The skill diet

John Gorrie is a name we should all know, but I didn’t know about him until this week. He’s the inventor of mechanical refrigeration. My air conditioner, my refrigerator, and freezer owe their existence to Gorrie. He invented refrigeration to help treat yellow fever, and yet he was completely misguided because his invention was probably making the sickness worse for his patients.

The logic was sound. Yellow fever surges in hot environments. But that has more to do with mosquitoes than heat. The fever itself was seen as the problem, but as we now know, the fever is the body’s immune response.

That’s what happens when you focus on a parameter rather than understanding how the system works. The fever was something visible. You could measure it. But the real problem was a virus attacking the liver cells.

A similar thing happens with diets. We get focused on calories, or macros, or weight measured on a scale. But the real solutions are found by understanding why we feel hungry, how different nutrients affect our metabolism, or why fat cells immediately take on water to replace any fat they mobilize (they need to maintain their structure).

Gorrie invented a compressor mechanism that cooled the indoor air, but he didn’t really help his patients. In fact it might have worked against the body’s own natural response to the disease. Still, his invention did eventually help lessen the impact of yellow fever. Without refrigeration there would not be a mechanism to create and distribute vaccines. The history of science is a history of blunders.

The main lesson I take from this, besides how parameters are a low-leverage interventions, is that new capabilities are high-leverage interventions. Mechanical refrigeration should be placed on the same dais with the invention of fire. Fire creates heat. Gorrie created cold.

And that might be an idea to apply back to weight loss and management. Skills can restructure a complex system. New capabilities compound. Maybe the most effective diet book would be one that teaches skills like growing a garden, pickling and canning vegetables, learning to dance the salsa, to run a dinner party, or would teach how to talk to your doctor.

“Doc, I don’t think this is working for me.”