The priceless scene I always think of takes place in his hospital room immediately after he comes to consciousness.  The doctor in charge of his case is explaining to Woody what has happened.  Woody refuses to believe he died and was frozen, asserting that the whole story is a put on.  Woody insists that the ‘doctor’ is clearly an actor hired by his friends!  It absolutely can’t be the year 2123.  ‘Oh, but it really is 2123,’ insists the doctor.  ’And it is no put on by his friends; all his friends are long dead; Woody knows no one at all in 2123 and had better prepare himself to start a new life.’

Woody still insists it is a put on.  “I had a healthfood store,” he says, “and all my friends ate brown rice.  They can’t be dead!”

And my perfectly nourished daughter couldn’t have developed cavities!  But she did.  And if she cheated on her perfect diet, bad food could not have amounted to more than two percent of her total caloric intake from birth to age ten.  I was a responsible mom and I made sure she ate right!  Now my daughter was demanding to know why she had tooth decay.  Fortunately, I now know the answer.  The answer is rather complex, but I can give a simplified explanation.

The Confusions About Diets and Foods

Like my daughter, many people of all ages are muddled about the relationship between health and diet.  Their confusions have created a profitable market for health-related information.  And equally, their confusions have been created by books, magazine articles, and TV news features.  This avalanche of data is highly contradictory.  In fact, one reason I found it hard to make myself write my own book is that I wondered if my book too would become just another part of the confusion.

Few people are willing to tolerate very much uncertainty.  Rather than live with the discomfort of not knowing why, they will create an explanation or find some answer, any answer, and then ever after, assert its rightness like a shipwrecked person clings to a floating spar in a storm.  This is how I explain the genesis of many contemporary food religions.

Appropriately new agey and spiritual, Macrobiotics teaches the way to perfect health is to eat like a Japanese whole foods vegetarian—­the endless staple being brown rice, some cooked vegetables and seaweeds, meanwhile balancing the “yin” and “yang” of the foods.  And Macrobiotics works great for a lot of people.  But not all people.  Because there’s next to nothing raw in the Macrobiotic diet and some people are allergic to rice, or can get allergic to rice on that diet.

Linda Clark’s Diet for a Small Planet also has hundreds of thousands of dedicated followers.  This system balances the proportions of essential amino acids at every, single meal and is vegetarian.  This diet also works and really helps some people, but not as well as Macrobiotics in my opinion because obsessed with protein, Clark’s diet contains too many hard-to-digest soy products and makes poor food combinations from the point of digestive capacity.