The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [82]
Raw carrots do contain the aptly named carotatoxin; when extracted from this red-orange, spindle-shaped root, carotatoxin does produce a severe neurological disorder in mice. But a human would have to eat 3,500 pounds of carrots at one sitting to consume an equivalent dose.
And what about raw fruit? Unlike the antisocial vegetable, ripe fruit is gregarious and loves to be eaten and have its seeds widely dispersed. That’s why all ripe fruits generate chemicals—flavors, sugars, dyes, and softeners—to entice animals rather than injure them. Raw ripe sweet tasty juicy fruit was designed to give ceaseless pleasure to man and beast alike, even to Neanderthals and their modern cousins. And you never have to boil it into submission.
June 1988
Just Say Yes
Give or take a few millennia, men and women have brightened their mealtimes with a glass or two of wine, beer, or spirits for the past twenty thousand years. Civilization dawned with the cultivation of grain, the pressing of olives, and the fermentation of grapes. Yet every sixty years or so, a small band of men and women reject their evolutionary heritage and set out to eradicate alcohol in all its forms.
Today the forces of Prohibitionism again stalk the land, those cheerless folks behind the surgeon general’s warning label on every bottle of alcohol, behind the call for advertising restrictions and excise taxes to force the 60 percent of us who drink moderately to pay for the sins of the 9 percent who overdo. In schools across the country defenseless little children are even taught that alcohol is one of the three “gateway drugs,” as seductive as marijuana and tobacco.
But the fundamental truth is really quite simple, and it has been understood for many years: People who drink moderate amounts of alcohol on a regular basis have far fewer heart attacks than those who do not drink at all. And since moderate drinking carries very few risks (except on the highway), moderate drinkers generally live longer than people who do not drink.
Heavy drinking is extremely dangerous. The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in Atlanta, lists thirty-six causes of death partly or entirely due to drinking, including automobile accidents, homicide, suicide, liver disease, cardiomyopathy, some cancers, and mental disorders. The CDC estimates that 105,095 Americans died in 1987 from alcohol use and misuse.
But seven times as many people die from heart disease, the most common cause of death in America, with 725,110 fatalities in 1988. Over two-thirds of these were cases of coronary heart disease, the closing of the blood vessels that feed the heart. And coronary heart disease (also known as ischemic heart disease and sometimes abbreviated as CHD) is precisely the ailment that moderate alcohol consumption protects us against.
The three major coronary risk factors that doctors warn about—smoking, high blood pressure, and saturated fats—explain only about half the difference in the rate of heart fatalities among various countries and various individuals. The most striking example is France, where the people eat much more butter, cheese, cream, lard, and goose fat than we do but have only one-third the heart attacks. This has become known as le paradoxe français (which I have explored in “Why Aren’t the French Dropping Like Flies?” in Part One). But the same violation of modern nutritional rules is also common in northern Spain, northern Italy, Switzerland, and Austria—places where the low incidence of heart attacks is commemorated nightly with dinners full of saturated fat. As the French drink ten times more wine than we do (the people in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria drink nearly as much as the French), the front-running explanation for solving le paradoxe français is that wine (or alcohol in general) protects the heart.
In 1979 a famous study in the Lancet by St. Leger, Cochrane, and Moore took the statistics for coronary heart fatalities in eighteen developed countries and looked for correlations with a wide variety