C M Y KID NAME: Nxxx,2006-02-14,F,001,Bs-4C,E1 YELO MAG CYAN BLK 3 7 15 25 50 75 85 93 97

By GINA KOLATA

In an early 19th-century best seller, a famous foodwriter offered a cure for obesity and chronic disease: alow-carbohydrate diet.

The notion that what you eat shapesyour medical fate has exerted a strongpull throughout history. And its appealcontinues to this day, medical historiansand researchers say.

“It’s one of the great principles — no, more than prin-ciples, canons — of American culture to suggest thatwhat you eat affects your health,” says James Morone,a professor of political science at Brown University.

“It’s this idea that you control your own destiny andthat it’s never too late to reinvent yourself,” he said.

“Vice gets punished and virtue gets rewarded. If youeat or drink or inhale the wrong things you get sick. Ifnot, you get healthy.”

That very American canon, he and others say, may inpart explain the criticism and disbelief that last weekgreeted a report that a low-fat diet might not preventbreast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease, after all.

The report, from a huge federal study called theWomen’s Health Initiative, raises important questionsabout how much even the most highly motivated people

can change their eating habits and whether the rela-tively small changes that they can make really have asubstantial effect on health.

The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were random-ly assigned to follow a low-fat diet or not, found that thediet did not make a significant difference in develop-ment of the two cancers or heart disease. But therewere limitations to the findings: the women assigned tothe low-fat diet, despite extensive and expensive coun-seling, never reached their goal of eating 20 percent fatin the first year —only 31 percent of them got their di-etary fat that low. And the study did not examine the ef-

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Maybe You’re NotWhat You Eat

Yet another study upends what

Americans thought they knew

about diet and health. But will

anyone listen? We seem to

have a primal urge to

control our destiny by

controlling what we

put in our mouths.

Photographs by Lars Klove for The New York Times

DIET DOUBTS Many food manufacturers useperceived health benefits to sell products. Anew study calls into question how muchbenefit people can gain with diet.Continued on Page 6

NewsAnalysis

F1N

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2006

By CORNELIA DEAN

In Isaac Asimov’s collection of stories, “I,Robot,” robots rise up against humanity.

In the classic sci-fi thriller “Blade Run-ner,” a bounty hunter must exterminate in-telligent androids that are both deadly andvery unhappy with their creators.

Even in 1920, when the playwright KarelCapek gave English speakers the Czechword “robot” (laborer) in his play “R.U.R.,”the androids at Rossum’s Universal Robotswere bent on wiping out the human race.

“If popular culture has taught us any-thing,” Daniel H. Wilson says, “it is thatsomeday mankind must face and destroythe growing robot menace.” Luckily, Dr.Wilson is just the guy to help us do it.

In his new book, “How to Survive a RobotUprising,” Dr. Wilson offers detailed — andhilariously deadpan — advice on evadinghostile swarms of robot insects (don’t try tofight — “loss of an individual robot is incon-sequential to the swarm”); outsmartingyour “smart” house (be suspicious if thehouse suggests you test the microwave byputting your head in it); escaping un-manned ground vehicles (drive in circles —they’ll have a harder time tracking you);and surviving hand-to-hand combat with ahumanoid (smear yourself with mud to dis-guise your distinctive human thermal signa-ture and go for the “eyes” — its cameras).

If all else fails, reasoning with a robotmay work, Dr. Wilson says, but emotionalappeals will fall on deaf sensors.

Should you prevail, he offers in a grim ad-dendum: “Have no mercy. Your enemydoesn’t.”

But he is no foe of robots, Dr. Wilson saidin a telephone interview from Portland,Ore., where he is living while he waits forParamount to decide whether to make a sci-fi comedy out of the book, which it has op-tioned.

A native of Tulsa, Okla., he earned his doc-Continued on Page 4

S C I E N T I S T A T P L A Y

Daniel Wilson

If Robots Ever Get Too Smart,

He’ll Know How to Stop Them

‘GO FOR THE EYES’ A new book offers ad-vice on dealing with a barrage of bots.

Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times

I Hear Marilyn SingingCases: A Parkinson drug’s bizarre

(but benign) side effect.

By Mark Derr Page 5

Personal Health: ExerciseWays to break the habits of this

sedentary society.

By Jane E. Brody Page 7

When Mothers and Daughters TalkA conversation on conversations,

with Deborah Tannen.

By Claudia Dreifus Page 2

Model CityReconstructing what happened when

New Orleans’s levees failed.

By John Schwartz Page 3

As a young man, Abraham Lincolnexperienced bouts of despair so pro-found that friends were concerned hemight commit suicide.

Ulysses S. Grant, the general underLincoln who later rose to the presiden-cy, often avoided social occasions andretreated into alcohol.

All told, almost half of Americanpresidents from 1789 to 1974 had, suf-fered from a mental illness at somepoint in life, according to a recent analy-sis of biographical sources by psychia-trists at Duke University Medical Cen-ter. And more than half of those presi-dents, the study found, struggled withtheir symptoms — most often depres-sion — while in office.

“What is hopeful about this is that it isevidence that people can suffer from de-pression or other mental problems andstill function at a presidential level, ifnot at their best,” said Dr. Jonathan Da-vidson, who, along with Dr. KathrynConnor and Dr. Marvin Swartz, cata-loged symptoms from presidential pa-pers and biographies, and identifiedthose disabling enough to qualify as dis-orders. They reported their findings inthe current issue of The Journal of Ner-vous and Mental Disease.

The authors acknowledge the hazardsand uncertainties of diagnosing fromsuch a distance. But the lifetime rate ofmental illness they found in these 37 pres-idents is identical to that found in somesurveys of the American population.

In some cases, they included problemsnot usually thought of as mental dis-orders: William Howard Taft, the 27thpresident, for example, suffered fromdifficulty breathing while asleep —most likely because of a disorder knownas sleep apnea — and often dozed offduring important meetings.

In most cases the disorders recall themen: the indefatigable TheodoreRoosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnsonshowed symptoms of the manic energythat characterizes bipolar disorder;Richard Nixon drank heavily throughthe Watergate period; and Calvin Cool-idge plunged into a pit of depression af-ter his teenage son died of an infection.

The report also serves as a cautionagainst judging troubled souls too early.“To contemporaries well acquaintedwith Madison, Hayes, Grant and Wil-son,” the authors write, “it must haveappeared that, as young men, these indi-viduals were doing very little with theirlives.” BENEDICT CAREY

Theodore Roosevelt Association, via Associated Press; Mathew Brady, 1864

MEN OF DESPAIR? PresidentsTheodore Roosevelt, Ulys-ses S. Grant and CalvinCoolidge all showed signsof mental illness.

F I N D I N G S

West Wing Blues: It’s Lonely at the Top