The Whole Food Fallacy
robrhinehart.com
robrhinehart.com
Someone gives free publicity to you and you compare their healthy skepticism to Vitalism. Seriously?
No one is upset that you're trying to make something new. No one. More power to you. But here is what pisses people off: The neverending strawmen. The constant jabs at other diets and other approaches. The smugness in every blog post. The assumption that you've mastered in a matter of months what you think others have failed at for years. And the certainty you'll have revolutionized the world in no more than a decade.
People don't like that kind of arrogance.
But then again, it seems like these days being pretentious helps to sell.
"... the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence." [1]
[1] http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/08/why_do_so_many_incompetent_m...
Also, IMO the elephant in the room of Soylent is that not all bodies, metabolic systems, are identical. We are a species in transition, not some kind of stable, predictable system. We experience a level of mutations between generations - which is how we stumbled onto larger frontal cortex and physical diversity. Yet, we perversely hallucinate that we are all identical and have identical needs.
Let name this "the typical body fallacy"
He's not trying to make this a highly optimized formula, he's trying to make it a widely used base platform with the minimal required pieces that work across platforms.
I think there is enough overlap between people we can find a common formula that will work for 90% of people on a 90% of meals basis (regular food already does this).
Yes, the current formula probably will not survive contact with the broader reality, but then he'll just make a v2.
When it comes to my body, my health and these subjects, I tend to err on the side of safety, instead on the side of something, that is "scientifically tested" like soylent.
I know, with our food industry nowadays it is, that we are the rats in the longtime testing lab.
But that is the reason, I changed my foodsources. And it is the reason I would never buy soylent.
The other reason is, that I really see more in food, then giving fuel to my body. It is an experience of cooking, of creating, of being creative, an experience of taste, of texture, a social experience and so much more.
So there you have the two reasons. The missing scientific rigor/testing. The arrogance, to believe, what he did is best for all and better then everything till now. And my personal take on food.
This is directly addressed in the article.
I am angry with Rhinehart because he has the balls to promote his product with not an iota of attention being paid to the scientific method or any type of rigor for that matter.
Can you point me to a food manufacturer that uses the scientific method to support their ridiculous claims?
Or have you not seen the fine-print on the vast majority of food packaging along the lines of "these claims have not been evaluated by the FDA"?
Your point is?
What I am telling you that, if that is the case, then you need to be angry at pretty much every food manufacturer ever. Because they also do not use scientific method or any type of rigor when they make claims about their products.
Furthermore, saying "They can get away with this because everyone else gets away with this" is kinda silly.
> We do not yet know what the ideal diet for a human is, but our present understanding permits us to easily design a diet that is far superior to what most people are eating.
If your bar for quality and benefits is the existing food industry then you've already massively failed. The existing food industry, especially in America is completely fucked. Of course you can trivially manufacture a healthier diet than what most people eat, because most people eat a lot of industrially processed foods engineered to fool your senses and get you addicted so that they can sell you more over-priced rehashed versions of the same subsidized farm grains at an obscenely profitable markup.
That's not evidence that we are anywhere near having a clue how to manufacture an ideal diet from raw chemicals. The fact that he keeps painting this picture that diet is just a list of chemicals and pays no attention to how the body metabolize is dangerously reductive. Animal metabolism is nowhere near as simple as the simple and isolated chemistry and physics on which he bases his reasoning. When anyone raises these issues he sticks his fingers in his ears hand-waves it away with accusations that people want him to fail for pseudo-religious emotional reasons.
Well, I for one don't want him to fail, the goal is noble and could be widely beneficial. However it will never be achieved by someone who is so willfully ignorant about the complexity of the problem he is facing.
I'm pretty sure thats part of it but I'm also pretty sure you'll find most "disruptive" teams have some domain experience in there somewhere.
I have not seen a solid explanation of how Soylent is distinct from Ensure. Rhinehart claims: "No MRP has been designed to be a sustainable source of nutrition", but this is not true. Ensure and medical liquid meal replacements can be used. He even admits as much (and contradicts himself) when he says further down "patients have lived for many years on synthetic diets in a medical setting"
Is he competing on cost? So far Soylent doesn't seem cheaper, and I don't see how his formula can compete on cost with a larger, more developed business with greater capital resources and infrastructure.
The taste of Soylent is described as "inoffensive", so I don't think he's competing on taste
So, unlike microbrewers, it's not clear how soylent goes up against products like Ensure. And I don't think the company has clearly laid out the advantages of Soylent vs. Ensure.
And since when did "that is already available" prevent anyone from having a go at it anyway?
The main things he wants to do to differentiate is to make it cheaper (ensure complete is $9.00, at walmart, for 1400 calories; his current goal is $5.00 per day, around 2400 kCal), scalable (recipe will be open sourced once complete), and environmentally sustainable (things that can be manufactured on a billions of servings scale).
The main things he wants to do to differentiate is to make it cheaper (ensure complete is $9.00, at walmart, for 1400 calories; his current goal is $5.00 per day, around 2400 kCal), scalable (recipe will be open sourced once complete), and environmentally sustainable (things that can be manufactured on a billions of servings scale).
Ensure has more sugar than I would personally want. It is designed to be palatable so old people in nursing homes will actually drink it. Soylent seem to lean toward better nutrition instead of palatability.
Who tried to make permanent, complete meal replacement and failed?
Perhaps Rhinehart doesn't feel that way, but it's the vibe I get.
We still don't directly understand how certain vitamins may interact with each other, how much the ratios of Omega-3s to Omega-6s affect overall health, whether there might be other chemicals that affect overall longevity and health, and so on.
I understand convenience, but why should we think we've "cracked the code" of the totality of nutrition?
I don't think Rob and is collaborators are making that claim at all. From the OP:
"We do not yet know what the ideal diet for a human is, but our present understanding permits us to easily design a diet that is far superior to what most people are eating."
He clearly states that they are making no claim to providing the ideal diet. They are simply on a mission to do something better than we have. I cannot predict the future so it's possible that he and his partners get rich and stop trying to improve the formula.
I would hope that instead they continue their research and further refine their formula over time and science finds out more about our bodies and their necessary nutrients.
"What if you never had to worry about food again?
For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous. Soylent will be personalized for different body types and customizable based on individual goals. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost."
That's very different than things like Ensure, where they talk about how it's an adjunct to regular eating.
They're making the claim that food can be entirely replaced by Soylent.
I don't see where, in this quote, that claim is made. The claim is made that you wouldn't have to _worry_ about food. That is, for the meals where the only concern is sustenance (i.e. the only meals you actually worry about), Soylent offers a "worry-free" approach. There's meals that you eat for culture, enjoyment, or something other than sustenance, but these don't involve worry.
As a vision statement, it seems fine. Google hasn't yet "organized the world's information", just a lot of it - occasionally we still need to resort to other means.
Perhaps they have stopped, but they certainly were making that claim when they were asking for money. This is what they once said on the crowdfunding site (emphasis mine):
>Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.
I was pretty upset at that claim. I think some of Tim Ferriss's statements are directed at those kinds of marketing claims specifically. Maybe they have backed off on that?
What follows from vitalism being false is that something like Soylent, that is, an entirely synthesized meal replacement, isn't metaphysically impossible. But I haven't seen anyone making metaphysical objections to Soylent; all the objections I've seen have been practical: nutrition is a much, much more complicated field than the makers of and advocates for Soylent seem prepared to accept.
We may have just read this differently.
> I havent seen anyone making metaphysical objections to Soylent
I think the title of the article, about 'whole foods,' is a mixture between metaphysics and the more common charge, epistemic.
If Vitalism is true, Soylent is a bad idea.
Vitalism is false,
therefore Soylent is a good idea.
- Vitamin supplements don't have nearly the efficacy as getting those vitamins from natural sources.
- Baby formula is universally accepted to be inferior in many ways to mother's milk, in ways that food science readily admits aren't completely known.
- Junk science like the lipid hypothesis are still regularly spouted, despite very little evidence that dietary fat has a direct correlation to bodily fat.
There's a world of difference between believing that food has some mystical power that transcends physics, and that we don't fully comprehend nutrition. Conflating the two isn't arguing in good faith.
Even the example of pet food is bunk - pets survive longer when domesticated because nearly all of the hazards they would face in the wild aren't present, not because their diet is better. There's plenty of evidence that pets benefit from raw meat diets far more than the carbohydrate-heavy diets that pet foods provide.
The more rational argument in favor of whole foods isn't that there's something fundamentally, irreducibly complex about them. It's that we don't yet know everything there is to know about how various nutrients work, and we're learning more all the time. While it's true that a chemical is a chemical is a chemical [1], we don't fully understand which chemicals are necessary, which are unnecessary, and which ones need which other ones to absorb or function properly. All we can say is that whole foods offer the whole package; what we can't yet say is that we've completely reverse-engineered that package. Someday we might, but today's science would beg to differ.
That's not Vitalism. Vitalism is something very different. It's a belief in some sort of "life force" that imbues the animal and vegetable kingdom, along with the implication that we'll never be able to recreate it. There are a lot of armchair Vitalists in the whole foods and organic foods movements. But dismissing the entire whole-foods hypothesis based on their beliefs is attacking a strawman.
[1] To an extent, of course. If we really want to go down this rabbit hole, we need to get into subjects like chirality, enantiomers, methyl groups, etc., and how the food industries tend to choose the cheapest version X if it's similar to Y, rather than choosing Y itself. Y may or may not have the same bioavailability as X, metabolize into the same byproducts, etc. For a good example, look into "Vitamin B12" in methylcobalamin form vs. cyanocobalamin form, as well as its other chemical cousins. All of these compounds can be labeled "Vitamin B12" in consumer products, even though they behave differently in the body.
> The more rational argument in favor of whole foods isn't that there's something fundamentally, irreducibly complex about them.
And
> It's a belief in some sort of "life force" that imbues the animal and vegetable kingdom, along with the implication that we'll never be able to recreate it.
? Is it that in the first, we have the possibility of knowing, but dont have the power yet? "Irreducably" suggests to me the same thing as "we'll never be able to recreate it."
I'm going to go back and italicize for emphasis.
Sometimes I find myself writing quickly and sloppily on HN -- especially when I want to post comment before running off to a meeting (or what have you).
When stuff like this happens, though, it reminds me to tighten up my writing. Speed is no excuse for sloppiness!
I applaud the Soylent creator for experimenting with his body and his life. I just hope that those who take this lifestyle leap, or any other, don't become too certain of their choice, because it turns out that biology is really, really hard.
All of that said, I am not a Vitalist. I am pretty sure biology is reducible, and that it can be reverse-engineered -- eventually. I just don't think we're sufficiently there yet.
In the meantime, I begrudge no one their choices, either way. And I applaud the Soylent team for its efforts. We should be doing more to reverse-engineer nature, so that we can get better at it. The best way to solve the problem is to keep trying and learning.
For example, in Rhinehart's blog post "How I Stopped Eating Food"[0], he writes:
My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my
teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone. My
resting heart rate is lower, I haven't felt the least bit
sickly, rare for me this time of year. I've had a common
skin condition called Keratosis Pilaris since birth. That
was gone by day 9. I used to run less than a mile at the
gym, now I can run 7. I have more energy than I know what to
do with. On day 4 I caught myself balancing on the curb and
jumping on and off the sidewalk when crossing the street like
I used to do when I was a kid. People gave me strange looks but
I just smiled back. Even my scars look better."
It is probably not fair for me to judge the entire project based on this blog post, but I have yet to see anyone claim that Soylent did the above for them, especially after 30 days.
FTA:Assuming this is actually true, I bet the reason for it is more complicated that "See! Synthetic is better! The End". What impact has mankind had on the natural habitat of the animal in question is the first thing that comes to mind. And it's debatable about living longer when the body is so old that it barely functions. Maybe the lifespan of animals in the wild are exactly "what they're meant to be" given the removal of mankind's interference. I question the assumption that science's "improvements" on mother-nature are always for the better. Unforeseen consequences and all that.
That being said, I still find this soylent thing to be interesting and I'd like to see how it all turns out. The same way I look at Bitcoin.
I have never tried Soylent myself, but I find the concept intriguing. I hope it takes off.
Personally I'm excited to get my month's supply of Soylent, because at the very least I know it won't kill me, and at the very best I'll have some more free time and extra pocket money to spend with good friends or a good book.
I wonder if it's possible to a/b test soylent versus a placebo. By definition, the placebo would have no actual food, so the person would starve. So, how can we test soylent, without the placebo effect?
1. Some people enjoy being righteously indignant. [0]
2. Some people see "food replacement" and are teleported to a fantasy movie-land where oranges & wheat are contraban and coffee is only marginally legal because it doesn't contain many calories. These people are using the same logic as those who protested gay marriage because they didn't want to be forced to divorce their heterosexual life partner.
I'm negative about Soylent because instead of the message being, "Hey look, we're trying to make mass market meal replacements that might help people eat healthier at a better price point", it's, "We're making food unnecessary"
That doesn't mean food will go away, of course, but it's a very smug, technocratic way to go about this process. "We have solved the problem" instead of "We're trying to figure this out".
Soylent proposes to replace the need for the human consumption of food. That's an extra level of chutzpah
If your product is making extraordinary claims then the template is actually very long form content with a lot of bold, italics, exclamation points and testimonials to wear down the reader's skepticism from a million different angles. But it still helps to be something that a lot of people so desperately want so their willingness to believe is already primed.
It's usually get-rick-quick schemes and workout programs.