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

• A cocktail shrimp fork, since that will make me eat more slowly than if I had a big fork. (The more slowly we eat, the less total food we stuff in. This is because the body, God bless it, is dumb and slow. It takes twenty minutes for the “I’m full” message to go from the stomach to the brain.)

• A small makeup mirror propped up by my place mat. (Studies show you eat less if you watch yourself doing it.)

Tonight’s dinner is whole-wheat pasta with tomato sauce and carrots. I’ve plated my food in the kitchen so as not to have extra on the table, tempting me.

We’re not a religious family. We don’t say grace. But I want my kids to realize the food didn’t spontaneously generate on their plates.

“Should we talk about where this food comes from?” I ask.

“The grocery store,” says Jasper.

“Well, yes. But even before that, someone had to grow the tomatoes. And someone had to pick them. Someone else had to put them in a box, and someone had to drive them in a truck. So we should appreciate how much it takes to get food on the table.”

My sons pause.

“And after we eat it, it will go in the toilet,” Jasper says.

For the five-and-under set, this is a bon mot worthy of George S. Kaufman. They are off and laughing.

“And after it’s in the toilet, it goes into the ocean,” adds Zane.

I’m still amazed at my sons’ ability to convert any topic—not just food, but airplanes, LEGOs, Australia—into scatology. I guess it’s better than nothing. Food mindfulness doesn’t have to stop in the stomach.

I take a bite and chew. And chew some more. I’ve been reading these pro-chewing websites on the Internet. It’s a surprisingly passionate movement. One member calls it “chewdaism.” They quote Gandhi (“chew your drink and drink your food”) and pro-chewing poems (“nature will castigate those who don’t masticate”). They sell chewing aids, such as a CD that chimes every minute, directing you to swallow. They revere the grandfather of the pro-chewing movement, a nineteenth-century health guru named Horace Fletcher, who counted John D. Rockefeller and Kafka among his followers. They say chewing will cure stomachaches, improve energy, clear the mind, cut down on gas, and strengthen the bones.

Those claims are overblown. But chewing does offer two advantages: You can wring more nutrition out of your food. And more important, chewing makes you thinner, as it forces you to eat more slowly.

Julie wants to ask me something, but I keep my finger in the hold-that-thought position. I chew thirty times, until my noodles are so liquid they slide down my throat.

After fifteen minutes, the kids have abandoned the table. Julie is in the other room checking her e-mail. But I’m still here, alone, chewing my food and watching myself in the mirror. Slow food and children under six—that’s a tricky combination. Something to work on.

Eating for Longevity

Maybe I’ll have better luck with a meal with my grandfather. He’s ninety-four, so I figure perhaps he’s got more patience. And better yet, I can learn a thing or two from him about longevity.

He lives in a small apartment on Sixty-first Street, where I have visited him every couple of weeks for the last ten years. I open the door, and find him in front of his huge computer screen, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, tapping out an e-mail. The font size looks to be seventy-two, about two characters per page. But the point is, he’s approaching the century mark and still typing e-mails.

He gives me his usual raised-fist salutation. “Give me one second to finish this up,” he says.

My grandfather is a remarkable man. His name is Theodore Kheel, and he has the relentless energy and hearty build of Theodore Roosevelt, for whom he was named. If I want to feel insecure, I need only think about his CV.

His job was a lawyer. But that doesn’t begin to describe his range. He worked as a labor mediator, helping to resolve hundreds of strikes—transit workers, bakers, conductors, you name it. He supported the civil rights movement and threw fund-raisers for Martin Luther King, Jr. He owned a midget-pony dealership. Well, that last one didn’t work out so well.

But the point is, he continues to be involved in an absurd number of projects. He promotes education in rural areas via computerized lectures. He’s investing in an eco-friendly hotel in the Caribbean. He encourages sustainable cuisine and fights overpopulation (though he did have six kids before he converted to that cause).

Naturally, in the last couple of years, he’s slowed down. But not totally. At age ninety-two, he started a campaign to make the New York subways and buses free, arguing in op-eds that it would ease traffic congestion.

He is not going gentle. And that’s no doubt one of the secrets to his longevity. The MacArthur Study of Successful Aging—a respected eight-year-long study of more than one thousand New Englanders—concluded that one of the keys is to stay active, connected, involved, and cognitively challenged. You can retire, but you must find something you’re passionate about in your retirement. You need some reason to wake up in the morning.

My grandfather shuffles over to join me at the table. He’s stooped over, but he still has a full head of hair. His eyebrows are thick, shaped like arrows that point to the ceiling.

We eat our meal unhurriedly. I’ve brought my shrimp cocktail fork, which I use to spear a salad. Usually, when he’s finished with lunch, my grandfather smacks his hand on the table. But we’ve been chatting and dining for an hour, and so far there’s no hand-smacking. We would make those slow-food Europeans proud.

We talk about mass transit and the legacy of highway booster Robert Moses (my grandfather is not a fan). We discuss the movie he watched last night: one of his all-time favorites, Inherit the Wind, based on the life