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

“Eating fruits and vegetables is vaguely logical. Get sleep. Don’t live in the most polluted parts of the world. Don’t smoke. Don’t do unsafe things like skiing and hang gliding, which are inconceivably more dangerous than eating ‘unhealthy’ foods. Exercise is pretty likely good for you. Don’t drink too much alcohol—one or two drinks a day. And that’s about it.”

In Bratman’s view, all the hype about antioxidants and glycemic indices is unproven. Nutrition science is barely more evidence-based than phrenology. Or as Bratman puts it, “hardly better than college bullshitting.”

This stance has not made him friends in the health food community. His website has a section devoted to reader hate mail. One of the milder samples: “Dr. Bratman, you are a moron. Please go to Mickey Dee’s and chow down on a few Big Macs and don’t call me in the morning. I guess Monsanto’s GMO products, high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, processed sugar and flour are great for us . . . Have a great day and don’t forget to supersize, you idiot.”

I don’t think Bratman is an idiot. Mind you, I don’t agree with him. His conclusions are far too radical for me. But I believe he provides an important cautionary voice. Because the more I learn, the more I realize we know a lot less about nutrition than the newspaper headlines would have you believe. Food is frustratingly complicated. It resists reductionism. Often, we’ll identify what we think is a secret healthy ingredient—carrots have beta carotene, which is why they prevent cancer. So we’ll give people beta-carotene supplements, only to find out it’s not so simple. Beta-carotene supplements increased the instances of lung cancer among smokers in a large study in Finland.

Your everyday carrot is filled with so many micronutrients, we don’t yet know how they interact with one another. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, likes to say, “Nutrition science, in my view, is sort of where surgery was in the year 1650. It’s interesting. . . . But would you really want them operating on you yet?” The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much.

Ben Goldacre—a British doctor, skeptic, and author of the book Bad Science—is even harsher. He talks about nutritionists’ lack of “intellectual horsepower” and their “crimes” against sensible dietary advice.

The problem is, it’s hard to conduct randomized placebo-controlled studies on humans and their diets. If you could lock ten thousand people in identical rooms for eighty years and feed half of them nothing but vegan food and feed the other half nothing but steak and eggs, and keep everything else the same, you could have some real data. But unless a Bond villain decides to pursue a doctorate in nutrition, that’s not going to happen.

Instead, much of our nutrition knowledge comes from two sources. First, animal studies. Which can be enlightening but don’t always translate to humans.

And second, epidemiological studies. I’m vastly oversimplifying here, but an epidemiological study is when scientists analyze statistics in a population to determine the cause of a disease. It’s a hugely useful tool. Epidemiology helped link tobacco and lung cancer, and cholera and dirty water. But it’s also got limitations, especially when it comes to something as complicated as food and drink. There are hundreds of confounding factors that can throw off the results.

Consider alcohol. The data show that drinking is healthy because moderate drinkers live longer than teetotalers. But what if it’s not the drinking but the social interaction that goes along with drinking? What if parties and sporting events are healthy, not vodka?

The science journalist Gary Taubes wrote a great New York Times Magazine story on the problem, and sums it up this way: We often confuse correlation and causation. To cite a famous example: Diabetes rates are much lower in areas where people own passports. Therefore, you might conclude that owning a passport prevents diabetes. Right? Wrong. It’s more likely that passport owners are wealthier, and wealthier people can afford healthier food.

These complexities make me feel both better and worse. Better because I now understand why nutrition headlines contradict each other every week. (Soy is the secret! Soy is poison!) It’s not always out of stupidity or conspiracy. Sometimes it’s just because it’s so darn complicated.

But it’s also dispiriting, because at least for now, there are no black-and-white answers.

The Battle for the Plate

That said, I can’t give up. I still want to figure out some basic guidelines on what to eat.

First, let me start with what almost everyone agrees on, not counting Bratman. Study after study suggests we should be eating more whole foods, not processed foods—broccoli instead of french fries. We’ve got way too much sugar in our diet. And to a lesser extent, too much salt. And, as I mentioned before, we eat too much damn food.

In other words, almost everyone agrees our nation’s typical fried and sugar-laden daily intake is a disaster. My aunt Marti calls it by the delightfully descriptive acronym SAD—Standard American Diet.

So there’s a lot we all agree on. But there’s also a lot of room for dispute. And man, is there dispute. The nutrition field resembles Congress. There are two warring tribes, and most everyone falls somewhere along the spectrum.

On the far left side, many advocate for the plant-based diet. On the far right, others argue for the low-carb, high-protein diet.

Currently, the advocates of the mostly plant diet have the majority. The holy text of radical plant fans is the bestselling 2005 book The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemistry professor at Cornell. It’s an impressive book based on a huge twenty-year study of 880 million people in China. The conclusion? Eating animal products causes a large number of health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, macular degeneration, bowel cancer, osteoporosis, and others. The healthiest diet is one with no animal products at all, no beef, no poultry, no eggs, no fish,