Alan Levinovitz

And so in this context...

What I saw so clearly was that a kind of metaphysics was making it hard for people to talk about these issues.

So words like real get thrown around all the time.

Many of the accusations that you'll see about my piece, which if you read the piece, of course, it's like a lot of people I talk to are like, wait, I don't think they're reading the piece.

But people say, he's saying long COVID's not real.

This is very interesting.

It's sort of like when people say, this food isn't real.

You need to eat real food.

So a lot of what I'm seeing coming out of this world of philosophy and religion and metaphysics is that behind what look like scientific arguments and really impassioned defenses of, in this case, a sort of etiology of long COVID, but in my other work, dietary interventions or certain kinds of medical treatments, what's operative in the background

is a metaphysics that people feel very strongly about and need to be able to defend using whatever the most powerful rhetoric is of the day, which right now is science and quantifiable research.

Really simply, as I was working on dietary stuff for the book before that, looking at non-celiac gluten sensitivity, just looking at people's dietary patterns in general, also looking at pseudoscience.

So I would run into people trying to heal their cancer with dietary interventions, that sort of thing, and then dying if they also abandoned chemo and surgery.

What I saw was the word natural came up all the time.

People say, what you should do is eat naturally.

And that was

used though always to defend whatever it was that they wanted to eat.

So vegetarians would often say that's the natural diet of humans.

And this goes back historically for centuries.

And I started to realize that what natural was, was a stand-in, a kind of scientific sounding or secular non-religious stand-in for holy or pure.

And what nature was, was a scientific or secular stand-in for an all-powerful organizing force that's on our side.