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

it was a pre-obituary Q&A. They filmed him, gray-haired and still articulate, against a black background.

“How do you want to be remembered?” he is asked.

My grandfather laughs. “I don’t want to be remembered,” he says. “I want to stick around for a while longer.”

Chapter 22

The Nose

The Quest to Smell Better

IT’S BEEN TWO WEEKS SINCE the death of my grandfather, and I’m eating too many refined carbs. I’m barely exercising, feeling fatalistic. I keep going back to the Jim Fixx argument, that chestnut of defeatist reasoning: Whatever I do, I’m still going to die, so why waste all this time and energy? And it’s not like my grandfather consumed a strict diet of cruciferous vegetables. Why should I?

I’m bingeing. I’ll eat a handful of raisins, peanuts, and chocolate chips. Then a granola bar with twenty-four grams of sugar. And more of the trail mix. Then I have the bag in my face like a farm animal. I recently read a brilliant description of bingeing. The passage isn’t even about eating, but it was the best portrayal of a shame spiral I’ve ever come across. It is from Plato, and describes a man who walks by a heap of corpses. The man tries to look away, but then gives in and says to his eyes: “Look for yourselves, you evil wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight!”

That’s the way I feel about my stomach. It’s a separate beast. “Here, you evil bastard, have your Fig Newtons and shut up.”

I need to snap out of it. A few weeks ago, I’d set up an appointment at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. This is America’s biggest research facility devoted to studying human smell and taste. People are always telling me to “smell the flowers.” Maybe that’s what I need to do.

I take the train down to Monell on a cold Tuesday morning. It’s hard not to spot the center, thanks to the entryway’s giant bronze sculpture of a nose. It’s probably a good thing the same designer didn’t work on the Harvard Urology Center.

The eighty scientists at Monell believe that smell and taste are an underappreciated part of healthy living. It’s why I came.

Smell and taste have been tied to health for millennia. The earliest doctors diagnosed with their nose, as Esther Sternberg points out in Healing Spaces. The scent of sweet urine meant diabetes, for instance. And now that’s coming back into vogue thanks to a field called “olfactory diagnostics,” which analyzes some of the thousands of compounds we exhale in every breath.

It’s long been suspected that smell and taste influence mood and behavior. Florence Nightingale believed the scent of lavender relaxed her patients. In Civil War hospitals, she would anoint the foreheads of wounded soldiers with the floral fragrance. Unfortunately, until recently, there’s been little rigorous research on the topic. Instead, we’ve gotten the fuzzy-headed but well-meaning field of aromatherapy. Aromatherapy—the use of scented essential oils—isn’t bad, necessarily, especially if accompanied by a foot rub. But it’s about as scientific as numerology.

The Monell Center is out to fix that.

One of Monell’s scientists, an energetic woman with blue glasses named Leslie Stein, gives me a tour of the six-story building: microscopes, truck-size freezers, mazes for mice, a dozen white lab coats hanging in a row, scientists crunching data in their offices, skullcaps with electrodes, an Oscar the Grouch doll in the children’s testing room. Oddly, it’s not a smelly building. I could only detect one researcher’s microwaved moo shu chicken.

There’s a sense of adventure here. Smell isn’t nearly as well researched as any of the other senses. “I love it because it’s uncharted territory,” says Sweden-born researcher Johan Lundström. “Whenever I have an idea, I can design an experiment to see if it’s true, because chances are, no one’s done it before.”

Among the experiments Monell is conducting:

• Treating post-traumatic stress disorder, which can be triggered by odors such as the burning of explosives.

• Regrowing nerve cells. The nose’s nerve cells have the unusual ability to regenerate after thirty days. Can doctors cause this regrowth to occur outside the nose?

• My personal favorite: an experiment that showed men’s body odor has a calming effect on women. Which is a brilliant excuse not to shower. “Just trying to put you at ease, dear.”

During my day at Monell, I’m given a variety of tests. For one, a researcher named Chris puts on a blue surgical glove and waves a series of eighteen Magic Marker–size pens under my nose. I have to identify each pen’s odor from a list of four options.

Is pen number five leather, turpentine, or rubber? I shut my eyes and inhale. It smells like my dad’s loafers. Leather.

Another smells like honey. Then peppermint and anise.

The pens are convincing—enough so that I’m salivating, especially at the lemon ones. Pen number sixteen, on the other hand, is a repulsive fish smell that makes me jerk my head back.

I move on to taste, with a psychologist named Danielle Reed. I swig three dozen tiny vials of clear fluid, each one a different cocktail of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. The last is the oft-overlooked fifth basic flavor, sometimes called savory. It’s a meaty taste found in shiitake mushrooms and fermented fish.

Dr. Reed flips through the six-page answer sheet, studying my scrawled responses and the words I’ve circled from such lists as “soap, musk, urine, milk, and vanilla.”

“Well,” says Dr. Reed, looking up from my test. “You’re our worst subject ever.”

I chuckle. A wry sense of humor, these scientists. She is straight-faced.

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

Apparently, I made some embarrassing mistakes. I confused sour for umami and semisweet for very sweet. I mixed up lemon and orange. I was their worst subject out of dozens who have taken the test over the years.

This is disconcerting. I never thought of myself as a gourmand, but to have the least discerning tongue in America—or at least of those tongues tested? Especially after I thought my discernment had improved, thanks to my cutting back