Of the last few weeks, no item has been more neglected than The Fast Food Critic, and for that I’m sorry. Especially since there has been plenty of recent developments in the food/health industries lately. Not least of which is the publication of A.J. Jacobs’s new book “Drop Dead Healthy.”
Some might remember A.J. Jacobs from his previous non-fiction experiments in reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (may it rest in peace), and trying to follow every commandment, code, and minor ritual in both the Old Testament and New Testament. Well, I recently got to attend a lecture/book signing he gave on his latest book “Drop Dead Healthy.” As he put it “I’ve taken on the mind, soul, and now I’m going after the body.”
The premise of the book is that he tried to follow every health craze for a year of his life and see what worked and what didn’t. Basically meaning that he was willing to try anything once in the pursuit of physical fitness, no matter how difficult (he admits he struggled to remember all of the various exercises like his hand strengthening techniques) or ridiculous (he had a funny bit about trying on this pressurized workout suit that was expensive but useless).
Here are some of the observations I found helpful…
1. “Sitting is Death.” That may sound dramatic, but sitting down for extended periods of time is really bad for your heart. Not saying you’ll die if you sit down to use the bathroom, but prolonged hours of sitting (when you’re awake) really are bad for the heart and take years off your life. Try to move around at least ten minutes of every hour you’re sitting down, if at all possible. And Jacobs even recommends using what’s called a “Standing desk” if you’re in a job that will let you. [He says he wrote the book on a treadmill equipped with his laptop, showing he’s perhaps the first “method writer” out there.]
2. “Refined sugars/carbs are THE obesity epidemic.” Perhaps point one should have been “Sugar is death.” A.J. doesn’t say exactly that but I’m willing to say it for him. The increase in refined sugars/carbs (which are harder for our bodies to burn) being added to almost everything we eat—-once the food regulators made food companies take out excess fat, they compensated for it by adding sugar to everything—-is what’s at the heart of the obesity epidemic in this country. He recommends diets that are higher in protein than carbs, and as low sugar as is humanly possible, with the exception of natural sugars found in healthy foods such as fruits.
3. “Take a Picture of Your Future Self to Motivate You.” He recommends taking a picture of your future self—-and there are apps that will digitally age a picture of you or you could do it at home with a little makeup and imagination—-and putting it on your desk or in your wallet to remind you of your future self because the two are at odds. As he explains it “Current you wants to sit on the couch today and eat a lot of ice cream, future self doesn’t want you to do that because he wants to be alive.” Thinking of the choices you make today keeping you from being alive when you’re 70 is a great way to NOT make them. I try to do this every time I walk past the ice cream aisle extra slow. The end goal for any diet/health decisions has to be life extension, and it’s important to frame it that way every time you think “I’ll eat as much as I want today and burn it off tomorrow,” because eating right today insures there will be a tomorrow.
Things I found less than helpful…
Okay, so as with any non-fiction book loaded with information and tips (there are stats on nearly every page, the dude has a lot of data in this book), there are a couple of things I disagree with. Not to be a nitpicky prick but…
1. “Coffee is good for you.” Coffee is NOT good for you. People today mistakenly think it helps reduce your chance of Alzheimer’s but there is almost no definitive research conclusively saying that. For all we know, there will be a study done in twenty years suggesting it increases your chances of Parkinson’s. I’m not saying coffee is the worst thing you could be drinking (we’ll get to that in the next point), but it’s definitely not health food. And I’m afraid people who are already addicted—-as a general rule, no food you crave during a stressful day is good for you—-will read that and say “YES!!!!!” because it validates something they want to hear. Speaking of…
2. “Alcohol is good for you.” WRONG. This could not be more wrong. Nothing drives me crazier than when people who know that cheeseburgers, milk shakes, and sodas are bad for them are basically alcoholics. They think the tiny amount of resveratrol found in a glass of red wine will make up for the debilitating effects alcohol has on their organs. “I glass of red wine a day lowers your risk of heart attack,” NOT if you don’t have a liver because you’ve damaged yours. To get the same benefits of a glass of red wine (and by the way, no one ever claims anything besides red wine is good for you, so sorry tequila/vodka/beer enthusiasts), you could take a capsule of resveratrol or eat twenty grapes and have none of the negative effects.
But those are just two pieces of bad information in a book that’s loaded with fairly good information. I just think it’s helpful to point those out because, as A.J. himself says, “people tend to cling to the answers they want. Someone will do twenty studies saying bacon is terrible for them, but a bacon lover gravitates toward the one study that says what he wants to hear.” So true (every irresponsible corporation has funded studies that say sugar/cigarettes/a new prescription drug isn’t that bad for you), and all the more reason to not let any substance slide.
Yeah Red wine :)
I agree that TOO much of anything is not good.