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for the purposes of this book is Da Vinci’s scholarship, which advanced and supported a new way of thinking: a synthesis of the whole and its parts. He embraced both breadth and depth of thinking both by paying attention to emerging facts and details as they were made available by science, and by apprehending the rapture of human emotion when all parts, known and unknown, acted in symphony to become the whole.
He understood that wholism needed reductionism to advance, and reductionism needed wholism to remain relevant. He realized that when you take something out of context to study it more closely or measure it more exactly, you risk losing more wisdom than you gain.
The South African statesman and philosopher Jan Smuts, who is credited with coining the term holism (without the “w”), wrote that reality consists of a “great whole” that comprises “small natural center[s] of wholeness.
parts of biology: genetic expression, intracellular metabolism, and nutrition.
Indeed, thinking that our classification system is a perfect mapping of reality is a limiting and potentially dangerous stance.
Chinese medicine, by contrast, sees the body as an energetic network.
If the world was, indeed, an accumulation of parts, each defined by discernable edges, then perhaps at some future point the technologists could understand the human body through a reductionist lens
The enzyme is not, in fact, a discrete unit that stands alone; it is an integral element of a larger system.
If an element ever ceases to act in service to its system, as with uncontrolled cancer growth, the system breaks down, and may even fail entirely.
And this means each part affects and is affected by the other parts. Removing or modifying a part changes the whole, just as changing the whole, as we will see in later discussions, impacts the parts—that is, when one part is altered, all the other parts are forced to adapt to try and keep the system running.
Put simply, there are no fixed “edges” within the human body that separate any one part from all the other parts. In their place are infinite connection and unending change, and it is this continual cascade of causes and effects that renders reductionist prediction models useless.
this is what I am lamenting: how, in studying parts out of context, we blind ourselves to wholistic interpretations as well as the real-life solutions to human health those interpretations would provide.
One of the core principles of science—the key element that distinguishes it from every other way of looking at the world—is the idea of falsifiability. Basically, if a theory is falsifiable, that means that evidence can be offered to disprove it. The opposite stance, dogma, is, by definition, anything that is considered unfalsifiable.
But the key point is, you accept in advance that some configuration of observable facts could partially or completely invalidate your theory.
The reductionist paradigm is dogma, an article of faith; it rejects, beforehand, the idea that it may not always be the best or only way to apprehend and measure reality. And modern science (and the biological and health sciences in particular) has embraced the dogma of reductionism to the exclusion of common sense and fairness.
To return to an earlier metaphor: these individuals spend their time studying and writing about the minutiae of elephants without a single one of them being aware that there is such a thing as an elephant.
Food writers are restaurant critics or purveyors of recipes, relegated to the same pages of the newspaper devoted to hairstyles, fashion, and home decor. But food is pretty much the most important topic there is.
But just because we don’t think about our food all the time doesn’t mean it’s not critically important.
Both the system and our personal choices have been heavily driven by our beliefs about nutrition.
And nearly everything our society believes about nutrition has reductionist fingerprints all over
The third, which we called the sum, was nothing more or less than what you got by adding the first two numbers. That’s the very soul of reductionism, remember: the sum (total) can be completely known if you know each individual part.
To reductionists, nutrition is just the arithmetic summation of the effects of individual nutrients.
These beliefs make sense only in a reductionist paradigm that identifies the component parts of food—the individual nutrients—and figures out exactly what each one does in the body and how much of it we need.
individual effects, as if there were, for each nutrient or chemical, one main mechanism that explains and perhaps controls the relationship between cause and effect.
We do the same thing in research as we do in education. The gold standard of nutritional research—the type that receives preference for funding and gets published in top-line journals—focuses on one nutrient and one explanation of its effect.
I mentioned, I, too, was taught to think this way,1 but also because, in order to get research funding, we scientists are forced to focus our hypotheses and experimental objectives on outcomes that can be measured.
My lab research at this early stage was completely acceptable according to the reductionist rules. We focused on one kind of carcinogen (AF) that caused one kind of cancer (hepatocellular liver cancer) that depended on one kind of enzyme (mixed-function oxidase)
And we discovered that the more the carcinogen bound itself to the DNA, the greater the amount of cancer occurred.2 Aha! This was the mechanism that “explained” the effect of protein on cancer!
All you need to know is that, according to this model, A causes B, which causes C, which leads to D. So the more A (cancer-causing chemical) you start with, the more D (cancer) you end up with.
Only by excluding messy and complex reality can we make linear, causal statements about biological chain reactions.
Esselstyn, McDougall, Goldhamer, Barnard, and Ornish,
No, the problem with reductionist research is that it’s too easy to run experiments that show what appears to be just the opposite effect: that milk prevents cancer.
Because when you’re looking through a microscope, either literally or metaphorically, you can’t see the big picture.
All you can see is a tiny bit of the far larger truth, completely out of context.
I’d have to manipulate the sample (say, studying the effects of Coke on people dying of thirst in the Sahara, or the effects of a Snickers bar on the mortality rate of tired drivers at 2 A.M.).
Or, like the elephant examiners we met in chapter four, I could perform honest research and still end up with conclusions that are incomplete and misleading because of the limited scope of my vision.
Because we scientists and researchers are considered “experts,” our worldview permeates our culture’s understanding of nutrition at every level.
It’s been that way for a long time. We’re brought up thinking of food in terms of the individual elements that we need. We eat carrots for vitamin A and oranges for vitamin C, and drink milk for calcium and vitamin D.
But even recent reductionist research has shown that supplementation doesn’t work. As it turns out, an apple does a lot more inside our bodies than all the known apple nutrients ingested in pill form. The whole apple is far more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to the reductionist worldview, however, we don’t really believe the food itself is important. Only the nutrients contained in the food matter.
This belief is reinforced every time we read the labels on food packages.
Second, it implies that the nutrients included on the label (a minuscule percentage of the total known nutrients) are the only important ones—indeed, perhaps the only ones that exist.
RDIs). Trouble is, RDIs still focus on individual nutrients. And these recommendations, expressed as numbers, now serve as quality control criteria for public nutrition initiatives like school lunch programs, hospital food guidelines, and other government-subsidized food service programs.
The RDI creators must wonder how our ancestors, without access to computers, were able to eat well enough to survive and reproduce!
But for most Americans who suffer from too much food and too much granular information about that food, this approach is misguided. It overwhelms us and keeps us, in motivational speaker Jim Rohn’s memorable phrase, “majoring in minor things.
In short, virtually all of us, professionals and laypeople alike, talk about nutrition, study nutrition, sell nutrition, and practice nutrition in reference to specific nutrients and, oftentimes, to specific quantities.
We fixate on the amounts. Vitamins. Minerals. Fatty acids. And of course, the biggest obsession of them all: calories.
So whether it’s the obsessive calorie counting of Weight Watchers or the 40/40/30 absurdity of the Zone diet, we believe that the more accurately we track our inputs, the more control we have over the output: our health.
no one acknowledges about nutrition: there is almost no direct relationship between the amount of a nutrient consumed at a meal and the amount that actually reaches its main site of action in the body—what is called its bioavailability.
The reason we can’t predict how much of a nutrient will be absorbed and utilized by the body is that, within limits, it depends on what the body needs at that moment.
The body reigns supreme in choosing which nutrients it uses and which it discards unmetabolized.
