Which is healthier: asparagus or cigarettes? Trick question, right? I’m not so sure. We all have friends who are skeptical of healthy eating: “Don’t make yourself crazy. You need to enjoy what you eat. If you’re upset, all you need is a nice tub of ice cream and everything will work out. Eating healthy will make you depressed! Have a geshmak in what you eat — you will live longer.” I’m sure you’ve heard this all before. But is it true?

If you’re looking for evidence-based health, then you would have to study a group of people who don’t eat healthy for a long period of time, and compare them to another group of people who do, and make sure the only difference between them is their food. Not so easy to find.

Well, in 1961 doctors did find such a town. Compared to the rest of the country, Roseto Pennsylvania had a 30–35% lower death rate. The death rate before the age of 65 was almost 0! Dr. Stewart Wolf discovered this, and he made it his business to find out why. He checked everything. Most of the people of the town were Italian, so Dr. Wolf thought that the “culprit” was the healthy olive oil that Italians usually cook with. But the people in Roseto were too poor to afford olive oil. They cooked with lard. In fact, 40% of their caloric intake came from fat. So perhaps exercise was giving them longevity. Nope. Most were obese. The location, water supply, and medical care were all checked out. Nothing stood out as being different than the rest of the country.

The only thing to which Dr. Wolf could attribute their longevity was their close-knit community. They all lived in two family houses. All the woman would cook together to make communal meals for the cousins, grandparents and children. The men would stay up talking together, smoking cigarettes, and drinking wine. When their children grew up, went to college, and married out of the community, they started having the same health issues as the rest of the country.

Doctors like Lisa Rankin M.D. use this example to explain to people that loneliness is more dangerous than cigarettes. So should we all go out and smoke cigarettes and drink lots of wine? Truth is, I haven’t met someone who doesn’t feel better when they eat healthier. If someone is healthy and eats horribly, then perhaps the old saying “If it aint broke, don’t fix it” applies. But if someone is overweight and sick, and he’s going around proclaiming healthy eating is nonsense — well, that just doesn’t make sense scientifically.

The main point for the rest of us is that although healthy eating is important, it doesn’t have priority over simcha and ahavas chaverim. The Rambam says very clearly that even eating healthy food in upsetting surroundings is dangerous for the body. If we were to make a proper food pyramid, than relationships would be the foundation. This is what my nutrition professor Jonathon Rosenthal calls “primal food.” If a person is not happy and not surrounded by supportive people, there is very little that healthy food can do for them.