Health. You know, that elusive state of being where your insides are all sparkly.
Unfortunately, these days every health tip should be met with the kind of skepticism usually reserved for UFO sightings. The suggestions we’re provided with range from “more alien than a David Bowie concept album” to “unintentionally hilarious.” To get health tips online is to have your brain explode in a shower of absurdity, leaving you wondering if the human race is really the most intelligent species or just the most gullible.
It’s enough to make you want to give up and join the health cynics who regale you with tales of great grandma Gertrude, who never exercised and lived to 110 on a diet of candy corn and spite. Scream into the void if you must, but know that the void is used to it.
We need answers and from legit science. So today we’re gonna go down the health rabbit hole and get insight from Harvard’s Daniel Lieberman, Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD, and Harvard Medical School professor Walter C. Willett, among others.
Let’s get to it…
Nutrition
Navigating the world of nutrition is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube that hates you. It’s the most hilariously perplexing aspect of adult life, where the only certainty is that everything you know about food will be embarrassingly wrong by next Tuesday. Every month there’s a new villain in the food world. One day, eggs are the elixir of life; the next day, they’re cholesterol-laden orbs of death. You might as well be mainlining poison, according to that one aunt on Facebook who’s suddenly a nutritionist.
So what should we eat? Fruit is that colorful thing we buy with good intentions and watch decay, like a slow, sad, still-life painting of our failed aspirations. Quinoa? Sounds like a character from Star Wars. Acidophilus? I’m not sure if it’s in yogurt or a lesser-known Greek philosopher. The innocent act of choosing breakfast becomes a diorama of internal conflict.
But beyond the low effort social media posts and supplement-of-the-week scams, there are good answers. Walter C. Willett, MD, has led the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for over twenty-five years. What he recommends is very similar to “The Mediterranean Diet.” Many studies have shown this pattern of eating works for improving health in most everyone. The skinny:
- Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Take it easy with fruit juices and corn. Skip the potatoes.
- Eat more monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat (mostly from plants) and less saturated fat (mostly from meat and dairy). Avoid artificial trans fats like they’re radioactive waste.
- Eat more whole-grain carbs and fewer refined carbs. Yes, that means a lot less sugar.
- No processed meat and less red meat. Choose fish, poultry or nuts for protein sources.
- Drink more water. Coffee is great. Tea is fine. Sugar-sweetened beverages like soda are bad. Go easy on alcohol. No more than two drinks a day for men, no more than one a day for women. Reduce milk consumption unless you’re a child or elderly.
- Take a multivitamin for cheap insurance.
It’s actually pretty simple. Nothing magic. Every year, some obscure berry gets discovered in a remote jungle and suddenly, it’s like we’ve found the Holy Grail, but it’s edible and costs $59.99 a pound. Yeah, like acai. And one should note acai’s Wikipedia entry has an entire section on “scams.”
Okay, we know what to eat – but what about that issue of how much we eat?
Weight Loss
You never woke up and thought, “Let’s add a few rings to this tree trunk.” And yet one day you’re enjoying a burger like a boss, and the next, your jeans are screaming for mercy like an extra in a horror movie.
Weight loss is the health industry’s longest-running sitcom. Buy a diet book and you feel great for a day and then spend the rest of the year avoiding it like it’s a friend who’s into multi-level marketing. The whole process is a buddy-cop movie where your brain’s the by-the-book detective, and your stomach’s the loose cannon. You drink shakes that taste like chalky despair and eat fiber bars till you’re practically crapping wicker furniture, all in an attempt to achieve some perverse version of body Tetris.
Maintaining a healthy weight matters. Eating healthy is vital but that doesn’t mean eating too much isn’t an issue and don’t let anyone tell you any different. How much you weigh in relation to your height, your waist size, and how much weight you gain after your early twenties are strongly correlated with heart attack, stroke, cancer, blood pressure, diabetes… Too much food can be as bad as bad food.
In 1960, one in seven US adults was obese. By 2010, that reached one in three. And childhood obesity has quintupled. We can contrive all sorts of unscientific voluptuous rationalizations for why this has occurred but the science is very simple: we ate more.
Yes, it’s a matter of energy balance: calories in vs calories out. Some people will take time away from building their perpetual motion machines to argue with me about this but it’s basic physics. (And if not we need to urgently revise the laws of thermodynamics.) More of you isn’t spontaneously created. The pounds come from somewhere and, no, it’s not dark matter.
And it’s unlikely you’re going to lose significant weight simply by exercising more. In general, people see better results from controlling intake vs increasing exercise. (Not to mention that unless you’re a professional athlete, the amount you eat can always outstrip the number of hours you can put in at the gym.) That said, the research is very consistent on exercise helping you maintain weight loss. It seems to help lean people resist fat gain in the face of overeating.
Oh, and now we get to the part about dieting. The schemes are endless. Eat, but only at designated times, and only specific things, unless it’s a cheat day, in which case, eat like you’ve never seen food before. (And calories don’t count when you’re sad, right?)
The most profound, impactful principle regarding weight loss is simple. I didn’t say it was pleasant or easy – just simple. In 1965 scientists locked people up and gave them nothing but a bland liquid diet. Had all the nutrients and calories you need but tasted meh. They could eat as much as they wanted…
So, of course, they didn’t. Lean subjects’ weight stayed stable. The obese subjects lost fat like they had a wasting disease. But here’s the interesting part…
There was no “starvation response.” They weren’t hungry. They didn’t feel deprived. And their weight resisted any notion of that “set point” we hear so much about. Their bodies didn’t fight to get back to a previous overweight condition. Yeah, you can see where this is going…
Weight loss is often less about genetics, or magic “evil” foods and more about when it tastes really good, we eat too much of it.
The answer? Eat blander food. Yes, I know what some of you just heard was “deprive yourself of all happiness on earth” but what I said was “eat blander food.” Not “flavorless” bland but “apples instead of chocolate cake” bland. (I understand this is akin to telling someone who’s just fallen off a cliff to enjoy the breeze on the way down.)
Okay, we’ve covered ingesting calories. Now let’s talk about burning them. (Remember when running used to mean you were playing tag and not escaping your own mortality?)
Exercise
We lift heavy things, in the vague hope our muscles might one day resemble those of a Greek statue but most of us end up resembling a Greek diner owner named Stavros. “CrossFit” makes it sound like you’re training to be a particularly energetic priest. Or people willingly pay to be locked in a room with stationary bikes, the classes always called something like “ThunderCycle” which sounds like a rejected “Mad Max” villain.
But we need it. Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman notes that going from being sedentary to exercising 60 minutes per week equals a 30% reduction in mortality. Yes — less likelihood of dying. Up that to three hours a week and you reduce chance of death by an additional 10%.
What’s optimal? Lieberman recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week and do weight training at least twice a week. Epidemiologists say this cuts the chance of premature death by half and reduces the likelihood of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and certain cancers by roughly 30 to 50 percent.
But what if you hate exercise? The idea of panting and grunting like a pug in a sauna makes you want to cry. The only endorphin rush you get from exercise is the sheer joy when it’s over. So what’s the absolute minimum? Well, that 10,000 steps-a-day stuff you’ve probably heard about actually jives with the science. It’s also no coincidence that hunter-gatherer women walk about 5 miles a day — which works out to about 10,000 steps.
Okay, time to discuss the healthy thing that doesn’t involve much effort at all…
Sleep
Who doesn’t love naps — that awkward little brother of sleep, the slacker cousin in the family of rest? I don’t mean that Instagram-worthy, artfully arranged in a field of sunflowers with a book kind of nap. I’m talking about the real-life, mouth open, drool staining your shirt, snoring louder than a freight train kind of nap. They’re glorious.
Oddly, we all sleep and it’s good for us, but we just don’t do it enough. And that’s bad. Very bad. Getting too little sleep is associated with hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and dementia.
Sleeping less than six hours a night is associated with a 20% higher chance of heart attack. Do that for two weeks is also the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk. Studies show when students in the top 10 percent of their class are restricted to under seven hours of sleep a night, they perform like students in the bottom 10 percent.
Being tired actually makes it harder to be happy. And if none of this convinces you, I’ll appeal to your vanity: there is such a thing as beauty sleep. Not getting enough shut eye makes you less attractive.
I miss the days when the only thing I needed to know about sleep was that I liked it. The National Sleep Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both recommend 7 to 9 hours a night — but neuroscientist Matt Walker says after 10 days of 7 hours your brain is mush whether you realize it or not. So get 8. What else do you need to know?
- Consistency: Want a blissful journey to the Land of Nod? Wake at the same time and go to bed at the same time every day. This is the single most important tip.
- Substances: Alcohol, sleeping pills, and caffeine all reduce sleep quality. Booze is the worst. Trying to perform at your best after a night of drinking is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, except the needle is also made of hay, and you’re not entirely certain what a needle is.
- Light: I know, the digitally addicted Gollum inside your head is clutching your phone and whispering, “Precious. We needs it.” Sorry. Avoid screens and darken your home before bed.
- Temperature: A room that’s a little chilly helps you pass out. You’ll sleep so hard you’ll wake up in positions the Kama Sutra doesn’t cover.
- Naps: There’s nothing quite like the pure decadence of a fully clothed, middle-of-the-day, under-the-covers bed nap. That’s right, full bed. Not messing around here. Keep it short so it doesn’t stop you from getting to sleep that night.
Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it all up and discuss the easiest and more enjoyable way to improve your heath…
Sum Up
Here’s how to be more healthy:
- Nutrition: When you start eating foods that don’t come with a toy, your body starts to function like it’s not a 1997 dial-up modem. Your taste buds, those poor, battered things, start to experience flavors beyond “salty” and “more salty.” Follow the Mediterranean diet.
- Weight Loss: Most days it seems like your body’s decided to turn every calorie into an unwanted souvenir. Eat blander food and you’ll eat less without trying.
- Exercise: You pedal a stationary bike that goes nowhere which, on bad days, feels like a perfect metaphor for life. But you need to move. Even 60 minutes a week means a 30% reduction in mortality.
- Sleep: That magical realm where our body supposedly repairs itself, but which we treat like an annoying ad we can’t skip. Get 7-9 hours a night.
The easy, fun way to stay healthy? Invest more in your relationships.
A UC Berkeley study of nine thousand people found good relationships add another decade to your life span, and a 2003 review of the research said this: “Positive social relationships are second only to genetics in predicting health and longevity in humans.”
What predicts whether you’ll be alive one year after a heart attack? Pretty much two things: how many friends you have and whether you smoke. Oxford professor Robin Dunbar says, “You can eat as much as you like, you can slob about, you can drink as much alcohol as you like—the effect is very modest compared with these other two factors.”
Getting healthier is less about monumental overhauls and more about mastering the art of not completely sabotaging yourself on a daily basis. Choose a real apple over apple-flavored gummy worms. Sleep like you’re getting paid for it. Take a walk. Pay attention to the people you love. Maybe read a book. Remember books? They’re like the internet made of trees.
Picture this: It’s a few months from now, and you’re not just surviving, but thriving. You’re walking down the street with a spring in your step, not because you’ve been possessed by the spirit of a musical theater enthusiast, but because you actually feel good. You’ve traded in your bleary-eyed mornings for the kind where you wake up and don’t immediately want to punch the sun in its stupid, bright face. Exercise has become a regular part of your life too. You’re no longer viewing your body as just a convenient way to transport your brain to the next sitting location. You’ve got a handle on this whole “being alive” thing.
And one final thing — no one ever got healthier by stressing about being healthy. Health isn’t about chasing an impossible ideal or living in a state of constant deprivation. It’s about finding a livable balance, one that doesn’t make you want to stab someone with a carrot stick. You’ll screw up occasionally. It’s okay. It’s not about perfection. It’s about being a little better every day.
Life’s a journey, not a spreadsheet.