In late March 1990, with Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki visiting Washington, President George H.W. Bush found himself embroiled in a domestic crisis. Several days earlier, a magazine had broken the news that Bush had banned broccoli from Air Force One. "The broccoli growers of America are up in arms against me," Bush, a broccoli hater from way back, explained to Mazowiecki. In fact, at that very moment, an invasion had been launched on the capital, with upward of 20,000 pounds of the offensive florets headed straight for the White House. But Bush would not waver: "Just as Poland had a rebellion against totalitarianism, I am rebelling against broccoli."

Rarely had I been so proud of an American president. If there had been a barricade, I would have been right there beside him, a faithful soldier in the war against greens. Of course I am aware that a healthy diet requires platefuls of bright vegetables and luminous fruits. But I like my food in beige. Give me the aureoline yellow of mac 'n' cheese or the deep ochre of all-natural peanut butter—just please keep the reds, purples, and oranges to yourself.

For years, the people closest to me have pointed out, with varying degrees of dismay, that while my eating habits might be (barely) appropriate for an eight-year-old, they definitely were not for someone who presented himself as a fully functioning adult. Mostly, I saw these admonishments as nothing more than affectionate teasing and laughed them off. By the time I hit my mid-twenties, however, I could no longer ignore the ways in which I was abusing my body. More than a decade of chemically fueled excesses had ravaged my health, and I finally had to accept that I was not invincible. I also realized that I actually liked this whole life thing, and that I wanted to stick around for as long as I could. So, after no small amount of literal kicking and screaming, I quit my illegal habits. A couple of years later, I started exercising; not long after that, I began to pay attention to how much sleep I got. I even meditated.

But I remained unwilling to take perhaps the most crucial step of all. A jog around the park and eight hours of sleep a night are good for you, to be sure, but only fruits and vegetables pack the antioxidant punch needed to do everything from fighting off the common cold to staving off Alzheimer's and cancer. I had chosen life, but I still couldn't bring myself to choose broccoli. So I compromised. I chose vitamins. In a major way.