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In any given day, lots of things enter our mouths—air, water, a piece of Bazooka. To prevent problems associated with your digestive system, these are the best things that can enter your intestinal pathway.
FIBER Fiber is the community-service director of the major food groups—it’s not a sexy job, but it sure does great things. Most important, fiber helps keep digested food bulky and soft—so it passes through the colon easily. Fiber makes it easier for the food to move through your intestines without much pressure being placed on your tubing. And that’s important for avoiding such things as diverticulosis and hemorrhoids. Found solely in plant foods, fiber is largely indigestible as it passes through the digestive tract intact. It contains no calories but makes you feel full, which helps control overeating. Both kinds of fiber—insoluble and soluble—are good for you. Insoluble fiber doesn’t easily dissolve in water and is not broken down by intestinal bacteria. (This type doesn’t lower your cholesterol, but still has an effect on your digestive system.) It’s found in grapefruit, orange, grapes, raisins, dried fruit, sweet potatoes, peas, and zucchini, but especially in whole-wheat or whole-grain bread (it has to be whole-grain, not five-or six-grain bread, to have enough fiber). Soluble fiber does dissolve in water; it regulates metabolism and digestion, and stabilizes blood glucose levels. And it’s mostly found in grains such as oats, barley, and rye; in legumes such as beans, peas, and lentils; and in some cereals.
In Real Age terms, people who eat 25 grams of fiber a day can be as much as three years younger than a person who eats only 12 grams a day (the average for American adults). Plus, one study showed that a 10-gram increase in the daily intake of fiber decreases the risk of heart attack by 29 percent—and makes you 1.9 years younger. These are the foods that can get you fiber quickly:
lima beans (3 tablespoons): 13 grams
buckwheat cereal (1 cup): 10 grams
artichoke (1 large): 10 grams
soybeans (1/21/2 cup): 10 grams
almonds (24): 5 grams peanuts (30): 5.5 grams
oatmeal (1 cup, instant): 3 to 4 grams
Cheerios® (1 cup): 3 grams
WATER (NOT SOFT DRINKS) If you’ve ever been to a water park, you know the way water slides work. The water shooting down each sliding board “lubricates” it so that the rider moves faster. Without water, there’d be too much friction on the slide, and it would take someone twice as long to make a big splash. Water works the same way in your body—it’s a natural lubricant that helps everything slide through your system. But it also has another great advantage: Water fights bad breath. As that bacteria comes up from your stomach to your mouth, it can become stagnant—which is what causes bad breath. Drinking water will help break up that stagnant bacteria and move it along, rather than having it greet people every time you say hello. Now, when we say water, we mean water—not any ole liquid. The empty calories and self-destructive ingredients found in soft drinks will leave you bloated, hungry, and fat (okay, so if you like diet sodas, at least you won’t consume the empty calories, but we mean water here). Also, since the main cause of kidney stones is dehydration, it’s essential to keep your body hydrated with sixty-four ounces (eight glasses of eight ounces) of water a day.
Action 2: Change How You Eat
Watch any hot-dog-eating contest and you know that there are as many eating styles in this world as there are actors waiting tables in Hollywood. You can have a positive effect on your health by making some subtle changes not just with what goes into your mouth, but also with how you put it there.
AVOID LATE MEALS If your idea of late-night entertainment is a party with a bowl of Lucky Charms, switch to lifting weights while watching Leno or Letterman (see Chapter 4). Lying down so soon after eating encourages the flow of acid back up your esophagus so you get that burning taste, which will intensify the symptoms of GERD. While you’re at it, avoid GERD-promoting items like foods or beverages containing pepper or peppers, caffeine, and alcohol. Some pills can also cause GERD if you don’t take them with water (these are individual to the person).
BUY NEW DISHES Eat on nine-inch plates instead of traditional thirteen-inch dinner plates. Research has shown that the visual effect of eating is a powerful signal to your stomach to slow the digestion process. People who eat meals from smaller plates consume fewer calories—but still have the same feeling of satiety as people who eat off larger dishes. Finally a case where size matters, and smaller is better. Reducing portion sizes also has the effect of making you up to 3 years younger because it helps reduce arterial and immune aging.
TRICK YOUR DIGESTION SYSTEM Many obese people have received attention for losing weight from gastric bypass surgery. After the surgery, people simply can’t eat as much food because a major portion of their stomach has been excluded. But researchers recently found out that part of the reason why they’re not hungry isn’t necessarily because their stomachs are smaller, but because the segment of the stomach producing the appetite-inducing ghrelin hormone was removed. But those hormones aren’t just in the stomach; they’re in the intestines, too. So one of the
ways you can turn those hunger triggers off is by making sure you don’t get to the point of feeling famished. The slower you digest food, the slower your stomach empties, the fuller you’ll feel, and the lower the chance that you’ll wind up with an aerial endorsement contract from Goodyear.
Fiber is one way to do that; here’s another: If you have a little fat before your meal, you’ll prevent your stomach from emptying quickly. Example: If you have tea and unbuttered toast in the morning, your stomach empties in about twenty to thirty minutes, leaving you craving a midmorning Doritos binge. But if you spread some peanut butter or apple butter on your toast, it takes about three and a half hours for the toast to leave your stomach. Feeling fuller slows everything down. We recommend eating a little fat at each meal, but especially before your most gorgeprone meal of the day—dinner. Eat about seventy calories in the form of healthy monounsaturated fats. That’s about six walnuts, twelve cashews, or twenty peanuts. The extra fat also has another advantage: It helps absorb fat-soluble nutrients like the lycopene in tomatoes.
TRY DIFFERENT DESSERTS We’re a society programmed to end our meals with something sweet—a piece of chocolate, a cookie, or some mile-high fudge monstrosity. Besides the damage dessert can do to your waistline, ending your meal with sugary foods help promote the buildup of bacteria on your teeth. Instead, think about other ways you can end your meal. Why not do what many Europeans do—and make salad the last thing you eat? Or even try three ounces of low-fat cheese or a handful of peanuts; they’re foods that help clear harmful sugars and plaque away from your teeth.

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Like a house, the inside of your body contains a series of overlapping pipes and cables. You’ve read so far that your veins and arteries pick up and transport blood, oxygen, and other nutrients all over your body. Your neurons send messages throughout your brain and body to other neurons and muscles. And then you have the largest pipe (at least in terms of mass) in your body—the digestive tract. Like your house’s piping system, this digestive pipeline primarily has one way in and one way out—though it also has many, many other smaller entrances and exits that help deliver nutrients throughout your body. The typical travel pattern flows from top to bottom, except at times when gravity or illness force food and liquid back up, like in the cases of heartburn, roller coasters, or a tequila-induced hangover. Of course, high school biology class taught us the basics of digestion: Food passes through the esophagus into the stomach, then through twenty-six feet of small intestines, to rest finally in the colon, until you are ready to pass it out of your body. But the devil is in the details of this process, especially since this system has the complexity of a brain part and micromanages how you interact with the outside world of food and water. So let’s follow a piece of food along the digestive tract to see how things start—and how they end.
Mouth
The food-consumption process starts right here—in your body’s food processor. Though opera singers, politicians, and courtside fans are mostly known for what comes out of their mouths, what makes our mouths so special is how we handle what goes into it. For starters, consider your mouth to be like the guy who buckles you in on a ferris wheel—it’s there simply to prepare the food for the journey. We’re different from most other animals in the way we chew. A crocodile, for instance, has nail-like teeth so it can grab its food and rip it apart. While intimidating, it’s actually not energy-efficient, because it cannot start extracting energy until the food is halfway through its intestinal system. Elephants have grinding teeth; they’re flat teeth made to chew in a grinding motion, which allows them to eat all kinds of food but at a slow pace. Neither way is very efficient (in fact, elephants have to make new teeth to replace the worn-out ones throughout their lives; when they lose their last tooth, they die of starvation.)

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When you think about it, it’s amazing how many things go down your drains—razor stubble, toilet paper, soap scum, onion skin, dinner crumbs, spiders, sand from a beach trip, toothpaste, an occasional wedding ring…A house’s plumbing system can handle a lot (thank goodness, or we’d all be living in HazMat suits). It takes away what we don’t want, shuttles it to some processing facility, and we never have to think about it again—unless some kink prevents our waste from being drained. Whatever plugs your pipes, you know you have to clear a clog with Drano® or some piece of heavy artillery. Without clean pipes, life stinks.
That’s why you take steps to keep all your pipes clear. Before winter, you may shut off the outside water supply to keep pipes from freezing, and though your toddler may have a different agenda, House Rule Number 26 is: No Tonka trucks down the toilet. Really, it’s much easier to keep your pipes working than to call a belt-phobic plumber to fix them.
It’s the same thing with your body’s pipes—your digestive system. We all put an extraordinary variety (and amount) of things down our anatomical drains, and we expect our plumbing system to shuttle everything away. Because our pipes don’t always appreciate the jalapeño-laden burritos or fraternity-prank goldfish we slide down them, we can experience digestive problems like clogs, spills, leaks, breaks, and spouse-scaring explosions. A key element in this factory of consumption and elimination is your intestinal tract. Most people don’t realize that your intestines are living things; they’re organs just like your heart’s an organ. They’re not inert tubes; instead, they actively absorb, secrete, send signals, and metabolize. In some ways, your intestines are the democratic government of your body. They give us the freedom to eat whatever we want, which means our intestines allow us to be omnivores instead of carnivores or herbivores. Depending on what we crave, we have the intestinal freedom to eat plants, animals, or a dozen Krispy Kremes at one sitting. That’s because our intestines let us micromanage what we allow within the borders of our body. But with that freedom comes responsibility. As young people, we think that our bodies are like machines, that they’ll convert whatever we want to eat into something our cells can convert to energy. That’s not entirely true, especially as we get older or don’t exercise as much. That’s because your body—as you can attest from your gastrointestinal reaction to your mom’s eight-bean casserole—responds differently to various types of food.

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1. Start walking thirty minutes every day, no excuses, every day. Start this ________.
2. Fill prescription. Ask your doctor for prescriptions for 100 milligram Wellbutrin tablets, and nicotine patches dosed according to the amount you smoke as indicated below:
•for 1/21/2 a pack a day, take 7–10 milligrams
•for 1/21/2–1 pack a day, take 14 milligrams
•for 1–2 packs a day, take 21 or 22 milligrams
•for more than 2 packs a day, ask your doctor
3. On _______ , (Day 31: two days before you plan to stop smoking, take 1 Wellbutrin (bupropion).
4. Next two days, take 1 Wellbutrin each morning.
5. Apply your nicotine transdermal patch system on Day 33 (this is your stop smoking day). Place one patch on your arm, chest, or thigh (replace daily).
6. On subsequent days, take Wellbutrin each morning and each evening. Most folks wean off Wellbutrin between days 90 and 180.
7. Continue walking thirty (to forty-five) minutes each day; feel free to drink as much coffee or water as you wish.
8. Fill out the chart of your daily activities.
9. Phone or e-mail your support person daily to discuss your progress.
10. Begin weight lifting on Day 37 ( _______ , or earlier). Do not increase your physical activities by more than 10 percent a week.
11. Decrease dose of nicotine in patch every 2 months (you can cut patches in half) until no longer needed.

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We’re a society that doesn’t like quitters—not in sports, not in school, not in wing-eating contests. So it’s against our human nature to give up something that we’ve started—even cigarettes. One of the toughest parts about quitting smoking is that they’re both physiologically and psychologically addictive. From the physiological end, it seems that the release of dopamine—a naturally occurring substance in your body that dulls pain and causes pleasure—is actually triggered when you’re smoking. When you smoke, you get used to the elevated dopamine levels, so when you don’t smoke, you crave the cigarette with no explanation as to why, almost like the way a pregnant woman craves chocolate-chip relish. Luckily, those dopamine levels don’t stay elevated all the time, and if you can quit, you can switch your dopamine level back to normal.
Psychologically, smoking becomes a behavioral addiction—you have a cigarette with a beer, after dinner, after sex. And you get used to the feeling of picking something up and putting it in your mouth. The hardest part of quitting comes in the first week. You feel cravings, you’re sluggish, and you start producing and expelling a lot of gunk from the lining of your lungs. But all that subsides after a few weeks, if you can push through. Luckily, there is an effective way you can stop smoking. Here’s the plan:
Days 1 through 30 (don’t try to stop yet; establish another behavior in its place): Walk thirty minutes a day, every day. When you’re done, report to another person that you’ve completed it (use the same person every day). Walking thirty minutes a day will help prevent the weight gain for when you do stop, but it also proves to you that you have the discipline to stick with a plan. Only one rule: You can’t act like an eleventh-grader who blew off doing his chemistry homework. No excuses. Tired? You walk. Hurricane swirling outside? You walk for thirty minutes, taking laps around the dining room table. Want to watch Seinfeld reruns? You buy a treadmill and walk while you watch. You walk every day.
Days 31 and 32: Start taking 100 milligrams of Wellbutrin (bupropion) once a day in the morning. An anticraving drug (it’s also an antidepressant, if you take much more of it) can help you make the transition from being a smoker to being a quitter. (Check with your doctor if you have high blood pressure or seizure disorders, because bupropion can have side effects when taken with other medications.) Keep walking thirty minutes (or more) every day, no excuses, and keep checking in with your support person.
Day 33: Quit. Throw away all your cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, ashtrays, lighters, pipes, and Kool boxer shorts. Put on a nicotine patch as prescribed by your doctor (usually about 7 to 10 milligrams if you smoke less than half a pack a day, 14 milligrams if you smoke between a half and one pack, and 21 or 22 milligrams if you smoke more than one pack a day). Also, increase your Wellbutrin to two a day—100 milligrams in the morning and the same dose in the evening. Keep walking. The toughest days will be three to five days after you quit, but if you can make it to Day 40—seven days after you quit—you’ll have crossed the desert and made it past the most difficult part of the quitting cycle. You’ll decrease the size of the nicotine patch after two months, and again after four months, and you’ll also gradually come off the pills so that you won’t be taking any after six months. Walking? You do that as long as U2 keeps selling albums. In other words, forever. After five days off cigarettes (Day 37 or so), you begin lifting weights ten minutes a day

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