Is living longer always better, or would you rather accept a shorter life span in exchange for living and dying how you want to?

I started thinking about this in a discussion in Steve Pavlina’s forum about raw foods. Steve said “If you’re an American, you have an 80-90% chance of dying from heart disease or cancer.” I took it that people who eat only raw foods have a much lower risk of succumbing to those diseases.

But is that necessarily a good thing? Your total probability of dying from all causes combined is 100%. That doesn’t change. So if you reduce the probability of dying from heart disease or cancer, you must increase the probability of dying in some other way, because it all has to add up to 100%.

If you knew that you were going to die from a heart attack at 65, maybe you’d change your diet to prevent that. But maybe then you’d live long enough to be skeletonized by piranhas at 66. Is that so much better? Suddenly the heart attack is looking pretty good.

Once you take heart disease and cancer off the table, so many unlikely causes of death become more realistic. Will you fall into a giant vat of sulfuric acid? Get strung up by an angry mob and burned at the stake? Get chopped up by an axe murderer who takes a little too much pride in his work?

The point of all this is that everyone talks about wanting to live longer, and many people make big sacrifices to do so. But dying from heart disease or cancer at a normal age doesn’t seem so bad. Dying a bit older in a horrible accident is worse. And worst of all is living too far past your prime, watching your body and mind slowly deteriorate as you run out of money, friends, and dignity.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Wish not so much to live long as to live well.”

I’ve never written much about food, but I came across an interesting post by Evita Ochel that I had to comment on. The post is called Going Behind the Scenes of the Food We Are Told to Eat By The News Media.

We hear about all kinds of foods that the media says we should eat. We’re told to eat salmon for the omega-3 fatty acids. We’re told to drink red wine for the resveratrol. We’re told to drink milk for the calcium. We’re even told to eat chocolate for the antioxidants.

We hear about a magical substance, and think that it’s the key to good health. So anything that contains it must be a miracle food. Red wine contains resveratrol, so it must give you immunity from cancer. Never mind all the alcohol. I suppose paint thinner or gasoline or rattlesnake venom would be nutritious too, if they added resveratrol.

Evita clears up some misconceptions about these foods. My favorite part: to get enough resveratrol from red wine, you’d need to drink 1,000 bottles a day. Bottoms up!

Why do we go nuts over every potential miracle food? I think it comes down to seeking an easy solution. If we can isolate the one chemical we really need, we can put good health in a pill.

So when one thing turns out not to be a magical substance, we go looking for the next one. Soy, beta-carotene, vitamin C…surely there must be one simple thing we can take for perfect health without restricting our diet in any way, or doing any of that damn exercise. What kind of a cruel world do we live in where effort is required?

But no, there’s no ambrosia that will make up for all the crap you eat and all the healthy food you don’t. It will take effort.

Evita points out that instead of eating junk because it contains trace elements of a good thing, we can just get that good thing from its source. Instead of eating salmon laced with mercury, pesticides, and antibiotics, we can simply eat the plants that the salmon get their omega-3 from. And instead of becoming winos in the name of good health, we can just eat red grapes.

Many years ago, I was at a wedding and deciding what to drink. I said “I like white wine much better, but everyone says red wine is good for you.” My friend replied, “Well, it’s not like people train for marathons by drinking red wine.”

Do you have sugar cravings? Admit it, that cookie looks really good to you!

For many people, sugar cravings become a full blown addiction, taking a severe toll on their health and self-esteem. They may suffer weight gain, emotional roller coaster rides, cardiovascular issues, diabetes, tooth decay, and other issues. Not to mention the thousands of dollars they’re compulsively spending on desserts.

Akemi Gaines offers to free people from their sugar addictions, with her new ebook Stop Craving Sugar! She used to have severe sugar cravings, until she learned the practices that made her petite, emotionally stable, and able to enjoy all the foods she likes, without being driven to binge eating.

Since I’ve already written a testimonial, I get to quote myself:

“Most nutrition books just talk about the food itself. Akemi goes deeper by tying together the physiological, emotional, mental, and spiritual causes of sugar cravings. Because let’s face it, you won’t cure your cravings just by forcing yourself to stop eating sugar. You need to address the root causes, and that’s what Akemi shows you how to do.”

You hear about a lot of different diets–high carb, low carb, high protein, low protein, vegetarian, vegan, raw, etc. People will try these diets and get completely different results, so it’s hard to know what to eat. That’s why I think it’s helpful to look beyond just the food to figure out the underlying causes of sugar addiction.

This ebook is scientific enough, but still easy to read. You don’t have to be a doctor to understand what Akemi’s talking about. This is something you can really put into practice right away.

It comes with a money-back guarantee as well as a special bonus offer: a free coaching session (normally $125) from weight loss coach Angie Monko, a friend of Akemi’s.

Do you experience sugar cravings? Get back your health with Stop Craving Sugar!

This is an order of Outback’s Aussie cheese fries with ranch dressing. It has received the honor of the #1 position on the list of the 20 worst foods in America.

It contains nearly three thousand calories, far more than an adult is supposed to have in a whole day. And this is what you eat before your dinner even arrives.

I thought it would be a good idea to check the list to see if I was eating anything that made the top 20. To my dismay, the Quiznos Classic Italian sub came in at #14, winner of the worst sandwich category at 1,370 calories. So good, yet so bad.

However, that was for a large, which is enormous. Even the regular size is really big.

The Quiznos website lists the large at 1,220 calories, not 1,370 like Men’s Health says. Nearly a third of the calories and more than half the fat come from the red wine vinaigrette dressing. A regular size Italian sub without dressing is 630 calories.

But it would be pretty miraculous if an American only had 630 calories for lunch. They’d be more likely to get a large sub with dressing and wonder why they can’t lose weight.

Contrast this with Hira Ratan Manek, who has gone for 411 days without food, living on only sunlight and water. However, his site says that “Occasionally, for hospitality and social purposes, he drinks tea, coffee and buttermilk.”

Wait a minute! Buttermilk is 100 calories per cup. That’s like saying that Winnie the Pooh has gone for years without food, living on only sunlight and water. Then the fine print says he occasionally has honey for hospitality and social purposes.

Just how much buttermilk are we talking about?

New addition to the Resources page: The Science of Being Well by Wallace D. Wattles. It was published in 1910, which ironically was the year before Wattles died from health problems at age 51. However, I don’t think this diminishes the validity of the book. For one thing, he didn’t have modern medicine working in his favor, and lots of people died young. Also, he had been in poor health for several years, and might not have even discovered his health secrets until the very end. I’m sure he would have been worse off not knowing what he knew.

Unlike The Science of Getting Rich, The Science of Being Well is not completely based on the law of attraction. Significant emphasis is placed on proper eating, drinking, breathing, and sleeping. It may be a bit controversial; for example, he says that you should always skip breakfast. But much of what he says is hard to argue with, aside from the polarizing issue of the law of attraction.

Partway through the book is an editor’s note that underscores the significance of this book:

“In 1910, very little was known about physiology and pathology, the inner workings of the body in health and disease. Today, almost a century later, despite huge advances in medical science, the human body is still largely a mystery. The process of mapping the intricate genetic code that makes us human (the Human Genome Project) has called into question what every present day doctor was taught in school about the most basic function in our cells: the role of DNA.

The implications of this are at least as dramatic as the discovery that the earth is not flat! Amazingly enough, cutting-edge science supports exactly what Mr. Wattles wrote in this last paragraph, which bears repeating: the Power of Nature within you is sufficient to overcome all hereditary impressions, and if you will learn to control your thoughts, so that you shall think only those of health, and if you will perform the voluntary functions of life in a perfectly healthy way, you can certainly be well.”

There are a tremendous number of unnatural typos in the book, such as periods and hard returns in the middle of a sentence. No doubt introduced by the editor and not the author, but unfortunately I found it very distracting. Still, it’s a very good ebook. You should read The Science of Getting Rich first, in order to get the necessary background on the law of attraction. The next book in the series is The Science of Being Great.

Note that this particular copy of the ebook contains an advertising link at the top of each page. I’m not affiliated with this link, I haven’t researched it, and I have no recommendation either for or against it.

Please share your thoughts on The Science of Being Well in the comments.

I took a day off from work today. Or rather, HR sent me home after a coworker found me lying comatose in my chair. I really needed the day off, as my head, chest, nose, throat, and stomach just aren’t cooperating at all, and I’m feeling chills that aren’t warranted by the 75 degree temperature.

Of course, I wouldn’t have come in to work in the first place if I could have afforded to take the day off. But being a new employee means you start with no vacation. I spent a week in Colorado this summer, and I had to go into a negative vacation balance to do it. Now I’m planning a trip to Japan in the spring, and I want to save up enough vacation time to cover that.

So yesterday when I was having trouble staying awake at work, I just closed my eyes for a bit. Today I made it in OK, but quickly realized that I was completely non-functional, and would have to more or less sleep the whole time. So when a thoughtful coworker noticed, he tried to work something out with HR. The HR lady is very nice, and said I could work from home without using my vacation time, and got a network guy to verify that my laptop had VPN access. I do consider this a favor though instead of just common courtesy, because my group typically doesn’t work from home, and she knows that I didn’t have much chance of actually getting any work done.

I thought that I had caught something from the guy next to me, who sounded like he was coughing up a lung yesterday (I’m sure he wanted to take a day off, but he’s newer than I am, so he has even less vacation time). But then the network guy said he thought I had what one of the other network guys had, and was surprised I was still standing (I might not be tomorrow). Why are all these people forced to work at a fraction of their normal capacity and get the rest of the office sick, instead of just going home?

How about this as a new global HR policy: when you’re sick, you go home. You don’t need to use any vacation time or PTO, you just go home. You work from home if you’re able to, or otherwise you just see a doctor and get some sleep. I’m sure that overall output and morale would increase under this system, and anyone abusing the system would quickly be found out. Everyone wins.

As for me, I might have to take another day off tomorrow, but I won’t know until the morning. But I’m going to remember this experience, and especially the experience I would have had if HR hadn’t been so accommodating. This is part of the “why” for many would-be entrepreneurs, people who are sick and tired of being sick and tired!

[Update 12/15/07 - I did have to stay home the next day. I went to work the following day and people said I sounded like I was going to die. All four people on my team ended up getting sick.]