High-Fidelity Lives Long-Playing, Too

Here are things professional scolds think could kill you: fake fat, fake sugar, real salt, Chinese food, Italian food, Mexican food, edible food, beef, poultry, fish, vegetables treated with anything, popcorn made with canola oil, potato chips, pizza, peanut butter, ice cream, coffee, tap water, beer and anything you might happen to enjoy.

Now, some things guaranteed to keep you alive: nagging from your spouse, taking out garbage, washing dishes, monogamy, family vacations, prayer, grueling trips to the mall, mortgage payments, car payments, orthodontist payments, religious services, parents’ nights at schools and minivans.

Contrast the two lists. The roster of deadly edibles has appeared on every front page in America, thanks to bean-curd worshiping sects such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. On the other hand, papers have all but ignored the revelation that you can add years to your life by marrying, staying married and getting right with God.

John DiIulio, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and Princeton University, tries to correct that injustice. In the current issue of National Review magazine, he calls attention to the overlooked oeuvre of Dr. David B. Larson, president of the National Institute of Healthcare Research.

Larson grew up in a broken household, and he approaches the issues of faith and family with special passion. While others investigate the fatal burrito, he has meticulously examined traditional-values folk wisdom - such as the notion that if you divorce, you die - and has decided on the basis of the best available epidemiological data that Grandma knows more about longevity than any frowning, white-frocked Naderite.

Consider his conclusions about the relationship between marriage and mortality:

If you want to die early and miserable, dump your mate. Divorced men enter psychiatric hospitals 21 times more often than their married counterparts. Their premature death rate is twice as high for heart disease, four times as high for pneumonia and seven times as high for suicide.

Men who break their vows are better candidates for on-the-job problems, stress-related disease and a stay in prison. They treat their kids like dirt. An amazing 45 percent haven’t seen their kids in a year and 22 percent haven’t seen their progeny in five years. Not surprisingly, the average divorced guy can expect to live a decade less than if he had stayed married.

Women also take it in the neck: Ex-wives have significantly higher death rates from infectious diseases, chronic illnesses, respiratory disorders and parasites other than lounge lizards. Divorced women, Larson reports, miss 50 percent more work than their married colleagues to injury and illness, and buy the farm five years earlier.

Predictably, both sexes hit the bottle and the medicine cabinet after they get their freedom. Divorced or separated couples abuse drugs and alcohol nearly five times as often as do the hidebound married.

These problems beget others, of course. Kids from divorced households do worse in school, spend more time behind bars, die earlier, earn less, receive welfare more often and inherit the family penchant for divorce.

This is spectacular stuff, especially for a public hooked on fad diets, relationship manuals and cosmetics guaranteed to roll back the years. According to figures collected from coast to coast by respectable physicians and social scientists: If you pray and stay married, you’ll live longer, weigh less, earn more, make less trouble and enjoy markedly higher self-esteem.

The research even has a lubricious angle. As Larson notes: “Love is better and more interesting than food. Sex is better than food.”

Despite this, the press has ignored the sensational revelation that faith and fidelity can add years to your life. Editors instead have focused on exposing the evils of Demon Popcorn.

No doubt media bias plays a role in this decision. The average journalist is a pagan who thinks God is an acronym for Git On Down and a church is an architectural knick-knack, from which a president occasionally emerges.

But Larson’s work will catch on anyway, for the simple reason that it makes sense. Nobody actually believes the hysterical warnings about killer foodstuffs. Often, news editors give the stories prominent play so people will have cause to laugh at somebody other than members of Congress.

There’s more to life than reading the labels and hyperventilating. Larson, like the proverbial grandmother, knows we’re happier when we can share life’s joys, tragedies, responsibilities, frustrations and compensations with a special someone.

Love and righteousness beat organic parsnips every time - and Larson has the numbers to prove it.

xxxx