All Diets Lead to Death

When my youngest daughter was eleven, she designed an experiment on the effects of nutrition for a science fair. I took her to the pet shop—her favorite place on earth—and bought four baby mice from a single litter, two males and two females. She put a pair into each of two cages. Both cages were alike: clean bedding, toys, a hiding place, a bottle for fresh water, and an exercise wheel. The only environmental difference between the two pairs of mice was their diet.

One pair lived in junk-food heaven. They eagerly grabbed at the chips and cookies that made up the largest part of their diet, and relished occasional treats of sweetened cereal.

The other pair enjoyed their daily offerings of nuts, fruit, vegetables and whole grains.

Sarah weighed them every day, and measured their growth (I have forgotten those statistics now), and they became quite tame.

The experiment took on a darker edge when the two females gave birth. The well-nourished mother had a large litter of strong little pups, who all remained healthy to weaning. The junk food mama gave birth to a large litter as well—and promptly devoured all but two of her babies. Of course, you can’t draw a conclusion from such a small sample, but we couldn’t help thinking that the junk food mama’s deficient diet had something to do with her ravenous appetite for fresh meat.

Sarah designed a maze to test their problem-solving ability and memory. Here again, the sample is way too small to draw a conclusion, but it was kind of interesting. The well-nourished mice figured out the maze more quickly than their junk food counterparts, and subsequent tests bore that out as the well-fed mice ran quicker and quicker courses through the maze without making mistakes. The undernourished mice never quite “got it.”

It was a good experiment, and Sarah got an A in the science fair. But the most memorable thing about it, the thing that has stayed with me and put so much of life in perspective, was my daughter’s observation: “You know, Mom, when you think about it, all diets lead to death.”