Leith, William Read online

  as an unbeliever in these things, these pillars of our culinary society? The answer, I think, is this: too much carbohydrate is bad in a sedentary society. Refined carbohydrate is bad, period. And look at the Italians. They have small platefuls of pasta, a little course before the meat and vegetables. We, on the other hand, have vast mounds of it, and we overcook it, which makes the starch molecules convert to glucose in a shorter time ...

  I sit there, during this brief crisis, recapitulating lowcarb science in my head; I'm like a religious convert repeating a mantra or fiddling with a string of beads. I'm thinking that, yes, carbohydrates definitely have an effect on insulin production, which means that they can be classified as addictive. So if you cut them out, you are less hungry. I'm thinking that, yes, addiction specialists, such as Robert Lefever, a doctor who runs a recovery centre in west London, have known about carbohydrate addiction for a while; it's accepted in the literature of bingeing. Addiction specialists talk about "trigger foods" foods that make you want to binge and addicts nearly always list pizza, bread, toast, sandwiches, bagels, doughnuts, and fries, as well as chocolate and other sugary snacks. They rarely list broccoli, cabbage, or Brussels sprouts. Never lettuce, chicory, raddichio, rocket. Never turkey breast, tomatoes, and thinly-sliced cheese.

  Eating my sandwich, which is slightly slimy, I begin to calm down. Carbs make you hungry, I'm thinking. Carbs make you hungry. They do. They do.

  I'm keeping the faith.

  But what about the contention that, if you avoid carbohydrates, you can actually eat more food and still lose weight?

  This appears to be happening to my father. He's eating a lot of bacon, sausage, steak, and black pudding, as well as some green vegetables, but he's losing weight quite dramatically

  faster than me, in fact. And he'd never lost weight before, ever.

  How can you eat high-calorie food and lose weight? This is the lowcarb mystery. It's what Atkins calls the 'metabolic advantage'. Atkins says, 'The metabolic advantage is there. It can't be disguised, evaded, put down to water weight or wished away.' It boils down to a simple idea that the body extracts less energy from a protein calorie, or a fat calorie, than from a carbohydrate calorie. That a greater proportion of the energy derived from fat or protein is burned up in the metabolic processes of the body.

  That, in short, not all calories are equal.

  Which might be true.

  After all, nobody has proved that calories derived from protein have the same metabolic 'exchange rate' as calories derived from carbohydrate. To assume they did would be to make a groundless assumption.

  So there's nothing to say that Atkins is not right.

  Whether he's right or not, I'm thinking, as I eat the last of my slimy sandwich, I'm not so interested in food as I was before; my drive to eat is no longer turbo-charged with low blood sugar. Food is no longer an addiction.

  And, therefore, no longer a source of escapism. I don't want to binge any more, at least not on food.

  Which is a good thing, right?

  I'm sitting on the sofa and I'm not hungry, not hungry for food, and I believe I'm doing the right thing, eating this lowcarb diet. It's ten minutes past one, and I started making my lunch at one o'clock precisely, and I'm done, sated, and I wonder what to do with the rest of the lunch break. I'm staring out of the window.

  I'm keeping the faith.

  A Day in Early April

  I'm having lunch with a woman, an old friend, and things are looking up, I'm 205 lbs, waist size 34, and soon I'll be size 32.

  Walking towards the restaurant I remember that I have two pairs of jeans in my wardrobe, jeans I bought in 1994 and held on to, hoping I'd be able wear them again, clinging to them through several moves. The jeans are comforting. This week I tried on a beige three-button jacket in Agnes B, and it didn't look terrible, it did not pull into ugly shapes around the shoulders. I didn't buy it, but still. Beige. I'm pleased with myself. It makes me happy that I have beaten the odds, that I've spent several weeks not giving in, not doing what the nagging voices all around me are telling me to do: consume more, have more, escape reality, buy more stuff, hate yourself.

  I also feel pretty pathetic that this is all it takes to make me feel happy. Last week, my hairdresser said the word `carbs'. I was startled. She told me she was trying to lose weight, she'd heard about Atkins, and she was looking into this thing about `carbs'. That day, waiting in the salon, I saw a picture of Justin Timberlake, stripped to the waist, and he looked great. I also saw an episode of Friends in which Joey has a shower,

  and he's a little chunky, but not bad, and I looked at him and thought: maybe in a month or two. Maybe in a month or two I'll be at that stage.

  Lunch starts off well, with fizzy water, and when the waiter comes with the bread basket I wave it away confidently, and the woman I'm with says, 'You're not into this low-carbohydrate nonsense, are you?'

  `Well, I'm sort of going easy on bread and stuff, yeah.'

  And she looks at me, and what I see in her eyes is a mixture of confusion and anger, much more than simple disagreement.

  `But it's so stupid! It's so faddy!'

  `Well, I don't know. What about people who don't eat fat?'

  `Well, that's fine. That's been proven. But bread! How can you be against bread? Bread is important. Bread is one of the most important, nourishing things, and it has been for thousands of years, and now! Now some stupid fad diet tells you not to eat it, and everybody's going along with it, oh I don't eat bread these days, oh, I'm lowcarb these days .

  `But what if, you know, fat is not so bad after all?'

  `Oh, come on! How can you fall for that?'

  "Well, you went for food-combining in a big way.' `Yes. But there was science behind food-combining.' `And you gave up meat.'

  `Meat causes cancer.'

  The waiter appears with the menus. My companion and I look at each other, still sparring. That's when I realize that low-carbohydrate diets are in for a rough ride, a rougher ride than I'd thought. People have an emotional, not to say economic, link to carbohydrates. Any politician who came

  out against carbohydrates would instantly make himself unpopular. If I was a politician, and I absolutely knew for sure that carbohydrates were the cause of the obesity crisis, I'd keep quiet about it, or at the very most, try to break the news gently. If I were a newspaper editor, depending on advertising revenue from food companies, I'd say nothing. I'd do what everybody else is doing: I'd blame fat and sugar and salt.

  I order a steak with green vegetables and a side salad. My companion orders a risotto.

  She says, 'I mean, what would I tell my children? What would I tell them about sandwiches and baked potatoes and pasta and rice? All these healthy things? What would other people think of them at school? What would I put in their lunch boxes?'

  After a while, we change the subject. Later that afternoon, a woman from the obituaries desk at the Guardian calls me. `Would you write an obituary of Dr Atkins?'

  `Is he dead?'

  `No, no. We just like to get things done in advance.' `Oh, I see. Yes, of course.'

  `Well, he has had a fall.'

  `A fall?'

  `He's in hospital. Probably under observation. But could you do it by tomorrow? just, you know, in case?'

  At 9.15 a.m. New York time, just about when I was ordering my steak, Atkins lost his footing in the street.

  One school of thought, dominated by those who believe the obesity crisis is the result of eating too much fat, will suggest that Atkins fell because his heart failed.

  Those who believe that the obesity crisis is the result of eating too much carbohydrate, on the other hand, will say that Atkins fell because the weather had been unseasonably cold, because he stepped on a patch of ice, and slipped those spiffy tasselled loafers with thin leather soles! and cracked his head on the sidewalk.

  Addressing a group of firefighters, New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, will say, 'I can't believe that bull that he dropped d
ead after slipping on the sidewalk. Yeah, right.'

  Bloomberg will cast a mischievous glance upwards, and continue, 'The guy was fat. Yeah. He was a big guy, but heavy.' Bloomberg had met Atkins at a reception hosted by the doctor at his house in the Hamptons.

  `And the food was inedible. I took my appetizer and had to spit it out in a napkin.'

  Denial

  In his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962, the Harvard physicist Thomas Kuhn explained that science the study of the natural world through observation and experiment does not move in a straight line. Science, in Kuhn's words, 'does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions'. Instead, scientific disciplines move forward in a jerky manner, punctuated by revolutions. For a while, scientists believe one thing, and then someone comes along and demonstrates that everything they thought was wrong, and they have to tear up their calculations and start again.

  This is known as the 'paradigm theory'. Kuhn describes a paradigm as 'an accepted model or theory'. For instance, at one time everybody believed that the earth was flat. That was a paradigm. At another time, everybody believed that the sun revolved around the earth. That was another paradigm. In the nineteenth century, scientists believed that God had created the world, the planets, and the stars. Another paradigm. Of course, Galileo caused a revolution in astronomy, with the eventual result that everybody came to believe that the earth revolved around the sun. And Darwin, with his theory of natural selection, caused the scientific world to doubt the existence of God.

  One of the most important things about scientific revolutions, though, is how scientists react to them. Basically, they hate them. Well, wouldn't you? As Kuhn says, most scientists spend their lives engaged in what he calls 'normal science' conducting experiments to prove the existence of the paradigm. Mostly, scientists behave like those old-time clerical philosophers who spent their lives trying to prove the existence of God. Remember Bishop Berkeley? The trees existed because God existed. God existed because the trees existed.

  Normal science, says Kuhn, is 'an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies'.

  A paradigm, then, is more than just a scientific model it becomes a focus for shared beliefs, a social club, a political stance, a bonding tool, a springboard for economic interests. It's a boat that doesn't like being rocked. And when somebody rocks the boat, what happens? At first, they are ignored. Next, they are contradicted. Defensive research is produced

  to discredit their position. Often, like Darwin, they are vilified or smeared. Sometimes, like Galileo, they are thrown into jail. And this, of course, is completely understandable. How would you like it if you spent your life believing in a scientific theory, had written books and academic papers and conducted research and received grants and delivered lectures in its service, and then someone came along and started to make people doubt you?

  You'd hate him. You'd say he was dishonest and stupid and wrong. You'd call him a conman and a huckster. At the very least, you'd make the point that your rival was less

  in

  experienced, less eminent, than you were. This is what happened to Crick and Watson, the Cambridge researchers who discovered the double helix, a breakthrough in genetics that eventually led to the mapping of the human genome. And actually, the people who pointed out their lack of eminence were right, as they usually are in these circumstances. 'Almost always,' says Kuhn, 'the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm are either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.'

  The history of science is littered with revolutions. And also with denial. Sometimes, and of course much more than we can ever know, the establishment is successful in its attempts to stifle revolutionary thought. As Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, said in his Scientific Autobiography, 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its Opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.'

  This is what I'm thinking as Atkins lies in a coma in hospital in New York. I'm thinking about death, about

  paradigms, about scientific revolutions. Is lowcarb a scientific revolution? For thirty years, the nutritional establishment has had the same paradigm fat is bad, carbs are good. Cut down on fat. Eat a balanced diet. Watch your intake of sugar and salt. A healthy diet is a low-fat diet. We're fat because we eat too much fat and sugar. Cut down on sweets. When you buy food, check the labels for fat content. That's the paradigm. And we've had thirty years of normal science to back it up. During those thirty years, vast economic interests have clustered around the paradigm, too supermarkets and farmers and bakers and producers of breakfast cereal. Naturally, the political establishment has fallen into line, making sure the boat is steady, protecting people's jobs, enhancing revenue, collecting taxes. And the media, whose job is to sell readers and viewers to advertisers they are believers, too.

  And Atkins came along and rocked the boat. In the 1960s, when he started his lowcarb diet, he fitted Kuhn's model perfectly. He was in his early thirties. He was a cardiologist, rather than a nutritionist. He hadn't discovered his lowcarb diet he'd read about it in a medical journal and tried it on himself. He was an outsider. He was not eminent. He had nothing to lose.

  In the obituary, I say that, just over a year ago, Atkins suffered a heart attack, 'but, as he pointed out, this was caused by an infection and had nothing to do with the Atkins diet', even though I do not know this for sure. I quote him from one of his last appearances on Larry King Live, on which he said, 'Carbohydrate is the bad guy.'

  When Atkins dies, on 17 April, having been in a coma fjust over a week, my obituary, like many articles on Atkins, is illustrated with a picture of the doctor looming over a huge chunk of meat, holding carving tools in the air, posing, grinning.

  My first thought is: no! The Atkins diet is not about eating huge amounts of meat! It's about avoiding carbohydrate!

  And I think about Thomas Kuhn, about the paradigm theory, about denial. Was Thomas Kuhn, the expert seeker of denial, himself in denial? Because the paradigm theory is, of course, itself a paradigm. And when you base your scientific or intellectual world on a paradigm, you do not see it as a paradigm you see it as the truth. As Kuhn says, 'What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see.

  Well, my visual-conceptual experience has taught me to see that I've lost weight. And I believe that carbohydrates were my problem. If you asked me, that's what I'd tell you right now. It was simple. Carbs were my problem.

  And I don't see that as a paradigm. I see it as the truth.

  A Simple Mistake

  When I quit alcohol, on New Year's Day, it was easy. It didn't even take any willpower. I drank a lot on New Year's Eve, of course, and woke up the next day, as usual, feeling fuzzy and nauseous, and the day after that I felt fuzzy and nauseous, too. For a few weeks, having drunk nothing in the evening, I Would wake up, and my first thought would be, 'Jesus! How

  much did I put away last night?' and I'd get out of bed, my head throbbing, and then I'd go into the bathroom, and look at myself in the mirror, and only then would it hit me: I hadn't drunk any alcohol at all. And then, after about five minutes, my head would clear, and I'd feel strangely hollow and shaky. Being hungover every morning, of course, had been awful. But waking up without a hangover was no picnic, either.

  This was something I had not factored in. Walking along the street, with a clear head, you find yourself assailed by all kinds of unfamiliar emotions. To remove hangovers from your life is to open a door somewhere in the deep recesses of your mind. As you go about your daily business, you have no idea what might come through that door. Like a teenager, you feel sudden bolts of joy, and dark waves of creeping confusion and terror. This is a very vulnerable state; sometimes you feel like a released prisoner yearning for the comfort of his cell. Like a fat person who,
having lost weight, feels naked.

  Early spring has turned into late spring, and I'm still losing weight. I'm not eating carbs, I'm not drinking alcohol. Incidentally, I'm not getting on especially well with my girlfriend. Giving up alcohol was easy, although it made me binge on carbs. Giving up carbs was just as easy. I don't think I'll go back to bingeing on carbs again or any food, for that matter. But I never intended to give up alcohol for ever. What I wanted, what I always wanted, was a sensible relationship with alcohol. I wanted to have a couple of drinks, every now and again. And, yes, to get drunk once in a while. But I didn't want to be smashed out of my head every night, and I didn't want to feel fuzzy and nauseous every day.

  The funny thing is that I miss the hangovers more than I miss being smashed.

  One morning I'm walking past a French wine shop, and the guy who runs the place walks into the doorway and waves at me, and we exchange greetings, tradesman to former customer, and I walk on, and the thought occurs to me again, yet again, that you haven't truly beaten alcohol If you just give it up. That's the easy option. And that's the moment I know that, sometime in the near future, I will visit the French wine shop again, and say hello to the guy again, and buy a bottle of wine, and try to have a sensible relationship with it.

  My girlfriend's away somewhere, and I go home and try to do some work. I can't settle. I look out the window, and get up from my desk, it's the middle of the afternoon now, and I put on my jacket and ten minutes later I'm back at home, with a bottle of wine, with which I believe I can have a sensible relationship.

  I'll open it at seven o'clock.

  I'll open it at six-thirty.

  Six o'clock.

  I have a very clear memory, from the time when I drank a lot, of an evening, six or seven years ago, when I had arranged to meet some friends and go to see a play. At the time, my habit was to start drinking at lunchtime, have a couple of vodkas and some wine with my lunch, and maybe a brandy or two afterwards, and then stop drinking and work through the afternoon, getting progressively sober, and then start drinking again in the early evening. On this particular day, I arrived at the theatre bar at seven o'clock, feeling bleary,