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

“I understand,” I replied solemnly. I pledged to join a gym, and at the time, I meant it. But inertia is a powerful force.

So I did nothing. I continued eating food packed with empty calories—lots of pasta and corn-syrupy cereal. There was a notable lack of anything green at my meals, not counting bottles of Rolling Rock. My exercise regimen was just as bad. I hadn’t done serious aerobic exercise since college. I got winded playing hide-and-seek with my sons.

And then I found myself in the hospital gasping for air. And so, right about when the nurse came into my room bearing a pill the size of my middle toe, I made a pledge: If I make it out alive, my next project will be about revamping my body.

I say “next project” because this book isn’t my first foray into radical self-improvement. Over the last decade, I’ve had a bit of a fixation. Studies show it’s healthy to have a purpose in life, and mine has been a relentless, well-intentioned if often misguided quest for perfection. Project Health will be the third leg of a triathlon devoted to upgrading my mind, my spirit, and my body.

Some quick context: The mind was first. After college, away from research papers and seminars, I worried my brain was slowly turning to the consistency of Greek yogurt (which is on my list of foods to eat, incidentally). I could feel my IQ gently ebbing away. So I came up with a fix: I pledged to read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and learn everything I could. It was an extreme measure, sure, but not without family precedent. I got the idea for this quest from my father, who had started to read our Britannica set when I was a kid but only made it up to the letter B, around “Borneo” or “boomerang.” I wanted to finish what he began and remove that black mark from our family history.

The alphabetical journey—which I chronicled in my first book—was painful at times. Including for those around me (my wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation). And frankly, I’ve forgotten 98 percent of what I’d learned. But it was also an amazing experience. Uplifting, even. After eighteen months of reading about the sweep of history, I emerged with more faith in humanity. I read about all the unfathomably evil things we’ve done, but also all the mind-boggling good ones (the art, the medicine, the flying buttresses of Gothic cathedrals). On balance, it seemed the good outweighed the bad, if only by a sliver.

Having checked off the mind, I was inspired enough to work on my spirit. I chose this next because I grew up without any religion or spirituality at all. As I wrote in a book about this project, I’m Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. Not very. But my wife had just given birth to our first son, and we were grappling with what to teach him about our heritage. So I decided to learn the Bible inside out—by living it.

I chose to follow all of the Good Book’s hundreds of rules. I wanted to obey the famous decrees, like “love thy neighbor” and the Ten Commandments. But I also wanted to pay attention to the often ignored, lesser-known rules, such as “don’t shave your beard” and “don’t wear clothes of mixed fibers.” I wanted to see which would improve my life and which were not so relevant to twenty-first-century America.

It was another experience that was simultaneously profound and absurd, manufactured and life-changing. When the year ended, I shaved my Ted Kaczynski–like facial hair and started wearing poly-cotton blends again, but I’ve kept much from my biblical life. I try to observe the Sabbath, for instance, and to be grateful, and to avoid gossiping. “Try” is the key word here, especially on the gossip one.

Which brings me to the final quest, the last leg of the bar stool: Remake my body.

As with my other adventures, this one is fueled, in good part, by ignorance. I know astoundingly little about my own body. I know the small intestine comes before the large intestine. I know the heart is the size of two fists and that it has four chambers. But the Krebs cycle? The thymus? Presumably I read about them in the encyclopedia, but they are not in the 2 percent I retained.

And even more to the point, I don’t know what to eat or drink or the best way to exercise. It’s a bizarre situation. It’s like owning a house for forty-one years and being unaware of the most basic information, such as how to work the kitchen sink. Or where to find the kitchen sink. Or what this so-called kitchen is all about.

I see this project as a crash course in my own body. I’ll be a student of the strange land inside my skin. I’ll try out diets and exercise regimens. I’ll test drugs and supplements and tight-fitting clothes. I’ll experiment with the most extreme health advice, because, as I learned in my year of living biblically, only by exploring the limits can you find the perfect middle ground.

At the end of the project, I probably won’t keep up all my healthy behaviors, but I’ll keep a bunch. I’ll find the ones that work best. And that, I hope, will keep me alive long enough to teach my kids how to be healthy.

The Warm-up

As with any physical endeavor, you need to warm up. You can’t just start doing squats and eating kale without knowing what’s what.

First thing I did was to assemble a board of medical advisers. I don’t have an M.D. After my name, but—through luck and persistence—I do have access to the best health minds in the country. It’s a somewhat ad hoc group, but varied and esteemed and far more knowledgeable than I.

I’ll be getting advice from Harvard professors and Johns Hopkins researchers, from