I contacted Hal, who agreed to pass my message along to Maffetone. A week or so later, I received an e-mail from “pm.” No name, just the two lowercase letters. If I was interested in talking, pm said, I should come to Oracle, Arizona.
Our home isn’t that easy to find. Call when you get close and I’ll talk you in. If your cell phone works. Don’t count on it.
So I was off to Oracle, a lonely desert outpost best known for UFO sightings and the occasional underground meth lab. Not far away is Biosphere 2, a self-contained environmental experiment constructed there deliberately to avoid being noticed by, basically, anyone. Edward Abbey had the same idea: decades ago, the irascible writer and eco-warrior began using Oracle as his mailing address so no one would know where he was. Geographically and psychologically, Oracle is out there.
I followed pm’s directions, crossing an old railroad track and rumbling down a dusty, red-dirt road until I pulled up at a pleasant little cottage ringed by an artful garden of desert plants. Chickens scratched in the side yard, then scattered behind the cacti when the door opened and a lean, handsome man with a snow-white ponytail stepped out.
“Was I really that hard to find?” Maffetone asked.
“You mean the drive? Not so bad. But the rest—”
Maffetone shrugged and led me inside to meet his wife, Dr. Coralee Thompson, a physician who for fifteen years was medical director at Philadelphia’s Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. “People seem to think I just went up in smoke like a genie.”
In Maffetone’s eyes, his sudden transformation from Dr. Ironman into InvisiPhil was a logical step. Fat-as-fuel was an intellectual challenge, and once he’d solved it—neatly, effectively, solid as a mathematical proof—it was on to the next endeavor. “I’ve had original music in my head since I was three years old,” he says. “It was time to do something about it.” So he shuttered his practice, referred his clients, rented his New York home, and rambled across the country until he found a place where he wouldn’t be disturbed or tempted back into endurance sports.
Which, he’s too polite to say, is exactly what I’m doing. The whole reason he settled out here, alone with coyote howls and Coralee and the guitar Johnny Cash gave him, was specifically to avoid people like me. But when he saw my message, he was intrigued; once Maffetone understood what I was up to, he spotted a connection I’d missed. I’d been wondering whether Paddy and Xan and their Cretan accomplices could have survived their long adventures through the mountains because they’d learned to tap into fat as fuel, but Maffetone realized something else.
“Do you know the healthiest diet in the world?” he asked.
“The Mediterranean?”
“Right. Do you know where it’s from?
“Greece?”
“Close,” he said. “Crete.”
Crete was both the strangest and most enduring result of Ancel Keys’s Seven Countries Study. Keys’s goal was to pin down the lifestyle causes of heart attacks and strokes, so for twelve years—from 1958 to 1970—his team gathered biological markers from men aged forty to fifty-nine, in Italy, Japan, Yugoslavia, Finland, Holland, America, and Greece. It really was a noble experiment; in his own way, Keys was trying to save millions of lives by demonstrating that cardiovascular disease was an active choice, not an Act of God. No one disputes the data Keys collected; they just argued that he should have included regions that didn’t necessarily fall in line with his saturated-fat-is-fatal theory.
For Greece, Keys took most of his subjects from Crete. It was a rare opportunity to travel back in time, because life in those mountain villages hadn’t changed in three hundred years. Cretan farmers were still living like their ancestors; they used the same rough tools, ate the same foods, slept in the same huts, and raised sheep descended from the same family flock. If Keys was right, and heart attacks were the result of a decadent modern lifestyle, then these Middle Age throwbacks should be fantastically healthy. And they were—except for one weird twist. The Cretans had the lowest rate of heart disease in the entire study, yet their serum cholesterol was high and they ate a ton of fat, more than any other country in the study. Nearly half of the calories that went down a Cretan’s throat came from fat. Going by Keys’s model, heart disease should have been all over those mountains. Instead, the Cretans lived long and stayed strong.
So why were Cretans more heart healthy than everyone else, including the Japanese, who consumed only a quarter as much fat? The secret was partly what they ate—meat, butter, fish, olive oil, wild greens, and walnuts—but mostly what they didn’t: sugar and starch. Unlike the rest of the industrialized world, Crete wasn’t jolted by World War II into a new way of eating. Much of postwar Europe and Asia desperately needed aid, so cattle and dairy farms were repurposed to raise grain; in a pinch, bread and porridge could fill more bellies and wouldn’t spoil in transit. Twenty years before Keys showed up with his research team, Finland had already begun converting grazing pasture into wheat fields and rows of sugar beets, which were processed into an all-purpose additive akin to high-fructose corn syrup. “During the Great Depression of the 1930s,” a Finnish economic analysis noted, the government “encouraged farmers to shift from exportable animal products to basic grains, a policy that kept farm incomes from falling as rapidly as they did elsewhere and enabled the country to feed itself better.” One result: more Finns died of heart disease than anyone else in the Seven Countries study.
Prosperity was its own peril in the United States. Giant factories constructed to feed the troops were now turning their attention to the family home, using wartime technologies to churn out canned soups, easy-grab snacks, and packaged bread. Orange juice, an exotic treat before the war, was suddenly everywhere; military contractors had figured out how to make frozen concentrate, and as soon as growers realized it could be sold as a “health” food, orange juice production skyrocketed from barely a quarter-million gallons a year to more than 115 million. Three out of every four Americans soon had OJ in the freezer, right next to another new sensation: frozen TV dinners, prepackaged with plenty of sugar, salt, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. In 1951, Kellogg’s rolled out its twin juggernauts—Sugar Frosted Flakes and Sugar Pops—then removed even the need for milk by inventing Pop-Tarts. The Great American Breakfast of bacon and eggs was becoming a dinosaur, along with home-cooked dinners, locally baked bread, and backyard gardens. Sucrose, fructose, corn syrup, and bleached white flour—the difference between dinner and dessert had disappeared.
But up in the mountains of Crete, nothing had changed. Most villages were self-sustaining and barely reachable by road, so they remained untouched by the flood of starch and sugars engulfing the rest of the world. The Cretans kept foraging for wild plants, baking rough millet into loaves as chewy as jerky, frying free-range eggs in home-pressed olive oil, and eating every part of the sheep but the baa. Potatoes were rare in the rocky highlands; rice was unheard of; pastries were an occasional indulgence and nearly as jawbreaking as the bread. The Cretans, in other words, were eating the same high-performance food as their Olympic-athlete ancestors.
“Like this,” Phil Maffetone said as we sat down with Coralee for lunch. They’d prepared steak—sliced thin and blood rare—alongside a jumbled salad of torn greens, tomatoes, cucumbers, and homemade goat-milk feta glistening with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh aromatic herbs. Break it down to raw components and it’s the same food that Paddy and Xan survived on during their time in the caves: all slow-burn, all the time. “Those Resistance fighters couldn’t have gotten their calories from starch and sugar, because it just wasn’t available,” Maffetone explains. “If they could only eat on the run, they needed food that would provide steady caloric energy all day.” Greek battlefields didn’t have Gatorade stations. Fugitives couldn’t detour in search of snacks. Survival depended on two things: choosing slow-burn food and adapting your body to use it.