If you want to extend your live beyond the limits faced by our species so far, your choices are clear. You can come as close as possible to not eating at all, and not enjoy the resulting long life not worth living. Or you can wait for the development of the pill that will mimic the effects of the starvation diet, but it may come too late for you. Or, as others have noticed, the most recent studies show you can subject yourself to the stern but fulfilling regimen of regularly drinking red wine; then it apparently makes little difference whether or not you remain fat.

So you can not eat and not drink or eat and drink--red wine, that is. What kills you is eating and not drinking. This is important news for us southerners. We are hopelessly addicted to eating, often have crude teetotaling prejudices, and often have mistakenly chosen beer and whiskey over Merlot and Pinot Noir. Contrary to SIDEWAYS, by the way, the argument for Merlot is overwhelming: If any fool can make a good one, and not even experts can distinguish easily between the cheap ones and the expensive ones, then that’s the wine for me.