In his most recent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease, Gary Taubes debunks the infallibility of the conventional wisdom on healthful eating (namely that dietary fat is bad and should be replaced with carbohydrates). He suggests that carbohydrates, and not dietary fat, are to blame for heart disease. Carbs increase insulin production which alters the regulation of fat by the body. Obesity is not caused by an excess of calories, but by a disorder of the regulation of fat tissue and fat metabolism that results when one partakes of excess carbohydrates.

Taubes’ book is compelling. I think it asks some really important questions. It’s neither conclusive nor foolproof. But certainly, I believe, it presents a hypothesis that certainly deserves more study.

Previous research concerning low-fat diets is lacking and often seemed driven by a tidal wave of popular momentum (Taubes’ book is as much about the biases of the science surrounding diet and nutrition as it is anything proscriptive). At any rate, there certainly needs to be more research on nutrition and diets of all kinds. The information that we’ve been fed doesn’t seem to be working for most of us. We need the facts as to what makes good nutrition.

Because it’s nearly impossible to conduct genuinely rigourous nutrition studies, the burden falls on us individually. We are our own lab rats. Its up to us to learn as much as we can about the subject and filter that information through our own behaviors and goals. We’re all going to be different. We are still but anecdotes with different weights and sizes, different food/exercise/leisure behaviors, and different outcome desires. As such, we should ALL be very careful not to be judgmental of others.

Perhaps the most intriguing notion that Taubes presents is that “obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation, not overeating and not sedentary behavior.” I think this challenges many of our assumptions, mainly the default position of blaming obesity on gluttony and sloth. Perhaps it’s because of a broad religous tradition that defines such as sins, or maybe it’s a result of a Puritan Work Ethic that is uniquely American, but more often than not obesity is seen as a personal failing. The assumption is that the obese simply lack willpower. If only they were better people, then they would not have the excess weight. But, what if those assumptions are incorrect? Are we willing to change the way we think about food and about the obese? Or, is it a necessary component of the human condition to retain something with which to beat down ourselves and others?

Personally, I can only take Taube’s recommendations so far. I think a lot more work needs to done in the field of nutrition and diet and health. I already eat a fairly conventionally healthy diet–mostly vegetables and fruit, little red meat, not many processed foods. The book reminds me that I should stay away from refined carbohydrates as much as possible. And I should replace bread and pasta with their whole grain counterparts whenever I can. But I cannot dive headlong into the Atkins pool. I can’t become that kind of meateater (Julia Child aside). More importantly, I cannot give up beer. Not now. So, perhaps I will make minor adjustments where possible, but my diet is not going to change that much. At least not right now.

For a general overview of Taubes thesis, see his 2002 piece in the NYT Magazine which was later expanded into the book Good Calories, Bad Calories.

 So what better way to spend a Thursday then trying to wrap your mind around the concept of time?

Time seems to be a recurring theme for me this week. First, I caught a science show the other night, What Time Is It?, featuring none other than my physicist-crush, Dr. Brian Cox. Cool science stuff, presented by a cute scientist – what could be better, right?

The show explored some of the mind-blowing craziness lurking just beneath the surface of a deceivingly simple question – “what time is it?” Time, we learn, is anything but simple.

One of the things that freaked me out was this: time is actually different for all of us, depending on how close to the earth we are, and on how fast we’re moving. So if you’re speeding across Oklahoma on one of those cool, high-speed rail lines we’ll hopefully have someday soon, while I’m lying on the ground in my backyard – my time will be moving much more slowly than your time.

I thought I had a shallow, basic understanding of the theory of relativity, but I’d never really thought about the time aspect of it quite in this way.

Then there’s all the string theory stuff, which is so out there, I can barely wrap my mind around it. Different planes and dimensions, all co-existing in space, sometimes bumping together and creating a universe or two – it desperately makes me want to grab my subtle knife and re-read the His Dark Materials trilogy.

That was the scientific part of time. Now, for the poetic part. (Although, there’s really no reason to separate those two. They absolutely overlap, at least in my mind. Science can very much be poetry. There’s a reason well-designed theories are often described as “elegant.”)

Anyway.

I just finished reading (nay, devouring) Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In the second chapter, I came across this passage:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance, They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interest them. It’s just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Granted, these words are spoken by a man (probably suffering from some combination of PTSD and brain injury) who is convinced that he has been abducted by aliens. But there’s so much beauty in them.

Throughout the entire book, Billy Pilgrim’s inner self jumps around in time, between his experience as an American infantryman captured by the Germans near the end of World War II, his childhood (road trips with his family to the Grand Canyon), and his post-war life as an optometrist with a comfortable, relatively unremarkable life. It’s rather lovely, this idea of being “unstuck in time,” and makes for a fascinatingly fractured narrative structure (not to mention, an effective self-defense mechanism with which to deal with the horrors of war).

What time is it?

And I love the description of time as “beads on a string” – a delicate, sequential collection of moments and memories. I actually prefer this “illusion” to the Tralfamadorian assertion that all moments coexist together. That it will always be, as it has always been. While there’s something slightly comforting about that idea, it also seems kind of dull. I much prefer the precious fleetingness of the “beads on a string” concept of time.

As strange as it may sound, Slaughterhouse-Five reminded me a lot of the science show I watched the other night. I remember that there was actually some theory that was pretty similar – that instead of existing in a linear fashion, the past, present and future all exist simultaneously. It might have been string theory. I can’t recall.

I don’t know if any of this even makes sense. I just know that I have all these weird thoughts and ideas racing around inside my head. I probably should’ve waited to write this until after I’d had “time” to sort them out a little. Heh. Heh.

Yesterday, I watched Iron Jawed Angels on HBO. I’d always kind of wanted to see it, and am rather embarrassed by how little I really know about the women’s suffrage movement. (And I call myself a feminist…)

I had a few problems with the movie itself. The hyperkinetic montage sequences made me wonder if I was watching a movie about Alice Paul and early-20th century feminism, or a movie about an audacious heist in a Las Vegas casino. There were also a couple of gratuitous naked flesh scenes that made me roll my eyes. It seemed, I don’t know, a little out of place. A little unnecessary. Perhaps they were trying to make the history of feminism a little more palatable to the masses. “Sex it up,” if you will.

As if the fact that women were once denied the same rights as men (and that many of them went through hell to obtain those rights) isn’t compelling enough. Nope, better throw in a softly-lit bathtub scene and a sexy soundtrack.

Sigh.

With that being said, the movie was, overall, a decent introduction to the events leading up to the passage of the 19th amendment. It stuns me to remember that it has not yet been a hundred years since women in this country won the right to vote. It stuns me even more that I still see today, on a regular basis, some of the same condescending, patriarchal attitudes towards women that I saw in Iron Jawed Angels. And it stuns me most of all to look around and see women today who don’t even bother to vote, women who seem completely oblivious to the fact that if they’d been born a century earlier, they would have been treated as property, simply because they’d been born female.

As flawed as Iron Jawed Angels may have been as a movie, I credit it for inspiring Winter Break Project ’08 – something of a self-directed, Feminism 101 course. No sooner had the movie ended, I was on the computer, looking for books to check out from the library. After scanning a few online course syllabi from various women’s studies courses (the program at M.I.T was especially helpful), I compiled the following reading list:

No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (Estelle Freedman )

The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan)

The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir)

A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf )

No Turning Back appeared on a few required reading lists for introductory women’s studies courses, and seems like a pretty good overview of historical feminism. The rest of the books I should have read years ago. Better late than never, I suppose.

This post has been languishing in half-written oblivion for the last week or so. Finally, after all the craziness surrounding the start of the semester and the political conventions, I’m able to return to it.

Last week, I finished the very last page (number 1168, to be exact) of Atlas Shrugged. And after a relatively intense, month-long relationship, I kind of feel like Ayn Rand and I are BFF now.

The first half of the book totally blew my mind as I began to grasp elements of her philosophy, but the second part, well, bored me. Everything became rather redundant – it was like I was being shown every possible permutation of a half-a-dozen or so core ideas. And the characters, while reasonably interesting and sympathetic, eventually led to some eye-rolling on my part.

The 60-page monologue, delivered near the very end of the book, nearly did me in. It was a nice, thorough synthesis of Rand’s ideas, but at that late stage, I was like, whatever. I’ve already read this.

It took me an entire weekend just to get through that section. 

I don’t think there was any reason the book needed to be that lengthy – Rand may have many wonderful attributes, but economy of words is not one them. I almost wonder if perhaps she wasn’t trying to make some kind of a point with the extreme size of this book – maybe trying to show us how good it felt to set out to do something and then do it? As someone with a history of starting things and never finishing them, I have to admit that I felt a profound sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction when I read the final few words on that last page, and then closed the book. Granted, the passive act of reading someone else’s words isn’t exactly the most productive achievement in the world, but for me, it’s pretty significant.

While I don’t, by any means, consider Atlas Shrugged an artistically flawless example of literary genius, I have a considerable amount of respect for some of the philosophical ideas espoused within its pages. Much of what I read made me seriously question – and in some cases, revise – some of my longest-held beliefs. Hell, I’m still questioning and reevaluating. It’s going to take me awhile to fully process what I’ve read.

One big change of perspective came in the realization that perhaps the private sector is not necessarily the enemy. I have a newfound respect for those who have a creative vision and through hard work and perseverance, turn that dream into a reality. It’s empowering and inspiring. It’s improved my personal work ethic a great deal, and made me realize even more the importance of finding a job where I feel productive and useful at the end of the day.

I also agree with the idea that businesspeople, in most cases, probably do know what’s better for them than does the government. In a perfect world, it’s better for everyone if the private sector is left free to do what it does best without the government in there, mucking things up. I’ve also come to realize that pro-business does not automatically mean anti-people. Sometimes the best thing for everyone is an environment conducive to business. More business means more competition, which means lower prices and higher-quality goods. And more jobs.

However, I do think there’s an element of “best-case scenario” going on here. If all business owners were principled, honest people like Dagny Taggart or Hank Rearden, it might be one thing. But there are far too many corrupt assholes out there, and I don’t know that it’s that terribly unreasonable to expect some degree of protection from the damage they could cause. I don’t think any of us want to give toxic toys to our children, or to eat contaminated food. I’d like to know that the drugs I put into my body have been tested out as much as possible, and that the steering wheel isn’t going to suddenly fall off of my car while I’m cruising down I-35 at 70 miles per hour.

Of course, I understand that not every accident can be prevented, and that a coddling, hand-holding government is pretty lame, but I don’t necessarily have a problem with reasonable steps being taken to protect the greatest number of people. Would non-governmental watchdog agencies perhaps be more acceptable? Is the problem not with oversight, but with the fact that it’s the government who’s doing so? I just think that there have been enough examples of unscrupulous and/or incompetent businesspeople to question the idea of pure self-regulation.
 
This is why, although I appreciate the idea of a limited government, I’m by no means ready to go to the extreme that Rand has, and start campaigning to rewrite the Constitution. I certainly see the scary, slippery slope of governmental control she laid out in Atlas, but I see a scary, slippery slope going in the other direction, as well. Maybe the right place lies somewhere in between Soviet Russia and a lawless Wild West. There’s got to be a lot of room in the middle there to play around with, and a lot of debate to be had over how best to achieve some sort of balance.

As someone who questions authority, and hates being told what to do, I can understand the desire of many to keep government out of your business (personal and professional) as much as possible. But this leads into my biggest problem with Atlas. For someone who seems to be all about individualism and self-determination, Rand also seems to be oddly inflexible about her ideas. It was interesting to me how absolutist she was, and how willingly and completely she wrote off anyone who disagreed. Especially after reading the chapter on the Ayn Rand cult of personality on the book, Why People Believe Weird Things, I find it interesting how she seemed to require complete obedience and agreement from her followers, while simultaneously preaching against dictatorial authoritarianism.

And that’s the rub. While I may agree with Rand on some issues, and while I may agree more with her system of morality than I do with others, I despise absolutism in all its forms. At times, even when I agreed with her points, I found myself turned off by how much of what I read resembled the very kind of fundamentalist religious doctrine I can’t stand.

I don’t want anyone telling me what to do or how to think – be that church, the government or Ayn Rand. With that being said, however, Atlas Shrugged has given me a valuable new perspective to draw upon when considering various issues. I’m extraordinarily grateful for that.

I’ve made it to page 633 of Atlas Shrugged, which puts me at just over halfway through. I noticed that writing last week’s post really helped me to focus my thoughts, so I’m going to try and sort through some of the frustratingly jumbled ones I’ve had since then. 

Since my last post, I’ve learned that Ayn Rand escaped from the Soviet Union, which certainly sheds a new light on the book. The story of a nation spiraling into what basically amounts to a Communist dictatorship is downright terrifying, and definitely makes me think twice about my old assumption that socialism is preferable to capitalism. If Rand’s intention was to portray the government as the slimiest, most incompetent, downright evil entity imaginable – well, she succeeded admirably. She’s certainly got me cheering for the beleaguered businesspeople (something I never thought would happen) in their fight against the scumbag Washington officials, and the mindless sheep who put them into power.

But while I’ll definitely accept Atlas’s role as a cautionary tale, I still don’t know if I’m fully convinced of some of its ideas.

One thing I’m finding particularly interesting is Rand’s concept of morality. She presents a moral system based on fact, reason, and the idea that the greatest thing man can do is achieve. What confuses me, though, is the whole absolute vs. relative thing. Rand seems to believe that there are objective standards of good and evil. “Good” is producing and achieving to the best of one’s ability. “Evil” is anything that tries to interfere with an individual’s right to do so. It’s also an objective assessment of the quality of one’s product – your work can either be “good” or “bad.” She scorns relativism, through the use of a few intellectual-type characters who take relativism to absurd extremes.

But whose standards are right? Could there be more than one “right” standard? Could selfishness and altruism both be virtues? Rand has convinced me that working hard, and then enjoying the rewards of your hard work can, indeed, be “moral” – but does that necessarily mean that giving some of those rewards to charities is immoral, especially if doing so gives you pleasure?

I suppose this is an example of the exact relativist thinking Rand despises. There are no contradictions, she says. If you come across what seems to be a contradiction, check your premises. One of them is wrong.

But is everything really so zero-sum? So black or white? Is it really that simple?

Rand’s philosophy reminds me quite a bit of some religious interpretations of morality, which can offer equally clear-cut distinctions between “good” and “bad.” However, it seems the exact opposite of what I always thought Christianity was about (altruism and selflessness). I’d be really curious to know if anyone has ever been able to reconcile Rand’s objectivism with Christian morality – to me, the two seem diametrically opposed in a whole lot of ways.

I see the bizarre and nonsensical extremes that moral relativism can be taken to, a strange no-man’s-land where everything is questioned, and nothing is ever certain. But, I still don’t see why I should adopt a particular moral code just because Matthew, Mark, Luke or Ayn said it was so. Maybe the point is to figure out your own moral code, and then not allow other people to guilt-trip you into accepting theirs?

Aw, hell – I’m so confused. The one thing I know for sure is that I need to hurry up and figure out what I’m good at, and make that my career. I’m tired of treading water. I want to go someplace. I want to feel like I’ve achieved something tangible. I want to feel the pride that comes with looking at something really cool and thinking, I made that. I did this.