Whole (9 page)

True, my social and professional collegialities changed when I began to speak of research findings that lay outside the norm. Skepticism and silence, to put it gently, became more common. Yet the rewards have been numerous, and I do not hesitate to encourage young people to follow the same path that I trod. (When they ask me, as many have, how they might be able to do what I do, I tell them very simply to never be afraid to ask questions, even ones everyone tells you are stupid. Just be prepared to use good science and logic when defending your perspective.)

The view from the outside of a paradigm can be especially rewarding, and also meaningful, when it is considered within the context of everyday life. As time has passed, the odd and unexpected research observations collectively began to shape a new worldview for me. They seemed to be more and more connected. If this worldview touched on matters of life and death, that’s when personal passions arose, both pro and con. That’s when the boundaries of these paradigms sharpened and came into view.

Now that you have a taste of my encounters with rigid paradigms, it’s time to share what I’ve learned, from all this questioning, about the prevailing scientific and medical paradigm.

From those initial outliers came heretical questions. From the questions flowed heretical answers, which led to a heretical set of principles. But for a long time I was trying to apply these principles inside a paradigm so big that even I couldn’t see it. It was only when I started questioning the mechanisms of the scientific method itself that I stepped outside the biggest, most restrictive, and most insidious paradigm of all: reductionism.

I
n Part I, I introduced the idea that important information about our health is being withheld from us, and that the lack of this information has contributed to our expensive and tragically ineffective health-care system. In Part II, we’ll take on the first of two things responsible for that withholding: the current reductionist paradigm.

We’ll begin in
chapter four
by introducing reductionism and its opposing worldview, wholism, in a philosophical and historical context. In some ways these two lenses represent a more fundamental division in consciousness than any other in modern society, including political and social views and religious affinities.

In chapters five through twelve, we’ll examine exactly how reductionism has affected the way we think about nutrition and health. We’ll consider how it influences not just how we interpret research results, but also what kind of research is done in the first place. We’ll look at its role in the ascendency of genetics in the scientific community—and the limitations of genetics for addressing disease—and at how reductionism influences the way we think about the connection between environmental toxins and cancer. We’ll see how reductionism has infected the most fundamental tenets of research, as well as the development of health products and services, turning powerful institutions into veritable zombies: seemingly animate, yet devoid of any compassion or desire to make us well. Last, we’ll broaden our view to the repercussions of reductionism in our eating habits far beyond our individual and collective health, in areas as diverse as human poverty, animal cruelty, and environmental degradation.

By the time we’re done, you’ll discover that “conclusive proof” can look very different depending on which paradigm you embrace. You’ll
discover why most research into diet and health is contradictory and confusing. And you’ll see why it’s so important for us to rescue nutrition from the rustic backwaters of science and social policy to which it has been relegated.

We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.

—
TALMUD

A
n old story: Six blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each feels a different body part: leg, tusk, trunk, tail, ear, and belly. Predictably, each offers a vastly different assessment: pillar, pipe, tree branch, rope, fan, and wall. They argue vigorously, each sure that their experience alone is the correct one.

I can’t think of a better metaphor to highlight the big problem with scientific research today. Except that instead of six blind men, modern science tasks 60,000 researchers to examine the elephant, each through a different lens.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. You could argue that the six men, each focused on an individual part, together produce a richer and more detailed description of an elephant than could be generated by one person just walking around looking at the creature
in its entirety. Similarly, think of the level of detailed understanding that 60,000 scientists can glean when they are empowered to focus on such granular component parts.

The problem arises only when, as in the parable, the individual points of view are mistakenly seen as describing the whole truth. When a laser-like focus is misunderstood as a global overview. When the six men or 60,000 researchers don’t talk to one another or acknowledge that the overall goal of the exploration is to perceive and appreciate the whole elephant. When they assume that any view that questions their own is simply wrong.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the two competing paradigms in science and medicine: reductionism and wholism. We’ll see that the triumph of reductionism over wholism over the past several hundred years—rather than reductionism being used as a tool in the service of wholistic understanding—has seriously impaired our ability to make sense of the world.

In a 2005 commencement address, the late novelist David Foster Wallace told a story that gets to the heart of how paradigms work: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”
¹

We talked about paradigms in
chapter three
to help explain the way many of my colleagues reacted to our research findings about animal protein and the health benefits of a WFPB diet. I compared my experience to that of a fish who leaves the water and encounters air for the first time: because I found myself outside the predominant scientific paradigm, I was therefore able to better understand where the limitations of that paradigm were.

What we didn’t look at in that chapter was the purpose of paradigms, along with their benefits and weaknesses. Paradigms start out as useful ways to frame knowledge and test theories. In fact, I would argue, we
can’t really live without them. We certainly can’t advance our knowledge of the universe without them.

In its broadest sense, a paradigm is a mental filter that restricts what you are able to see at any one time. Mental filters are essential; without your brain’s reticular activating system, you would be overwhelmed by stimuli and therefore unable to respond to the important ones. Without the ability to focus on one thing and shut out distractions, you wouldn’t be able to get much done. And in science, without the literal filters of microscopes and telescopes, we would know precious little about inner and outer space.

Filters—mental and literal—become problematic only when we forget about them and think that what we’re seeing is the whole of reality, instead of a very narrow slice of it. Paradigms become prisons only when we stop recognizing them as paradigms—when we think that water is all there is, so we don’t even have a name for it anymore. In a world shaped by the paradigm of water, anyone who suggests the existence of “not water” is automatically a heretic, a lunatic, or a clown.

So first, let’s dive into some troubling philosophical waters and try to pin down those two competing paradigms I introduced a few pages ago: reductionism and wholism.

If you are a reductionist, you believe that everything in the world can be understood if you understand all its component parts. A wholist, on the other hand, believes that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. That’s it: the entire debate in a nutshell. But the debate is one that has been raging among philosophers, theologians, and scientists since antiquity. Is this just academic philosophy, the equivalent of arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hardly. As we’ll see, choosing one paradigm or the other leads to very different approaches to science, medicine, commerce, politics, and life itself.

I’ll show how these approaches influence our understanding of nutrition in
chapter five
. For now, let’s look more broadly at the battle
between wholism and reductionism, and explore how the latter got the upper hand.

I must begin by saying that it’s a battle that isn’t actually necessary; there’s no inherent conflict between the reductionist techniques of science and an overarching wholistic outlook. Reductionism is not, in itself, a bad thing. Indeed, reductionist research has been responsible for some of the most profound breakthroughs of the past several centuries. From anatomy to physics to astronomy to biology to geology, we have gained a greater appreciation of—and ability to interact positively with—the universe through scientific advances brought about by the focused, controlled experimentation of reductionism.

Wholism does not oppose reductionism; rather, wholism
encompasses
reductionism, just as each whole encompasses its parts. I don’t think we need to reverse two millennia of scientific progress and go back to a time where humans worshipped nature without desiring to understand its workings. I think it’s great that we’ve got six blind men working on the elephant problem. I just wish someone would clue them in about the whole elephant.

You may be puzzled by my spelling of the word
wholism
with a “w.” The more common spelling is
holism,
which I think is part of the problem. Holism reminds scientists of the word
holy,
which smacks of religion. And many scientists are as hostile to religion as religious fundamentalists are to science. When they encounter the word
holistic,
they think of sloppy, “fairy-tale” belief systems that have no place in a serious exploration of the “real world.” Ironically, this dismissal of wholism by scientists is the height of dogmatism, a fundamentalist stance that denies the possibility of any truth other than that granted by reductionism. I can just see my science colleagues recoiling at the suggestion that we might be raging fundamentalists without knowing it!

From the beginning of our existence, humans have had an insatiable desire to know more about our world and ourselves. Where did we come from? What are human emotions, and how do we come to grips with them? Where are we going? What is the meaning of life?

In ancient Greece—the birthplace of much of Western thought—the philosophies of science and theology were closely intertwined, with much common ground. Both dealt with the all-time great questions concerning the meaning of human existence and the mystery of nature’s secrets. They worked hand in hand, with science providing the raw materials—the observations—and theology working those raw materials into overarching theories, or big stories about the universe.

Science and theology are both lenses through which to interact with and interpret reality, sort of like a microscope and a pair of binoculars. Both sets of lenses tell us more about the world than we could see with the naked eye, but the information we get from each can diverge considerably. Greek scientist/theologians such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Aristotle, or Plato would have chafed at the suggestion that they choose one instrument and abandon the other. These philosophers (literally, “lovers of wisdom”) wrote and spoke about food and health, justice, women’s rights, literature, and theology as easily and with as much passion and conviction as they wrote about geology, physics, and mathematics.

Somewhere along the line—and I don’t claim to be a historian, so I’ll leave the details to them—science and theology diverged, to the impoverishment of both. Church officials attached rigid dogmas to certain understandings of the universe, with the result that any questioning of those understandings constituted heresy. Science went into retreat in the West. What had been perfectly logical scientific assumptions based on observable facts (such as the earth being the center of the universe, as in Ptolemaic astronomy) were distorted into immutable principles of faith. Firsthand observation of reality was now rightly viewed as a dangerous activity—for what if you observed something that contradicted current theology?