A man of conscience is a rare thing

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Ever since I first saw the video of Edward Snowden, recorded in an undisclosed hotel room in Hong Kong, I have been following media reports on his whereabouts, his government’s attempts to “bring him to justice,” and the massive American spying program that he exposed.

When I saw the video, I was struck by the simplicity of Ed Snowden’s actions. When we are young, it’s easier to do the right thing, or perhaps the “right thing” is more clear to us, because we’re not worrying so much about protecting family, making a living and our personal safety. Snowden has left all these things behind.

Much of the power of his actions comes from this simplicity. No prevarication, justification, or any other five-syllable words. Snowden followed his conscience.

“I’m no different from anybody else. I don’t have special skills. I’m just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what’s happening and goes, ‘This is something that’s not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.’” – Ed Snowden

Right now, the American government is paying lip service to the rule of law, and John Kerry, Secretary of State, has even suggested he is deeply troubled by China’s willingness to protect Snowden, which it did by allowing Snowden to leave Hong Kong. The official Chinese response to the US request for the extradition of Snowden was that the American request “did not fully comply with the law.”

Given that Snowden had recently provided the Chinese government proof that the US has been hacking into its computer systems for years, it is hardly surprising that Chinese officials dragged their feet in handing Snowden over to US authorities.

I am mystified as to why John Kerry not more troubled by his country’s massive spying apparatus.  How can a presumably intelligent human being stand before the entire world and justify this massive, unconstitutional invasion of privacy? All this in the name of freedom from terrorism. As frightening as terrorism is, more people die in the US each year in traffic accidents. Far more.

And why are we not more troubled?  Western governments are able to count on our unwillingness to leave our comfort zone. We are anaesthetized by our attachment to comfort and material things, hypnotized by the drone of our daily routine: get up, go to work, navigate traffic, pay bills, do chores, go to sleep – a rhythm punctuated by moments of real connection to people, to nature, to ideas. But all in all, we are half-asleep, and the government is listening to all our chatter, listening for disturbances in the cadence of our activities.

“…you have to make a determination about what it is that’s important to you. And if living unfreely but comfortably is something you’re willing to accept – and I think  many of us are because it’s the human nature – you can get up every day, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.” – Ed Snowden

Kerry defends the Obama administration’s spying policies and Obama calls on other governments to respect the rule of law. Yet what about America’s own constitution and laws? This huge spying program is illegal. America has no grounds to appeal to the rule of law. This is reality and we need to remind politicians of it.

And if I die before I learn to speak
Can money pay for all the days I lived awake
But half asleep?

-Primitive Radio Gods

Being Human – Love, loyalty and friendship

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“You could say we’re all from different parts of the same country.” – Mitchell, Being Human

Imagine if some unspeakable change took place in your life, and you found yourself on the outside during every moment of every day? This is the story of Being Human, the story of a ghost named Annie, a vampire (Mitchell) and a werewolf  (George) who become roommates in a rundown flat in Bristol.  As Annie says, “we’ve driven off the edge of the map but we’re still travelling.”

When you’ve driven off the edge of the world, fallen out of human society so completely that you cannot find your way back, your redemption becomes the company of others who are also on the outside: your companions in an unbelievable world, a world you have been thrown into. You come to  know each other and love each other more than ordinary humans ever could.

The BBC 3 program Being Human explores the lives of three characters who are no longer human. They have been cast out, but they find each other, as Annie says: “So. What have we got left to look forward to? Us refugees. The flotsam and jetsam of death. Maybe, if we still deserve such a thing as mercy, we find each other.”

Being Human is a courageous program – like its characters, it drives off the map and encounters its audience there, in a strange, unbelievable world. But even if a vampire, and werewolf and a ghost are not human, they turn out to be more human than we are. Like three strangers who meet on a train and have only a few hours to connect before parting ways forever, in a short time, these characters come to love each other as deeply as life-long companions. They reveal everything. They are already broken beyond repair, and are freed of the need to prove their worth to others.

The premise of this show—that these characters are thrown here as the flotsam and jetsam of death—reminds me of Heidegger’s description of the human condition in the twentieth century. “We are thrown into the world,” he says. We don’t emerge from a tradition, since traditions have broken down. We are not a part of an eternal and orderly fabric created by an all-knowing God, because that God is dead. And in His place is a God that Walter Wink, an American theologian, tells us is trapped in a cage by the brokenness of creation. God made this world, but God is not its master. When we pray, we rattle God’s cage; we wake him up, call on him to break himself free.

Mitchell: “God made man in His own image. What if that included His rage? And His spite. And His indifference. And His cruelty. What if God made us too? We’re all his children, you see. God’s a bit of a bastard. Look at us both. Covered in other people’s blood and talking about morality.”

In this world where we cannot call on God the all-knowing, God the arbiter of right and wrong, our actions take precedence. We act out our love for one another; we rescue each other from the ends of the earth with our compassion. God is found in these moments of grace, as when Sister Helen Préjean says to the condemned prisoner when he’s about to be executed in the movie Dead Man Walking: “I want the last face you see in this world to be the face of love, so you look at me when they do this thing. I’ll be the face of love for you.”

As when the character Mitchell crosses into Purgatory to rescue Annie and bring her back, not to the world of the living, but back into the knot of love that binds the three friends together, like blood vessels intertwined—warm, pulsing and enveloping.

Or like the eternal Celtic knot of love, loyalty and friendship. The ghost, the vampire and the werewolf are cold out there on the edge of the world, but they are transformed by their humanity, which, it turns out, is no longer about being biologically human, or even alive in the usual sense. It is an ineffable connection that emerges as more than the sum of all its parts.

Maybe I should write a letter to Toby Whithouse, the creator of this show, to thank him for showing me that television can be a platform for such a courageous art form. I was raised on a steady diet of American commercial television, with a little CBC and BBC thrown in.  American TV can rarely, if ever,  match programs like Being Human, which despite a small budget,  has wonderful script writing, carefully designed sets, and is permeated with a sense of the importance of nurturing the humanity of its characters as well as the audience. Little, if anything, that appears in the show is there by accident. Every prop, costume element and relationship serves a purpose.

Having read bell hooks, I learned to critique American mainstream television, which seems to be afflicted by an inability to move beyond certain racial tropes that it plays out again and again. For example, the African-American as confidante to the white protagonist; the African American who has special spiritual powers (e.g. Guinan in Star Trek, played by Whoopi Goldberg); the tendency to kill off African-American characters within the opening moments of many programs; the African-American as criminal. The total absence of Arab (or Arab-seeming) characters who are not terrorists.  The repeated rape and/or murder of women and the the avenging these crimes, without any sense of pushing back against the source of the violence. The endlessly-repeated theme of redemptive violence permeates pretty much everything:

“The myth of redemptive violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational and primitive depiction of evil the world has ever known.

According to this myth, life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible world; it is theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society.” – Walter Wink

Lack of attention is part of the myth of redemptive violence. Instead of attending to the other, you attack the other. Instead of risking disorder, you preserve certainty by deferring to the violence that ensures security and predictability. You never attend to the disorderly facts of real life and their meaning.

This lack of attention is at the heart of a great many American TV programs. Instead of creating detail and having deference for a unique story and characters, there is formula: each episode the same as the last. The triumph of order over chaos, safety over danger, again and again. Simple and dumb, in the sense of being unable to speak to the heart.

Outside of the borders of the myth of redemptive violence, we find a wealth of stories, like those of Being Human, tracing acts of courage and love. They are so numerous they cannot be contained. We find these stories on television, in theatres, in books, on the stage, on canvas, in galleries, music halls, churches, temples—everywhere.  Small acts of love that need only to be noticed in order for them to become miracles.

A visit to Pass Control

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This morning I went to Pass Control. I waited in line until the commissionaire called me forward on his intercom. He pushed open a metal drawer, where I placed my forms and ID. He closed the drawer and did the paperwork to get me a temporary pass, which he slid into the metal drawer. I took the card and sat back in my seat. A little while later, an old gentleman in uniform came to the entrance and called out “Pass Control! Anyone for Pass Control?” I got up and went with him. We passed through two sets of security doors, turned right, and then passed through another door. It had a Men’s Washroom sign on it. I was starting to feel a little nervous. Once through the Men’s Washroom door, we walked past the men’s and women’s washrooms and arrived at an elevator. Then we went down, down, down until we reached Pass Control. The old man left me there and I took a number. On a bulletin board nearby were posters advertising wanted men and posters offering rewards for information leading to the arrest of a variety of murderers and kidnappers. It was called the Military Police board. When my number was called, the clerk said “No. You need the person whose name is on this card (she handed me a business card) to approve this other person’s signature.” Back to my seat to wait for the elderly man in uniform, then up, up, up, and through the Men’s Washroom door, back out through the security doors and into the line-up. I slid my temporary pass once again into the metal drawer, got back my own ID and left the building.

Being Human

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“John Mitchell: I’ve got this friend. He says the human condition, the human nature, ‘being human’ – is to be cold and alone. Like someone lost in the woods. It’s safe to say he’s a ‘glass-is-half-empty’ kind of guy. And I see nature differently. I see the ancient machinery of the world. Elegant and ferocious, neither good nor bad, it’s full of beautiful things, unspeakable things. The trick is to keep them hidden – until the right moment.”

I happened upon the BBC version of Being Human on Netflix. As a Canadian, most of my TV viewing has been either American or CBC programs. Seeing BBC’s Being Human has made me realize how truly awful most mainstream American TV and film actually is. It is formulaic, boring, poorly acted, poorly written and beats the same themes of racism, sexual repression and violence to death over and over again. Now, I have NOT seen any HBO programs and I suspect there may be some very good shows on HBO.

What I love about Being Human is that the program is courageous. Nothing happens that is not fully considered – thought through all the way. If there is violence, it has a purpose, one that the actors, the writers, the set designers – everyone involved – seems to be aware of.

The show is a compassionate, funny, well thought-out exploration of the dark side of being human through the lives of people who are no longer human. The only American program that I can think of that reminds me of BH is Joan of Arcadia, which also seemed to move beyond unreflected violence and formulaic script writing to explore the depths of human life. But of course it was cancelled after two years!

Image

As far as American TV is concerned, I have gone on strike; called a boycott. I have decided that there is just so much wonderful programming to be found elsewhere that it will take me the rest of my life just to scratch the surface.

Braveheart has left the building

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Now that the USADA report is out,  I’ve been thinking about how it could be that the sport of cycling was so dirty for so long; that an aggressive and single-minded athlete like Armstrong, for whom winning at all costs is more important than any else, could be so successful. I also wonder why we focus so much on medals. In Canada, I know there was been some discussion about why it is that government sponsorship for athletes destined to the Olympics is so heavily weighted in favour of winning medals, as opposed to excelling in a sport, whether that leads to medals or not.

There is a kind of contradiction in highly competitive sports. The intense competition brings out the best athletes, and their best performances. But it also brings out, and encourages, our worst qualities – like we have seen with Armstrong. Maybe the shocking extent of the problems in cycling will push the organizations and corporations attached to this sport to rethink their values – that competing in sports should not be about winning at all costs, and that we (the fans) need to stop looking to these athletes to fulfill our cultural fantasies about heroism. After all, the Tour de France is not Braveheart. If a person needs a hero, why don’t they get on a bike, or put on some runners, maybe get out the skis, and become their own hero? Failing that, why not just go see a movie?

The Secret Race – Inside the competition machine

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Tyler Hamilton’s new book, The Secret Race, accomplishes many things. First and foremost, from Hamilton’s perspective, it frees him from lies. He had lied so much during his cycling career that telling the truth in general was not enough. He needed to retell his whole story in detail – truthfully this time – in order to free himself.

It was as if he had gotten caught in a web of deceit and the only way out of it was to weave another, truer story. Surely all autobiographies are to some extent fiction, in that they only reflect the past as the teller remembers it, in a subjective way. But Hamilton engaged Daniel Coyne to help him tell a truer tale. The writer and journalist corroborated the details of Tyler’s account, making it more accurate and complete. The end result is a detailed, excruciating tale that recasts Hamilton’s past as a competitive cyclist in a much more painful and accurate light, freeing him from the lies of his past.

Not that Hamilton’s motivation is only to exonerate himself to his own conscience. The book is intended to shake up the sport of cycling, and given that it was originally scheduled for release on Lance Armstrong’s birthday, Hamilton no doubt intends for the book’s revelations to shake Armstrong’s resolve to continue lying about his own use of performance enhancing drugs.

So, exoneration for Hamilton, and (yet another) challenge to Armstrong to tell the truth:  two things this book does.

A third is dispelling the myth that since during the era when Hamilton and Armstrong competed, all the professional cyclists were doping, it was a level playing field. Not so, says Hamilton (and David Millar, and Jonathan Vaughters). Some riders responded really well to drugs, and this gave them an advantage over others who responded less, meaning, for example, that slower riders could surpass superior riders because of how their biology interacted with EPO.

Also, the richer and more influential the cyclist, the better his access to doping doctors, cutting edge methods for avoiding detection, the latest drugs, etc. He would have a lot of advantages. If you were doping without these advantages, you would be more likely to be caught, more likely to damage your health, and you would probably be slower too. Not exactly a level playing field.

But, really, even without the drugs, cycling, like other very competitive sports where athletes and their sponsors stake their reputations and their fortunes on winning, would still not be a level playing field.

Athletes from rich countries have great advantages over those from poor countries – they have better training, equipment, nutrition, coaching, education, travel, competition opportunities – the list goes on and on. And in cycling, athletes win prize money and sponsorships, which in turn allow them to further cement their advantages.

Getting rid of doping is probably important not because the sport would be more fair (I don’t really think it would be), but because it would be safer for athletes. They would not have to risk their health by taking drugs that could cause heart attacks, cancer and other serious problems.

And finally, it would free athletes from having to choose between living an honest life and living a life of deceit and constant stress. As Hamilton has made clear, no amount of glory, adulation or money could compensate for the loss of an honest life.

Hamilton has said many times that he takes full responsibility for doping – that it was his own free choice. I disagree. Many of the top cyclists of that period were pressured to take PEDs by doctors, coaches and mentors whose job it was to ensure their well-being and success.

These riders were also under a pressure to keep their teams winning so that riders and staff would not lose their jobs.

Doctors are among the most trusted of all authority figures, and coaches are a close second to athletes who rely on them. To expect a young athlete to freely choose not to dope when his doctor and coach are handing him EPO is unrealistic to say the least, and to place all the blame on the individual cyclists misses the point – doping was a part of a very compelling, high pressure culture, and refusing to participate meant giving up any chance of winning.

Cleaning up cycling is in no way the sole responsibility of individual athletes, and neither is the choice to dope. That choice is the product of cycling’s competition machine.

Bicycle Love

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At Bridgehead in Westboro – I biked here from home, and the round trip will be about 14 kms. After a long time without much regular biking, I am getting back into commuting everywhere on my bike. Learning how Tyler Hamilton rode for weeks with broken bones (his shoulder or his collarbone, depending on the race) has made me realize that I can do FAR more than I realize. I do long to be in shape again like I was before my son was born – at that time I was working out at the gym and biking between 50 and 140 kms per week, including commuting, mountain biking and touring. And I could ski for hours in the Gatineaus in winter.

Even though I have never been thin, and have struggled with my weight off and on, I didn’t really have a serious weight problem until I developed asthma a few years ago. Apparently it is the kind of asthma that medical residents (at the clinic where I am a patient) have a very hard time diagnosing. I must have seen about 4 of them over the course of a year, and even though I complained of wheezing and exhaustion, they all insisted I did not have asthma. To be fair, I did have severe sinusitis, which probably tricked them into thinking that was the problem. Finally, on my fifth try, I got a really experienced doctor who, after listening very carefully to my lungs, said I had asthma – or “reactive airway disease.”

Whatever! The Advair worked like a charm and in a few days the exhaustion lifted and I had energy again. Unfortunately, I was a good 40 pounds heavier than I had been six months before. At the weight loss clinic that I eventually attended, the doctor pronounced my sudden weight gain “unusual,” but nobody really knows why it happened, other than maybe a new medication I started, or the asthma. Or maybe all the Thai Express, but the question is why I wanted all those Thai Express curries in the first place (I later learned that each individual serving has 1000 calories – horrors). And nobody knows what caused the asthma either.

So anyway, I lost 20 pounds, but stupidly (or not), I took a really high-stress job with sometimes odd hours. It was exciting and I learned a lot, including how stress causes weight gain, since I am now almost back to where I started, give or take a few pounds.

This is where Tyler Hamilton comes in. Surely the task of losing the weight again and getting back into really good shape (like I used to be) will not be as daunting as his crazy journeys with broken bones, and teeth that wore down from clenching against all the pain.

Tyler crashing
Tyler crashing during the 2002 Giro d’Italia, where he broke his shoulder.

Unfortunately, what might be as daunting as Tyler’s journeys is contending with the self-consciousness and revulsion that I feel because I am fat. I have tried to like myself as I am, but I just don’t, no matter how I try. I feel that part of the reason is tied up with the pressure that is placed on women to conform with the images of young, thin women and girls that are used in advertising everywhere.

What a world we live in – everywhere, beauty is linked to thinness and youth, and everywhere, there are advertisings and offerings of food – junk food, gourmet food, pastries, chocolates, candies – and always, the people depicted enjoying these foods in ads are young and thin.

But it is not just the crazy beauty images combined with the crazy food world that leads me to feel this…intense dislike for my appearance sometimes. I think it also has to do with the kind of person I am. I am at my best when I can go mountain biking or x-c skiing for hours at a time, and I love being able to suddenly run for a bus without feeling like a sack of potatoes.

I think being fit and active is part of being fully human for me. Even though I am a writer and spend my working life in a sedentary occupation, I probably have never experienced as much joy as I have hurtling downhill on skis when the sky is the colour of the mediterranean sea, and the snow sparkles with millions of diamonds. I think this latter reason for disliking being fat is a legitimate one, and something worthy of acting on.

The former reason, that the world is a mess and corporations are lying to us about what beauty is, and what good food is, does not strike me as a good reason at all to whip myself back into shape. In fact, it almost makes me want to stay fat, or become even fatter, as a way of saying “fuck you” to these stupid structures.

I suspect that this beauty-as-thinness-junk-food complex might be behind the phenomenon of young women purposely making themselves ugly, or at least un-beautiful, with piercings in weird places, extra fat, shaved heads and lots of black stretchy clothing. I admire this response, because it defies the pressures to conform to everything we are taught, as women, about beauty and how to be attractive.

However, in the end, I think I would like to get back to being the super-fit mountain biker / pilates fanatic, since it is such a positive part of who I am and have been. And besides, I really enjoyed riding my bike today. Since dear Tyler inspired me with his broken bones and flying through the Alps, I have not reset the odometer on my bike.

By the time I get home today, I will have biked 80 kms in about a week and a half. I have enough experience to know I have to ease back into cycling slowly, and weather has also intervened. I am curious to see how many kms I will have on the odometer by the end of the season, in October.

What Tyler Hamilton did

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He rode for three weeks with a broken collar bone and came in fourth place at the Tour de France. I would have thought it impossible, but there you have it – Tyler Hamilton with his collar bone held in place with tape:

Oy.I came across this fact (no doubt well known among people who follow cycling as a sport) when a friend posted an article about Lance Armstrong’s latest issues with the American anti-doping agency.

So yes, I know that Tyler Hamilton was on EPO, testosterone and quite possibly a pint of his own fresh blood when that picture was taken. That’s how he knows Lance Armstrong dopes – they did it together.

But I am impressed by Hamilton. He has been referred to as “tough” for his ability to withstand pain on the epic three-week ride through the Alps. He also rode with a broken shoulder during the Giro d’Italia in 2002. He was in so much pain he vomited.

But I am not sure that “tough” is the right word to describe Hamilton’s feats of withstanding pain. Because maybe he did not withstand the pain so much as stand, or cycle, with it–even  within it, never letting go.

This notion of toughness with regard to Hamilton interests me because he is not a big tough guy. At his peak, when he came in fourth at the Tour de France, he weighed about 140 pounds. He was and is an elf on a bicycle. A little guy riding through mountains as if he had wings.

Whatever it is that made it possible for Tyler Hamilton to ride a bike for three weeks with a broken collar bone is the same quality that came forth when he testified before a grand jury about doping. Flood gates opened, and he revealed everything he had kept hidden for 14 years. Along with a great many of his peers in the cycling world, he had led a double life – hiding the reality of doping from everyone outside of pro cycling’s closed inner circle. But once the he started telling the truth to the jury, Tyler’s double life collapsed. And in the wake of that collapse, he appeared on 60 minutes to let the entire cycling community, along with all his friends, fans and enemies, know that he had given away all his secrets, and in so doing, the secrets of cycling’s great master, Lance Armstrong.

For the average person, the only way to tell if someone is lying is to trust their instincts. Armstrong and his supporters say that Tyler is lying – that he is trying to draw attention to himself to make money or sell books.

But the face I saw in the 60 Minutes interview was a human face; the face of a person standing within his pain, moving through debris created by the wave of truth-telling that cleared away his past life.

If toughness has a hard outer shell, if it is insensitive to suffering, then Tyler Hamilton is not tough. And he is certainly not big. His strength seems to be in his ability to move with the currents that push and pull him – wind currents, waves of pain, the force of truth rushing through his life – until he somehow arrives at a new place which is sometimes, but not always, the finish line.

Interview with Gary Taubes – Part Three

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JD: Here is a quote from an article you wrote for Discover Magazine in 1997:

“There is a theory that creativity arises when individuals are out of sync with their environment. To put it simply, people who fit in with their communities have insufficient motivation to risk their psyches in creating something truly new, while those who are out of sync are driven by the constant need to prove their worth.” -Beyond the Soapsuds Universe, Discover Magazine

How well does your description of how creativity arises describe you?

GT: It’s an interesting question. That idea comes from a theory by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote a book called Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience. You do need someone to come in from outside. One of the theories about why mathematicians do their best work when they’re young is because they’re not yet educated enough to know what seems obviously wrong . So they try new things.

I was thinking today about why crazy people seem to be so creative – is it because they’re not bound to the social structures and mores that the rest of us have lived with? They think outside of the box, and usually 99% of the time it doesn’t work, and they create crap, but the 1% – somebody who is completely disconnected from the way the rest of us think – creates something that resonates and we think that person is a creative genius. Picasso could have been seen as a nutcase, but instead there was something about cubism that resonated and we all say this guy’s a genius. But he’s obviously different. He’s built differently from other people. Picasso is probably one of the examples that was used by Csikszentmihalyi when he was developing his theory.

When Gina Kolata reviewed my book, Good Calories, Bad Calories in the New York Times, she said I was a brave and bold science writer. I guess she meant that I’m brave because I’m putting myself out there. One advantage I have is I don’t have to worry about getting funding from the nutrition community. So being an outsider in that sense works. Another advantage is that I don’t have to spend all my time reading the journals to keep up with what other people are doing because I’m not competing with them. I can spend my time reading the history.

I definitely think differently from the nutritionists in general, because I was trained by very good experimental scientists in the physics community, when I spent all my time writing about high energy physics and cold fusion. These people were teaching me about how they think. When they were telling me what they thought was wrong with experiments, I was seeing how they think about science. So there were a lot of advantages I had there.

But still, I just stumbled into this. I could have spent my whole life being a kind of science journalism equivalent of Philip Marlowe the detective, and gotten these little cases that were interesting. Something where I could kind of get my hands dirty and do some investigations that other science journalists didn’t have the time or the energy or the desire to do. And then I just sort of fell through the looking glass, and suddenly I was in this world where all the science is terrible and there is actually a legitimate hypothesis that you could see had been left behind, that tended the answer all these questions and explain the observations.

I’m also an obsessive researcher. I have a personality that always thinks about what it doesn’t know. Like rich people who don’t care about what they have, but only care about what they haven’t bought yet. It’s a kind of psychological problem. It bugs me when somebody finds something in this field that I don’t know about. Like a paper that I didn’t read that’s important and so I keep looking and I keep reading the literature. There are always things you don’t know. And it just keeps leading you from one path to another.

The other thing is I hate writing – it doesn’t come easy to me. So the research is always a great way to procrastinate. You just keep researching, which is fun.

Most of us don’t have the talent to actually analyze what’s being said. You never know what people are leaving out. Which is something that Gina Kolata said correctly about my book – you don’t know what I’m leaving out. Then somebody comes along and says “oh look at this, he left this out.” Good Calories, Bad Calories is a 500 page book written about 150 years of science – there is an enormous amount left out. There are a lot of decisions being made along the way.

Actually, it’s funny, the original draft of the book was 200,000 words longer and unfinished. I gave it to my editor. I said “I can’t write anymore.” I know it’s 200, 000 words longer than it should be and I’m not done. I was saying in the book “here is the history, here is what happened, here is the data, here is how it was interpreted incorrectly, here is how the establishment took it, and here is how it is wrong. Here is the correct interpretation, and here is how that has been refuted.”

The editor said that I don’t have to give everybody else’s opinion. He said that if I lecture on it, people could ask questions, and then I can explain. That got rid of 180,000 words right there. Then of course what happens is people say what about this, what about that. Taubes cherry-picks because he doesn’t include those things. The same people, like Gina Kolata, who accuse me of going on and on and on and on, will then say but he leaves this out, he leaves that out. And that’s when I really want to pull my hair out.

JD: Tell me three things that you have learned from science about health that you are certain of.

GT: I’m not really sure of anything. I’ll tell you a funny story. A friend of the family is science director of Phoenix House, which are rehab centres all around America. They’re a pretty big deal in New York City. He took Why We Get Fat on vacation with him about five weeks ago and I got an email from him saying that he just found it fantastic. Then I got a call from him about a week ago. He got off the plane after he read the book and hadn’t had any carbs since. Lost 17 lbs in five weeks. He total cholesterol is 140, his blood pressure was 110 over 70, he’s off statins and beta blockers. And all I could think was thank god it didn’t kill him.

JD: So the answer to the question is nothing, right?

GT: Yeah, I’d still worry. I know – and this isn’t science, it’s personal experience – that I can eat as much as I want now. Without the carbohydrates it has no effect on my weight. Is it going to kill me? That I’m not so positive about. But I know that my weight is regulated by the carbohydrates that I consume. The research tells it to me, the science seems clear, but it’s my personal experience indeed that makes me know it for sure.

Interview with Gary Taubes, Part Two

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For Part One of this interview, see the previous post.

JD: It’s like somebody ran a restaurant for 20 or 30 years and they never had a health inspection. Then suddenly one day a health inspector walked in and went “Oh my god, what a mess!” And the people who have been there all along, they can’t see it because they’re so used to it, and they say “What are you talking about?”

GT: Yes, that’s a very good metaphor. This calories idea is a classic. I believed the calories-in, calories-out idea until about 2004, I’d say, and the more I talk about it, the less I can believe that anyone else really believes it. The idea that the accumulation of fat in the human body would be regulated by merely how much we ate and exercised and nothing else is just absurd.

It’s funny, one of the criticisms of my sugar story in New York Times Magazine was from my old friend Ellen Shell, who can’t get over the fact that I keep concluding things about nutrition that are the opposite of the things she’s concluded over the years. This has indeed ruined our friendship.

She said it was preposterous that the nutrients in the diet would have a differential effect on weight control. I would say if the nutrients in the diet have a differential effect on the hormones that regulate weight, it would be preposterous to say that they didn’t. And when I lecture about it, I use the analogy of a crowded restaurant to explain the problem with this belief that we get fat because we eat too much; because we take in more calories that we expend.

When you’re too fat, you’ve got too much energy in your fat tissue. When a restaurant is very crowded, there is a lot of energy in the people there. So you ask why is there so much energy in the form of people in the restaurant? If I said to you well, it’s so crowded because more people came in that left, you’d assume I was being a wise-ass, right? Because of course more people came in that left. It’s the logical equivalent to saying you get fat because you take in more calories that you expend. If more people come in than leave, then the restaurant has to get more crowded. It has to be true. But it still tells you absolutely nothing about why the restaurant’s crowded. Why did you eat more, and why did you get fatter? Why did more people walk into the restaurant and why that restaurant rather than the one next door which isn’t crowded?

JD: Because it has a really good band.

GT: The restaurant might have a good band, and maybe Angelina Jolie is eating there. Who knows, maybe the food is good and it’s happy hour in that restaurant. They’re having a party. There are a lot of reasons why it might be crowded and the other restaurants aren’t. And they all have to do with characteristics either inside the restaurant or outside – maybe it’s crowded because it started to rain and everyone ran in. But that more people entered than left tells you nothing. And yet that’s what we’ve been saying about obesity for 50 years.

Here is the difference in the metaphor. To say you get fat because you eat too much is like saying that the restaurant got crowded because more people came into Ottawa than left. The fat cell got fat because more fat entered the body than left. So how did the people who entered Ottawa and didn’t leave, get into the restaurant? Ottawa could get more crowded and the restaurant stays empty because they’re going to a football game or something.

JD: So, you take in energy in the form of food, but the energy could go elsewhere rather than going into the fat cell. It could be expended.

GT: Why does it go into the fat cell?

JD: A central criticism of your work in Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat is that you focus on one element of the diet as being responsible for metabolic syndrome. This has, of course, happened before. Over the years, we’ve been told not to eat fat, especially saturated fat, red meat, white bread, salt, sugar, eggs, etc. Here is a quote from Barry Glassner that speaks very well to this problem or argument:

“My own view is eat and let eat. I’m perfectly comfortable with people following an Atkins diet and eating meat with every meal, or a vegan diet and never eating any animal products. What I’m uncomfortable with are the exaggerated claims that they make, that a meatless regimen can prevent most every serious malady from heart disease to world hunger, or that following an Atkins diet is a magical potion for longevity and weight loss.

I think there are millions and millions of Americans who try to follow one version or another of the “gospel of naught,” which is this notion that the worth of a meal lies primarily in what it lacks rather than what it has. So the less sugar, salt, fat, calories, preservatives, animal products, carbs, additives or whatever the person is concerned about, the better the food. And this seems to me a quite curious notion that’s worth a lot more attention than we’ve given it.” – Barry Glassner, The Gospel of Food

Yet you’re saying that there really is something to worry about, and you arrived at this conclusion by following the science. How to you respond to this criticism?  Glassner wants to defuse the anxiety about food that we experience inNorth America.

GT: One of the reasons I went into this field is because I wanted to as well. I was so offended by the idea that the food police kept me from eating avocados and peanut butter for like a decade because they have dietary fat in them. And then the science is terrible.

But the fact that we were wrong about fat or we were wrong about meat doesn’t mean de facto we were wrong sugar or refined carbs being the cause of nutritional diseases like diabetes.

The argument I’m making is that the science of nutrition has been terrible. There is a lot of evidence suggesting the western diet is bad. There’s some factor of the western diet that causes heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer and probably Alzheimer’s as well. There used to be populations that didn’t eat the western diet and didn’t have these diseases. And there are variations in cancer rates between nations and between populations. When populations migrate from one area to another, cancer rates tend to change, so you can make the assumption that something is causing cancer. Different types of cancer might have different causes. The classic example – breast cancer is almost non-existent in Japanese women living in Japan. They come to the US and by the second generation the rates of breast cancer are the same as any other ethnic group here. Either they’re protected from it in Japan or something is causing it here.

Now Barry doesn’t have to worry about breast cancer. But if you get breast cancer, which one in nine American women do, you might be more concerned about what it was that caused it, because something does. There is a significant amount of evidence that the diseases of civilization argument is right. Then the question is, what is it about western diets and lifestyle? The vegetarians say it’s meat, the physical activity proponents say it’s sedentary behaviour, and a lot of people will say sugar and energy-dense foods and obesity, because obesity associates with all these diseases.

So then it’s just eating too much food in general. I’m making the argument that there is a lot of evidence implicating refined carbs and sugar. I know that it’s uncomfortable to contemplate this, but if you look at the evidence, if you read Good Calories, Bad Calories, I don’t see how you could come away not thinking that this is a very viable hypothesis. And then what you want to know is can it be refuted. What experiments do you have to do to refute it?

Recently I lectured at the Tufts University nutrition department and Alice Lichtenstein, is a professor emeritus there. However many US dietary guideline committees there have been, she’s been on them. When I was done with the lecture, which was the one debunking the calories myth and replacing it with the carbohydrates and insulin hypothesis, Alice basically stood up and explained why everything I said was wrong.

Instead of considering the whole of the argument and deciding to test it, she had an explanation for everything. What I would want after giving a presentation like this, is to have the audience say “have you considered this,” “have you considered that,” and how would you test it, because it’s a viable hypothesis.

And then on top of it, you have these clinical trials showing that if you remove the carbohydrates from the diet – the Atkins diet is basically the diet that removes the carbohydrates – but keep calories high, the subjects in the trial lose weight and their heart disease risk factors get better. If they’re diabetic, their diabetes gets better, their metabolic syndrome goes away.  There is a consistent story that can be told from the late 19th century through the latest science today. So that’s my argument against Barry’s ideas. It sounds good, what he’s saying, eat what you want, but if you called him you know, he would probably tell you that he’s on statins and beta blockers.

When you’re an authority, you have to assert your authority. So if you’re a nutrition writer or you run an obesity clinic and you’ve been saying one thing your whole life, it’s supposed to be right. If somebody else comes along and says something different, even if you agree with it, you still have to somehow convince your readers and yourself that you’re a smart person and that you know something that person doesn’t. If it’s drastically different from your own approach, then you can’t allow it to stand.

JD: Dr. Jay Wortman is celebrated for his work using a low carb diet to help an Aboriginal community in BC. People seem to assume that such a diet is acceptable for Native people because they are somehow more “paleolithic” than the rest of us. It is rare to hear criticism of the low carb diet when Jay Wortman is using it to help First Nations people. Yet when it comes applying it to non-Native people, there is a great deal more criticism. What do you think of that? Why is the low carbohydrate diet considered an innovative approach to obesity in the one case, and a potentially dangerous fad diet when recommended to a broader population?

GT: It’s an interesting way of looking at it. In the U.S., we don’t have the kind of Inuit and First Nations presence the way you do. Native Americans are not as much a part of our psyche. So there is no population that is encouraged to follow that kind of diet. I’ll show you how twisted this world is: if you read the American Institute of Cancer Research World Cancer Fund Report on diet, physical activity and cancer, they talk about the paleolithic diet, which is a diet where we basically eat what we evolved to eat, and they refer to the paleolithic peoples as gather-hunters instead of hunter-gatherers.

JD: Because they want to put the emphasis on the fruits and vegetables.

GT: Yeah. What world do we live in?

JD: Whatever world we want to, I guess.

GT: Yeah, I guess that’s the answer. I mean, even if they’re right, why change the name?

JD: Well, the Inuit have never been gatherer-hunters, that’s for sure.

GT: Back in the 1980s there was a study done on a population in Africa – the ones with the exclamation point at the beginning – I never know how to pronounce it. The book that came out of it was called Man the Hunter. Its publication sparked a feminist response trying to make the point that most of the food in these populations was gathered by the women, so it should have been called Woman the Gatherer instead of Man the Hunter. But we’re talking human health here, not feminism. It’s theoretically a science. When I really want to piss people off when I lecture, I say “let’s just pretend this is a science.” What would we do if this were really science – how would we interpret this data?

JD: I kind of wonder if people approve of the diet when it comes to First Nations is because they are seen as more paleolithic. Then, you know, there is kind of an undercurrent of racism.

GT: Even here I think – people who never do the Atkins diet would will do a paleo diet. They see the Atkins diet as some weird fad diet where you’re eating quarter pound cheese burgers or something. There is so much baggage. I’ve had doctors come up to me after lectures and say, of course I agree with everything you say, and of course I would never prescribe the Atkins diet.

Rob Lustig, who is the main character in my sugar story – even he thinks that the Atkins diet is some kind of weird fad. He was brought up in this medical community that’s inculcated with the belief that you can tell people not to eat sugar, but you still don’t go so far as to tell them that fat can be good for you and that you should, or could eat it.

One of the things I was trained to do when I was writing about high energy physics and talking to all these very good experimental physicists, is to be willing to break things down and throw them out if they don’t work.

Lustig’s done some pretty good work, but it doesn’t involve tearing down what other people believe, or tearing down conventional wisdom. You just sort of add onto it or go sideways from it.

You’ve got to start again, get rid of all the detritus of calories and fat being bad and look at what the data really show you. And not many people think that way. When they’re looking at these diets, people have this notion that they could eat fat and they could eat meat and that it won’t kill them. Because how can it not be true?

JD: It seems that what you’re trying to do is get past being tricked by your subjectivity. People get tricked by their own experiences. You mentioned in one of your interviews about how Mehmet Oz is very thin, sort of waif-like person who probably can’t conceive of carbohydrates as being something that doesn’t give you energy. Glenn Gaesser who wrote The Spark – he recommends that people eat a huge amount of carbohydrates. I knew without even trying it that that diet would make me hungry all the time. I think maybe because he’s such a thin person, for him, it makes sense, on a biological level. It’s the truth for him, so that he can’t see past it. Is that what you mean when you say you’re obsessed with getting to the truth?

GT: Yes, one of the things you have to do is distance yourself from subjective perceptions. In my case – I’m not naturally lean. I mean, I’m built like a linebacker. I could probably weigh 260 or 270 if I let myself. My brother, on the other hand, is naturally lean and always has been, so we have entirely different beliefs about food. The research scientists are a little different, but a lot of the people who get into nutrition are people who are lean and healthy and want to spread the word – what they know to be true. They’re different from the people who have problems with weight.

Certainly exercise physiology is full of lean muscular athletes. It’s like having a track star try to train a sumo wrestler. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s a fellow here in Berkeley, he’s about 5”8, maybe 140 pounds. When I interviewed him for Good Calories, Bad Calories, he was telling me that when he was in med school at Yale he used to run ten miles every day. He believes that if every fat person just ran ten miles a night like he did they’d be thin too. This is a very smart metabolism researcher. But he cannot get past the idea that he isn’t thin because he ran ten miles a day. He ran ten miles a day because he was thin. That’s what his body wanted to do with the food it consumed.

These issues of causality are really fascinating. The gestalt paradigm has been so overused that it’s kind of an embarrassment to evoke it. But if you read Thomas Kuhn, the metaphor he uses are these optical illusions – these drawings, like the naked woman on the face of Freud, called “What’s on the mind of a man.” You screw up your eyes one way, and you see a naked woman. You screw up your eyes the other way, and you suddenly see Freud – you can’t see the naked woman anymore. And if you screw up your head again then you just see the naked woman and you can’t see Freud anymore. That was the metaphor that Kuhn used for paradigms and it’s really true. Once you see the causality going the other way, you can’t understand how anyone could seriously believe the opposite. The metabolism researcher I referred to above seriously believes that his body has been shaped by these ten mile runs.

My goal in life is to somehow get people to switch their way of looking at it. When I give lectures I feel like I accomplish it for about 36 hours. After the lecture the shifting of paradigms has about a 36 hour half life and then instead of the naked woman suddenly you see Freud and that’s all you see, and you don’t remember how you ever saw the naked woman.

It’s one of the fundamental problems in all of medicine. Because I am something or I do something, I believe that everyone can be like me. Years ago I wrote about the controversy on the use of mammograms for women in their forties. Basically there was no benefit. So why did mammographers believe so much in the effectiveness of mammograms for this age group?

A woman comes in and you scan her and you find a tumour. You take it out and you believe you saved her life. A woman comes in, has a mammogram, you find a tumour, you take it out and she dies anyway. You believe she didn’t come in soon enough. A woman doesn’t come in, has a tumour and dies; you think she should have gotten the mammogram. You would have saved her life, right? The woman, who had the mammogram followed by surgery and lived, might have lived anyway. All these logical fallacies that we perpetuate. It’s extremely difficult to step outside of that.

As Francis Bacon said four hundred years ago, we are incapable of seeing the world as it is. There are all these distortions that our brains inflict on our perception. So what we have to do is figure out a way to get rid of these distortions so we can see things they way they really are. That was the scientific method. Bacon’s book was called Novo Organum, which means a new technology. It was a new technology of reasoning to try and get around these fallacies, these errors that are unavoidable because we’re human.

I had an argument with one of my best friends in science journalism, David Friedman, who wrote the cover story for Scientific American in February on obesity arguing that the only way we’re going to stop the obesity epidemic is with behavioural therapy. I felt like I was reading an article from the early 1970s. He’s read my book. We’ve talked about it. He said to me in an email, “not even you really believe that it’s not about calories.” We’re living in different paradigms.

The idea that sugar is bad for you has been around for a long time. The essence of what I’m arguing, and that Robert Lustig is saying, is that it’s not about calories. It’s about the metabolic and hormonal effects of refined carbohydrates and sugar. The medical community will get it. I mean, they’ve gone beyond such simple things as hormones. Now it’s all about proteomics and transduction pathways and stuff, but they will get it.

I recently wrote a story on sugar for the New York Times Magazine story called “Is Sugar Toxic.” The cancer aspect of my sugar story had been researched first for a piece I’m doing for Science on cancer that I haven’t had time to write yet. As part of that research, I interviewed Craig Thompson, a cancer researcher who is now president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Lewis Cantley, a cancer researcher at Harvard.

In my article I explain how both of these researchers think it’s likely that sugar is the dietary cause of many cancers. If sugar causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes some cancers, at least. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it. Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”

Thompson knew nothing of my work, but he had come to the same conclusions because they were obvious to him. He didn’t train in nutrition and obesity – he trained in cancer research. He’s currently studying how cells determine if they’re going to stay alive or not. One of the points he makes is that every cell has more than enough nutrients surrounding it to survive. The question is what makes a cell decide to take up more nutrients. So the idea of overeating is meaningless, because the cells could always overeat. From the cell point of view, what signals it to take up more nutrients?

It’s very easy for me to get people outside of the field of nutrition and obesity to see how the problem is not about how much a person eats. If I tell them insulin regulates fat accumulation, they’ll say oh, so carbohydrates make you fat after all. It’s just in the nutrition and obesity field there is such resistance and cognitive dissonance. Not wanting to be wrong, not wanting to admit to yourself and others that you missed the obvious.

I lectured on this at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is a very influential centre. I gave the talk, Why We Get Fat, which the book is based on. When I was done, one of the faculty raised his hand and said “Mr. Taubes, would it be unfair to say that one subtext of your lecture is you think we are all idiots?” I said, well, I would never say that, I would say that you’ve inherited a paradigm from the generation that preceded you that seemed so obvious that you never thought to question it. And that’s what we all did. And if I’m right, they were idiotic – they should have thought to question it. And they did a lot of damage by not questioning it.

JD: That’s a really bad position for nutrition and obesity experts to be in.

GT: Nobody wants to think of themselves as wrong. I mean, what if I’m killing people? I have a friend who used to joke that if I’m wrong, I’m going to have to go and live in Argentina with all the Nazis who escaped after the Holocaust because I will have killed millions of people myself!