A Salon piece picks up on something I've been saying for a while: low-carbing is the geek diet. It's why conferences are now filled with nerds with jawlines.
Sure, if you eat fewer calories and exercise more you'll lose weight, but if, like so many dieters, you're unable to follow that advice, who cares if it's an airtight theory? "If that's science, then it's science that has yet to produce a lot of results because American asses grow rounder every day," says Doctorow. "If you ask people to reduce their caloric intake and increase their exercise, you won't get a lot of good results. It's like going around complaining that people have crappy passwords."
"The hacker ethic is not necessarily being a formally trained engineer, not necessarily being someone who understands the science. It's a reverse-engineering perspective: Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong, but it's based on empiricism," says Doctorow. "That's kind of the low-carb approach, which goes against the conventional wisdom about how you do nutrition and weight loss."
Scientific studies sanctioning the approach are just starting to appear, but there's a still a sense that one is tinkering with one's own body to somewhat unknown ends. "Maybe it will make us all grow third arms and go blind in 20 years," quips Doctorow. "It's sort of hard to tell. It represents a kind of hacker's approach, grounded as it is in jack-legged engineering rather than science."
