a number of salty comments.”

Salty. Interesting choice. He even uses unhealthy foods as adjectives.

When I talk to him, Dr. Bratman is as full of sodium as promised. He says the obsession with healthy food is “stupid.” Its practitioners are filled with “hot air.” In the end, too much emphasis on your diet is harmful because “you don’t have balance in your life.”

Once upon a time, Bratman himself had a fetish for healthy food. Back in the seventies, he was an organic farmer and chef at a commune in upstate New York. He spent his days steaming tomatoes and arguing about whether aluminum pots were poisonous. He reached a breaking point when, he says, “a particularly enthusiastic visitor tried to convince me that slicing a vegetable would destroy its energy field.” In frustration, Bratman chased the guy away with a flat Chinese cleaver.

After his fall from health food grace, he coined the term “orthorexia.” The “ortho” part derives from the Greek for “correct,” and the “rexia” is from the word for “appetite.” Hence orthorexia, the mania for the correct diet. The condition hasn’t yet made it into The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychological illnesses. But it’s gained some fans among therapists and researchers. Bratman wrote a book about the condition called Health Food Junkies.

The symptoms include:

• When you stray from healthy food, you’re filled with guilt and self-loathing.

• You become socially isolated because it’s hard to eat at the same table as less conscientious friends.

• Healthy eating has become your replacement religion, making you feel virtuous. You regard omnivores with disgust.

In Bratman’s words, “a day filled with wheatgrass juice, tofu and quinoa biscuits may come to feel as holy as one spent serving the destitute and homeless.”

So according to Bratman, health food fetishism will hurt me. Perhaps. But even if it’s true, I need some basic instructions on what to eat to be the healthiest person alive. What does he recommend?

“Don’t get fat and get your vitamins.”

That’s it? That’s his health advice? I press him for more.

Bratman resists. The problem is, everyone wants secrets: Selenium will prevent bladder cancer, so eat Brazil nuts! Flavonoids prevent heart disease, so eat pineapple! But the science just isn’t there yet. He tells me all