The Man Who Ate Everything (17 page)

And then suddenly I thought, in a flash of blinding insight: Wait just one minute! Is this what I have been reduced to? What
in the world am I doing, standing in my own kitchen, mixing up packets of microwavable, artificial Tex-Mex convenience food? Is this what being a strict vegetarian boils down to? And in large part, I’m afraid the answer is yes. Only as a vegan would I have been able to stomach more than 30 percent of what I have eaten over the past month. It was then that I decided to let my cholesterol test determine whether I would remain a vegetarian for another month.

I have come to the conclusion that Mother Nature never wanted us to become strict and unyielding vegetarians. There is nothing natural about it at all. Visit any vegan, and you will find his cabinet of vitamin supplements at least as well stocked as his larder. The truth is that humans were designed to be omnivores, complete with all-purpose dentition and digestive systems. Vegetarianism is not our natural diet. Anthropologists know that for most of the past million years of our evolution, humans have
eaten meat, especially fish and low-fat wild game. The only source of plant protein that does not require cooking to become digestible is, I think, nuts. But cooking was invented only fifty thousand years ago, long after most of our physiology and genetic structure had evolved. I cannot think of a traditional, nonindustrial culture (we used to call them primitive cultures) that practices vegetarianism if it can help it. Vegetarianism is always the product of scarcity, of religion, or of ideology, including nutritional fads and fashions.

The environmental arguments against meat are strong, but they apply mainly to factory farming—vast numbers of animals kept in close confinement, fed with grain and water hauled from long distances and producing more waste than we can possibly use as fertilizer or fuel. I have read that more than half of America’s water consumption goes to raising beef and that twenty pure vegetarians like me can be fed on the same amount of land needed to feed one meat eater. Meat has been called a petroleum by-product: you can grow forty pounds of soybeans with the amount of oil consumed in producing a pound of beef.

But unless you insist that we must all eat in the most economical manner possible—though few of us dress in the cheapest way or live in the smallest possible space—these are arguments not for avoiding all meat but for eating less meat and raising it in a sustainable way. Universal vegetarianism would not be an unmixed blessing for the environment. Ecological nutritionist Joan Gussow explained to me that for millennia livestock has been indispensable for its magical ability to convert agricultural waste, failed crops, and the vegetation on unfarmable land into high-quality protein. And without grazing animals, it would be difficult to practice environmentally sound crop rotation. Cutting your meat consumption by 50 or 75 percent makes more environmental sense than becoming a vegan like me.

As you can see, I was furiously preparing myself for the switch back to meat. Everything depended on the cholesterol test. And then my doctor called with the results. I don’t know
whether to be happy or sad, but my serum cholesterol is, if anything, slightly higher than when I started. Even with a near-zero intake of saturated fat, my cholesterol has not budged. For better or worse, my ultimate fate does not seem to depend on my diet. Tonight I will eat a lobster.

Familiarity Breeds …

An automatic demerit goes to the waiter or waitress who unfurls your napkin and flattens it onto your lap. This is a pretentious and unsanitary practice. He or she has been handling dirty plates, linens, and money for the past hour; now she touches the snowy cloth that will later brush my lips. I keep a very short list of people who are allowed to touch my lap, and an even shorter list of people who are allowed to touch my wife’s. A waiter or even a waitress to whom I have never been introduced is extremely unlikely to have made it onto either.

June 1993

Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.

—
FIELD MARSHAL HERMANN GORING, 1936

The twentieth-century ideal of the dominant, successful, and emaciated man or woman is nearly irresistible. Even I succumbed to emaciation fifteen years ago. For one entire day in 1976, I weighed 116 pounds. This was the culmination of a yearlong diet composed mainly of low-fat cottage cheese and single-malt Scotch whiskey, plus nine hundred packs of cigarettes and a daily vitamin pill. I hit upon this happy combination all on my own, and it is the only diet that has ever worked for me. Having followed a potentially destructive course of conduct that left me thirty pounds underweight, I was inundated with accolades and marriage proposals.

Since then, the fat man inside me has had no trouble getting out. I’ve gradually passed from svelte through statistically normal, then on to adorably chubby, and finally well past that point, arriving at thirty pounds on the far side of average. Another ten
pounds and I will be legally obese. All it took was a steady gain of four pounds a year, which works out to no more than forty excess calories a day—an extra pat of butter or an Oreo. Yet somehow I doubt that I would still be skinny if I had turned down just one mouthful of food every day for fifteen years. How could I have known when I had eaten precisely enough? Which mouthfuls should I have avoided?

Most animals don’t even have to think about it. If they stuff themselves on Monday, they will automatically hold back on Tuesday. Even when some scientist forces them to overdo for several weeks in a row, they will naturally trim their appetites for the next few weeks and slim down to normal. Many humans are like laboratory animals. When they’ve stored a little excess fat or lost too much of it, a gentle biological buzzer goes off in their brains (probably in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus), and their appetite adjusts. If you give them a snack before dinner, they will eat less later. For people like me, undereating triggers the urge to make up for what we have missed, but overeating simply whets our appetite for the joys to come.

In our defense, I should mention that modern science has shown chubby people to be more discriminating and discerning than our skinny neighbors, at least at the dinner table. If you take away their food for twenty-four hours, skinny people will breathlessly devour whatever you put in front of them. We, in contrast, will still pick and choose, eating only food we normally enjoy and rejecting what we normally find distasteful. One reason for this is that chubby eaters are rarely truly hungry. We simply have abnormally generous appetites. But let’s leave the distinction between hunger and appetite until later.

Obesity is partly—maybe largely—a genetic condition. Australian research has found you can predict whether a male adolescent will become overweight by learning whether his father is. Any diet doctor can tell you about patients who weigh seventy-five pounds too much, eat only a thousand calories a day, and don’t lose an ounce. In a study using volunteers from a Vermont
prison, men of normal weight consumed twice their regular intake of food, as many as seven thousand calories a day. Some didn’t gain a pound; some gained only a few. We all know people like that.

I am cursed with thrifty genes. This sounds like a fine thing, and for about a million years it was. In a triumph of natural selection, my remote ancestors evolved the talent of turning food into energy with extreme efficiency, saving lots of fuel to store as fat for a rainy day, when people with wasteful genes find themselves in a real pickle. The problem is that rainy days are much less common now than they were a million years ago. I, for one, spend only brief periods more than an arm’s length from an abundant supply of inviting food.

Always on the lookout for a scapegoat, I have had my metabolism tested as often as possible since boyhood. Every attempt was a total flop. The doctor makes you lie down and breathe through a tube attached to a machine that measures how much oxygen you inhale. People with a low metabolic rate use up less oxygen because they oxidize (or burn) fewer calories every hour. But research in the past two decades has discovered that most chubby people burn just as much energy as they should—given their height, weight, and physical activity. Attempts to tinker with the process are rarely successful. If you take a thyroid hormone to raise your metabolic rate, your appetite is likely to become voracious. The same thing happens when you take drugs that block the burning of sugars and fats from today’s lunch or dinner in order to force your body to draw on the fuel it stored long ago in your fat cells. These drugs help you lose weight only if you can ignore your hunger and stick to a strict dietary regime. Appetite is still the enemy.

Hunger and appetite are not the same, at least as scientists use the terms. You probably don’t feel hungry while you are making elaborate plans for a week of intensive eating in Paris, but your plans themselves are an expression of boundless appetite. Hunger is an annoying, nagging sensation that triggers constant
thoughts of food and reminds you that your body wants to eat. But appetite is a more objective measure. Appetite is simply the tendency to eat. It is difficult to measure somebody else’s hunger except by asking him how he feels, but we can gauge the size of his appetite by counting up how much he actually ate. Satiety is the state of being without appetite. It is the tendency not to eat.

The difference is important because hunger and appetite do not always coincide. I don’t feel hungry after the main course of my dinner, but I still have an appetite for dessert. Eating lots of fiber may take away my hunger and make me feel full, but as we’ll see, it may not do much to appease my appetite—my tendency to eat. There are chemicals that affect one and not the other. The drug naloxone can reduce the amount you eat without alleviating your hunger; dopamine antagonists do the reverse.

Someday medical science may discover a way to transform me into one of those people who can eat as much as they wish and never gain weight. But until it does, I plan to concentrate on trying to calm my appetite. I don’t want to eat differently, just to eat less. Not for me a diet of steamed broccoli spears with toasted sesame seeds. And as luck would have it, today’s research on appetite is as enterprising and energetic as any specialty in the study of obesity. I’ve located four hundred papers and abstracts published in the past three years alone.

My current thinking is that if I can only get my hands on 180,000 pounds of raw potatoes, everything will turn out right. As it may take me a while to explain how I arrived at this conclusion, I should first summarize some current findings about appetite that may be helpful in a minor sort of way.

· Protein is more satisfying, calorie for calorie, than carbohydrates. A high-protein diet fed to rhesus monkeys reduced their intake by 25 percent. A high-protein lunch caused human subjects to eat 12 percent less at dinner than a high-carbohydrate lunch. This is bad news for nutritionists, both in government and on best-seller lists, who urge us to emphasize pasta, grains, and beans.

Unfortunately, nature often insists on putting protein and fat in the same package, like cows and chickens. Eating stringy low-fat beef or chicken without its crispy skin holds little gastronomic interest, but high-protein lean fish and tofu, the mainstays of the Japanese diet, are another matter entirely. I lost five pounds on a recent culinary idyll in Japan, and two months later I have not gained them back. Could this be the solution to everything?

· Solid foods are more satisfying than liquid foods with the same caloric content. It’s conceivable that the mere activity of chewing helps appease your appetite or that solid food stays in your stomach longer and makes you feel fuller. But both possibilities have been ruled out in the laboratory, leaving us without an explanation for this phenomenon.

· Filling up with fiber does not appear to help much with your appetite. Adding fiber to a very low calorie diet makes you feel less hungry at the end of the meal, but it does not seem to affect how fast your appetite returns afterward. And though a high-fiber breakfast makes you feel fuller than a low-fiber breakfast with the same number of calories, it will have only a slight or short-lived effect on the amount you eat at lunch, depending on which study you read.

This surprised me. I used to think that if I could only work up an interest in those dreary yet bulky high-fiber, low-calorie foods, my appetite problem would be solved. One extreme measure sometimes used to help massively obese people is to place a balloon in their stomachs and fill it up with air or water. The idea is that a gastric balloon—like great quantities of fiber-rich food— will suppress their appetites by triggering “stretch receptors” in the walls of their stomach and intestines, sending signals of fullness to the brain. But gastric balloons are often unsuccessful, and when they work at all, patients feel less hungry and eat less food for only a few weeks and then return to normal. As we’ll see later, the messages the brain receives in the course of a meal are so numerous and complex that gastric distension has only a weak effect on lessening your appetite once the body learns that you are not eating your usual number of calories.

· Low-calorie snacks will stave off your appetite for the first few days by fooling your body into thinking that you are feeding it calories along with the bulk. But your appetite quickly wises up and begins to compensate at dinnertime for what it thought you were eating in midafternoon.