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

The term autoscopic, as used by Sabom, is actually incorrect for an out-of-body experience. In the event of an autoscopy, a patient (usually with psychiatric symptoms) observes a kind of double of the self from the vantage point of his or her own physical body. In the event of an out-of-body experience, however, people see their body, including verifiable details, from a position outside and above the lifeless body

Paranormal refers to all those phenomena that defy explanation with our normal physical laws and universally accepted concepts. The paranormal component may include a hyperacute auditory and visual sense, the conscious experience of remote events, premonitions and prophetic visions, and an out-of-body experience. Transcendental literally means “climbing or going beyond.” The transcendental component involves traveling to an unearthly realm, meeting or sensing the presence of a mystical being, seeing and communicating with deceased persons or religious figures, and reaching a border. The affective and transcendental components were reported most frequently, the paranormal and cognitive components less often

This new Greyson Scale provides a better overall picture, is easier to use, and makes it possible to distinguish between NDEs and experiences resulting from brain damage, from other stress responses, or from an altered state of mind caused, for example, by the use of drugs. Greyson uses a scale of 0 to 32, in which a score of 7 or higher marks the cutoff point for genuine NDEs in retrospective studies. The WCEI is best for determining the depth of an NDE while the Greyson Scale is useful for screening a population to identify NDEs.11
In both scoring systems, experiences with a score of 6 or lower in retrospective studies are not seen as real NDEs. I am convinced, however, that in the more recent prospective studies, in which all patients are monitored from the moment they regain consciousness or wake from their coma, each reported memory of the period of unconsciousness, even an experience with just a single element (that is, with an extremely low score), merits the label NDE. I say so because in the Dutch study all people with a low score—with a so-called superficial NDE—displayed in later interviews the classic personality changes associated with an NDE, which we will look at in more detail later.

1. Ineffability
What happens in a life-threatening situation is often totally unfamiliar and indescribable and lies outside our normal sphere of experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that people run into difficulties when they try to put their experience into words.
“I was there. I was on the other side.” For a long time that was all I could say. I still get tears in my eyes thinking about the experience. Too much! It’s simply too much for human words. The other dimension, I call it now, where there’s no distinction between good and evil, and time and place don’t exist.

And an immense, intense pure love compared to which love in our human dimension pales into insignificance, a mere shadow of what it could be. It exposes the lie we live in in our dimension. Our words, which are so limited, can’t describe it. Everything I saw was suffused with an indescribable love. The knowledge and the messages going through me were so clear and pure. And I knew where I was: where there’s no distinction between life and death. The frustration at not being able to put it into human words is immense.

2. A Feeling of Peace and Quiet; the Pain Has Gone
For many people, the overwhelming feelings of peace, joy, and bliss constitute the first and best-remembered element of their experience. The intense pain that usually follows a traffic accident or a heart attack is suddenly completely gone.
And the pain, especially the pressure on my lungs, was gone. The atmosphere made me feel totally relaxed. I’d never felt this happy before.

It is often confusing to hear bystanders or doctors declare you dead at a moment when you feel extremely alive and whole. If a sound is heard at this point it is usually a buzzing or whistling sound, sometimes a loud click or a soft murmur.
The weird thing is that I wasn’t at all surprised or anything. I simply thought: Hey, I’m dead now. So this is what we call death.