LA INFIDELIDAD PUEDE SER LA MEJOR TERAPIA PARA SALVAR TU RELACIÓN DE PAREJA

¿Ha dejado de ser el adulterio una tragedia?


Cada vez son más los terapeutas que la recomiendan...


Marian Benito - 01/06/2018

Los incesantes devaneos sexuales de Don Draper, uno de los mejores publicistas del Nueva York de los 60, marcan cada capítulo de Mad Men.


La ecuación que une sexo y salud parece sencilla de armar. Veamos. Practicado una vez por semana, ayuda a regular el sueño y también el apetito. Si duplicamos la frecuencia, fortalece un 30 % el sistema inmunológico. Tres veces por semana, mejora el ritmo cardíaco y la circulación sanguínea. Quien llegue a cuatro veces notará un rejuvenecimiento casi instantáneo de su piel. ¿Cinco? Buen humor y mayor rendimiento laboral. A diario, el sexo sería un fabuloso regalo para nuestro cerebro. Oxigena la sangre, nos dota de nuevas neuronas, libera endorfinas y reduce los niveles de ansiedad y depresión. Son conclusiones refrendadas por diferentes investigaciones científicas, como la del neuropsicólogo David Weeks, del Hospital Royal Edinburgh (Escocia), que asegura que los encuentros sexuales, si son regulares, incrementan las defensas y ayudan a detener la vejez. Pero la realidad podría hacer añicos tales alegrías: a partir del tercer año de relación, las parejas no pasan, según las estadísticas, del 1,1 encuentro sexual por semana.


Y a pesar del mal dato, todavía cabe confiar en una solución para lograr mantenernos sanos a partir del sexo: buscar un amante. La psicóloga Deborah Taj Anapol (EE.UU.), una de las impulsoras del poliamor, alega una razón de salud para defender la infidelidad como fortalecedora no solo del sistema inmunitario, también del matrimonio.


Sin orgasmos, la salud se resiente


En su libro Poligamia en el siglo XXI, plantea que el sexo puede prevenir la enfermedad e incluso curarnos de ciertas patologías, y relega el matrimonio a una simple institución reproductiva “sin cabida para experimentar el lujo del romanticismo y la pasión”. Su trabajo como terapeuta de parejas le hizo llegar a la siguiente conclusión: “La ausencia de sexo en la relación acaba acelerando el envejecimiento y perjudicando la salud, ya que la acumulación de tensión sexual debilita las defensas del sistema inmunológico. Es preciso acceder a más de una pareja para educarnos en el arte del amor y acceder a todo nuestro potencial sexual”.

Los británicos no creen que acostarse con un robot sea infidelidad, pero no les gustaría ver a un amigo en ese trance


A Anapol le aleccionó su propia experiencia: “Una vez que dejé de lado la identidad de la monogamia, atraje a una serie de amantes que reflejaban diferentes partes de mí misma. Sin poliamor, me habría perdido la sensación de libertad”. Sus pensamientos ponen patas arriba las reglas básicas del matrimonio. “La cuestión no es –escribe en su libro– un amante, muchos o ninguno, sino rendirse a la dirección que el amor elige en lugar de rendirse al condicionamiento cultural, la censura o la presión de grupo”. En su trabajo, aconseja y ofrece alternativas para alcanzar la plenitud sexual, teniendo en cuenta que el sexo fuera del matrimonio es el que permite dejar de reprimir y de ignorar el deseo sexual para verlo como una práctica de goce. Su propuesta más polémica es que difícilmente se puede liberar el apetito sexual sin superar la monogamia, a no ser que se tenga la suerte de tener una pareja especialista en sexo tántrico o con una maravillosa educación sexual. Solo hay, según ella, dos obstáculos que frenan el poliamor: los celos y el tiempo. El primero tiene difícil solución, pero para el segundo sugiere que la cura es trabajar menos para disfrutar de más momentos de intimidad. Y, por tanto, vivir de manera más saludable.


Danièle Flaumenbaum, ginecóloga francesa, respalda la teoría de Anapol y ahonda en esa idea de que la energía que libera el encuentro sexual contribuye a curarnos de ciertos achaques y enfermedades y también a prevenirlos. “El sexo –dice– ayuda a mejorar la salud física y el bienestar mental, alejando muchas de las patologías afectivas, emocionales y psíquicas”. Se trata de una convicción cada vez más presente en la sociedad. Cuando, hace unos meses, Gleeden, un portal de encuentros extraconyugales, sondeó entre sus usuarias qué les hace felices, la respuesta fue casi unánime: “Un amante”. Curiosamente, las entrevistadas compartían, según Silvia Rubies, portavoz en España y Latinoamérica de este servicio, una peculiaridad: “Aman a sus maridos, ni siquiera atraviesan una crisis de pareja, pero necesitan savia nueva para nutrir la relación oficial”.


Alicia Walker es socióloga estadounidense y autora del libro The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure (La vida secreta de la esposa infiel: poder, pragmatismo y placer), un trabajo que destaca que el concepto de infidelidad no es igual para todos. Para unos implica carne, para otros basta con deseo. ¿Es infidelidad pagar por sexo? ¿Mirar pornografía? ¿Coquetear con el vecino? La línea se mueve tanto que la horquilla en las encuestas es gigantesca. Ese es el motivo por el cual distintos estudios de EE. UU. afirman que la infidelidad femenina oscila entre el 26 y 70 %, y que la masculina va del 33 a 75 %. El dato lo recoge la psicoterapeuta Esther Perel en su libro The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (La situación de los amoríos: repensando la infidelidad).


Las ventajas de un amante terapéutico


Sean cuales sean los números exactos, lo incuestionable es que se confiesa más. En comparación con 1990, las mujeres afirman tener amantes un 40 % más (o, al menos, lo manifiestan), mientras que entre varones las cifras se han mantenido. La igualdad llega a todos los rincones de la casa, y la alcoba no iba a ser menos. Con el equilibrio, surge también otra manera de mirar la infidelidad.


Anapol (gurú del poliamor): "La ausencia de sexo en la relación acelera el envejecimiento y debilita el sistema inmunológico"


“Estamos ante un nuevo modo de ser infieles –afirma el psicólogo Antoni Bolinches–, en el que desaparece el tono de traición o dolor que ha acompañado usualmente a este acto”. Autor del libro Sexo sabio, él sugiere que “existe una infidelidad compensatoria que consigue salvar el equilibrio emocional de muchas parejas y garantizar su perdurabilidad. Son personas que se llevan bien, con un proyecto y unos intereses comunes, pero la rutina les ha llevado a la habituación uno del otro, rompiendo la erótica definitivamente”. Es el caso de Laura Soto, una de las usuarias más veteranas de Gleeden. Su testimonio, plasmado en su novela Las pasiones ocultas de Jade, es revelador de una infidelidad como opción sexual cada vez más aceptada socialmente de cara a mantener la estabilidad matrimonial. También Isabel Allende, cuando, en 2015, presentó El amante japonés manifestó: “¡Las veces que he tenido amante ha sido rebueno!”.


Es posible amar a tu pareja siendo infiel


Infidelidad no implica necesariamente desamor. Es una idea que empieza a ser palpable en la terapia matrimonial. En Nueva York, Perel atiende en su consulta a un número cada vez mayor de parejas que se aman, se llevan bien, pero han dejado de practicar sexo. “La infidelidad abre en la pareja un diálogo honesto y profundo sobre los intereses y preocupaciones de uno y otro”, defiende. Su fórmula es pactar una nueva libertad que permita conciliar la vida conyugal con la realización de los deseos de cada uno. Es el mismo planteamiento que expuso Juan del Val en la presentación de su último libro, Parece mentira. “Si existe la base imprescindible del amor, la fidelidad tiene una importancia residual”, declaró. Fidelidad o infidelidad, ¿qué más da? Ambas son opciones válidas, aunque deja claro que la primera le produce claustrofobia. En su caso, dice, hay amor y atracción física, pero también espacios donde cada uno tiene su mundo y el otro no se inmiscuye. Tanto Del Val como su esposa, la periodista Nuria Roca, han confesado en televisión que mantienen una relación abierta que les permite crecer, evolucionar y madurar.


Ashley Madison, otra de las páginas para personas casadas, proporciona un dato muy elocuente: el 48 % de los usuarios considera que es posible amar a tu pareja mientras eres infiel. “Tienen claro que sería estúpido romper una relación que funciona solo porque falla en un punto”, indican en su nota de prensa. Aún hay más. El 64 % de los hombres y el 78 % de las mujeres reconoce que la infidelidad ha tenido un efecto positivo en sus matrimonios. Y solo el 19 % de los hombres y el 7 % de las mujeres a nivel mundial siente culpa después de un encuentro con su amante. En Gleeden, el 27 % de las usuarias confiesa también que “son momentos de libertad que ayudan a mantener en pie el matrimonio”.


Además, quienes frecuentan las páginas para adúlteros no descartan la posibilidad de aprender algo nuevo que quizás puedan aplicar después en su pareja estable. Es una de las ideas que se desprenden de la encuesta realizada por el portal de citas Second Live, en la que más del 85 % de los usuarios confiesa que las fantasías prefieren confiárselas a un amante. Y si es una aventura de una sola noche, mucho mejor. Son apetencias que por miedo, vergüenza o culpa cuesta compartir con la pareja oficial. “Siempre resulta más cómodo con un extraño, sobre todo si lo que se desea no encaja en ciertos estándares”, explica su portavoz, Matías Lamouret. Hasta los besos son más y saben mejor en un encuentro extraconyugal, según los datos recogidos entre casi 16.000 mujeres y hombres europeos por Gleeden con motivo del Día del Beso, el pasado 13 de abril. El 72 % se excita con un beso de su amante, casi el mismo porcentaje que dice que raramente le sucede con su cónyuge.


Mayor inteligencia sexual


También en parejas homosexuales la infidelidad, lejos de ser señal de debilitamiento del amor o de la convivencia, puede resultar una experiencia positiva, tal y como concluye una investigación llevada a cabo por el escritor Dan Savage y los psicólogos Justin Lehmiller y David J. Ley. En este caso, más que la emoción de lo prohibido, atrae la posibilidad de personalizar sus necesidades y deseos sexuales, algo que puede ser muy ventajoso para vivir juntos muchos años. Incluso desde el punto de vista tradicional –o sea, entendiendo la infidelidad asociada al dolor y a la traición– puede resultar beneficiosa, al menos a largo plazo, según un estudio de la Universidad de Binghamton con 5.000 personas abandonadas de 96 países diferentes. Craig Morris, antropólogo biocultural y responsable de la investigación, destaca que, después de un periodo de dolor, esta mala experiencia aporta una inteligencia de pareja superior que le ayudará a detectar mejor las señales que indican que un posible compañero no es el adecuado. “A largo plazo, gana”, señala.


El debate ético y emocional sobre la fidelidad está ampliando sus límites y la pregunta que estaba por llegar ya acaba de formularse. ¿Acostarse con un androide es infidelidad? La lanzó hace unos meses HBO en una serie de marquesinas de Madrid a propósito del estreno de la segunda temporada de la serie Westworld. En las imágenes, una desafiante Lili Simmons (Clementine Pennyfeather) dirige su insólito mensaje a quien espera en las paradas de autobús. La inminente integración de robots en nuestras vidas cotidianas ha empezado a expandir las posibilidades sexuales humanas. Ahora bien, ¿sería infidelidad?


El 40 % de los británicos que contestaron a una encuesta realizada por la plataforma digital NOW TV cree que no. Uno de cada tres consideraría esa posibilidad y el 39 % está convencido de que en el año 2050 será una realidad. No es menos paradójico el dato de que al 30 % le horrorizaría ver a uno de sus amigos en ese trance. Y si, llegado el momento, fuese el robot el que pidiese practicar sexo con otro ser humano, ¿sería eso infidelidad?


¿Por qué escoger si pueden ser dos?


Aun siéndolo, de acuerdo con esta nueva percepción del adulterio, transcurriría sin conflicto, sin la disyuntiva de tener que escoger, porque el vínculo con la pareja estable se mantiene intacto. Como dice Bolinches, “una infidelidad bien gestionada puede ser una medida de choque para convertir una relación decadente en duradera y saludable. Mucho más pernicioso que un escarceo o un enamoramiento extramatrimonial sería frustrar un deseo o una emoción inesperada por respeto a la pareja. Esta sí sería una represión que desestructuraría de manera irremediable la relación”. La duda ahora es cómo manejarla sin estrés. ¿Cómo gozar del sexo extramatrimonial sin que se tambalee la pareja oficial? “No olvidemos –recuerda el psicólogo– que el 95 % de las parejas son cerradas. Esto no significa que haya que tabicar el deseo, sino simplemente entender que hay goces que solo te los va a proporcionar una aventura”. Su primer consejo es la discreción. Esto fue lo que perdió a Don Draprer, protagonista de la serie Mad Men y adúltero compulsivo. La infidelidad, demasiado obvia en su matrimonio, pasó a ser dolorosa solo cuando su esposa descubre que los demás conocían lo que ella no había querido ver. Don llegó a su última temporada incapaz casi de hacer un recuento de amantes. Una maestra, su vecina, una prostituta, jóvenes solteras, casadas maduras... Hasta entonces, y mientras pudo mirar hacia otro lado, ella no se había sentido humillada.


Un tercero en escena.

¿Qué es lo ocurre en nuestro cerebro?


Cuando aparece un tercero o una tercera, la química del cerebro es similar a la de hacer puenting. Y, además, genera adicción. Lo explica el neurofisiólogo Eduardo Calixto González.


El deseo gana a la razón. El sistema límbico (donde gobierna el deseo) gana a la corteza frontal (sede de la razón). El cerebro registra menor actividad en esta última y un incremento en las estructuras límbicas, lo que le lleva a abrirse a nuevas experiencias y a un mayor deseo sexual.


Las hormonas te emborrachan. El cerebro se inunda de dopamina, un neurotransmisor que aumenta la sensación de placer, euforia y energía. También de oxitocina, hormona del apego asociada Además, hay mayor secreción de endorfinas, que multiplican ese efecto placentero. Además, hay mayor secreción de endorfinas, que multiplican ese efecto placentero. Más testosterona y con ella más apetito sexual. Otras sustancias químicas reducen la atención y llevan a la falta de control.


Niveles altos de cortisol, la hormona del estrés, ante la presión por mantener en silencio la aventura. Pueden derivar en problemas de memoria. Aumento de la hormona vasopresina (asociada a la búsqueda de emociones). En algunas personas esto se relaciona con el gen RS334.

Clinical observations with Paleolithic ketogenic diets by Csaba Toth

Could Schmaltz Really Be Good For You? An Interview with Science Journalist Nina Teicholz

By

Elliot Resnick

Eating is not a simple endeavor in our health-conscious society. A juicy steak may taste good, but conventional wisdom has it that red meat should best be eaten sparingly. And that delicious schmaltz that so many Jews ate at youngsters is now regarded almost universally as a sure killer.

According to science journalist Nina Teicholz, though, this conventional wisdom is flat out wrong. Teicholz spent nine years researching the origins of – and scientific basis for – the “fat-is-bad” premise and published her findings in 2014 in what became a New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet (Simon & Schuster). Today, she serves as executive director of The Nutrition Coalition, promoting evidence-based nutrition policy.

The Jewish Press: For decades, experts have told us that fat is bad for you. You say it isn’t. Why should someone trust you over them?

Teicholz: The thesis of my book is that saturated fat isn’t bad for you. The idea that fat isn’t bad for health is actually accepted today by our highest nutritional authorities – although nobody really knows that because it hasn’t been publicized due to the incredible amount of politics in the field of nutrition. But if you go to the federal government’s website on the “Dietary Guidelines,” you cannot find any publication since 1995 with the words “low fat” in them.

Why should people trust you that saturated fat isn’t bad when the experts say it is?

First, I would say to read the book. Second, experts have been wrong before, especially in the field of nutrition. Three generations of experts were wrong about dietary cholesterol. In the last five years, both the American Heart Association and the U.S. government have dropped their caps on dietary cholesterol, which is the reason people were avoiding egg yolks and liver, for example. So one of the pillars of our dietary advice for 50 years turned out to be a mistake.

All experts for generations have also recommended a low-fat diet, but the American Heart Association and U.S. government have both dropped that low-fat recommendation as well. So in both those cases, a universe of experts have been wrong and have had to retract themselves.

The official scientific consensus now is that cholesterol is not bad for you?

Yes, it’s an incredible story. Ever since 1961 when the very first nutrition guidelines were issued by the American Heart Association, Americans have been told to avoid dietary cholesterol as a measure of protection against heart disease. But in 2013, the American Heart Association dropped that recommendation with a single line in a scientific paper stating that there is insufficient evidence to support that recommendation.

And then the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, which tends to follow the American Heart Association, said in a sentence or two in 2015 that it finds insufficient evidence for the recommendation to restrict one’s dietary cholesterol.

So experts can be wrong, and in many cases it requires outsiders to confront longstanding paradigms. I don’t rely on NIH grants. I don’t need to be invited to top conferences. I don’t need to talk to nutrition scientists at the water cooler. I don’t depend upon research grants and all those things that scientists depend on for their careers. So I have more liberty.

Most people think of science as a noble, dispassionate endeavor with researchers carefully following the facts wherever they lead. You write, though, that sometimes a few powerful personalities at the heads of key institutions or scientific journals use their positions to advance their own pet theories and suppress competing ones, creating a scientific “consensus” by default that has nothing to do with hard evidence. Can you elaborate?

In writing this book, I started off with the same idea you expressed – that science is this sober, respectful practice of responding to observations, and if your hypothesis doesn’t explain your observations, you change your hypothesis. But what I found instead was that politics explains so much more of what goes on in nutrition than rigorous science.

The hypothesis that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol is bad for health took hold at the very highest levels in the 1950s and ‘60s, and soon after it became virtually impossible to challenge it. When respected professors did studies whose results contradicted this hypothesis, their research findings were simply ignored or, in some cases, went unpublished.

One researcher at Rockefeller University, Pete Ahrens – who was one of the most respected fat experts in the country – told me he stopped getting invited to expert conferences and had trouble getting his papers published or his research funded because he challenged the low-fat hypothesis. That is a common story I head from many researchers.

You write interestingly that many nations consume much more meat than Americans, yet don’t suffer from heart disease nearly as much as Americans do. Which nations are these?

The Germans, Swiss, and French all eat much more saturated fat than we think is healthy but have low rates of heart disease. The Masai warriors in Kenya eat pounds of red meat a day, along with the blood and milk. They don’t eat any fresh fruits or vegetables or grains. And yet, scientists who studied them in the 1970s – and took 400 electrocardiographs – could find no evidence of heart attacks among these people. The Masai were also found to have very low blood cholesterol and low blood pressure, which, remarkably, did not rise with age.

I present these examples, not to say we should eat like the Masai warriors – although there’s no evidence you couldn’t – but to show that they contradict the hypothesis that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for your heart. [Studies on these and other nations] were published in peer-reviewed journals decades ago; experts have known about them, but they’ve simply ignored them.

Some people may argue that even if we can’t prove that saturated fat or cholesterol is bad for you, why take a chance? Might as well play it safe and avoid these foods just in case they do cause heart disease. What’s your response?

Red meat is a very low-calorie way to obtain a complete protein. It contains Vitamin A, all of the B vitamins, choline, and minerals such as iron, copper, zinc, selenum and manganese. Quite a few of these are not available in plant foods, especially Vitamin B12. Deficiencies in B12 are really dangerous for women, especially of child-bearing age if they want to have healthy normal children. The symptoms of deficiencies in B12, for example, are almost exactly parallel to the symptoms of autism.

So there is potential harm in eliminating a food that delivers so many essential nutrients. Liver in particular is the most nutrient-dense food on the planet, but many people no longer eat it even though they might remember having chopped liver with their grandparents.

Also, it’s important to note that any time you eliminate one food, you have to replace it with something else. So if you eliminate steaks for dinner, what do you to replace that with? Do you replace it with pasta or vegetables? Well that’s a high-carbohydrate meal. So all of a sudden you go from a zero-carbohydrate meal to a high-carbohydrate meal with only a fraction of the vitamins and other nutrients you need for good health.

Carbohydrates and, to a certain extent, polyunsaturated fats (found in vegetable oils) are the “enemy” in your book. You write, interestingly, that heart disease was actually quite rare until the modern era when people started eating carbohydrates in large amounts. Can you elaborate?

We’ve been living with obesity, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer for so long that we assume they’ve always been present. But that’s not the case. Heart disease, for example, was exceedingly rare right through the early 1900s.

Obesity, diabetes, gout, Alzheimer’s etc. are all relatively recent epidemics, and historically they’ve all appeared in populations more or less simultaneously when refined carbohydrates – particularly sugar – were introduced into these populations’ diets.

People who have studied relatively isolated indigenous populations have noticed that the health of these populations plummeted, almost overnight, with the introduction of sugars and other refined carbohydrates [i.e., modern Western foods] into their diets. Many of these peoples previously hunted animals and lived in good health, so clearly saturated fat wasn’t the problem.

You claim fatty foods are not bad for you, but the fact is that we now live longer than our grandparents who ate all these foods. Doesn’t that contradict your thesis?

We do live longer, but to what should we attribute that to? Is it our diet? Other explanations are that we have conquered all the infectious diseases that used to kill people.

Since 1980, Americans have suffered from rising rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, etc. Although heart disease is treated more effectively now with earlier diagnosis and medications, the incidence itself has actually not declined. We’re also seeing rising rates of cancer and Alzheimer’s. We now even have infants with obesity and diabetes. That was rare or non-existent until quite recently.

At the end of your book, you write that “a beet salad with a fruit smoothie for lunch is ultimately less healthy for your waistline and your heart than a plate of eggs fried in butter. Steak salad is preferable to a plate of hummus and crackers. And a snack of full-fat cheese is better than fruit.” Are you exaggerating?

No. In recent years, there have been numerous position statements signed by nutrition experts worldwide saying that saturated fats are better for your cardiovascular health than carbohydrates. If you compare the two – and this has been done – saturated fats are definitely better.

My father was a physician and researcher and his stock answer to many dietary questions was, “Different people are different.” Is it possible that we should be advocating different diets for different people and that the modern tendency to make sweeping recommendations for all 320 million Americans is misguided?

Yes, I think that’s an excellent point. It should be said that that the low-fat diet was developed to fight disease in middle-aged men and never took into consideration the different nutritional needs of women and children, especially growing children. So I’m hugely in favor of abandoning our one-size-fits-all recommendations and diversifying the number of officially-permitted diets so that doctors can recommend them.

People don’t realize that doctors are often very constrained in what they can recommend. They have to follow the official advice; otherwise, in some cases, they risk medical liability.

You used to be a vegetarian, correct?

Yes, I was a low-fat vegetarian for over 25 years, and I was always struggling with my weight. I exercised fanatically, always trying to be thin, but it wasn’t until I did the research for this book and started dropping bread and pasta – and felt more comfortable eating butter and allowing red meat back into my diet – that I found that I could just effortlessly stay thin.

So that diet has clearly worked for me. It may not be right for everyone, but it is definitely the diet that has the most evidence to support it.

The Nutrition Coalition, which you head, is currently lobbying the U.S. government to only issue dietary guidelines henceforth that are based on rigorous science as opposed to ideology. What is the status of those efforts?

We’ve been working with whomever we can in government to take on this issue, and we feel buoyed by a really strong report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine which came out last year and has quite a bit of language about how the government’s dietary guidelines lack scientific rigor. So that has opened up a lot of doors.

I don’t know how far we’ll get, but our goal is to try to have rigorous, evidence-based dietary guidelines by the year 2020, which is when the next dietary guidelines come out.

La agonía del eros

Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?

One of the paradoxes of the dating game is that we know that by coming across as enthusiastic at an early stage – if we ring them the next day, if we are open about how attractive we find them, if we suggest meeting them again very soon – we are putting ourselves at a high risk of disgusting the very person we would so like to get to know better.

It is in order to counter this risk that, early on in our dating lives, we are taught by well-meaning friends to adopt a facade of indifference. We become experts at deliberately not phoning or sending messages, at treating our dates in a carefully off-hand manner and in subtly pretending we don’t much care if we never cross their paths again – while privately pining and longing. We are told that the only way to get them to care about us is to pretend not to care for them. And, in the process, we waste a lot of time, we may lose them altogether and we have to suffer the indignity of denying that we feel a desire that should never have been associated with shame in the first place.

© Flickr/Petra Bensted

But we can find a way out of the conundrum by drilling deeper into the philosophy that underpins the well-flagged danger of being overly eager. Why is detachment so often recommended? Why are we in essence not meant to call too soon?

High levels of enthusiasm are generally not recommended for one central reason: because they have been equated with what is a true psychological problem: manic dependence. In other words, calling too soon has become a symbol of weakness, desperation and the inability to deal adequately with life’s challenges without the constant support of a lover whose real identity the manically keen party doesn’t much care about because their underlying priority is to ensure that they are never alone without someone, rather than with any one being in particular.

But we should note that what is ultimately the problem is manic dependence, not high enthusiasm. The difficulty is that our cultural narratives have unfairly glued these two elements together with an unnecessarily strong and unbudging kind of adhesive.

Yet, there should logically be an option to disentangle the two strands: that is, to be able to reveal high enthusiasm and, at the same time, not thereby to imply manic dependence. There should be an option to appear at once very keen and very sane.

The ability to do so depends on a little known emotional art to which we seldom have recourse or introduction: strong vulnerability. The strongly vulnerable person is a diplomat of the emotions who manages carefully to unite on the one hand self-confidence and independence and on the other, a capacity for closeness, self-revelation and honesty. It is a balancing act. The strongly vulnerable know how to confess with authority to a sense of feeling small. They can sound in control even while revealing that they have an impression of being lost. They can talk as adults about their childlike dimensions. They can be unfrightening at the same time as admitting to their own fears. And they can tell us of their immense desire for us while simultaneously leaving us under the impression that they could well survive a frank rejection. They would love to build a life with us, they imply, but they could very quickly and adroitly find something else to do if that didn’t sound like fun from our side.

© Flickr/Pedro Ribeiro Simões

In the way that the strongly vulnerable speak of their desire for us, we sense a beguiling mixture of candour and independence. They don’t need to play it cool because they have found a way of carrying off high enthusiasm which sidesteps the dangers it has traditionally and nefariously been associated with.

What is offputting is never in fact that someone likes us; what is frightening is that they seem in danger of having no options other than us, of not being able to survive without us. Manic dependence, not enthusiasm has only ever been the problem. With this distinction in mind, we should learn to tell those we like that we’re really extremely keen to see them again, perhaps as early as tomorrow night, and find them exceptionally marvellous – while simultaneously leaving them in no doubt that we could, if the answer were no, without trouble and at high speed, find some equally enchanting people to play with and be bewitched by.

Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson

Sugar: How We Became Her Junkies In Denial

The rise of sugar correlates with a chronic disease plague that few paid attention to before the late 20th century. Today, sugar wreaks more biochemical havoc than a century of wars. What can we do about it?


Sugar. I spent four and a half decades in her embrace – fondling her thousand and one manifestations.


She was sweet, loving and caring. On a regular day she would give me energy, drive and motivation. On rainy days she’d reward me with compassion or thinly veiled indifference. And when the shit hit the fan, she’d help me forget both the shit and the fan.


Sugar was there from the beginning. She entered my crib in the form of treats. She sang a lullaby and dripped a sweet substitute for mother’s milk. Later, she took my hand and guided me through life’s ups and downs.


I swam with her, intoxicated, as a juvenile, a bachelor, an addict and a multiholic. I felt lost without her, and focused and determined with her. Together we hit the rat race and rode life’s roller coaster, fueled by a Western diet. And after every day of grind, it was her comfort and warmth that I looked forward to, without understanding why.


I didn’t know that she was history’s most prolific assassin.


Nor did I know that life doesn’t actually move like a roller coaster, except on and off sugar.


Either fact is going to be hard to accept, at first. Unless we belong to the Yanomami tribe in Venezuela, or other off-the-grid indigenous people who remain uncompromised by modern diet and Western living standards, we’re most likely still within her grasp, brain fogged.
Sugar messes with both body and mind


Sugar operates in mysterious, multitudinous ways, custom tailored to our individual psychology. She is an empress and a dominatrix, operating on the deepest levels of our subconscious, both individually and collectively.


Today, sugar seems to be nowhere, yet she is everywhere, from staple to culture. When someone dies, we mourn with sugar. When someone is born, we celebrate with sugar. And in between these two events, we eat sugar.


It’s a mistake to associate her with just the sweet stuff. She hides in 80 percent of the processed foods. Her safe house is refined carbs, anything that is canned, processed or packaged. She is wheat, all forms of grains, bread, pies, dough, pasta, couscous, chips, tortillas, soda, yoghurt, rice, pizza, bagels, jams, cereals, waffles, energy bars, muffins, ice cream, syrups, fruit, flour, oatmeal and a thousand others. She is two-thirds of the Healthy Eating Pyramid. She goes hand-in-hand with booze. She shape shifts, mixes and hides in forms that are invisible to her concubines.


There is both a biochemical and emotional edge to her deadly brilliance. The truth about sugar also happens to be the truth about our civilization.
How We Became Her Junkies


A baby with the expectant eyes of a delighted junky will reject her mother’s milk in favor of sugary water (which has zero nutritional value). Children shut up when we give them the standard parental shut-up remedy: candy. An alcoholic in withdrawal eats a Mars bar for relief, per the Alcoholics Anonymous manual. A lab rat that has been addicted to cocaine with intravenous shots, will switch to sugary water in record time.


Sugar is not a nutrient. It’s a drug. And we are her addicts in denial.


In The Case Against Sugar, author Gary Taube tells the story of a pharmacist who got addicted to morphine after being wounded in the Civil War. John Pemperton tried to wean himself off the habit with a mix of sugar, water, caffeine and cocaine. The mixture worked so well that it became the world’s most popular drink. By 1938, a Kansas newspaper editor wrote about Coca-Cola as the “sublimated essence of all that America stands for.”


The removal of cocaine from Pemberton’s secret recipe didn’t slow down Coke’s growth; it enabled it. Coke became the world’s most widely distributed product, and the second-most-recognized word on Earth. (“Okay” is first.)


The secret behind Coke’s “secret formula,” of course, was and is sugar. (One quart, or liter of Coke contains 28 sugar cubes.)


Or take tobacco. Only after R.J. Reynolds dipped their tobacco in sugar in 1913, followed by the rest of the tobacco industry, did cigarettes became more inhalable and addictive. This drove the worldwide explosion in cigarette smoking, and the first lung-cancer epidemic in human history, with today’s cancer death rate due to smoking at 1 in 4.


The addictive nature of sugar is intimately related to the same biochemical nature of illegal drugs, booze and pharmaceuticals, although most scientific studies avoid making this parallel.


Alcohol, opioids, cocaine and other psycho-stimulants work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain. Serotonin regulates our feeling of well-being and happiness. Sugar achieves this effect by allowing a serotonin building block, tryptophan, to enter the brain at a rapid rate. You can test it yourself by eating chocolate, which is rich in both sugar and tryptophan.


When we eat a refined carb snack, we also take an opiate-like hit, along with a drop of comfortable numb and a bit of pleasurable buzz. That’s because sugar also activates enkephalins and endorphins, morphine-like painkillers and pleasure drivers. And beta-endorphins, which stimulate cravings for more sugar and refined carbs. And dynorphins, a class of opioid peptides that increase overall craving.


In the same vein as a classic drug addict, a sugar abuser will incrementally up his dose to stimulate dwindling tryptophan levels in the brain. Just a little bit more. The genius, pull-push motivational mechanism of sugar is both biochemical and emotional. Every bite becomes another nudge that speeds our biochemical tailspin. A tailspin that starts in childhood, with every little piece of comfort and reward.
It’s the surplus and deficit of sugar that appears as “life’s ups and downs”


The difference between sugar and Schedule 1 drugs like heroin and cocaine is that the biochemical damage of sugar accrues slower. And because sugar works invisibly, the damage goes deeper.


Because the drug-sugar analogy goes against everything we’ve been taught, we tend to ask defensive questions.


“If sugar is so bad, why did we evolve a sweet tooth?”


“Why does the human tongue, roof of the mouth and throat carry special receptors for sugar?”


“Why do babies light up with a smile when sugar hits their palate?”


“Why does Aunt Betty finally shut up and stop complaining 10 seconds after having her chocolate cake?”


“Shouldn’t millions of years of hominid evolution have taught us better?”


“So why didn’t someone label this stuff with skull images?”


Relative to the environmental problems, wars and all other conflicts that are going on in the world, sugar seems like a minor infraction. We downplay it. We tend to do comparative judgements on what is, more or less, “bad” versus “good” to eat, but oddly the comparison tends to always favor foods with sugar in them.


Instead of examining sugar as an ethical or dietary choice, we need look at its influence on natural selection, evolution and our biochemistry. Both humans and plants evolved with sugar through millions of years of trial and error, to survive and procreate.


For the early humans and their hominid predecessors, life consisted of gathering and hunting food on a daily basis. Our biochemistries adapted to intermittent starvation as a norm. Coming across fruit was a rare delicacy, reserved for spring and summer, for a reason.


Dr. Richard Johnson, an expert in leptin and insulin resistance, argues in his book The Fat Switch that the metabolic syndrome (having excessive fat) is a biochemical condition to protect us against famine while we were still roaming the plains as hunter-gatherers. Excess fat is activated by an enzyme called fructokinase, which is triggered by fructose, aka fruit sugar. Fructose basically accumulates as fat directly and doesn’t tell us when we’re full, so that the early hominoid could gain the extra few pounds of energy reserves to get to his next destination, with a bit of buffer for the winter.
That extra fat was not intended to stay there


Excess fat around the belly is not a body type, it’s a sign of a metabolic disease that wears and tears us on a cellular level, depleting both body and mind. But sugar doesn’t care about that. It’s sole purpose is entrapment.


Our sweet taste buds evolved to spot the sources for this precious burst of energy. It probably saved more than a few hunters who migrated across the great plains in search of new sources of energy. For the plant, or fruit, that carried her sweet taste, sugar became a way to guarantee survival.


The fruit plant learned to propagate by having herbivores and carnivores “hitchhike” its progeny across the plains. The reward for the carrier was a hit of energy and momentary sense of well-being. Plants have evolved thousands of ways to attract seed carriers, ranging from little parachutes that get carried away by the wind to psychoactive substances that attract the prey to alter their states of consciousness. Yet sugar won the natural selection battle for the best entrapment drug.


Millions of years of natural selection made fructose a leading psychoactive stimulant in helping plants build their dominion. We learned to differentiate the lush fruit that was “ripe” for us to eat by color, taste and smell, unwittingly making ourselves the taxi drivers of plant heritage.


The Paleo man got his sugar high at best once every few weeks during the summer season. He certainly wasn’t digesting 170 lbs of fructose per year (or eating a life-size sugar statue of himself) in highly refined form, like the average Westerner does today. To replicate modern levels of fructose consumption, the hunter and gatherer would have needed to eat about 30 apples per day, every day, for 365 days per year. That doesn’t leave much time for either hunting or gathering. Instead, the hunter would transform into a shapeless prey, unable to keep up with the tribe. Eventually, the hyenas would catch up with him.


The hyenas are also catching up with us. The average modern man and woman is high on fructose, non-stop, 24/7/365. Table sugar, also known as sucrose, is made out of fructose and glucose in equal proportions. Even if we manage to say no to sucrose, we still get our hit from high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a universal ingredient that’s hiding in practically all processed and packaged foods today. HFCS is also half fructose. Even if you make a conscious effort to avoid refined fructose, you’re probably still eating it in hidden forms.


Jared Diamond, an evolutionary biologist and author of The Third Chimpanzee, has an apt analogy about the introduction of refined carbs into our diets. Imagine the evolutionary journey from a chimpanzee to human as a 24-hour clock. Every hour represents 100,000 years of past time. We go through night, dawn, afternoon, day, evening … all the way to minutes before midnight, as hunter-gatherers, eating high-fat, low-carb diets. During this time, fruit is a rare delicacy. At 11:54 PM, we get the idea to separate plants and animals with a fence, in order to grow monocultures like cane sugar, corn, wheat and other grains, the cornucopia of carbs that we recognize as the birth of agriculture, and thereby civilization.


The shift to modern civilization was rapid enough to present a toxic dump on our virgin biochemistry. Our cells were attacked, unprepared. After the evolution of a particular lifestyle for over two million years – actually seven million if you include our great ape ancestors – we switched to a high-carb diet only six minutes before midnight (or 10,000 years go). That’s the time you should be in bed.


In the same vein, refined sugar, which is the crack cocaine version of carbs, hit us in the last 0.36 seconds of our existence (the 20th century). That’s about the same time it takes to shove an adrenaline syringe into the heart of a comatose junkie, a’la Pulp Fiction.


No wonder we’re having problems adapting to her sweet, refined forms.
Our biochemistries weren’t expecting the invasion of processed carbs


In 1822, when Americans still consumed 6 lbs of sugar per year, a British army surgeon needed nearly two decades to pinpoint two diabetes cases in the Wild West. Today, 80 million have pre-diabetes and 29 million have type 2 diabetes in the U.S. Soon, up to half of the population is expected to have diabetes.


Sidney Mintz, professor of anthropology, estimates that the Brits were eating 4 lbs of sugar per person per year in 1704 and 90 lbs in 1901, a 22-fold increase over the colonial heydays. No one had the guts to tell Queen Elizabeth that her teeth had turned black in the late 16th century, or that her Majesty’s army had a hard time finding recruits without rotten dentures. Dental issues only appeared after sugar entered our diets. Pre-agricultural skeletons had perfect teeth.


Two missionary physicians who arrived in Kenya in the 1920s wrote that “hypertension and diabetes were absent… the native population was as thin as ancient Egyptians.” It took 40 years of British high-carb diets to convert the slim Kenyans into obese Africans with a host of health issues, starting with tooth decay and leading to “gout, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, and eventually encompassing all of them,” the missionaries observed.


India was similarly transformed into the “Diabetes Capital of the World” with British-introduced nutrition habits in half a century, after millennia of natural, healthy eating habits. Western diets literally wiped out the perfectly healthy Inuit, the Native Americans, the Zulus, the Natal Indians, Polynesian cultures, Yanomamo and Xingu Indians of Brazil, and whoever else was either forcibly or willingly acculturated to our lifestyle.
The problem of sugar boils down to a hormonal imbalance


The two hormones that manage our energy and metabolism, leptin and insulin, adapted over millions of years for us to survive in unpredictable environments.


Leptin tells us when to stop eating. The “satiety hormone” is stored all over our body inside our fat cells. As more fat accumulates, more “I’m full”-signals are received by the brain via the hypothalamus.


Insulin, aka the “energy storage” hormone, is produced by the pancreas. It tells our cells to convert the new energy into cellular fuel (ATP) or store it as fat for later use, effectively balancing our energy needs.


The normal process goes like this. Eating sugar releases insulin. Insulin makes cells convert sugar (glucose) into glycogen (ATP). Excess glucose is turned into triglycerides (fat) and distributed around the body. The extra fat increases leptin levels. Extra leptin, in turn, tells the brain that the body’s energy requirements have been satisfied.


This is a delicate, predictive hormonal cycle that helped our ancestors achieve an optimal weight-and-energy-burn balance. We could run fast, hunt, and avoid predators while also carrying adequate, but not excessive, energy reserves.


Civilization changed all that. A high and constant sugar intake desensitizes the leptin and insulin receptors in our tissues, cells, muscles and organs, causing us to remain hungry, even though our fat and energy reserves are plentiful .


Sugar desensitizing means that even though leptin and insulin levels rise, the receptors for these hormones don’t pay attention. They’ve been “fed up” with the constant bombardment of the respective hormones.


Imagine going into a college dorm room crammed with sweaty sports clothes. After a few minutes, you forget about the stink because your nose becomes desensitized to the stimuli. The same goes for the hormone receptors, except this time we’re dealing with a much bigger problem than smelly socks. In the hormonal world, the problem is known as leptin and insulin resistance.



”In a healthy fat cell, rising leptin levels cause leptin receptors to release triglycerides to use for energy. In leptin-resistant fat cells, the receptors are clogged with triglycerides, and no fat is being released for energy,” points out Richard Byron in The Leptin Diet.


Insulin resistance on muscle, fat and liver cells means that their ability to absorb glucose from the bloodstream is hindered. As a result, the pancreas goes on overdrive, trying to drive down blood sugar levels with even more insulin. The oversupply of insulin desensitizes the tissues, organs and cells to become even more insulin resistant, in a downward spiral. Over time this will likely evolve into pre-diabetes and finally type 2 diabetes. It’s the flush of intermittent insulin that is so destructive to the body, like the engine damage you would get from cranking high RPM on first gear.


According to Dr. Dimitris Tsoukalas, founder of Metabolomic Medicine, a medical branch that specializes in identifying and preventing blockades to energy metabolism, by the time diabetes has been diagnosed, “damage to coronary arteries has already occurred in 50 percent of patients… because of high levels of insulin.”


Note: Modern medicine advocates insulin shots for Type 2 diabetes, when the problem in fact has to do with excessive sugar intake rather than insufficient insulin production. Hence, the insulin damage is exacerbated further with insulin shots under the standard protocol.


The typical symptoms for a pre-diabetic or metabolic syndrome (high levels of insulin, triglycerides, excess weight, high blood pressure, inflammation) appear several years before the onset of diabetes and/or other chronic complications.


Fructose is the Darth Vader of carbs, in that it also features what Dr. Johnson termed the “Fat Switch” function, a powerful chemical trigger for storing fat. Most of the fructose is processed into fat in the liver, without entering the bloodstream. This is the reason why Glycemic Index (GI), the measure of how “harmful” different foods may be to diabetics, is misleading. Fructose hardly shows up in the GI since it hardly shows up in the bloodstream.


The more refined the carb, the more fructose, the faster our cells become desensitized, and the more fat is produced, distributed and stored in the body.


We weren’t designed to eat and get hungry every few hours. In fact, it’s not hunger. It’s withdrawal.


Fat doesn’t make us fat. Sugar and processed carbs do.
The alpha and the omega of civilization


Sugar lies at the root of our cumulative health problems. The direct and indirect health effects related to sugar consumption are hard to assess. Or, it’s more accurate to say that no one has really properly assessed the damage because our focus is on other “threats.”


Take, for example, the terrorism threat, which is responsible, on average, for one (1) American death per year since 9/11, the day three skyscrapers collapsed at free fall speeds for the first time in skyscraper history.


Or take drugs.
About 570,000 people die annually from drug use in the US
480,000 of those are tobacco related (indirectly related to sugar)
31,000 are due to alcohol (indirectly related to sugar)
23,000 are related to pain medication
22,000 are due to Schedule 1 drug abuse (heroin, cocaine and other “hard core” substances)


All disease is cumulative and multifactorial, which is why there is never a single culprit for any type of disease. If we lead a stressful life, drink too little water, too much soda, breathe polluted air, isolate ourselves from nature with a sedentary lifestyle, eat processed foods with scarce nutrients… we compound causality.


If we accept sugar as a multifactorial agent of disease, we also need to accept the sci-fi- type reality of its disease impact.


In this reality, sugar connects directly or indirectly to nearly 70 percent of all chronic, premature deaths worldwide (a.k.a. NCDs or Noncommunicable Diseases). That’s 30 million casualties globally. In America, NCDs account for 88 percent of all deaths, or nearly 3 million people per year.


Yet, sugar is a celebration of our culture and lifestyle. She is the pink Godzilla in the middle of our kitchen, whose existence we deny. We give her permission to pull us into a wet, premature grave, while on a permanent high.


Even if we manage to avoid sugar in its most conspicuous forms, other refined carbs boil down to the same biochemical effects on our bodies. Grains and wheat in particular. It’s important to remember that the USDA recommends grains as our dominant calorie source. Grains and sugar together are the Bonnie and Clyde of biochemistry.


Aside from the direct fatality rate, the crippling effect on life quality is hard to fathom. Once we live with a chronic disease, quality of life is compromised. Our performance is handicapped. What about our creativity, innovation, relationships, vitality and other joys that make life worth living? They become negative energy conducts. We seep energy away from all doors of our being, because of a single negative input.


Chronic disease is about becoming a slave to a malfunctioning body and mind. Ninety-five per cent of the global population was sick with a chronic issue in 2013, according to a Global Health Study.


The cumulative statistics from diseases like diabetes (today’s prevalence: 1 in 10), pre-diabetes (1 in 3), cancer (4 in 10), dementia (1 in 4), obesity (1 in 3) and overweight (2 in 3) spell out a slow-motion species collapse.


That is, if we decide to participate in the collapse.


With a bit of awareness and education, we can also choose to close the chapter on the most damaging drug in history, starting with the individual. A significant amount of biochemical damage can be reversed in a surprisingly short time with a clean, individualized, wholesome diet.


People who quit sugar feel the effect in weeks. They change their life in months. The ultimate reward is a long and vibrant existence, without a hint of disease.


Exactly as nature designed us.