Drop Dead Healthy

It’s basically a modified Mediterranean diet, the diet that is perhaps supported by the most studies. I don’t mind the sameness. It’s my comfort food. But for the sake of health, I should probably mix it up more. Do something crazy, like substitute bulgur for quinoa.

And for the sake of self-experimentation, I should go to the extremes. I should road-test some of the diets I’ve been reading about. For the next few weeks, I pledge to sample the two poles of the nutrition world: the raw-food vegan diet and the Paleo-Atkins-type diet.

Raw Food

My aunt Marti is in town, and we meet at a vegan restaurant on the East Side called Candle 79. I’ve asked Marti to give me a personal Idiot’s Guide to raw foodism.

We sit down in the back corner. Marti doesn’t like the toxins emitted by the eponymous candles. She asks that the one on our table be removed.

“It’s not a real candle,” says the waitress. “It’s electric.”

“I’d still like it taken away—the electromagnetic pollution.”

With the candle gone, I ask Marti’s advice on going raw. “You’re going to have to get over your aversion to making your own food,” she tells me.

I need to get: a blender, a slicer, a spiralizer, a dehydrator, spirulina powder, blue-green algae crystals, and Himalayan or Celtic sea salt. I need a juicer, but not just any juicer—I need it with an auger gear, not a centrifuge, since the blades oxidize the food and lower its nutritional value.

Oh man. As I scribble my notes, I feel my book advance slowly slipping away.

My auger-geared juicer arrived a couple of days later. Within an hour I had baptized it in blood from my ring finger, which I accidentally sliced while fitting the parts together.

I took out my plastic bags of organic cucumbers, kale, carrots, beets, Swiss chard, and zucchini. I put the zucchini into the juicer and pushed down. Nothing. I pushed harder. A whirring and thumping as the juicer devoured the zucchini and drooled out a weak green stream on the other end. That’s right. I’m juicing!

After decimating several vegetables, I decide juicing is my favorite form of food preparation. There’s something perversely appealing about subjecting an innocent plant to that much violence. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to gutting a fish or field dressing a deer.

The juicing takes forty-five minutes, much of that time devoted to rinsing the myriad parts. As Marti warned, raw food is astoundingly time-consuming. You’d think not cooking would be a time-saver. You would be wrong.

And juicing is microwave-quick compared to another noncooking technique: dehydrating. My dehydrator was delivered the other day—an air conditioner–size black box with removable shelves. In raw food circles, you’re forbidden from using heat higher than 104°F because it supposedly destroys the living enzymes. So the dehydrator blows warm air on your food for hours, sometimes days. It reminds me of the temperature and intensity of dog’s breath. So imagine a German shepherd exhaling on your fruit for a weekend. I dried apples, oranges, carrots, strawberries, and blueberries into chewy leathery slices. Not bad, the family agreed. Dehydrating is glacial, but at least it’s hard to screw up.

After two weeks of juicing and dehydrating, here’s my assessment:

Positive: I feel lighter and cleaner. And I discovered that raw food, if prepared properly, can be tasty. I’ve spent hours 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. “Total abstention from refined carbs and sweets—losing your sweet tooth—may be ultimately easier than trying to eat them in moderation.” But Taubes has young kids, so that won’t be happening in his life. Nor mine.

Consider dried mangoes. My kids are allowed to eat a couple of slices after lunch. But I’m addicted to them as well, polishing off as many as twenty in a day.

Dried mangoes have the veneer of healthiness—which is why I originally chose them as our treat of choice. But really, they’re just Snickers that happen to grow on trees. Those mango slices are delivering sixty grams of sugar to my blood each day—the equivalent of fifteen teaspoons of white sugar.

My willpower is failing me here. I’ve tried several strategies to kick this mango habit. I put them as far away from eye level as possible, tucking them behind a tray on the top shelf. Guess what? I found them.

I repackaged the mango slices, dropping each of them in its own individual wallet-size plastic bag. The strategy worked for a while. I felt guilty about unzipping fifteen bags to have fifteen portions a day. But it became too time-consuming to prepare, not to mention plastic-bag-consuming.

Sometimes, before padding out to the kitchen, I’d look at the digitally aged picture of Old A.J. Should I do this to him? Well, I think he’d forgive me. I’ve found Old A.J. is better for motivating me to take action—go to the gym, hop on the treadmill, have a cucumber—than he is at stopping my vices.

The other day, though, I had a breakthrough. I listened to a segment on the great science show Radiolab about bad habits. It featured an interview with Thomas Schelling—the Nobel Prize–winning economist who came up with now-self-vs.-future-self concept of egonomics.

He talked about an antismoking strategy that sounded intriguing. Perhaps I could apply it to my sugar habit.

When Julie got home, I asked her for a favor.

“If I have another dried mango this month, I want you to donate a thousand dollars of my money to the American Nazi Party.”

“The Nazi Party? Why not Oxfam?”

“That’s not enough of a disincentive. I want something that will make me sick to my stomach.”

“Ah, right,” said Julie.

She quickly got into the spirit. She filled out a check to the Nazi Party, signed it, and wrote “Courtesy of A.J. Jacobs” in the memo space. She waved it in front of me. “Don’t eat any of those dried mangoes—as delicious they may be.”

This is what’s known as an “Odysseus Contract.” In the Odyssey, our crafty hero demanded that his sailors tie him to the mast so that he wouldn’t take a dive off the starboard side when he heard the alluring singing of the Sirens. You shouldn’t trust your future self. Prepare for his or her weaknesses.

Thank God for Odysseus. Because let me tell you: This strategy is one of the most effective I’ve ever encountered. I haven’t eaten a dried mango in two weeks.

I still open the cabinet, and see those slices, and get a few drops of Pavlovian saliva. But there’s no way I’m going to put one in my mouth. It’s like a switch has been flipped. I can’t even conceive of eating one. The repercussions are too horrible. I’m not going to pay for a bunch of new swastika flags and jackboot laces.

It’s as if I were dating a woman and discovered she was my long-lost sister. The thought of kissing her repulses.

It’s been two weeks, and I haven’t eaten a single slice. I’m a hero.

The no-sugar diet is ridiculously hard to sustain, and sustain it I won’t. But just two weeks of sugar fasting improved how I felt. I had more energy, fewer aches and pains, and better workouts. As always, the placebo effect shouldn’t be discounted. But I’ve become more antisugar as a result of this mini-experiment.

I’m a weak man, so after the two weeks were over, I started using a sugar substitute called stevia. Sugar haters say it’s a crutch, and may raise insulin resistance. But most believe that, as far as sugar substitutes go, stevia is the healthiest. You can buy stevia in leaf form, or as little packets of powder. It has a vanilla taste, so I’m enjoying some vanilla-infused steel-cut oatmeal, and broccoli puree that tastes a bit like ice cream.

In my final act of defiance against King Sugar, I decide to try to cut sweet talk from my language as well. I shouldn’t glorify sugar’s taste by calling Julie by my usual pet name, “sweetie.” Calling her “savory” didn’t sound so romantic, so I settled on “pumpkin,” even though it’s kind of starchy. She approved.

Checkup: Month 16

Weight: 157 (dropped to 154 when eating raw food)

Miles walked while writing this book: 1012 (broke the grand mark)

Meals this month with bok choy: 12

Meals with bok choy 1968–2009: 0

Most steps in a single day: 21,340 (walking to Tribeca, plus a lot of housecleaning)

This month, I joined my mom and dad for their respective workouts. Research shows that spending time with the family is healthy, assuming you don’t despise your family, which, thankfully, I don’t.

My mom took me to her Pilates studio, with its collection of machines made of leather, wood, and cables. They look as if they were jointly designed by Eric Roberts in Star 80 and Tomás de Torquemada. They have vaguely threatening names like “The Reformer.”

The workout itself wasn’t too scary, though. “We get to run while lying down,” my mom told me. I had to agree that’s a pretty good deal.

My dad’s workout was more traditional: treadmill trotting and strength training at a gym near his midtown office.

I never imagined I’d be working out with my parents. Mostly because, when I was growing up, my parents weren’t exercise enthusiasts. They emphasized intellect. My dad spent his free time reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica and writing law books. (He holds the record for the most footnotes in a law review article: 4,824.)

Athletics just weren’t high on the agenda. It’s only now, as they’ve gotten older, that they’ve started to exercise in earnest.

My childhood biases run deep, though. I often feel guilty that I’m spending so much time on my body. Shouldn’t I be busy improving my brain instead of my delts?