'Accept the idea of living to be 100," nutrition guru Gayelord Hauser declared in his 1951 book Look Younger, Live Longer. "In imagination, extend your life forward, far into the future."
Sixty-five years later, I'm looking ahead with hope. It's 2016, and there are about 250,000 centenarians in the world, but the figure is expected to reach 3.7 million by 2050. A combination of medical advances and "functional" foods -- foods to which medicine, drugs, beneficial chemicals have been added, often through genetic modification -- are considered responsible for the breakthrough.
When I scan centenarian obits, I look for the pics. It's surprising how good cosmetic surgery has become -- any old nonagenarian can look like a rapper. But food has played the major role.
Mr. Hauser was the most influential nutritionist of the 20th century, and he maintained that what you eat between 40 and 60 determines how you feel at 80. So, 2016's ninetysomethings -- Hugh Hefner, Queen Elizabeth, Fidel Castro, Mel Brooks, Chuck Berry, Bea Arthur and Cloris Leachman -- must have eaten well in their youth.
How are my chances? I'm waiting to find out. For the past year, I've been on a diet that is literally my very own: the new DNA diet.
It's called nutrigenomics -- how a person's genetic makeup interacts with diet. Genetic variations, also known as genotypes, are what dictate an individual's response to medicines as well as to food and supplements that interact with genes.
The government gave me a bonus for being tested. It has a lot invested in my good health. It wants wrinklies to look good too. That way, the younger generation will want to grow old, rather than flame out in old-fashioned fast-food binges.
I was tested two ways: for my personal nutrition profile and then for my susceptibility to diet-related diseases. A drop of blood -- that's all it took.
My body is as unique as my fingerprint. I metabolize food differently from anyone else. Genetic markers reveal how I digest specific foods and how my body responds to them. Even if I started off with a perfect double helix, my DNA has been affected by the way I have lived, how much exercise I've taken, how much sleep I've got, what my job is and how I handle stress as well as by heredity.
The second test revealed that, like every aging person, I am susceptible to cancer. My cholesterol is slightly raised, but my heart's okay. I have lurking arthritis and after a lifetime of high living, I have a degenerating liver.
I'm a little disappointed to say the diet starts out same old, same old. No alcohol and start laying off processed bread, preservatives, multivitamins (because of the iron), sausages, bacon, salami, dairy. And no junk, such as hot dogs and Big Macs. But no problem there because junk's now hard to get. TV ads for it are banned, doughnut junkies are shamed by having to eat in tiny chairless rooms; a Twinkie tax has been imposed on junk, and you can get a ticket for scarfing down pizza in public. The food police are so zealous that they even gave the prime minister a citation for child abuse when he bought his kids cotton candy at an Ottawa benefit.
The liver is an uncongenial organ; it likes bitter, so dill, caraway seeds, garlic, onions, boldo leaf, turmeric and cayenne, dandelion greens, mustard greens, bitter melon and nettles are all selling out at farmers' markets, along with balloon-flower root, which produces the master antioxidant glutathione, key to my liver's health.
And I must eat nutriceuticals, which are foods that incorporate such added benefits as Omega-3, the fatty acid now regarded as a cure for almost everything, including arthritis. As a regular swimmer and walker, I am prescribed two nutriceutical drinks, one to turn on my genes when I'm exercising, one to turn on other genes when I'm resting, and both are designed for someone in middle age because each age reacts differently.
From now on, I am encouraged to "graze" all day long, rather than have formal meals. Eating is a continuum, from sterol-fortified orange juice to lower my bad cholesterol to two glasses of kefir, the tipple from the Caucasus made from fermented milk (fizzy and mildly alcoholic), because it's packed with even more friendly bacteria than Mr. Hauser's yogurt. Small wonder the Caucasus is where 114-year-olds spring around like goats.
I browse on a hard-boiled Omega-3 egg (the hens are fed flaxseed), a slice of toasted rye bread (incorporating healthy soy flour because I have an incipient allergy to wheat), a pat of milk thistle (a liver reviver) oil butter, a little sugarless fruit jam and a café au lait, which is okay for me. DNA analysis shows I metabolize coffee quickly, so I can benefit from the antioxidants, the cop cells that rush around rubbing out free radicals, those biker-gang cells that prey on the hearts of those who can't metabolize coffee quickly.
I take a multivitamin. For elevenses, I eat a genetically modified Macintosh apple that prevents gum disease. Around 1 in the afternoon, I have half a farmed salmon steak, spinach and salad. (Sometimes I switch to "swimming pig," which is low-fat pork that has been genetically modified to have even more valuable Omega-3 than the ubiquitous salmon.)
Peckish in the p.m., I'll eat fresh blueberries and blackberries to ward off Alzheimer's. Later on, I can have an organic-chicken breast with more salad. Raspberries are my snack because they have twice as many antioxidants as my favourite strawberries do.
I drink gallons of distilled water, eat lite at night, go to sleep early to rest my liver.
This regime is a small price to pay to extend my healthy life. I don't want to make it to 100 if that only means sitting in front of American Idol and sucking toothlessly on nutrients. I want to feel alive, to enjoy what it is I eat -- and goddamn it, if I am still around at l00, I'll drink champagne non-stop -- to play tennis, golf and ski, which all spiked-up nonagenarians enjoy.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
I look back at 2006. Food was in ferment. It had been only four years since the human genome was mapped, and even before 2002, commercial companies were jumping on the genetics bandwagon, offering DNA tests for predisposition to diseases and DNA tests for diet.
The latter weren't any good because genes are enormously complicated. We each have 22,000 to 25,000 of them, and they're all busy, turning on and off like a switchboard and exquisitely sensitive to our every breath and movement, even thought. So designing a personal diet was going to be an arduous task. But who could wait? Food and its effect on human genes had never been so important -- not just in terms of life expectancy, but in controlling health budgets.
And it had all happened so fast. Over the previous 60 years, our eating habits had changed more rapidly than any time in history. We in the West had acquired the unprecedented luxury of being able to choose our foods, rather than eating whatever was available.
The bounty started with the end of the Second World War. The food industry did sterling work in producing canned foods, such as Spam, during rationing, and when the war ended, it had a monopoly in North America. We became a processed-food society -- 90 per cent of North Americans ate the stuff.
And the industry that allowed us to eat so well and so cheaply was dynamic, never taking its sales for granted. About 10,000 new products came on stream annually, each promoted vigorously and seeking a market. In some quarters, it was fashionable to put down the North American taste for processed food. But the truth was that the world loved it. In France, the nation of the AOC baguette, consumers went crazy for Wonder bread (or its French equivalent). Fact is, processed food was designed to be irresistible, salted to induce more drinking of pop, sweetened to maintain the universal sugar addiction.
In the fifties, the "I Hate to Cook" decade, the industry locked onto convenience as its guiding star. The idea was right, the execution bad. Frozen foods should have been a breakthrough but they stalled because few city people had large enough freezers. And consumers were getting picky. Few had ever eaten the vrai camembert, but they knew frozen stuff wasn't it.
Come the sixties and the processed-food monopoly was challenged by the first of the guerrilla food groups: newfound gourmets who made Julia Child's books and TV show bestsellers. A market but a niche one, and industry abhors niche markets, expensive to maintain, often slow moving. Consumers were asking for unfamiliar foods -- bittersweet chocolate, rabbit, imported mustards . . .
The next guerrillas came from the seventies counterculture, a demographic (18 to 39) that the food industry couldn't afford to ignore. The counterculture picked up where nutritionist Mr. Hauser had left off -- it demanded foods that, like brown rice, were unrefined and organic. California turned green almost overnight. The message was eat fresh, local, seasonal. Consumers loved it. Farmers markets were revived across the continent; artisanal bread and cheeses became the rage.
Again the food trade adapted, this time appropriating the organic movement and making it an industry, prompting Lawrence Andres who'd started Harmony Organic Dairy farm in Ontario in 1979, to remark: "Organics started as a movement and now it's upside down."
Out the window went the organic grower's closeness to the earth, his sensitivity to its rhythms and the growing cycle. Instead, huge California farms started producing acres of food in the usual industry manner, using organic fertilizers and pesticides.
By the end of the nineties, organic was far from its local roots. It was being trucked cross-country to Whole Food supermarkets. Indeed, flown from all over the world to meet the rising demand. It became a supermarket staple -- by early 2006, even mighty Wal-Mart had decided to start stocking organic produce in its bid to steamroll over traditional grocers.
The reason was health. Industrial organics weren't actually better for you, but they sounded like it in the age of processed-food scares. The industry had already reacted quickly to the trans-fat fiasco, replacing oils that had been hydrogenated to give food a longer shelf life with palm oil, and making the heart-friendly Omega-3 egg Canada's biggest seller (even though it cost half again as much as a regular egg).
But the baby boomers, more than one-third of North America's population, weren't satisfied. As they began to turn 60, they decided they wanted to live to 100, looking good, feeling sexy. They went to the gym, drank gallons of bottled water, ate hectares of salad.
The food industry got right in line. "Wellness will be to the food business what convenience was over the last 15 years," intoned Brock Leach, chief innovations officer for PepsiCo Inc. At least 100 popular PepsiCo products (including Tropicana, Gatorade, Frito-Lay) were retooled with lower salt, sugars, fat counts.
Heinz also was quick to catch the health wave after scientists revealed that cooked tomatoes released lycopene, a cancer-busting chemical. (Ronald Reagan was right: Ketchup is a great food!)
Not that all functional foods were so easily marketed. As Julian Mellatin of the Centre for Food and Education in London observed, you had to know what you needed. For example, unless you've been tested for osteoporosis, why buy calcium-fortified milk? (To clear this obstacle, a New Zealand producer trying to crack the Japanese market offered free bone scans in people's homes.)
Even so, by 2006, it seemed the food industry could grant consumers' every wish. We had all the food we could want, available 7/24, and should have been the healthiest people on Earth. But we weren't, because the industry's success in feeding all the people all the time had undermined the role of food in our culture, as a sensual delight, a shared experience, a way of life, a family mixer. Instead of being communities interconnected by the web of food, we were huge -- we had an intractable obesity problem, an epidemic born in North America and following our cheap, irresistible, processed food as it gained in popularity around the world.
The problem, as nutritionist Marion Nestle of New York University pointed out, was that the industry could deliver only one message: Eat more. Processed food was cleaning up its act, but any food is fattening if you eat too much.
BRAVE NEW FOODS
In the decade since 2006, food has become an obsession. There have been more conferences about it than there used to be varieties of Tim Hortons doughnuts.
Back at the end of 2005, I was on a panel at the Future of Food conference held in Adelaide, Australia. The topic was whither taste in food, and nutrigenomics was the elephant in the room no one recognized. Instead, the panel whinged about school food, teaching kids how to cook, bringing back home economics and obesity. A few months later, at the big What Are We Eating? gathering at McGill University in Montreal, obesity was again the headline.
But more than anything else in recent years -- the fading farms, the surprising rise of China's food empire, food-borne illness -- nutrigenomics has come to shape future food, future us.
Food for pleasure is gone. You've eaten your last steak au poivre, your last torchon of foie gras, your last brownie, your last hot dog. How much cooking will there be now that half your diet is live greens?
Nutrigenomics is our Faustian bargain. We traded taste and enjoyment of food for longevity. Now we have to hope we can live with it.
Gina Mallet is a Toronto writer and the author of Last Chance to Eat, winner of the 2005 James Beard Award for writing on food.
Brave new grub
Some neutriceuticals -- foods with added health benefits -- are already with us:
Yogurt with live bacterial culture (to boost the immune system).
Sports bars packed with beta-carotene (to reduce the risk of cancer).
Eggs, milk, egg mixtures with Omega-3 (the fatty acid from fish oil that boosts mental alertness and reduces risk of heart disease).
Cereal with boosted levels of beta-glucan (to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease).
100-per-cent orange juice with calcium and vitamin C supplement.
Soy drinks, low glycemic index (good for fending off diabetes), low in carbs and calories, high in calcium, often with fibre added, low fat and organic.
Green tea, one of nature's more powerful antioxidants and a natural fat inhibitor. Most potent in extract.
Blueberries, considered a defence against heart disease and Alzheimer's.
Cooked, canned, processed tomatoes, which contain lycopene, a cancer buster.
White button mushrooms -- potent antioxidant.
-- Gina Mallet