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• UCLA's Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior
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• Dr. Whybrow featured on The Road to Health

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Peter Whybrow on neuroscience
 

Tavis: Dr. Peter Whybrow is chairman of the UCLA department of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences here in L.A. His new book--Dr. Whybrow contends in the book that America's dangerous desire to have more of everything is literally making us sick. The book is called 'American Mania: When More Is Not Enough.' Dr. Whybrow, nice to have you on the program, sir.

Dr. Peter Whybrow: Thank you, sir.

Tavis: When you argue--a lot of good stuff in here, but when you argue that our desire to have more of everything is making us sick, you mean this literally, don't you?

Whybrow: I do. Yeah, yeah.

Tavis: Talk to me about what you think.

Whybrow: There are all sorts of ways in which that's happening. We're getting more anxious. Probably the most obvious, though, is we're getting fatter. And that's a big problem, especially for kids, because they are going to be ruining their own life span in that way. It could well be that they'll live shorter lives than we will.

Tavis: We were just talking before we came on camera here about a study from the New England Journal of Medicine that talks about, in very stark terms, what obesity is going to mean in terms of... Well, you take it from there.

Whybrow: Well, it's a major national epidemic now. 70% of males are overweight. Something like 30% are obese. That's not just sort of chubbiness, that's real obese. Women are in the same category. And so what's happening basically is that, as we move forward, we've got a whole group of young people who are essentially addicted to food, which is not good for them. And breaking that cycle is not gonna be easy.

The amount of choice we have in terms of foods is extraordinary, and many of those foods are very, very high calories. And we don't exercise like we used to. I used to walk to school. Many kids don't walk to school now either because they've got too many books to carry or it's too dangerous. So you put those two things together, the reduction in exercise and increase in calories, and you're in trouble.

We were designed to run for our supper, you know, and if you caught it you ate it. It's a very different life we live now. We human beings don't know how to deal with affluence, in terms of information, in terms of food, in terms of choice. This is the first time--America is the head of the curve. We don't really know how affluence influences us because we've never experienced it.

Tavis: But that is the epitome, though, of the American dream.

Whybrow: It is, it is.

Tavis: Affluence.

Whybrow: Yes, it is. I mean, there's a paradox there, obviously, that we have achieved what we wanted in terms of the material content of our lives, but it's probably turning out to be a toxic environment. And we're losing the interaction, the social interaction which enables us to really figure all that out.

Tavis: What does it mean, though, when--I'm just trying to grab ahold of this. What does it mean when, on the one hand we don't know how to handle affluence, and affluence... Essentially what you're arguing here is that affluence has a way of killing us, literally. On the other hand, we know that poverty and hunger and all the things that we really dread kill us as well.

Whybrow: Exactly.

Tavis: What does that say?

Whybrow: It's finding the 'balance in the mean,' as Shakespeare said. The fact is that it's undoubtedly true that poverty is bad for you. But it's also becoming true that affluence is bad for you, especially if you don't know how to manage it. So somewhere in the middle is the ideal.

For example, there's some evidence growing now that kids who grow up in families where the average income is over $150,000 a year do worse in terms of measuring in teenage years their suicidal ideation, the drugs they take, the ennui they have compared to kids growing up in families where the mean might be $50,000 a year. So, affluence-- You're quite right: poverty is-- We've got to get rid of poverty. But affluence is not good. And in this country we have the biggest spread, as you know, of income in the whole world. We have very poor people here. That's a scandal. And at the other end we don't know what to do with this extraordinary treadmill-driven life that we've developed.

Tavis: how much of this do you think was...predictable but missed? I mean, what you talked about in this book. How much of it, if any, was something that we could have predicted but weren't paying attention to the signs?

Whybrow: It is predictable. I mean, if you understand the way in which the human being is wired up, it's absolutely predictable. In fact we are desire-driven creatures. That's how we got out of our origins and became dominant throughout the world. We follow things. We're very curious, and we follow things that we like. And so we are easily addicted to all sorts of things. But when we were in frugal circumstances--when, you know, finding the fruit tree was a wonderful thing and we remembered it and went back to it, and we became ingenious about how to kill the mammoth by working together--all those interesting old things that we used to do together, we no longer have to do them. You can go down to the store and you can buy yourself 3,000 calories for $8.00, yes? I mean, you don't have to run for that particular supper. So we're ending up now with a set of circumstances where we're in a totally different environment. It's one where we have to be just as ingenious as we were when we were living under frugal circumstances.

Tavis: I did not ask you, as I thought to 30 seconds ago, who you blame for this, who we can legitimately cast aspersion on. And I'm not gonna ask you that because I suspect that there are any number of people. You don't have enough fingers to point at all the people, institutions, entities who could be blamed for this reality. That said, let me ask you this, though: What's driving this addiction that we have for consumerism and for wanting more of everything? What's driving that?

Whybrow: Well, I think it is the same addictive potential I was talking about earlier. But, you know, if you think about a market society, on the one hand, it's self-interest that drives wealth. But, on the other hand, in the original concept back when Adam Smith invented it, was the notion that the social context in which you lived--all the people around you, the people you loved, the people who loved you--that contained the greed. It educated you that, you know, doing the things that you're doing may be a short-term pleasure, but in the long term it's not good for you. And in a market society in which you live, if you did things that weren't good, you went out of business. So the fact is that we've lost that community base. And I think the thrust of the book, the thrust of my ideas behind the book is that we have to get back to a community base. That's why I love your program so much, because you're an advocate. You want something that we need to put together as a great nation. We can't do that if we are just busily chasing the next novelty.

Tavis: Thank you for the compliment. I appreciate that, the compliment. Let me ask you, though, 'cause you used a word a moment ago that just got me thinking in another different direction. You used the word 'greed.' Greed could be, at least as I'm perceiving at the moment, could be ostensibly, at least, antithetical to the notion of achievement. What I mean to suggest by that is maybe what started out as achievement has become overachievement but not necessarily greed. Maybe we don't know how to handle, to your point, the success that our achievement, that our efforts have brought us, but that's different, it seems to me, from the notion of greed. Does that make sense?

Whybrow: I agree with you. I think I use greed in a behavioral sense, not in a moral sense.

Tavis: Got it. OK, got it.

Whybrow: Because I think we are all prone to being greedy. I'm greedy about potato chips. I can't put them down if I open the bag, so I--

Tavis: We have that in common. But anyway, go ahead here. Can eat just one, but that's another issue. Go ahead.

Whybrow: That's right. So I think that that is, in fact, what winds human beings up. That's why we are so clever, that's why we have done so many things. That's why we built these extraordinary palaces in which we live. That's why we have TV studios. All these things are part of our ingenuity.

But the other thing that keeps us in track is our relationships with others--the ones that we love and so on and so forth. That is the constraint. Plus the fact that there used to be physical constraints. You couldn't work 24 hours a day when you had to get wherever you went by pony and carriage. In fact, now with the electronic world we live in, you could work 24 hours a day all day, every day, the whole year. And so what's happened is that that has thrown gasoline on this extraordinary energy that we have which, as you say, self-interest in the long run is very valuable to us. We need to preserve that. It's only if it's unbridled that it runs away to greed.

Tavis: Let me ask you in about 45 seconds, for people, in advance of reading 'American Mania,' in advance of reading it, what is the one thing you suggest that folk can do right now, simple thing, to start to arrest this development?

Whybrow: Focus upon the moment in which you're working, because, as you know, as we talk to each other we're focusing on what we are talking about. But if I were thinking about what I should have done 10 minutes ago or what I've got to do in an hour's time, you get distracted. So focusing upon the moment in question is the very beginning of setting your own priorities. And once you've set those priorities, then your life will begin to change because you'll be able to figure out what it is that you really want to do. And you can slow down. You don't have to be distracted.

Tavis: We gotta work harder compartmentalizing and focusing. Nice to have you on.

Whybrow: Thank you so much.

Tavis: Fascinating research found in this new book by Dr. Peter C. Whybrow. The book again, 'American Mania: When More Is Not Enough.' I highly recommend it. Doc, nice to have you on.

Whybrow: Thank you, sir.

Tavis: Up next on this program, Emmy-winning actress Alfre Woodard. She stars alongside Queen Latifah and a wonderful cast in a new comedy, 'Beauty Shop.' We'll talk to Alfre Woodard in just a moment. Stay with us.