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

on raw food websites downloading recipes (and studying raw food humor: “You know you are a raw vegan when your pots and pans are the new fruit baskets). The avocado-and-mango salad? Zesty goodness.

Negative: I am hungry all the time, and I started to look gaunt. “What’s with the manorexic look?” my friend asked. By the end, I’d lost three pounds. (So, if weight loss is your goal, and you have impressive self-control, raw food is something to consider.) In other news, it made me feel light-headed and spacey. Also, since you asked, it was the most flatulent two weeks of my life. I was tempted to call Dr. Gottesman for some surgery.

Marti will kill me for saying so, but the mainstream scientific evidence for the raw food diet isn’t overly strong. There’s lots of evidence in favor of a plant-based diet, but the notion that uncooked plants are healthier than cooked plants remains unproven. If done properly, with enough protein and B12 supplements, raw foodism is certainly better than the Standard American Diet. (Then again, eating nothing but asbestos sandwiches is probably better than the Standard American Diet.)

The War on Carbs

On the other side of the spectrum we find the low-carb, high-protein diets, such as the Atkins and the Paleo regimes. Before embarking on one, I asked John Durant—the reasonable caveman from the wilderness workout—if he’d answer my questions. He suggested we meet at a Korean barbecue restaurant in midtown.

At a Korean barbecue, in case you’ve never been, you get to cook your own food over a Frisbee-size grill in the middle of your table. Fire and meat. It’s all quite Stone Age, except for the waiters, sparkling water, and gender-separated bathrooms.

Durant is a good-looking caveman, with long hair he sometimes ties in a ponytail and a tidily trimmed beard. Durant works at an Internet start-up, a job he will later quit to become, as he put it, a “professional caveman,” and devote his time to writing a book.

He appeared on The Colbert Report, where he joked that his ideal girlfriend would have celiac disease and be unable to eat grains. Several women with grain allergies e-mailed him after the show.

The waiter approaches. Durant orders some cow intestine. I go with the fish and vegetables.

I ask him if he ever eats raw meat, like Vlad does.

“I eat raw meat in socially acceptable ways,” Durant says. “There are a surprising number of ways—sushi, sashimi, steak tartare.”

At home, Durant has a waist-high refrigerated meat locker that holds deer ribs, beef, and organ meats. But that’s only part of his diet.

“There’s a misconception that we only eat meat off rib bones. We eat a lot of vegetables and eggs and some nuts.” The idea is to avoid dairy, grass seeds, potatoes, and grain, which were developed only in the last ten thousand years.

How does the Paleo diet make him feel?

“Much better. My complexion is better. I don’t get mood spikes like I used to. I’ve lost twenty to twenty-five pounds.”

The Paleo diet made me feel amazingly full. Protein and fats are the most satiating types of food. This why the low-carb diets can be so effective when it comes to weight loss—your body produces less insulin, which often translates to dampened hunger.

I must confess, Durant might not have approved of some of my choices. The first night, I tried veal, but it was like a drone strike in my stomach. Plus, my aunt Marti’s decades-long campaign instills guilt in me when I eat mammals. I switched my protein intake to eggs, fish, and nuts. Still, I noticed a jump in energy, much less of my usual afternoon lethargy.

As with raw food, the evidence for the Paleo diet is still inconclusive. It probably helps you lose weight if you’re obese, as do most carb-restricting diets. But it’s not clear what effect the diet has on heart disease. We also don’t know if this is actually the diet that our ancestors ate. Paleo skeptics—such as Marion Nestle—argue that plants from prehistoric kitchens wouldn’t leave fossils.

The Not So Dolce Vita

I conduct one other dietary experiment: living a sugar-free life.

Sugar has never been a favorite of dieticians, parents, or dentists. But now its reputation is in a steep descent, challenging tobacco as Public Health Enemy number one. The sugar-is-toxic movement has taken wing thanks to two convincing publicizers, Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at UCSF, and Gary Taubes, the science writer. The argument is that sugar in any form—white table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, fruit juice—isn’t just empty calories. Sugar ravages your liver and pancreas, and makes cells resistant to insulin, which leads to diabetes and obesity.

There are plenty of sugar defenders out there. Sugar is fine in moderation, they say. One doctor, David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center, points out that sugar is the hummingbird’s sole source of energy: “How evil can hummingbird fuel be?”

Pretty evil, the hard-core sugar haters say. They advise avoiding fruit high on the sweetness scale (pineapple and watermelon, for instance), and even suggest drinking low-sugar wine like Sauvignon Blanc instead of Chardonnay. They point out studies that show that sugar is addictive. It has the same effect on the brain as cocaine.

My favorite depressing fact is that just thinking about sugar might be bad for you. Taubes writes that the sweet thoughts trigger a Pavlovian response that includes saliva, gastric juices, and, most unhealthily, the release of insulin. So to be truly healthy, I should refuse to watch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory with my kids.

As always in nutrition, the sugar debate is a big old murky mess of evidence. But I do think there’s a good chance that sugar is a lot worse than we’ve long thought. So I’m going to give it up for at least two weeks. No juices, no granola, nothing with the dreaded suffix “ose.”

This self-imposed Lent will be hard. When I talk to Taubes, he suggests the out-of-sight-out-of-mind strategy is probably best. Remove all sweets from the house.