had the good fortune to able to spend some time with my childhood hero
Timothy Leary, hanging out, conversing, and sucking down nitrous oxide,
before his very sad death last May. I wrote about some of those experiences
for a magazine, LIBERTY. That piece emphasized the political /
social /
technological
end of Leary's thought. [that interview here]
But we also talked about food. Frighteningly thin in the later stages
of his prostate cancer (There are many other terrible forms of cancer, one of the worst being Mesothelioma), I asked Tim if he were being kept on any diet regimen
by his doctors. He had some thoughts about diet, doctors, and food.
"I have prostate cancer that's metastasized, a painful cancer rupture
in my left hip. I'm having radiation, doing everything the cancer
doctors want," Tim told me. "I want to be a good patient. They
want me to follow a certain diet, but I'm not. Ray Walford, a scientist
at UCLA, a longevity scientist, all his studies show that the skinnier you
are, the longer you are going to live. But to the average doctor, they want
to fatten people up. That thought derives from a 19th century economy of
scarcity. The whole mentality of fattening people up for when the blizzard
came. Fat meant you were rich, it lets you live through a whole season of
starvation or drought."
In his later days, Tim's train of thought was easily derailed. I asked
again, after the above comments, whether he really just ate whatever the
hell he felt like. "Yup," he said. All he consumed in my presence
were some mushroom on toast hors d'oevres at the party at which I met him,
glasses of wine, nitrous oxide, and Benson & Hedges 120 cigarettes.
The Timothy Leary Web Site
Brian Doherty's Web Site