Pagan Kenned, NY Times - Some of the biggest names in dieting, organic agriculture and preventive medicine died at surprisingly young ages. The wild-foods enthusiast Euell Gibbons was far ahead of his time in his advocacy of a diverse plant diet — but he died at age 64 of an aortic aneurysm. (He had been born with a genetic disorder that predisposed him to heart problems.) The nutritionist Adelle Davis helped to wake millions of people to the dangers of refined foods like white bread, but she died of cancer at 70. Nathan Pritikin, one of the foremost champions of low-fat diets, died at 69, nearly the same age as Dr. Robert Atkins, who believed in the opposite regimen.
Then there is Jerome Rodale, founder of the publishing empire dedicated to health. In 1971, Dick Cavett invited Mr. Rodale onto his TV show after reading a New York Times Magazine article that called him “the guru of the organic food cult.” Mr. Rodale, 72, took his chair next to Mr. Cavett, proclaimed that he would live to be 100, and then made a snoring sound and died. (The episode never aired.)
There are obviously things you can do to improve your health. Give up cigarettes and start walking — that kind of common-sense lifestyle redo can deliver good results. But there are diminishing returns. My travels in the obituary section convinced me that the more esoteric personal choices — and diets based on the latest scientific findings — have far less of an effect on our own health than we may think.
Even those pioneers who did everything “right” were buffeted by circumstances that they couldn’t control on their own — like bad genes, accidents or exposure to smog or pesticides.
It’s the decisions that we make as a collective that matter more than any choice we make on our own.
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