scientific puritanism

Futher pondering and pontificating on our government's absurd drug policy:

The puritanism on which prohibition is based is not just derived from religious misthinking but from ill-founded scientific presumption as well, according to Colin Tudge in his astoundingly well informed and hugely important book (you've got to respect someone who gives their book a title this good, this long, and has it printed in full on the cover and the spine) So Shall We Reap: How Everyone Who Is Liable to Be Born in the Next Ten Thousand Years Could Eat Very Well Indeed; and Why, in Practice, Our Immediate Descendants Are Likely to Be in Serious Trouble.

He explains that there are many important elements in our diet apart from essential nutrients. There is a whole new sphere known as nutraceuticals, agents that we don't die or even get very ill without, but which positively benefit us. Things that are consituent parts of plants that we eat, bits that our bodies have grown used to and over time come to utilise. The example given is sterols that reduce cholesterol. Presumably, apes have always eaten plants that included sterols, and our cholesterol function evolved to semi-rely on them.

These days with our pharmacologically impoverished diet, we don't get the sterols and consequently we get high cholesterol levels. In the face of this, we invent Benecol, a sterol-enhanced margarine.

Our diet is certainly pharmacologically impoverished, as hunter-gatherers make use of up to a hundred wild plants and use all parts, whereas what looks like variety to us is actually twenty types of pasta made from exactly the same durum wheat. The benefits of a 'varied diet' are obvious, even though they are not fully understood because quite how all the various component parts interact is still not figured. What is clear is that a limited diet is not healthy. 'Unhealthy' means foods and diets that don't match the ways of eating we evolved on.

Following this through to our drug policy, Tudge writes:

We have in general a puritanical attitude to these agents. The legal case against them is not based simply on the harm that they may do. It is rooted, more deeply, in the belief that our bodies and minds ought to be free of such materials. The moral puritanism is reinforced by a kind of scientific puritanism: the deep (and necessary) belief of scientists that all explanations and descriptions of nature should be as simple as possible - according to the principle known as 'Occam's razor'.

Doctors, traditionally, tend to be both moral puritans and scientists; and putting the two together they have concluded that our bodies (and minds!) are more or less bound to function most efficiently when their chemical intake is as bland as possible; when indeed it is more or less confined to those materials that are recognised as bona fide nutrients - proteins, essential fats, unrefined carbohydrates and the approved list of vitamins. The idea that our bodies might actually function better in the presence of a weird assemblage of apparently arbitrary materials seems to run counter to those most fundamental premises.

Yet evolutionary theory explains why this might be so. Our bodies feel deprived of plant sterols, and since our modern diets are so biochemically innocent, sterols must be added. Additives in margarine are not ideal; but for the time being, in the absence of a wild diet, they are perhaps the best we can do.

Our minds, perhaps, feel and are deprived of the stimulation and the relaxation that out ancestors once derived from the berries and mushrooms around them. I am not a 'druggie' myself, incidentally, apart from a perpetual intake of tea and coffee. I need the caffeine buzz but otherwise have no stake in the drug culture. But I do feel the Western world's 'War on Drugs', which it has so obviously lost, probably does far more harm than good; and the deep reason is that it is misguided. It is rooted in the belief that it is good, in all senses, to be as biochemically innocent as possible, and that may simply be wrong. It runs against the tide of evolutionary history. Like most government policies in the modern world, in all spheres, it is rooted in bad biology.