Eggs, Chocolate, and Longevity: Are We After the Wrong Thing?

CNN reported this week that "eating an egg a day may lower your risk of cardiovascular disease," if a study of more than 400,000 adults in China can be trusted.  "Daily egg eaters had an 18% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease," they reported, as opposed to those who avoided eggs in their diet.  They said the news was published in the journal "Heart."

Which reminded me of this OpEd piece I wrote for the New Jersey Herald on Sunday, April 4, 1999:

Chocolate lovers, rejoice!

In what may be the best science news of 1998, researchers at Harvard's School of Public Health have announced that among the 8,000 men in their study, the ones who ate chocolate and other candy one to three times a month lived about a year longer than the ones who didn't.

The scientists seemed baffled by their finding but speculated that maybe it was the antioxidants present in chocolate that produced the healthful result.  And they also backed off by pointing out that the results were preliminary.  But there it is.  Chocolate and candy bars, if you can believer Harvard, are good for you.

Even people who pigged out on three or more candy bars a week had a 16 percent decreased risk of death than those who had eliminated chocolate from their diets completely.

Something is wacky.  For those who haven't noticed, there have been several shocking reversals from the medical establishment recently.  Doctors are now recommending moderate drinking, one to three glasses of red wine every day, for example.  The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the high-fiber diets of 88,000 nurses did not prevent colorectal cancer.  Some time back, real butter took a step forward when margarine was discovered to have something called "trans-fatty acids," worse by far than butter itself.

Furthermore, milk fat has been discovered to contain several cancer-fighting agents, according to research done for the American Dairy Science Association.  Even vitamins, herbs and magnets, the kind of therapy sometimes called "alternative" medicine and dismissed as folklore by the American Medical Association, is now given a measure of respect.

What's going on here?  And where will it end?  Maybe cigarette smoke will turn out to be beneficial to one's health, and asbestos and chemical pesticides, too.

For more years than anyone can remember, we've been bombarded with warnings about our diets, sedentary lifestyles and pollution of every sort.  Maybe this is payback time for all those who were skeptical of warnings and scientific "announcements."  More likely, however, it is the normal movement to the center, where most truth, scientific and otherwise, generally lies.

Of course, the real but underlying obsession is with longevity.  We seem to have decided as a society that death is embarrassing, that we need to apologize for it, drop out of sight and memory when it is impending, and never ever talk about it.  We join gyms, eat according to the newest food pyramid, avoid sweets, and quit smoking.  It seems to be working too because the average length of the average life gets longer and longer, from 47 to 72 for men over the past hundred years.  Women are doing even better.

This is probably a good thing on balance, but what will happen when people regularly live to 110 or 115?  Will they have enough of their minds and bodies left to enjoy those extra years?  Will they have outlived all their friends and family and face their longevity in prolonged grief?  Will they have spent all their productive years earlier?  Will youngsters mortify them at their 115th birthdays by saying they don't look a day over 106?

From a purely practical standpoint, what impact will so many centenarians have on the economy?  How much will their health care cost?  Will insurance companies be able to keep up benefits that stretch on and on for decades longer than the actuarial tables projected?  And for the young people, who will have to wait longer in junior positions while older people continue working, there will be the added burden of picking up the Social Security tab on an aging but death-resistant society.

How many 100-year-old drivers will there be on the roads?

In the end it's all frustratingly relative anyway.  The planet is 14.5 billion years old.  Dinosaurs faded out a mere 65 million years ago, and nothing even remotely like man came on the scene until two or three million years ago.  If you're looking for your own family tree, it doesn't even start until about 40,000 years ago--and none of them lived very long either.

No, chocolate or no chocolate, longevity by itself is not a worthy enough goal.  The real measure has to be what we do with the time we have.  The American philosopher William James put it this way about a hundred years ago:  "The great use of life is to spend it on something that outlasts it."  Amen.