HarperOne

The longest-lived people in the world get an average of 10 percent of their total calories from protein. Our average is as high as 15 to 20 percent, and of course, if you’re on a high-protein diet—Atkins, Paleo, or the diets recommended by many of my colleagues, and formerly by me—that figure goes up to 40 or 50 percent.

For example, the German physiologist Dr. Carl von Voit studied the diets of late-nineteenth-century laborers and found that they ate about 118 grams of protein per day. Von Voit then made a couple of classic errors. He confused description with prescription, and he extrapolated from heavy laborers to the population at large. He assumed that the workers ate what their bodies needed, so therefore 118 grams of protein must be the optimal daily amount for everyone

The moment of reentry into the physical body usually coincides with the moment of successful resuscitation, which patients sometimes observe. Astonished by the level of detail that patients know about their own resuscitation, hospital staff often respond with disbelief. The detailed resuscitation accounts led Sabom to conclude that the out-of-body experiences with verifiable perception could have occurred only during the cardiac arrest. In order to check whether the descriptions of resuscitations were merely reconstructions based on familiar images from medical TV programs, Sabom also interviewed twenty-five heart patients who had not reported an NDE after their resuscitation. Their descriptions contained at least one aspect that did not correspond with reality, unlike those of NDE patients with an out-of-body experience. At times the latter even recalled very specific and atypical details they could not have known