My BFF is eccentric. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. She’s high-functioning or they would have locked her up long ago.

She describes herself as a 5½ year old adult. Mel maintains that she was forced to become a grownup during her tonsillectomy experience (it was that or retreat into autism), so she still carries 5½ year old perspective into all situations. Socially she claims she’s a lesbian trapped in a straight body, but that’s more for second-takes and appreciative laughs. She’s straight. She’s strong. She’s sweeter and less confrontational than she appears.

She’s so weird and she may be correct.

Her kindergarten perspective is interesting. She’s like the boy watching the naked emperor parade by, except she’s not just the only one to say the obvious, she’s often the only one to see it. She has a way of viewing situations differently than the rest of us. Sometimes that lets her come up with a suggestion that none of us would have seen. And she’s hung up like a 5 year old on fairness; I’ve seen her act like a hero, and that’s what it’s always about.

Mel finally has the living situation she wants. She dwells in a one-room garden cottage, amid trees and amongst critters, but in an urban area. It’s like camping with amenities in her cottage, but it’s just a ten minute walk to decent restaurants and small stores. Her situation is way too rustic for my taste, but she seems to love the daily challenges of living with skunks, opossums, racoons, squirrels, and birds.

Her taste in food is simple, monkish. I think she’d object like a 5 year old to different items touching one another on her plate (that’s not true. Mel likes salad). Her palate is acute and unsophisticated; she loves grapefruit and hates olives.

She’s not much of a drinker. She’ll have a glass of white with a meal, but she selects varietals that taste like grapefruit. She vastly prefers pot to booze. She shouldn’t smoke any more, but she still does. She inhales carefully and deeply, because marijuana is strong and expensive now, and Mel wants to get as much out of it as she can.

She has to inhale carefully because she’s done some bronchial damage with all the smoking (it was strong cigarettes along with pot, for the first 25 years).

She has a license but she doesn’t drive. She hasn’t owned a car for 20 years. She says she doesn’t need one where she lives. She’s told me she doesn’t mind driving but she can’t deal with traffic (I don’t believe that – she contends with all sorts of traffic on city sidewalks and public transit). She also says it’s being strapped in that irritates her, which is why she avoids cars and planes but doesn’t mind boats and buses and trains (this one rings true).

I’m describing her odd preferences because she’s starting to believe that she’s been (inadvertently) correct, and I’m starting to agree with her.

It all began when she read some science book her brother gave her. She’s been reporting to me as she got more into it, but I haven’t done the reading myself. So this little essay is hearsay and second-hand. I suggested she write on the subject herself. Mel says she’s not ready.

We’re female. We’re white post-war American babies. Jewish even. So of course Mel and I share an eating disorder: how not? We’ve both been dieting all our lives (actually, she has pointed out to me that we began when we started ovulating, and she has some teenage diaries that support her statement).

She’s more scientific and systematic than I am, so she went about the food thing by counting calories and weighing daily. I was more likely to skip meals and eat diet pills. But both of us were saturated with the standard 20th century nutrition advice (the good old pyramid). We spent the prime years of our lives seeking healthy carbohydrates and avoiding fats.

Losing and regaining like every other dieter. Steadily increasing in weight as we increased in years. Beating ourselves up about our lack of will power or about not exercising enough. Rating days as good or bad, based solely on how we did with food. Throwing away old attempts and starting new diets daily.

Yes, we did all that. Then Mel read the book. It was a thorough readable report about the irresponsible nutritional science we’ve been fed, along with tons of silage, all our lives. Mel says she felt like a child at the knee of some guru, having all of her ideas about food wiped out of her brain.

Then she repopulated her brain, by reading deeper. She tells me that the USA discarded all German nutritional science after WWII, which is exactly like letting the baby go down the drain with the bathwater, because it was Germany and Austria that made the scientific advances in the subject over the prior one hundred years. Then America fell in love with the personality and proclamations of the man who invented K-rations, and who unfortunately engaged in magical thinking regarding dietary cholesterol. That was the beginning of the demonization of saturated fat and the hoisting of carbohydrate as the “natural” human diet (not). Attempts to stabilize food prices by increasing silage in the American diet came soon after. All of this, and more, resulted in a crazy nutritional experiment for the whole population, for the last 75 years.

Guess what? The experiment’s results are obvious. Our population is metabolically deranged now. That’s Mel’s word I think: deranged.

Early in her reading, Mel gave up sugar. She now says it was easy for her. She was expecting at least a couple of tough weeks. She thought she was a chocaholic; she’d always tried to reserve some calories for a few squares of dark or a bakery cookie every night. But it was like she’d had enough sugar – she stopped and never looked back. It took her a while to realize that she’d never actually had a sweet tooth. As a kid she ate the cupcake and gave away the frosting. She liked the oreo wafers but not the filling. She never wanted cotton candy. She only enjoyed a jelly bean or candy corn if it was so stale it was a chewing experience. Mel lived six and a half decades before it occurred to her that she doesn’t even like sweet fruit – she ODs on peaches and nectarines and cherries every summer but she doesn’t go for the sweetness of tropical fruit or most apples or pears or even melons.

So it was easy for her. She stayed off sugar and soon lost most of her appetite for bread and pasta. She said it tasted too bland and gluey.

I should give up sugar too. But I’m a little addicted. I’ve had my struggles with alcohol, and they say there’s a connection between the two. Then again, it’s now been a year and a half since I had a drink. Teetotaling wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared: it’s like living single that way – tough in theory but not at all hard if you just do it day by day. As I’m verbalizing this I’m thinking I really should try giving up sweets.

Because Mel’s experiment has succeeded. She’s been off sugar over a year, and she doesn’t want to go back. She’s dropped like three dress sizes and she says her body is better-toned than it’s ever been. She seems easier-going and more relaxed. She never gets crazed with hunger.

She’s well. We’re in our late 60s and she takes no meds. She contends with some periodontal issues, but those are caused by her anatomy. She has the occasional orthopedic complaint but that’s owing to normal aging coupled with high activity (the no car thing); she learns a new stretch and moves on.

I think my childish BFF has lucked into the way of health. Her simple diet may be the perfect menu for anyone: all those fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and legumes and full fats. Not having a car requires her to walk every day, and that means interaction with people and also meditative time.

Her reading has now led her to some theory about metabolic origins of cancer. As she describes what she’s learning, it isn’t that deranged metabolism causes cancer. Cancer cells occur all the time, but if our bodies work right we wipe out the bad cells. A broken metabolism favors the proliferation of cancer cells. A high level of sugar feeds cancer cells. A dearth of oxygen aids cancer cells.

Mel says we’re all breathing shallowly most of the time. She recommends deep breathing now and then. In the same way that we should get out of the seat every hour on a long drive or flight, to stretch our legs and back, she says we should occasionally do a minute or two of conscious deep respiration. Mel isn’t good at meditating because she won’t empty her mind, but she can walk a few residential blocks while focusing on her balance, her alignment, her breath.

She’s even arguing lately that her smoking is good for her. She knows that she has compromised her bronchial area and for years she’s beaten herself up for continuing to smoke. But the fact is, she smokes carefully and consciously. She stands outside and takes a deep carbureted hit of high-quality marijuana, holds it in, and then exhales, fully and for some seconds.

Sure she’s taking in some pollutants along with THC and air. But on balance, the oxygen in and carbon dioxide out may be more beneficial to her than the burning particulates are bad.

She may be right. Certainly she’s thriving. We debate things all the time, but I’m not arguing now.