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Over the next nine years (1960—68) appeared the twenty-odd scientific papers reporting the plate-tectonics story: that plates are essentially rigid, and deform at their boundaries; that all plates include ocean crust, and generally a very large amount of it (the continents are passengers on the plates); that new seafloor moves away from a spreading center until it goes down into a trench to be consumed; that plates sliding past each other (as at San Francisco) do so in strike-slip sporadic jumps; that ocean crust colliding with continental crust can pry up something like the Andes; that continental crust hitting continental crust will build Himalayas, Urals, Appalachians, and Alps.
Assembling California
John McPhee
A suitably versatile definition that I like, borrowing from researcher Samuele Marcora, is that endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”5 That’s actually Marcora’s description of “effort” rather than endurance (a distinction we’ll explore further in Chapter 4), but it captures both the physical and mental aspects of endurance. What’s crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.
If sugar does cause insulin resistance, as the evidence suggests, then once populations begin to consume a sufficient amount—whatever that amount might be—and once the women in these populations begin to manifest metabolic syndrome, once they begin to get fatter and insulin-resistant, once this insulin resistance and glucose intolerance manifest themselves during pregnancy, then the epidemics of obesity and diabetes may be preordained. They may happen quickly, as they have in indigenous populations exposed over the course of a few decades to the sugar-rich environment of twentieth-century Western populations, or they may happen more slowly. But they will happen. And as the NIH researchers wrote in 1988 when discussing this problem in the Pima, there may be no going back. “It is unknown,” they wrote, “whether this cycle can be broken.” Treating diabetes and high blood sugar during pregnancy is obviously one way to do so, and physicians now work hard to do just that. Identifying the ultimate cause of the insulin resistance, though, even acknowledging the possibility that it could be sugar, would have far more profound consequences.
The Case Against Sugar
Gary Taubes
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