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

myopic. I have abnormally low hematocrit, which means the percentage of red blood cells is depressed, which could explain my fatigue. I have a heart murmur and elevated liver enzymes.

Far from perfect, but not terrible. Overall, I should be grateful I don’t have any debilitating diseases. Just the usual American sloth-related maladies.

Though I should mention this was just the first test. In the coming months, I will submit myself to dozens of additional exams and find out an alarming number of other things wrong with me. Among them: sleep apnea, depleted iron, deviated septum, collapsed nostril, precancerous skin growths, and, particularly embarrassing for someone who works at a men’s magazine: low testosterone. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As my start date approached, I realized just how overwhelming being maximally healthy is. It will consume my every waking hour, and my sleeping ones, too.

I need some structure. Taking a cue from the digestive system, I’ve decided to break my project down into smaller, bite-size chunks. I will improve my body one part at a time. I will attempt to have the healthiest heart and the healthiest brain. But also the healthiest skin, ears, nose, feet, hands, glands, genitals, and lungs.

I know all the body parts are all linked on some level. But I want to lavish some individual attention on each.

And where to start? Since diet is such a huge part of health, I’ve chosen the stomach as my jumping-off point. The first part will be about what to put in my Buddha-like belly.

Chapter 1

The Stomach

The Quest to Eat Right

I’VE MADE A LIST of more than a hundred diets. The Mediterranean diet. The USDA diet. The Michael Pollan eat-what-your-grandparents-ate diet. The Blood-type diet. The Paleo diet. The Okinawa diet. Veganism. Raw foodism. Not to mention the more outré ones, like The Cookie Diet. The Rastafarian diet. The Master-Cleanse diet.

I want to try them all. Well, maybe not The Taco Bell Drive-Thru Diet (it exists). But most of the others. Eventually, that is. The thing is, studies show that if you switch habits too rapidly, the changes don’t stick. So my plan is to wade into my new diets slowly, like my five-year-old son entering a chilly pool.

Which is how I’ve decided on my first dietary reforms: more chocolate, booze, and coffee.

“Salud,” I say to Julie as I pour a cup of Starbucks Gold Coast on my first morning.

That night, our friends Paul and Lisa—who are visiting New York from D.C.—come over for an informal Thai dinner. Before the meal, as we wait for the delivery guy, I hand out glasses of Pinot Noir, and dig out a Toblerone bar from the fridge.

“So when does your health thing start?” Paul asks.

“It started today,” I say, breaking off a triangular chunk.

Paul gives me a questioning look.

“He also had two cups of coffee this morning,” says Julie. “That’s his new health plan: chocolate, coffee, and wine.”

“All very good for you,” I say.

“Huh. Sounds like you’re really committing yourself to this project,” says Paul.

“How about heroin?” asks Lisa. “I hear that it’s loaded with antioxidants.”

Everyone has a good laugh.

Clever. But Paul and Lisa have to acknowledge, science is on my side. Consider:

• As the Mars Corporation gleefully and regularly points out, dark chocolate is, in fact, loaded with antioxidants and has been shown to cut the risk of heart disease and stroke. It also might be good for the eyes: According to at least one study, chocolate improves contrast sensitivity.

• A bunch of studies has shown that alcohol is good for your heart in judicious amounts (one glass per day for women, one to two for men) and that moderate drinkers live longer than both teetotalers and heavy drinkers. That includes drinkers of beer or liquor, not just the highly trumpeted red wine, though red wine does contain the much beloved resveratrol, which might have age-resistant effects.

• Coffee lowers the odds of several types of cancer (bladder, breast, prostate, and liver) as well as Alzheimer’s. It has some downsides (more than two cups can cause sleeplessness and raise cholesterol), and isn’t quite as healthy as its cousin green tea, but drunk in moderation, coffee’s benefits outweigh the risks.

Sadly, I do understand my Vice Diet won’t lead me to everlasting health. Chocolate, alcohol, and coffee are outliers. In general, food that tastes good is bad for the body. As Jack LaLanne liked to say: “If it tastes good, spit it out.”

Which is a bizarre situation. Evolution has betrayed us here. The human body—as miraculous as it can be—is in many ways a malfunctioning machine, a biological version of a 1978 Ford Pinto.

If evolution worked perfectly, healthy food would taste delicious and unhealthy food would make us gag. On Halloween, kids would fill their pails with quinoa and cauliflower. Dairy Queen would sell millions of bok choy Blizzards.

The problem is, we live in a modern world, but we’re stuck with caveman taste buds. When our ancestors roamed the plains, our preferences actually did make sense: Our tastes aligned with healthy foods. We evolved to like sugar because it’s in fruit. And fruit—which is rare in the wild—is high in nutrients, fiber, and calories. We evolved to like salt because the body needs salt to retain water. Salt—also rare in the wild—was an occasional lifesaving treat.

But then we figured out how to extract sugar from plants and put it in pastries and Frappuccinos. We mined salt and stuck it in our soups and burritos and neon-orange cheese snacks. And in large quantities, sugar and salt are not so good for you at all.

We also started to live longer. We cured a lot of infectious diseases, but this presented a new problem. Foods that were healthy in the short run—like those loaded with fat to allow the caveman to survive the famine until the next kill—turned out to be damaging in the long run.

My question is, can I reprogram myself to love healthy food? And can I figure out how to prepare and buy