Did Winston Churchill Pump Iron?

Oats. Used to be only horses and Englishmen ate oats. But now we are all urged to strap on the feed bag and devour oats. For our own good health, of course. When The New England Journal of Medicine announced that the oats you ate turned around and ate cholesterol, and then scoured out your bowels, for good measure, there were oat riots as Yuppies mobbed the health-food stores.

Oats, at least, represented hope of a distinctly dreary sort. Sunshine, on the other hand, was fear itself. Too much would kill you, we were warned in the panic that preceded the dawn of oats. Before sunlight, it was the scarcity of calcium that would lead to brittle bones; so across the land, otherwise sensible people paid good money for powders made of crushed oyster shells, which they sprinkled over their spinach salads and washed down with soda water.

Eggs and butter have long been linked to certain death, along with red meat, the greatest killer of all. Sugar was bad and salt was worse. Eating salted nuts or popcorn was almost a suicidal act. For a while, high fiber and carbohydrates looked good.

A Texan I know said about all of this, "Hell, you got to eat something."

And now it turns out you can eat oats. Porridge. Which just about takes all the fun out of eating, once and for all.

Actually, you don't have to eat anything. Thousands of anorexics are proof of that. They starve themselves into hospitals and asylums and, eventually, the grave. They are the grisly proof that, while what you eat may kill, what you don't eat will, too. And if you make eating and drinking fearful enough that people refuse to put anything in their mouths (except, perhaps, their thumbs), the average life expectancy will not increase. It may even fall. Most anorexics are young girls and women who have been made pathologically fearful of eating. That is to say, they have been made afraid of life, which, if it can be reduced to any one thing, is appetite. To live is to satisfy the craving that allows you to live some more. When man first walked, all of life was devoted to the business of finding food. Now, in the last, feeble days of the 20th Century, we see the development of an almost philosophical loathing of the very idea of appetite. We (some of (continued on page 150)Winston Churchill(continued from page 95) us, anyway) hate the very idea that our body makes these demands. E. M. Forster, a nearly bloodless writer if ever there was one, found it curious that man should go "day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored."

Forster didn't come up with any good alternatives, and nobody else has, either. The next best thing, it seems, is to make all appetites repulsive, fearful and dangerous. The Puritans among us once said that man should not live to eat but should eat to live. The new puritans seem to say that man should eat to live because so far, nobody has come up with anything better. But--they go on--as long as man must eat, every bite should be an exercise in dread and loathing. With every forkful, he should remember that he will get fat, his arteries will become clogged, his heart will become overworked and ... he will die.

Just as Forster found no alternative to eating, the modern anti-appetite crowd hasn't really found any good alternative to dying. But the assumption is that, with modern science working like hell, it is only a matter of time. However, until that great day when we can dispense once and for all with this messy dying business, the best thing is to take those steps that will surely prolong life.

Some of these measures take the form of exercise and some take the form of diet.

Now, I do not doubt that clean living will lengthen the odds of your living longer. I believed it when the high school gym and health teacher said it--the same teacher who said masturbating would make you nearsighted and too slow for the basketball team. But even if some judicious moderation--in eating, drinking, masturbating and other pleasurable activities--may make you a better insurance risk, it is good to keep the words of A. J. Liebling in mind. "Life," said the man who loved boxing and food and Louisiana politics, "is nine to five against."

Or, as they say in the street, nobody gets out of life alive.

Consider James Fixx, who preached the benefits--physical, emotional and even moral--of running. He wrote The Complete Book of Running, the title of which would lead you to believe it said about all there was to say--about that subject, anyway.

Fixx had more to say, however, and wrote a sequel that he did not call The Incomplete Book of Running.

One of the messages Fixx preached from every pulpit was that running was sure protection against a heart attack.

He died of a heart attack that he suffered while he was out running. He was in his early 50s. A young man, according to the actuarial tables.

Fixx did not die because he ran. Only an antirunning fanatic would say that. But neither did he live because he ran. The fact is, he died in spite of all the running that he did. He was going to die sooner or later. One merely hopes that he actually enjoyed the running, that it gave the life that he did have some extra quality that would have been missing if he had spent that time sitting around reading or watching television. One suspects that the running did provide Fixx with something extra in his too-short life. It certainly made him rich, and that is more than most of us ever realize from running.

Adelle Davis was the author of many books, the most celebrated and popular of which was Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit. In that book and others, as well as through ceaseless personal appearances, Davis promoted the cause of vitamins and organic food. She crusaded against fast food, processed food and all manner of additives and supplements. They led to an early grave, she said, especially from cancer.

Then the crab got her.

It was the fast food and processed food that she had eaten before she discovered the truth, she told audiences. I remember watching her on the old Cavett show when she made this argument. Here she was dying, I thought, and still clinging to the faith, spending some of the little time she had left to defend the message. There was something heroic about it.

But she died, just the same. One hopes that she enjoyed the taste of organic carrots and spinach and that she never really suffered from Big Mac attacks or a craving for Hershey bars. And one suspects that she did not.

Moderation has been considered a virtue and a path to the good life since the time of the Greeks. The Greeks, of course, had a place in their crowded and chaotic theology for Bacchus and Dionysus. And as Edith Hamilton, the great popularizer of Greek thought, has pointed out, Socrates himself enjoyed staying up all night, drinking wine and arguing philosophy with the boys.

Jane Brody would certainly not have approved and would have found a way to say so--inelegantly.

Brody is the voice of the new moderation. Her pulpit is The New York Times, where she preaches once a week in a column called "Personal Health." It is probably the most widely and seriously read column in the Times these days (no one takes Tom Wicker or William Safire as seriously as Jane Brody) and is, in its way, as depressing a sign of the times as "About Men."

The appearance of Jane Brody in the nation's paper of record is the final validation of all the high school health teachers who warned you about the perils of soft drinks and candy. She has raised the stakes to the point that a kind of fearful prissiness is entrenched in the Zeitgeist and right-thinking people would die before ordering a T-bone, rare, and another martini, please, waiter.

Not long ago, I was trapped in the hot, flat Piedmont region of North Carolina during the worst heat wave in memory. I went out for the papers, which I intended to enjoy along with at least one ice-cold beer and maybe two. Hell, I'd been a good boy. Got up and ran five miles that morning to jump-start my heart.

There, not far from the sports page, was Jane Brody, shaking her finger and telling me, "You'd better not. It's bad for you."

Brody's column had been syndicated out into the provinces and the paper I was reading gave this one the title "Keep cool with drinks that quench." It was the second of two parts.

A two-part article, I thought, telling you to drink something when you are thirsty?

After a couple of paragraphs of harmless introductory chatter, Brody got down to the style that suits her best. A sort of tsk-tsk kind of schoolmarmism calculated to make you feel uneasy, if not guilty, for actually enjoying anything.

"Many popular drinks," she warned, "do not satisfy the body's need for liquid refreshment. Beverages like fruit juices and sugar-sweetened drinks may wet your whistle [note the vernacular touch that Brody uses to come off as just one of the boys], but they contain enough sugar (natural or otherwise) to increase the body's need for water, not diminish it."

Well, OK, I thought. I didn't exactly have a tall peach nectar in mind, anyway.

Brody warned against dairy products in the next paragraph and I didn't worry about that, either. I've never liked buttermilk.

But then, she came to me. I could almost hear her saying, in a dry, sexless voice, "Now you in the back of the class...."

"And beverages that contain caffeine or alcohol are diuretics, causing the body to lose more water than they supply, and cannot be counted on to satisfy the recommended daily intake of six to eight glasses of water."

So there.

And how was I to know my body was getting all the water it needed? I'd always thought being thirsty was a sure sign you were dry. But Brody had a better system.

"An easy way to tell if your body is well hydrated is to check the color of your urine. If you have not eaten foods like liver, carrots or beets [a damned good bet in my case] that add color, urine should be pale yellow; the darker the color, the more concentrated the urine and the more liquid you need to replenish water and reduce the stress on your kidneys."

So now, in addition to the seven warning signals for cancer, my blood pressure, pulse rate, cholesterol level, blood-sugar level, calcium intake, exposure to the sun and a multitude of other things I had to worry about, I had to start getting nervous about the color of my piss.

Brody went on from urine color to calories, the risk of getting cancer from drinking tea and the ambivalence of caffeine. After reading nearly a third of the page of newsprint, I still didn't know what I was supposed to drink when I was thirsty on a blazing-hot summer day. But I felt sure that it would be water. Brody would, I thought, sing praises to the purity of water and remind us that we are all four fifths--or whatever--water and that we need constantly to replenish and blah, blah, blah.

Turned out I was only half right. Brody wants us all to drink water, but she doesn't want us to relax. Her concluding paragraph went like this:

"But even at its worst, water is still likely to be the best drink to quench thirst. But don't rely on thirst to prompt you to drink or tell you when to stop. It's safe to assume that when the weather is warm, you need more liquid, and a little extra cannot hurt."

In Brody's world, one must be eternally vigilant, for the body is always looking to betray you, somehow.

Me--I threw the Raleigh News and Observer away, sat out under a shade tree, drank a cold beer and wondered if Socrates had ever worried about the color of his urine.

Brody has distilled her columns into two fat, best-selling books. In the prologue to one of them, she writes, "My guiding principle is moderation. Except for an absolute ban on smoking, I am not a fanatic about anything."

Scarcely anyone in this world is going to admit to being a fanatic, and certainly no one who works for The New York Times, where they burn incense to moderation in all its forms.

If Brody is a moderate, then she is a new kind of moderate, one who believes immoderately in the benefits of moderation.

She is capable of a touching, simple-minded faith in her own message. "Your body is a machine," she writes earnestly. "It will run as well as its fuel allows."

Well, the body is a lot more complicated, mysterious and treacherous than any machine. Consider Brian Piccolo or anyone else who has had the body suddenly betray him in some profound way. Children don't develop leukemia because they forgot to change their crankcase oil. Life--even considered as mere biology--is not that simple.

But leaving aside the sincere triteness of her metaphors, it is interesting to consider the rationale behind Brody's campaign to get us all to eat and drink and behave more moderately. The reason she falls back on, time and again, is that we can all live longer if we'll just do the sensible thing.

In one case, she cites a report by one of those Senate committees--this one chaired by George McGovern--that concluded proper eating habits would result in "an 80 percent drop in the number of obese Americans, a 25 percent decline in deaths from heart disease, a 50 percent drop in deaths from diabetes and a one percent annual increase in longevity."

Brody accepts this committee finding as gospel, though committees like that one tend to come and go and reach conclusions that are frequently more politically sensitive than scientifically sound. Still, to be fair, throughout her researches, Brody cites doctors and scientists and all sorts of experts in support of her arguments.

So who am I to quibble?

Well, I am someone with a moderate regard for the medical profession. Medical men are capable of error. In this century, doctors with the most impressive credentials lobotomized patients or endorsed the practice. In the 19th Century, they wrote elaborate papers to support the thesis that masturbation caused softening of the spine. They also performed autopsies on known masturbators to find the physical proof they needed to support their theories. And, of course, they found it.

The point is that even doctors can be influenced by the social climate. In Victorian times, it was necessary to find medical evidence that masturbation was bad for you. In the age of denial, it is necessary to prove the same thing about red meat.

Brody, herself, admits as much when the topic is cholesterol.

"Some researchers and physicians disagree with the emphasis others have placed on fats and cholesterol as contributors to diseases of the heart and blood vessels. They cite various studies of Americans that failed to show a link between diet and blood levels of cholesterol....

"Unfortunately, while analysis of the relative amounts of ... cholesterol in a person's blood can give some important clues, it's currently impossible to say with certainty who is and who is not 'immune' to heart disease.... Given this uncertainty, the advocates of dietary change say, the most sensible approach is for everyone to cut back on the potentially harmful foodstuffs. In every aspect of life, the pleasures of a few must be sacrificed for the safety of many. Why not, they ask, when it comes to overconsumption of fats and cholesterol?"

My answer is that we have too goddamned many commissars around already without having some to tell you what you may and may not eat--for your own good, of course.

At another point in one of her books, Brody argues that since a low-cholesterol diet can't do you any harm, and a high-cholesterol diet may, isn't it prudent to go with the former? A sort of low-rent version of Pascal's famous wager. The stakes, in this case, are not eternity but a few extra moments in this vale of tears.

You won't die of a heart attack at 42, in other words, but will die, instead, of systemic failure complicated by Alzheimer's disease, spending your last years, and the family fortune, trapped inside a nursing home, wetting your bed, drooling all over yourself and apprehending nothing. Much better to go out like Jim Fixx.

Brody's approach to death is to postpone it by any means available or possible. Which leads one to wonder, What is the point of life that it is so important to conserve it and extend it?

For Brody, life is The New York Times and her books. In the acknowledgments of one of them, she thanks her family for enduring the eight months of six-day weeks and 14-hour days that went into the making of the book. She also mentions (in the proud way people have of mentioning such things these days) that she normally works an 11-hour day. Her priorities are plain.

Some of us might be forgiven for thinking that her life sounds just a little, er, grim. Kind of joyless. You almost want to say to her, "Lighten up a little, Jane. The New York Times will come out tomorrow, if the sun comes up. The fact is, you are probably less important to the Times and its readers than the Bloomingdale's ads."

For some of us, 11-hour days, working for the man, do not the good life make. We think you need a little red meat, dark ale, laughter, fellowship and other dangerous things ... in moderation, of course.

Long life is probably best considered a happy accident and not an objective to be pursued by any means, like some kind of fanatic. If giving up meat, say, means a chance at a couple of extra years, then just think what giving up driving automobiles would do to your actuarial profile. You could never again go near the water, to make sure you didn't drown. Never get up on a ladder. Stay out of the sun. Give up sex. You could turn yourself into one of those hysterics who stay out of tall grass because there may be a snake in there. You could, in short, live your life according to your fears.

Jane Brody's Guide to Personal Health is full of suggestions on how to avoid drowning and being electrocuted and falling victim to other such accidents that are plainly bad for your health. So when you start working on living longer, you can't stop with nutrition.

And, to be fair, it isn't merely long life that Brody and the lesser priests of the new faith are promising. There are secondary benefits to a life of immoderate moderation. It isn't simply a matter of not dying in the near future. When you come down a notch or two from the puritanical Times, these benefits become more important. The religion of denial when preached by, say, Vogue promises immediate payoffs, not the least of which is being right in the thick of things. (The funniest titles in all of publishing appear in Vogue. The magazine's article on the new denial was called "Quitting Is the New High.")

According to this line of thinking, if you eat right and drink less and do your Jane Fondas, you will be happier, sexier, busier, richer and in general lead a lot fuller life.

This message is preached from every pulpit in the land. Health equals better performance and increased happiness. It has become one of those unchallenged assumptions. Nobody argues with it.

But I've wondered, ever since I talked with a thin, sulky New York woman one night and listened to her say, with absolute finality, that "no one can be fat and also be happy," if maybe this dogmatic belief in fitness and denial as the path to happiness wasn't just one more delusion.

The woman herself made a good case. She was on her third divorce and second shrink--or vice versa. She lived in a $1,000,000 apartment and spent more on clothes in a month than a city cop takes home in a year. She called her friends at night to cry about how much trouble she was having "getting it together." She'd done her head with drugs when she lived in California. Now she was paying attention to her body because "it's the only thing you bring into this world with you."

I tried arguing with her. Certainly, some fat people were happy, I said.

Nope. None of them.

How about Falstaff? I suggested, just to keep things literary.

No way. All that compulsive eating and drinking was just a way of hiding. Like the obsessive womanizing of Casanova.

Was she saying that being thin was equivalent to being happy?

Yes, she said, exactly.

Well, what about those adolescent girls who starved themselves to death?

That, she replied with some indignation, was a disease.

Since that discussion, I've wished that I had thought of some comebacks that didn't occur to me then. (Too much red meat, probably.)

I should have asked her, just for openers, to consider the realm of statesmanship. Jimmy Carter was a thin man who liked to jog and play tennis and fish and do all sorts of healthy, outdoor things. If he drank or smoked cigarettes, it was one of those rare state secrets that were never leaked. Being from Georgia, he probably ate things that would cause Jane Brody to fall over in a faint. Ham and corn bread and things like that. But as world leaders go, Carter was probably head of the class when graded against the standards of the new denial.

Well, did it improve his performance? Was he a happier President for being lean and having a low pulse rate?

Winston Churchill, on the other hand, drank a fifth of brandy and smoked a box of cigars a day. He also wrote brilliantly, made the finest public speeches in the history of the English language, led his people capably through their most solemn ordeal when he was more than 60 years old and generally behaved like the most remarkable figure of the century. Further more, although he had his bouts with depression (he called them his "black dog"), he bore up under the burdens of state with great wit and good cheer and seemed positively to relish the pressures. Carter bitched and moaned and wanted us all to feel as though we weren't worthy of his effort. He behaved pretty much the way you would expect the followers of the new denial to behave: pettily.

(It really is unfair that after everything you do, all the miles you run and the meat you don't eat and the gin you don't drink, you are still going to have to die just like people who are overweight. It is enough to sour you on the whole business.)

There are other examples and they don't prove much except that extravagant claims can usually be discredited. (Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and there was one miserable son of a bitch.) You can point to the Duchess of Windsor--an American gold digger who succeeded in landing a bumbling monarch--who once said, "You can never be too rich or too thin," and then spent the rest of her life proving that you can be both. But ... no matter.

If one wants to run ten miles a day and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables and bulgur wheat, then fine--have at it. Exercise makes some people feel good, and so does eating, according to some theory--generally temporary--about what is the best fuel for the body. It is harmless when carried on in private; boring when made into a cause. It lacks the appeal of real stoicism, of eating so little and pushing oneself so hard as to experience something transcendent. It is not denial pushed to the point of pain--the kind of sweet, liberating pain you feel when you have gone beyond the limit and your spirit rules your body. Apostles of the new denial don't understand or approve of that kind of pain. The kind that boxers, for instance, understand. The new denial doesn't go much further than a light lunch and a Jane Fonda workout. It is woefully moderate.

All of these things occurred to me not long ago, as I sat at my desk feeling slightly guilty. I had just come home after a week of diving in the Florida Keys. The diving had been good, even better than I'd expected. On my second day, the owner of a dive shop took me down below 100 feet to a scuttled coastal freighter that lay on the sandy bottom, the bales of marijuana in its hold slowly, inevitably breaking up, just as the big plans of the would-be smugglers had no doubt disintegrated when they sank this ship.

The water was clear, the visibility was excellent. We saw a five-foot green moray, a sting ray as wide as a desk and a jew-fish that would have filled the bed of an average pickup. All that life was clustered around the dead ship in a tight web of predation.

The beer tasted better when I was back aboard the dive boat, my mouth and throat dry from breathing compressed air.

The rum tasted better that night.

I ate Cuban food, Conch food and, one night, a big steak well marbled and rare, just the way I like it. Potato on the side, extra sour cream. Roquefort on the salad.

Brandy with your coffee, sir?

Yes, indeed.

I stayed out late and got up early. I took a day off from diving to go bonefishing, and since the sun was shining and I already had a tan, I didn't wear a shirt or any sun block. It felt fine. Give me those rays.

I got stung by a jellyfish and burned by some fire coral. I pushed the limit of my bottom time a little. I ate too much and drank too much and got too much sun. By the time I made it back home, I had the feeling I'd been bad.

Woefully immoderate.

Then I was sitting at my desk, thinking that maybe it was time to--well, to cut back. To start living sensibly. I couldn't go on like this. All the experts said so.

Who was I to defy The New York Times?

I pushed some papers around on my desk and decided that since I was at the beach and it was Saturday and after 12 o'clock (weekend beach rules), I could drink a beer. I went upstairs and got it.

A big black bruising thunderstorm was building out over the water. The kind that appears in the last hot days of summer and will spend an entire morning accumulating the energy that it discharges in one violent afternoon hour. The air was absolutely still; the water, flat calm. There was a smell of ozone and something else in the air.

I carried my beer back downstairs. I took a guilty little sip and rationalized. There were carbohydrates in beer and they were OK, from what I'd heard.

I was pulling the office door shut when I saw a blue flash and felt the air pushed out of my lungs. There was a loud pop, like the sound of a bullet passing over my head. I made a noise of some sort, from the pain and the force of the concussion. I fell to my knees, and that is the last I remember before coming to, a minute or so later, with my ears ringing and my nostrils full of the smell of battery acid and the fingers on the hand that had been holding the doorknob tingling and numb.

Well, damn. I had just been hit by lightning.

The bolt had hit the chimney. Blown it apart. The charge had run down the chimney, looking for ground, and jumped to me, since the doorknob I was holding was in contact with some brass weather stripping. But no matter how. I had been struck and I was still alive, which pretty much sums up the human condition.

I called a doctor, since it seemed like I should.

He asked me how I felt.

I told him my bones ached, but otherwise, I felt fine.

"Any burns?" He was an old Navy flight surgeon. My kind of doctor.

"Nope."

"Well, lucky you."

"Anything I should do?"

"Can't think of anything."

Neither could I. Except that this called for a celebration. It isn't every day you survive being struck by lightning. So I decided a big dinner was in order. Brown whiskey and red meat. You don't live forever. No matter what you eat.