Obesity-Linked Cancers Increase

Betsy McKay, The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2012

Several cancers linked to obesity and a sedentary lifestyle rose every year from 1999 through 2008, even as improved screening and a sharp decline in the number of smokers have helped push down the rate of new cancer diagnoses overall across the U.S., according to a report released Wednesday.

Rates of cancers of the kidney, pancreas, lower esophagus and uterus increased annually through 2008, the latest data available, according to the Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer. Rates of breast cancer in women at least 50 years old declined 1.3% annually from 1999 to 2005 but rose slightly between 2005 and 2008.

The data add to a growing body of evidence that obesity raises the risk of these and some other cancers. As many as one-third of common cancers in industrialized nations are linked to excess weight and lack of physical activity, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Obesity rates leveled off in the U.S. a decade ago, but an estimated 68.8% of adults remain overweight or obese, according to the CDC, and cancers can take years to develop.

Obesity-related cancers include common ones, such as breast and colorectal cancer, as well as less common ones, such as pancreatic cancer. Excess weight can also decrease the chance of survival once a patient is diagnosed. The burden "is pretty substantial," said Marcus Plescia, director of the division of cancer prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an author of the study.

The report, published online Wednesday in the journal Cancer, is by researchers from the CDC, the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society.

The evidence of a causal link with cancer, while not yet definitive, is far clearer with excess weight and lack of physical activity than with specific foods or nutrients.

"People might think they can do themselves the most good by taking a vitamin or mineral supplement, when actually what they need to do, to do the most good, is to be physically active and control their weight," said June Stevens, head of the department of nutrition at the University of North Carolina's Gillings School of Global Public Health.

The rising rates contrast with the progress made in recent years against major killers such as lung cancer, scientists say. While tobacco use has plummeted since the 1960s, obesity rates have soared.

"The gains made by reducing tobacco use over the past few decades are at least partially being offset now by obesity," said Susan Mayne, professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and associate director of the Yale Cancer Center.

Overall, rates of new cancer diagnosis have been declining slightly since the mid-1990s. They fell 0.6% annually among men between 1998 and 2008. But the declines aren't uniform. Among women, rates fell 0.5% annually between 1998 and 2006 and then leveled off between 2006 and 2008.

A review of more than 7,000 studies found evidence of a link between excess weight and several cancers, according to the report. While the precise link isn't understood, fat cells can encourage the body to produce more substances such as insulin or hormones that can stimulate tumor growth, scientists say. Obese postmenopausal women may have higher levels of free estrogens and androgens, a risk factor for breast, ovarian and uterine cancers. Adenocarcinoma, in the lower esophagus, develops mostly in people who suffer from chronic stomach-acid reflux, often triggered by excess weight.

Not all of the obesity-related cancers are on the rise. Rates of colorectal cancer declined 2.6% yearly between 1999 and 2008, thanks in large part to widespread screening, said Dr. Plescia. Whether the rise in obesity-related cancers will continue is unknown. "Are we just beginning to see these changes, or is what we're seeing what we're going to see, and it's not going to get any worse?" said Dr. Plescia. "My suspicion is it's going to get worse, but we just don't know."

Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared Mar. 29, 2012, on page A3 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obesity-Linked Cancers Increase.

CRS: Food Insufficiency and Income Volatility in U.S. Households

Food Insufficiency and Income Volatility in U.S. Households: The Effects of Imputed Earnings in the Survey of Income and Program Participation

Molly Dahl, Thomas DeLeire, and Shannon Mok, March 27, 2012

Heather Negley, Congressional Budget Office

From the abstract:

This paper explores how the use of imputed earnings data to measure income in the Survey of Income and Program Participation affects the observed relationship between household income volatility and food insufficiency. The study finds that the inclusion of imputed earnings data when measuring income volatility substantially understates the association between large drops in household income and food insufficiency. After excluding observations with imputed earnings, large drops in income are associated with a 1.3 percentage point increase in the probability of food insufficiency, although the estimate is not statistically significant at conventional levels.

+ Direct link to full report (PDF; 274 KB)

Childhood Obesity

The journal Childhood Obesity has a special issue of articles related to Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign.  Mrs. Obama wrote the foreword.

Here are some selections:
Let’s Move! Raising a Healthier Generation of Kids
First Lady Michelle Obama
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 1-1.
First Page | Full Text PDF|
Let’s Move! Progress, Promise, and the Miles Left To Go
David L. Katz
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 2-3.
First Page | Full Text PDF |
The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act— Building Healthier Schools
Thomas J. Vilsack, BA, JD, US Secretary of Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 4-4.
First Page | Full Text PDF|

Motivating Kids To Move: The Role of Sports Stars in the Fight Against Childhood Obesity
Shellie Y. Pfohl, MS, President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition (PCFSN), Drew Brees, Co-Chair, President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition (PCFSN) and NFL Quarterback
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 5-6.
First Page | Full Text PDF|

Promoting Health at the Community Level: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally
Christina D. Economos, Alison Tovar
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 19-22.
First Page | Full Text PDF
Reestablishing Healthy Food Retail: Changing the Landscape of Food Deserts
Allison Karpyn, Candace Young, Stephanie Weiss
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 28-30.
First Page | Full Text PDF|
Children’s Meals in Restaurants: Families Need More Help To Make Healthy Choices
Margo G. Wootan
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 31-33.
First Page | Full Text PDF|
Stepping Up Across America: The Small Changes Approach
John C. Peters, Rachel C. Lindstrom, James O. Hill
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 76-78.
First Page | Full Text PDF |

Making the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice
Jamie Devereaux
Childhood Obesity. February 2012, 8(1): 82-84.
First Page | Full Text PDF |

From SXSW to the White House, Food Data a Trending Topic

Destin Joy Layne,  EcoCentric Blog,  March 20, 2012

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We may be a small subset of the population, but some people can't get enough data about food. Back in grad school, I spent hours upon hours poring over federal data, drafting surveys and developing new models to assess community food security, even running experiments (such as nutritious vs. balanced meals) and overseeing the delivery and return of thousands of (paper!) surveys, which I later entered by hand as part of a scaling analysis. My love affair didn't end there — over the past 10 years, especially through my work with Eat Well Guide, I have continued to monitor, analyze and strategize around USDA and other food systems data.

Open data and third party integration was just beginning in 2000; the first GIS maps were exciting but elementary, and I still recall my thrill at downloading early CPS (Current Population Survey) and ERS (Economic Research Service) data sets, only to be disheartened by the challenge in working with the limited fields and forms. But accessibility and interest in federal data has grown dramatically over the years, and the recent launch of the USDA Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Compass is proof of this evolution; it's clear that research and development will never be the same. And that's exciting!

Open data is the new frontier. Data has always been a sorely missing link in the food movement, and it is high time for it to help advocates improve our food and agriculture systems. During last week's South by Southwest Interactive festival, #openfood was a trending topic on Twitter, and the panel "Better Food Through Open Data Standards" (led by Anthony Nicalo of Foodtree and featuring Danielle Gould of Food + Tech Connect, Britta Riley of Window Farms and Chacha Sikes of Code for America) was a major highlight, and not just for yours truly.

It is clear that there is a real need, and a real opportunity, to use data to tell the stories of the food movement and to support advancements in agriculture, advocacy, science and health. Data is also a necessary tool for policymakers to produce smarter policy that speaks to the actual needs of the people.

It is clear that there is a real need, and a real opportunity, to use data to tell the stories of the food movement and to support advancements in agriculture, advocacy, science and health. Data is also a necessary tool for policymakers to produce smarter policy that speaks to the actual needs of the people. Data maintenance and accuracy, something we have learned a lot about in our years of curating and updating the Eat Well Guide, is also a major – and often overlooked – challenge which still needs to be addressed.

Projects like the new Code for America Brigade and last fall's Food + Tech Connect's Farm Bill Hackathon demonstrate emerging opportunities to unwrap data and share it in ways that make sense and are interesting. There is a clear need to create channels for data convergence on a larger scale and it is inspiring to see the USDA, as well as other agencies, respond to the call for leadership in this area.

Last month, I was invited to the White House launch of the USDA's Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Compass (KYF2). The event was a ground-breaking one, the first virtual conversation of its kind, and it was a thrilling moment to be a part of. Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan and White House Office of Public Engagement Director Jon Carson co-led a live video broadcast and Twitter chat in a room full of leading experts to discuss the future of food (#kyf2).

In attendance that day were Sam Kass, Senior White House Chef and Advisor on Food Policy, Daniel Bowman Simon of Snap Gardens, Stephanie Ritchie of National Agriculture Library, Helena Bottemiller of Food Safety News, Gary Oppenheimer of AmpleHarvest.org, Ralph Loglisci of Wholesome Wave, Hilde Steffey of Farm Aid, Renee Catalos of Future Harvest – CASA and some 50 other national advocates representing their tireless work on the KYF2 themes of infrastructure, healthy food access, local meat and dairy, land stewardship, local food knowledge and interactive maps and data..

During the afternoon, Merrigan featured the new Compass Map, calling it "one of the most engaging docs we've ever produced." She also spotlighted foodhubs, proudly announced the"54% growth in farmers markets between 2001 and2008" and touched upon plans to explore geo-spatial data as a way to learn more about local food economies. It was clear to me that our administration had taken some giant steps forward through this exploration of open data as well as through their use of new media, even without "understanding much of it," according to Merrigan. But I also felt that these were just the first steps, and that it would be up to us, the representatives of the food movement, to carry this campaign forward and determine next steps for application and implementation of these resources. When Deputy Merrigan called upon to me speak on local food data (the USDA has shared farmers' market data with the GRACE food programs for the Eat Well Guide since 2010), I took the opportunity to speak about data usage across media and web platforms, our commitment to this work and next steps. I called the Compass a "dream come true," given the true need for this data. Unable to resist, I also previewed plans to co-host another hackathon this fall to support developers integrating USDA data into their own platforms.

Here are some of the other food and tech themes that emerged throughout the course of the day:

· Best ways to make information and data open and available

· How to reach new constituencies

· Multi-platform media

· Collaboration among local, regional and national food projects

· Innovative use of data to tell new stories

· New models of mapping

· Twitter feeds and virtual community

So what are the next steps when we consider the possibilities for innovation and application? How can we support the USDA's effort to share food data? And how to increase data relevance and collaboration among projects? There are many opportunities ahead, and considering how far we've all – but especially the USDA – come since my graduate school days, it's a thrill to be a part of this movement as we continue to make huge strides toward greater transparency and accessibility to information.

Added Sugars Pile Up on Children's Plates

Nicholas Bakalar, The New York Times, March 19, 2012

Older children consume more sugar than younger ones do, boys consume more than girls, and white children consume more than black or Mexican-American children, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. And they all consume too much.

Multimedia

Graphic

Calories from Added Sugars

Researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a continuous examination of a large cross-section of the American population. The survey includes interviews, physical examinations and laboratory tests of blood and urine. For this study, published on Feb. 29, researchers interviewed subjects about their food consumption over the previous 24 hours.

The scientists measured all added sugars — spooned on at the table or used as ingredients in processed and prepared foods like bread, jam, candy and ice cream. Added sugars include white sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, honey, molasses and others, but not sugars in fruit or pure fruit juice.

Boys got an average of 16.3 percent of their calories from added sugar, and girls 15.5 percent. The older the child, the greater the intake of sugar calories — the diets of 2- to 5-year-olds had less than 14 percent sugar, but boys 12 to 19 consumed 17.5 percent of their calories as added sugar, and adolescent girls, 16.6 percent.

Non-Hispanic whites consumed the largest percentage of calories from sugar and Mexican-Americans the smallest. Family income made no difference in sugar consumption.

The numbers reveal two facts that may contradict commonly held beliefs. First, young people got 60 percent of their sugar calories from foods, and only 40 percent from soft drinks. And second, whether it was from food or drink, they got most of their sugar at home, not at school or elsewhere.

Cynthia L. Ogden, the senior author and an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that added sugars account for 27 percent of the calories in a chocolate chip cookie, 17 percent in a blueberry muffin, 42 percent in sugar-sweetened cereal and 91 percent in a can of cola. The C.D.C. recommends that no more than 5 to 15 percent of calories come from solid fats and added sugars.

“The important thing is reading food labels,” Dr. Ogden said, “and looking at what you’re consuming.”

How the (Finally Ended) Corn Ethanol Subsidy Made Us Fatter - DailyFinance

Bruce Watson, Daily Finance (AOL), January 4, 2012

America's food chain has lately produced a bumper crop of headline-ready catastrophes.     From arsenic in apple juice to antibiotics in beef to E. coli-tainted lettuce, a trip to the friendly neighborhood grocery store can sometimes feel like a round of Russian roulette.

But the biggest threat -- the one that food experts agree is most responsible for America's health, economic, and dietary problems -- has just been neutralized: At the end of 2011, Congress allowed the much-vilified corn ethanol subsidy to expire.


Ethanol, a gasoline replacement and additive that could help reduce America's dependence upon foreign oil, has long been America's top recipient of alternative fuel funding. And since 1980, corn ethanol -- essentially, gas made from corn -- has been the biggest beneficiary of the biofuel craze. Over the past 30 years, the federal government has given an estimated $45 billion to the corn industry to help support ethanol production. In 2011 alone, those subsidies totaled about $6 billion, or about 45cents forevery gallon of ethanol.


Brutalizing America's Waistlines ...


But the investment in generating more home-grown fuel has also generated a host of painful side effects. First, by driving down the cost of corn, the subsidy helped spur the wider use of America's most notorious sweetener:high fructose corn syrup.


Starting in the mid-1980s, as subsidy money trickled through the agricultural economy, farmers and food production companies discovered that, even when sale prices for corn were low, the government's largess meant it was still worthwhile to grow it --lotsof it. This meant that more was grown than could be consumed by people or livestock, but only so much of the excess could be made into fuel. Turns out, ethanol is hard on engines, so the standard blend of gas that goes into your tank is only 10% ethanol -- the rest is good old fossil fuel.


So what were corn producers supposed to do with the rest of that huge surplus?


Enter HFCS. Beginning in the late 1970s, the U.S. instituted tariffs that drove up the price of sugar. By coincidence, a few years later, the corn subsidy started driving down the price of corn. The combination suddenly made HFCS a great deal for food producers. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the sweetener started working its way into foods, and within a few years, it was showing up in thousands of products -- contributing thousands of empty calories a week to the average American diet.


Over the past few years, attacks on HFCS by nutritionists and food wonks likeMichael Pollanhave made consumers more wary of the additive. However, as HFCS usage has dropped, ethanol use has increased. In 2007,Congress mandatedthat the U.S. must consume 15 billion gallons of alternative fuels a year -- including ethanol -- by 2015; by 2022, annual usage must increase to36 billion gallons. As ethanol production has ramped up,it has taken the price of HFCS with it, further reducing the sweetener's viability. The removal of the corn subsidy will likely make HFCS even more expensive -- and less attractive to food producers.


... And Mexico's Economy


At the same time that the corn subsidy was expanding America's waistlines, it was alsodevastating Mexico's rural economy. Because of the subsidy, U.S. farmers were able to sell corn for less money than it cost them to grow it. When the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed in 1994, it opened Mexico's borders to a tidal wave of cheap American corn. Since then, an estimated 2 million Mexican farm jobs have disappeared as unsubsidized Mexican corn has been priced out of existence. Today, farming in Mexico is a shadow of its former self, and millions of would-be agriculture workers have departed for sunnier pastures -- usually in the United States.

The saddest part of the subsidy saga is that corn isn't actually all that good as a source for fuel. For years, critics have argued that other crops, includingsweet potatoes,wood chips, and evenswitch grass, can produce more fuel per acre than corn.


In fact, to make the U.S. corn ethanol industry profitable, lawmakers had to institute atariff against Brazilian ethanol, which is made with sugar cane. The 54-cents-a-gallon tariff, coupled with the 45-cents-a-gallon corn subsidy, effectively cut 99 cents from the price of every gallon of ethanol produced, making American corn ethanol far more cost-effective than competitors from other countries -- or other crops.


The decisions to drop the corn subsidy and kill the tariff aren't the end for ethanol -- or for the endless debates that surround the alternative fuel. Given the questions about the effect of ethanol on engines, it remains to be seen if the federally mandated alternative fuel goals for the next decade will be reached, but one thing is certain: 10 years from now, far less of the ethanol going into America's gas tanks will be coming from corn.

CRS: Previewing the Next Farm Bill

Peggy Garvin,  Source:  Congressional Research Service, via Federation of American Scientists

From the summary:

Congress periodically establishes agricultural and food policy in an omnibus farm bill. The 112th Congress faces reauthorization of the current five-year farm bill (the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, P.L. 110-246) because many of its provisions expire in 2012. The 2008 farm bill contained 15 titles covering farm commodity support, horticulture, livestock, conservation, nutrition assistance, international food aid, trade, agricultural research, farm credit, rural development, bioenergy, and forestry, among others. ...

Leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees anticipate having a new farm bill completed before the end of this session. If the current farm bill expires without a new authorization or a temporary extension, it automatically would be replaced with permanent statutes for farm commodity support, which are not fully compatible with current national economic objectives, global trading rules, and federal budgetary or regulatory policies.

Still a Fast-Food Nation: Eric Schlosser Reflects on 10 Years Later

Ten years after his seminal book ‘Fast Food Nation,’ Eric Schlosser reflects on how little has changed in the production, safety, and consumption in America—but why he’s still hopeful.

Eric Schlosser, The Daily Beast,  March 12, 2012

More than a decade has passed since Fast Food Nation was published, and I’d love to report that the book is out of date, that the many problems it describes have been solved, and that the Golden Arches are now the symbol of a fallen empire, like the pyramids at Giza. Sadly, that is not the case. Every day about 65 million people eat at a McDonald’s restaurant somewhere in the world, more than ever before. The annual revenues of America’s fast-food industry, adjusted for inflation, have risen by about 20 percent since 2001. The number of fast-food ads aimed at American children has greatly increased as well. The typical preschooler now sees about three fast-food ads on television every day. The typical teenager sees about five. The endless barrage of ads, toys, contests, and marketing gimmicks has fueled not only fast-food sales, but also a wide range of diet-related illnesses. About two thirds of the adults in the United States are obese or overweight. The obesity rate among preschoolers has doubled in the past 30 years. The rate among children aged 6 to 11 has tripled. And by some odd coincidence, the annual cost of the nation’s obesity epidemic—about $168 billion, as calculated by researchers at Emory University—is the same as the amount of money Americans spent on fast food in 2011.

Throughout both terms of President George W. Bush’s administration, every effort to reform the nation’s food-safety system was blocked by the White House and by Republicans in Congress. During the summer of 2002, ground beef from the ConAgra slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colo., was linked to an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7. The outbreak killed one person and sickened at least 46.

ConAgra voluntarily recalled almost 19 million pounds of potentially contaminated meat, less than a month’s worth of production at Greeley. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the Inspector General subsequently found that the plant had been shipping beef tainted with E. coli O157:H7 for nearly two years. The Greeley recall later seemed minuscule compared to that of the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. In 2008 Westland/Hallmark agreed to recall 143 million pounds of potentially contaminated ground beef after an undercover video showed downer cows being dragged by forklift into a slaughterhouse. More than one fourth of the recalled meat had been purchased to make tacos, chili, and hamburgers for federal school-lunch and nutrition programs. As of this writing, the USDA still lacks the authority to test widely for dangerous pathogens, to set enforceable limits on those pathogens, and to demand the recall of contaminated meat.

The industry-friendly policies of the Bush administration also reduced government oversight of worker safety. In 2002 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration changed the form that meatpacking companies must use to report injuries. The new form had no space to report musculoskeletal disorders caused by repetitive trauma—thereby preventing a whole category of serious injury from being counted. Instantly, as if by magic, the injury rate in meatpacking dropped by almost 50 percent. “Recordable safety incident rate in plants cut in half since 1996,” the American Meat Institute proudly announced in a press release, without ever mentioning that the decline was due to the change in record keeping. In a scathing report on the exploitation of American meatpacking workers, Human Rights Watch suggested that the AMI had deliberately chosen the year 1996, as a basis of comparison, to mislead the public. “A 50 percent drop in meat and poultry industry injury rates in a single year would be implausible,” the report noted, “but reaching back six years creates an impressive but fictitious improvement in plant safety.”

A few years later the AMI claimed that “recordable injuries” had actually fallen by 70 percent, thanks to the meatpacking industry’s concern for worker safety. The claim was made in an AMI pamphlet commemorating the 100th anniversary of The Jungle’s publication.

The title of the pamphlet—“If Upton Sinclair Were Alive Today ... He’d Be Amazed by the U.S. Meat Industry”—was perhaps its most accurate assertion. Sinclair would no doubt be amazed. He would be amazed by how little has fundamentally changed over the past century, by how poor immigrant workers are still routinely being injured, and by how the industry’s lies, no matter how brazen, are still said with a straight face.

Despite all the needless harm that continues to be done, much has changed for the better since 2001, when Fast Food Nation appeared in bookstores. Issues that were rarely discussed in the mainstream media—food safety, animal welfare, the obesity epidemic, the ethics of marketing junk food to children, the need for a new and sustainable agricultural system—have become inescapable. A food movement has arisen across the country, promoted by authors, activists, and filmmakers. Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2002), Frances and Anna Lappé’s Hope’s Edge (2003), Matthew Scully’s Dominion (2003), Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food (2004), Deborah Koons Garcia’s The Future of Food (2004), Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004), Franny Armstrong’s McLibel (2005), Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), Aaron Woolf’s King Corn (2008), Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved (2008), Robby Kenner’s Food, Inc. (2008), Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland (2011), the reporting of Tom Philpott, the essays of Corby Kummer and Mark Bittman, the many books of Wendell Berry and Alice Waters, Jamie Oliver’s televised Food Revolution—all of these works have combined to create a new food culture in the United States. That culture rejects highly processed foods, genetically modified foods, and the whole industrial approach to food production. It champions farmers’ markets, school gardens, healthy school lunches, and local and organic production. And it has caused a sea change in American attitudes toward food. A decade ago, the idea of an organic garden at the White House would have seemed inconceivable.

Throughout the United States, parents are working to kick fast food, junk food, and soda out of their children’s schools. The sale of fruit and vegetable seeds for home gardens is soaring.

Idealistic college kids often dream of becoming chefs or farmers, instead of doctors and lawyers. The Food Network has turned cooking into a form of mass entertainment and transformed people who cook well into celebrities. The frozen, reheated, salty, fatty foods served at McDonald’s and Burger King and KFC are the antithesis of what this new movement wants. Even the National Restaurant Association, a corporate bastion of the old mindset, now acknowledges the change. Its 2011 “Restaurant Industry Forecast” says that today’s top menu trends are “local sourcing, sustainability, and nutrition.”

At the moment, the main problem with the food movement is how few Americans can enjoy its benefits. Although the amount of money spent on organic food has increased more than 20-fold since the early 1990s, it currently accounts for only 4 percent of the nation’s total spending on food. The annual revenue of McDonald’s Corp. are roughly equal to those of America’s entire organic-food industry. Organic food is more expensive. Families in which both parents work outside the home often don’t have the time to prepare meals from scratch. And more than 23 million low-income Americans now live in “food deserts” that lack supermarkets. As upper-middle-class and well-educated people increasingly reject fast food, the industry has responded much like the tobacco industry once did when that demographic group decided to quit smoking. The fast-food chains, like the tobacco companies, are now aggressively targeting African-Americans, Latinos, and the poor. America’s low-income communities now boast the highest proportion of fast-food restaurants—as well as the highest obesity rates and the highest rates of diabetes. Two vastly different food cultures now coexist in the United States. While some Americans eat free-range chicken and organic produce, exercise regularly, and improve their health, most are consuming inexpensive processed foods, drinking large amounts of soda, and reducing their life expectancy. The contrast between the thin, fit, and well-to-do and the illness-ridden, poor, and obese has no historical precedent. The wealthy used to be corpulent, while the poor starved.

Although the food movement originated among the well-educated upper middle class, it is now reaching out to those less fortunate. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization that campaigns on behalf of migrant farm workers in Florida, has persuaded the leading fast-food chains—after years of protests—to help raise the wages and improve the working conditions in the fields there. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United is fighting against wage theft, racism, and the abuse of workers in the restaurant industry. The Edible Schoolyard Project and Slow Food USA are trying to bring healthy food to children in low-income communities. And Growing Power, a group led by Will Allen and based in Milwaukee, is demonstrating how agriculture can thrive in the inner city, turning urban food deserts into farms that produce healthy food.

There are inherent limits, however, on how much this thriving new movement can achieve. At a time when unemployment is high, 46 million Americans live below the poverty line, and the minimum wage remains almost 20 percent lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was 40 years ago, changes to America’s food system won’t be enough. In the previous chapter of this book, I argued that the 21st century would be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. I believe that more strongly today than I did a decade ago. The Founding Fathers of the United States believed that absolute power corrupts absolutely. They believed in the need for competing centers of power. They created a system of government with checks and balances so that no branch of government would become despotic. And they were equally convinced that competition was essential in the economic sphere. If they were alive today, like Upton Sinclair they would be amazed by the monopolies and monopsonies that now dominate the American economy, by the corruption of government officials, and by the wide disparities in wealth. The food movement needs to become part of a larger movement with a broader vision—a movement that opposes unchecked corporate power, that demands not only healthy food but also a living wage and a safe workplace for every single American.

Fast Food Nation was my first book, and I had no idea whether anyone would care to read it. The views expressed in the book seemed completely out of step with the views of most people. I certainly didn’t expect that it would still be in print more than a decade later. Since the book was published, I’ve been strongly criticized by fast-food chains, meatpacking companies, and industry-front groups. The criticism has, for the most part, been quite personal. I’ve been called a communist and a socialist, a “dunce,” a “health fascist,” an “economics ignoramus,” a “banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid,” a “hectoring nanny of the nanny state,” and much stronger epithets. Elementary school principals have been contacted and warned that I shouldn’t be allowed to visit classrooms or speak with schoolchildren. Extraordinary lies about me have been spread on the Internet. A number of my readings at bookstores and talks on college campuses have been disrupted by industry supporters. At times I’ve been accompanied at public appearances by police officers. And all of that has occurred because this book describes the business practices of companies that sell hamburgers.

Nevertheless, I’ve found the whole experience immensely rewarding. Over the years, I’ve done my best to help groups campaigning for food safety, child nutrition, worker rights, animal welfare, and sustainable agriculture, among other causes. It has felt good to get out of the office and into the world, to try and do things instead of simply writing about them. I’ve met countless people who are making a difference, whose self-sacrifice makes my work on behalf of change seem insignificant.

Everything that I’ve learned since Fast Food Nation was published has made me more, not less, optimistic about the possibilities for change. I believe, more than ever before, that nothing about our current food system was inevitable. And when things aren’t inevitable, that means things don’t have to be the way they are. I hope that 10 years from now this book really is irrelevant—and that the world it describes, so full of greed and lacking in compassion, is just a bad memory.

“Afterword” from Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser. Afterword copyright 2012 by Eric Schlosser. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Food Politics » The Lancet on nudging and nagging vs. environmental change

Marion Nestle, Food Politics, March 9, 2012

I’m getting caught up on my journal reading and just ran across an editorial from The Lancet, January 21.  It takes on the UK government’s “personal responsibility” approach to health promotion based on the idea that

gently ‘nudging’ people to change their unhealthy behaviours was the key to public health.

Even the UK government has to admit that the nudge approach isn’t working.  Now it is telling physicians in the National Health Service (NHS) to nag:

use every contact with patients and the public to help them maintain and improve their physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The Lancet asks:

Is this a realistic, sensible, and effective recommendation? We would say not.

Effective, evidenced-based public health measures do not include nudging people into healthy behaviours or getting NHS staff to lecture patients on healthy lifestyles.

They include measures such as raising taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, fatty foods, and sugary drinks, reducing junk food and drink advertising to children, and restricting hours on sale of alcoholic drinks….Focusing on other approaches is foolish.

The nudge and nag approaches need one thing: the firm elbow.

I do enjoy reading The Lancet.  Its editors are so clear about the need for environmental changes to make it easier for people eat better diets and be more active.

The Billionaire Who Is Planning His 125th Birthday

Frank Bruni, The New York Times, March 3, 2011

 One morning in early January, David Murdock awoke to an unsettling sensation. At first he didn’t recognize it and then he couldn’t believe it, because for years — decades, really — he maintained what was, in his immodest estimation, perfect health. But now there was this undeniable imperfection, a scratchiness and swollenness familiar only from the distant past. Incredibly, infuriatingly, he had a sore throat.

 “I never have anything go wrong,” he said later. “Never have a backache. Never have a headache. Never have anything else.” This would make him a lucky man no matter his age. Because he is 87, it makes him an unusually robust specimen, which is what he must be if he is to defy the odds (and maybe even the gods) and live as long as he intends to. He wants to reach 125, and sees no reason he can’t, provided that he continues eating the way he has for the last quarter century: with a methodical, messianic correctness that he believes can, and will, ward off major disease and minor ailment alike.

 So that sore throat wasn’t just an irritant. It was a challenge to the whole gut-centered worldview on which his bid for extreme longevity rests. “I went back in my mind: what am I not eating enough of?” he told me. Definitely not fruits and vegetables: he crams as many as 20 of them, including pulverized banana peels and the ground-up rinds of oranges, into the smoothies he drinks two to three times a day, to keep his body brimming with fiber and vitamins. Probably not protein: he eats plenty of seafood, egg whites, beans and nuts to compensate for his avoidance of dairy, red meat and poultry, which are consigned to a list of forbidden foods that also includes alcohol, sugar and salt.

“I couldn’t figure it out,” he said. So he made a frustrated peace with his malady, which was gone in 36 hours and, he stressed, not all that bad. “I wasn’t really struggling with it,” he said. “But my voice changed a little bit. I always have a powerful voice.” Indeed, he speaks so loudly at times, and in such a declamatory manner, that it cows people, who sometimes assume they’ve angered him. “When I open my mouth,” he noted, “the room rings.”

The room ringing just then was the vast, stately common area of his vast, stately North Carolina lodge, which sits on more than 500 acres of woods and meadows where a flock of rare black Welsh sheep — which he keeps as pets, certainly not as chops and cheese in the making — roam under the protection of four Great Pyrenees dogs. He got the dogs after a donkey and two llamas entrusted with guarding the flock from predators failed at the task. The donkey and llamas still hang out with their fleecy charges, but they are purely ornamental.

 Murdock loves to collect things: animals, orchids, Chippendale mirrors, Czechoslovakian chandeliers. He keeps yet another black Welsh flock at one of his two homes in Southern California, a 2,200-acre ranch whose zoological bounty extends to a herd of longhorn cattle, about 800 koi in a manmade lake and 16 horses — down from a population of more than 550, most of them Arabians, 35 years ago — with their own exercise pool. He has five homes in all, one on the small Hawaiian island of Lanai, which he owns almost in its entirety. He shuttles among them in a private jet. Forbes magazine’s most recent list of the 400 richest Americans put him at No. 130, with an estimated net worth of $2.7 billion, thanks to real estate development and majority stakes in an array of companies, most notably Dole. Five years earlier the estimate was $4.2 billion, but the recession took its toll.

 His affluence has enabled him to turn his private fixation on diet and longevity into a public one. I went to see him first in North Carolina in late January. It is there, outside of Charlotte, in a city named Kannapolis near his lodge, that he has spent some $500 million of his fortune in recent years to construct the North Carolina Research Campus, a scientific center dedicated to his conviction that plants, eaten in copious quantities and the right variety, hold the promise of optimal health and maximal life span. The campus is a grand and grandiose sight, a cluster of mammoth Georgian-style buildings that dwarf everything around them. They call to mind an august, aged university, but the brick is without blemish, and there is no ivy.

 Inside are world-class laboratories with cutting-edge equipment and emblems of the ostentation with which Murdock approaches much of what he does. He made two separate trips to the mountaintop quarries in Carrara, Italy, to select the 125 tons of off-white marble that cover the floor and even the walls of the central atrium of the main building, called the David H. Murdock Core Laboratory. He also commissioned, for the atrium’s dome, an enormous painted mural with outsize, hypervivid representations of about two dozen foods at the center of his diet, including grapes as large as Frisbees, radishes bigger than beach balls and a pineapple the size of a schooner. This kaleidoscopic orgy of antioxidants is presented as a wreath around a soaring eagle, whose wingspan was lengthened at the last minute, to about 18 feet from 12, at his request. The bird symbolizes him.

 There are health nuts, and then there is Murdock: health paragon, patron and proselytizer, with a biography as colorful as that mural, a determination to write a few more chapters of it still and a paradox of sorts at the center of it all. What set him on this quest was a loss that no amplitude of wellness can restore, and even if he teased out his days into eternity, he would be hard pressed to fill them with the contentment they once had.

 Murdock stands only 5-foot-8, and while he perhaps doesn’t look each and every one of his many years, his skin is deeply wrinkled, and his hair is entirely white. His hearing has dulled, so that he frequently misunderstands the questions he is asked, though it’s possible in some instances that he simply decides not to answer them and to talk about something else instead. He thrums with willfulness.

 “I never had a boss in my whole life,” he says, owning up to what he labels a “dictatorial” streak. “I’ve totally destroyed anybody’s ability to tell me what to do.”

 His energy, more than his appearance, makes him seem younger than he is. At his lodge he leapt from his chair every 20 minutes to grab unwieldy four-foot-long logs and hurl them into a stone fireplace two stories tall. The gesture was not only irresistible metaphor — he didn’t want the flame to die — but also showy proof of his strength. He tries to fit in weight lifting several times a week, and that, combined with brisk walks on a treadmill and his diet, helps keep his weight at about 140 pounds, though he has always been naturally slender, even when he ate what he pleased. He doesn’t count calories or believe in extreme caloric restriction as a way to extend life. But he does believe that excess weight is a sure way to abbreviate it, and reprimands friends, acquaintances and even strangers who are heavy.

 In 2006, when he first met with D. H. Griffin, whose demolition company was to prepare the site for the research campus, he took note of Griffin’s size. At 5-foot-11, he weighed about 285 pounds.

 “You’re probably going to die before this job’s done, because you’re so fat and unhealthy,” Murdock told Griffin, as Griffin recalls, adding that Griffin’s family would wind up paying extra money for an extra-large coffin. Later he did something more constructive: he offered Griffin a bonus if he lost 30 pounds. Griffin did and collected $100,000. He has since regained 22 of them.

 In restaurants Murdock will push the butter dish toward the server and say, “Take the death off the table.” He will ask employees or friends who are putting sugar in coffee or milk in tea why they want to kill themselves and will upbraid people leaving healthful food unfinished about the vitamins they’re squandering.

 I experienced this during a visit in early February to his California ranch, where I joined him for lunch: a six-fruit smoothie; a mixed-leaf salad with toasted walnuts, fennel and blood orange; a soup with more than eight vegetables and beans; a sliver of grilled Dover sole on a bed of baby carrots, broccoli and brown rice.

 “How did you like your soup?” he asked me after one of his household staff members removed it. I said it was just fine.

 “Did you eat all your juice?” he added, referring to the broth. I said I had left perhaps an inch of it.

 He shot me a stern look. “You got a little bit of it,” he said. “I get a lot — every bit I can.” He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s O.K. You’ll go before me.”

 There was dessert, too: flourless cookies made with dark chocolate and walnuts, both rich in antioxidants, and sweetened not with sugar but with honey. He quickly polished one off and then called out to the kitchen to say that he wanted the cookies to make an encore appearance after dinner, so he could have another then. Five minutes later, still cookie-struck, he walked into the kitchen to ask that a few be packed up for him to have handy through the afternoon.

 Murdock grew up in the tiny town of Wayne, Ohio, the middle child of three and the only son. He didn’t see much of his father, a traveling salesman with an inconsistent income, but was close to his mother, who took in laundry and scrubbed floors to help make ends meet. He softens when he recalls sitting in her lap while she read to him, a memory that he says hasn’t been dimmed by the length of her absence. She died, from cancer, when she was just 42 and he 17.

 By then he was living on his own, having dropped out of school at 14. He has dyslexia, though no one initially realized it, and never managed grades better than D’s. “Everybody laughed at me,” he says. “They thought I was an imbecile.” He traded classwork for changing oil and pumping gas; he lived in a room above the service station.

 When he talks about his childhood, his lack of formal education is one of two themes he brings up again and again, usually to cast it as an inadvertent gift. He says that because he felt the need to compensate for it, he read prodigiously and, he stresses, without the narrowness of focus he notices in many conventionally learned people. Biographies of Andrew Carnegie, Socratic dialogues, Shakespearean sonnets, “The Prince”— he devoured it all over time. He also studied something called brain acceleration, which he says taught him to think about three things at once. “I’ll match wits with anybody,” he says. “I don’t care if they have the top degree in the world.” He notes that everyone on his research campus’s board is a Ph.D. or an M.D. But he, the high-school dropout, presides over the meetings.

 The other theme is how low the point from which he rose to riches was. After finishing several years of service in the U.S. Army at age 22, he was not only penniless but also homeless, and slept for a while under a bush in a Detroit park. He would cadge free coffee from a friend employed at a greasy spoon. A man who worked for a loan company met Murdock there, learned that he was a veteran and offered to help.

With the man’s assistance, he rounded up $1,200 in loans and bought that diner, which he whipped into freshly scrubbed, newly painted shape. He sold it a year and a half later for $1,900, spent $75 of the profit on a car, set out for California and stopped along the way in Phoenix, where the opportunity to make money was too good to pass up. He stayed for 17 years, buying cheap land and constructing affordable houses for all the people moving South and West after World War II. “I was building as fast as I could break ground,” he says. “Bang, bang, bang: I could hardly get a house finished before it was sold.”

 Houses and small office buildings were followed by larger office buildings, in Arizona and California and eventually the Midwest. To invest all the money pouring in, he bought stock, then more stock, then whole companies. He acquired control of International Mining in 1978 and in the early 1980s became the largest shareholder in Occidental Petroleum by selling the company his 18 percent interest in Iowa Beef. (That was back when he and filet were on friendly terms.) He took over Dole, part of a larger company, Castle & Cooke, which he acquired control of in 1985.

 It was a heady ride, and his partner for the headiest stretch of it was a raven-haired, German-born beauty who became his wife in 1967, when he was in his mid-40s and she was in her late 20s. Her name was Gabriele. Although he was married twice before, he hadn’t fathered any children. With Gabriele he had two boys, who joined a son of hers whom he adopted. He moved his base of operations from Arizona to California and, for his new family, bought the legendary Conrad Hilton estate in Beverly Hills. Soon afterward, for weekend getaways, he also bought the ranch, in Ventura County, about a 30-minute drive away. For the three boys, he got all those animals, and for Gabriele, jewels, gowns, fresh flowers — whatever she wanted.

 “He adored her,” says E. Rolland Dickson, Murdock’s personal physician at the Mayo Clinic and a longtime close friend, adding that even 15 years into the marriage, “he had that look of a young guy on his honeymoon.”

 He and Gabriele traveled the world; he chose one trip, she the next. Murdock says: “She always wanted to do what I wanted to do, and I always wanted to do what she wanted to do. It’s very hard to find somebody that way.”

 And harder still to lose her. In 1983 she was given a diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer. There was no effective treatment, though he looked wide and far. The couple took a suite at a hotel adjacent to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Determined to heal her somehow, he wondered about nutrition and began to do extensive research into what she — and he, in support of her — should eat. The answer was more or less the kind of diet he has stuck to ever since.

 Because many cancers have environmental links and the one she got didn’t run in her family, he suspects that lifestyle was a culprit, and is convinced that if the two of them had eaten better sooner, she would have been spared the surgery, the radiation, the chemotherapy, the wheelchair, the year and a half of hope and fear and pain. “If I had known what I know today,” he says, “I could have saved my wife’s life. And I think I could have saved my mother’s life too.” Gabriele Murdock died 18 years into their marriage, in 1985. She was 43.

 Less than a year later, the oldest of the couple’s three sons, Eugene, drowned in the estate’s pool, apparently after accidentally hitting his head. He was 23. Even then death wasn’t done with the family Murdock and Gabriele created. About seven years ago, the second of the three boys, David II, had a fatal car crash as he sped down the Santa Monica Freeway. He was 36. The family is down to just Murdock and his youngest son, Justin, now 38, who helps run NovaRx, a biotechnology firm in which Murdock owns a controlling share. Murdock did marry a fourth time, and then a fifth, but neither union lasted long. He has been single for more than a decade now, though he frequently makes passing references to “my wife,” meaning Gabriele and only Gabriele, photographs of whom dominate his homes. The other wives don’t show up.

 “I had a lot of tragedy,” he told me one of the few times he engaged the topic of his family’s steady, cruel erosion. The room wasn’t ringing, and he turned his face away.

 For a few years after losing Gabriele and Eugene, he couldn’t find the energy for much of anything and delegated many business dealings to subordinates. When his zest finally returned, he was consumed by the subject of what and how he and Gabriele should have eaten. He pored over medical journals, befriended and debriefed experts, gave speeches. Bit by bit his entire world became one of well-being. Out behind the orchid conservatory on his California ranch, he constructed tens of thousands of square feet of additional greenhouse space, where a small posse of gardeners tend an encyclopedic array of produce. If he can’t find something at the grocery store, he can probably just pluck it from here. When I walked through the greenhouses recently, I spotted Swiss chard, cabbage, celery, onions, spinach, beets, radishes, eggplant, artichokes, red peppers, rhubarb, baby bananas, strawberries, grapefruit, kumquats, clementines, lemons, star fruit and a whole lot else I couldn’t immediately identify. Where Willy Wonka had rivers of chocolate, Murdock has thickets of cruciferous vegetables.

 At Dole’s headquarters in Westlake Village, Calif., just a 15-minute drive from the ranch, employees eat in a subsidized cafeteria where salad is plentiful and chicken nuggets unthinkable, and they have free access to a company gym where personal training, also subsidized, is $30 an hour. The exhortation to eat right is so pervasive that if you call Dole and are put on hold, you don’t hear Muzak but, instead, sunny dietary bromides and nutrition news bulletins.

 Across the street is a hotel, completed in 2006 and operated by the Four Seasons, that Murdock built to house the California Health and Longevity Institute, a combination medical suite, spa and demonstration kitchen. Clients can be screened for various cancers, have their body fat measured inside a special pod and get an earful about quinoa, along with a cooking tutorial. On the hotel’s room-service menus, in place of heart-shaped symbols designating low-cholesterol selections, there are L-shaped symbols designating dishes that might, by dint of fiber or antioxidants or omega-3 fatty acids, promote longevity. The hummus wears such a tag; so does the multigrain penne with a meatless tomato sauce.

 The institute and hotel are meant to turn a profit — and do, a small one — and they underscore how interconnected Murdock’s evangelism and business interests have become. As does the research campus. Dole is the world’s largest producer of fruits and vegetables, so studies into their health benefits have a huge potential upside for the company. Many of the foods under the microscope are foods Dole sells.

Blueberries, for example. Murdock lured Mary Ann Lila, a world-renowned blueberry authority, to the research campus from the University of Illinois, where, she says, she simply didn’t have anything like the instant access to specialized equipment that Murdock has made possible. The campus has a particularly impressive lineup of high-powered nuclear magnetic-resonance machines, which analyze compounds on a molecular level. Lila — technically affiliated now with North Carolina State University — and colleagues are using the fastest of these to look for the unknown natural compounds in blueberries that will speed their efforts to maximize the fruit’s medicinal properties. They believe blueberries could help combat several diseases, including obesity.

 Other researchers on campus are investigating such matters as the extent to which quercetin, found in the skins of apples, can have an anti-inflammatory effect; whether Chia seeds are as useful a source of omega-3 fatty acids as, say, halibut; and how significantly and reliably a certain type of fermented Chinese tea can lower bad cholesterol. But while they’re working in a setting created by Murdock, they’re for the most part from the faculties of leading North Carolina universities that aren’t formally affiliated with Dole, and they might well be doing this work anywhere. Besides which, Murdock’s own fortunes aren’t tethered to how well Dole does, with or without the boost of campus research. Over the decades he has collected companies the way he has collected sheep, and owns the one, for example, that provided all the red brick for the campus.

 Murdock checks in with researchers regularly and impatiently, asking them why science is so stubbornly sluggish. He moves fast. Little more than two years elapsed between the demolition of six million square feet of shuttered textile mills and the opening of the campus in October 2008. He chose this location because he owned those mills in the early 1980s, long before the textile industry tanked, and still had land and investments all around them. He has had the lodge nearby for almost three decades.

The luxury with which the campus is furnished is almost as remarkable as the speed with which it materialized. There are tables carved from rare Hawaiian palm trees; desks from India whose black marble surfaces have lapis lazuli and jade inlays; marble statuettes. Lila cracks: “Normally, when you have a lab and someone’s wheeling in liquid nitrogen, you don’t have to worry about them hitting a Ming vase. But we have a different paradigm here.”

 This lavishness is just one clue that the campus reflects a passion as much as it does a business strategy. Another is the millions Murdock is spending on the Murdock Study, with the goal of enrolling 50,000 Kannapolis-area residents, taking full blood work from them, storing it in a refrigerated warehouse with backup generators for the backup generators and annually monitoring the residents’ health. The hope is that the study will help determine what biological markers today can tell doctors about the onset of disease decades later. The results won’t be proprietary to Dole.

 Murdock says that he wants to slay such killers as diabetes, heart disease and, of course, cancer, and the scientists around him say that in some epically optimistic corner of his mind, he quite possibly believes he can. Unable to save Gabriele or the boys, he’s out to save the world. It’s certainly not his own health that stands to benefit most from the campus, because the nutrients studied there are ones he’s already consuming in abundance, to cover his bases. What the research is more likely to do, at least during his lifetime, is validate that he knows better than anybody else.

 Dreamers have pursued longevity — and, in some cases, immortality — in all sorts of wacky and exacting ways, from hyperbaric chambers to cryogenics. And they have sought to fine-tune their bodies with all manner of rigorously proscribed diets: only raw foods; only plants; only the flesh, fruit and nuts that prehistoric humans, not yet wise to agriculture, would have hunted and foraged.

 Murdock’s methods are, in that context, utterly mainstream, an example of extraordinary discipline rather than frontier science. Sure, the rinds and peels — which he explains by saying that the parts of fruits most directly sun-kissed are bound to harbor the most energy — may be a little strange. But they’re not dangerous-strange, and a plant-based diet that’s low in animal fat while still allowing for protein sources beyond legumes has emerged as the consensus recommendation of most medical professionals. Murdock never neglects protein: the breakfast he ate just hours before our lunch included not only a smoothie and 10-grain cereal in almond milk but also a bevy of sardines.

 He is careful to get a little bit of daily sun, which is crucial for proper absorption of vitamin D, but not too much, lest he court skin cancer. He tries to go to bed no later than 11 p.m. and to get more than six hours of sleep every night. Perhaps the only real eyebrow raiser in his regimen is his rejection of any medicine that isn’t truly necessary. When he had that sore throat, he didn’t suck on a lozenge or swallow aspirin. When he has had precancerous growths removed from his face, he has passed on anesthetics.

 “I just turned my brain on and said, ‘Cut!’ ” he said. “Of course it hurt. But I controlled that.”

The doctors who work with Murdock say that he has ideal blood pressure, clear arteries, good muscle tone. But they doubt that these will carry him to 125. They point out that he didn’t adopt his healthful ways until his 60s, and they note that genes often trump behavior. Although Murdock’s father lived well into his 90s, his mother died young, and his sisters are both dead.

 The life expectancy for an American man born today is only 75½, and demographic data suggest that an American man who has made it to 87 can expect, on average, another 5¼ years. The longest life span on record is 122½, and that belonged to a woman — French, of course — who died in 1997. Her closest male competitors reached only 115½.

 As for beating those statistics, “There’s been no documented intervention that has been shown to radically extend duration of life — ever,” says S. Jay Olshansky, an expert on aging who teaches at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Told of Murdock’s health-minded habits, Olshansky said that just about all of them were prudent ways of probably “letting his body live out to its genetic potential,” but added, “He’ll be disappointed when he doesn’t reach 125.”

 Robert Califf, a Duke University cardiologist who sits on the research campus board, says that even Murdock’s laudable diet isn’t a provable longevity booster. “You can do short-term studies that give you a lot of information about biology,” Califf says. “But knowing whether eating a food actually causes you to live longer than not eating that food: the answer to that will only come with a study of an entire generation.”

 If he could live to 125, why he would want to? More than his hearing will ebb. He may never find the right companion for the long fade-out. Although he says that he’d ideally like to marry again, he acknowledges that few women are suited to his degree of autonomy and wanderlust.

 I got the feeling that part of what pushes him toward 125 is the sheer challenge. Years are yet another thing to collect, and he likes racking up accomplishments others haven’t. He bragged to me several times about once transplanting a centuries-old tree larger than any ever successfully moved. And he drew my attention to scores of massive, oddly shaped boulders from Thailand’s River Kwai that decorate the grounds of the ranch, the residence where he spends most of his time (he sold the former Hilton estate 10 years ago). Each weighs several tons; he brought over six shiploads. “These are the only boulders that ever left Thailand,” he says. “You can’t take them out now.”

 He says that he still gets pleasure from them, and from much of the rest of his gilded life, and that he doesn’t know what, if anything, comes after. “There have been billions of people born and billions of people died, and people think God’s going to be standing at the gate ready to shake hands with everybody who’s coming through?” he says. Although he is a churchgoing Christian, death, he concedes, could simply be blackness, nullity.

 During my last visit with him, Murdock took me out to see the koi. He enjoys tossing them their pellets of food from the red wood bridge that arches over the lake, and in particular delights in the way he merely has to stamp his feet to make them come swimming toward the bridge in a frenzy, eager for sustenance from on high.

 “You want to know what I like and what makes me happy?” he said as we stood on the bridge. “Just having these fish makes me happy. Every one is alive because of me.” He pointed out that some were ordinary and some magnificent — just like people, he said — and told me that after a female releases her eggs, she tries to ward off lesser males, so stronger ones fertilize them. “It’s the survival of the fittest in all aspects of the world.”

 We began tossing out pellets by the handful. He told me that I wasn’t using enough muscle and showed me how it was done.

 Then he frowned. The koi, he said, weren’t lunging and thrashing. Had someone fed them too recently? Was someone feeding them too often? He vowed to look into it, declaiming the same fault in the fish that he finds in so many of the planet’s inhabitants.

 “They’re not eating the way I like them to,” he said.

Frank Bruni (bruni@nytimes.com) is a staff writer for the magazine. Earlier, he had been the paper’s chief restaurant critic. He is the author of a memoir, “Born Round.”

Editor: Dean Robinson (d.robinson-MagGroup@nytimes.com)