
The Whole Food Fallacy - caublestone
http://robrhinehart.com/?p=874
======
jere
>I do not understand the negativity surrounding Soylent.

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.

~~~
mattstocum
I don't get what his goal is. As best as I can tell, Ensure is the product
he's trying to create, and it's been on the market for years.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Well... that logic would have told all the "micro brewers" of recent years to
just pack it up because Bud Light is already at the store.

~~~
jljljl
Microbrewers compete on taste, or on producing varieties of beer that are not
reduced-calorie pilsners.

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.

~~~
solarmist
Rhinehart means sustainable from an environmental perspective in this
argument.

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).

------
mattzito
The thing that bothers me about Soylent is the arrogance that the incredibly
complex interplay of how the food we eat interacts with our body can be
distilled down to a simple formula - X g protein/kg bodyweight, etc.

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?

~~~
JRobertson
> 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.

~~~
mattzito
I understand, but from the soylent webpage:

"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.

~~~
lgbr
> 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.

------
zdean
Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" is an excellent, well thought out
counter-argument to this position:

[http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-
food/](http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/books/03masl.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/books/03masl.html)

------
voyou
There should be a name for the fallacy of drawing a specific, practical
conclusion from an abstract or metaphysical premise. "Vitalism is false,
therefore Soylent is a good idea" is such a fallacious argument. Clearly, the
premise doesn't follow from the conclusion at all.

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.

~~~
steveklabnik
I read it more as "vitalism is false, therefore, assertions against Soylent
via vitalism are false," which seems good. I didn't read it as "therefore
Soylent is good" but rather as "therefore this criticism of Soylent is
invalid."

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.

------
ryanbrunner
The entire food science industry is a long, sordid history of hubris in
thinking that science has solved every aspect of human nutrition.

\- 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.

------
jonnathanson
I'll grant you that there _appears_ to be a thin line between mystical
thinking and genuine curiosity when it comes to the whole-foods movement. But
we do a disservice when we conflate the two.

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.

~~~
lukifer
I see the desire for whole foods as simple gastronomic conservatism: for
better or worse, our species has done very well on foods like fish and leafy
greens for millions of years. Given the clear consequences of poor diet, I
make the choice to play it safe. Doesn't mean there needs to be any antagonism
towards those who make a different choice.

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.

~~~
jonnathanson
Agreed. Until I'm more confident that we've successfully learned all we need
to learn, and reverse-engineered all we need to reverse-engineer -- and
figured out which corners we can cut, and which we can't -- I'll take the
whole foods wager when/if I can afford to.

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.

------
Judson
I have been through quite an up and down cycle regarding my attitude towards
Soylent. Upon first hearing about it, I was pretty excited about the idea. But
the more Rob talked, the more I thought the idea was a total hoax.

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."
    

I think the only ailment he forgot to mention was his inoperable cancer that
had disappeared by day 10 (sarcasm). On a serious note, after I read this, I
realized that Rob was going into full marketing mode. He had talked about
releasing the recipe for Soylent in on of his first posts, but I realized now
that he wanted to build as much hype as possible so he could commercialize his
idea. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with that, but I now felt a degree of
skepticism towards the whole thing, because his incentive structure was
changing. For goodness sakes, he's claiming that his endurance increased 7x
simply by switching to Soylent.

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.

[0]: [http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298](http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298)

------
nornagon
Whole _Food_ , not Whole Foods, lest one confuse this for the hip organic
grocery store.

------
smtddr

      FTA:

_> Pets live on synthetic diets and are much healthier and long-lived than
their wild counterparts._

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.

~~~
bitwize
Pets live on synthetic diets with humans who baby them and fuss over them and
protect them from the elements and predators and take them to the vet when
they get sick or injured. Their cousins in the wild don't have those luxuries.

------
xutopia
I love cooking (it's beyond a normal passion for me) and I love eating
wholesome foods every chance I get. I actually spend more money and time to
eat a properly balanced diet. When I'm lazy or lack time to cook properly I'd
love to have some alternative that I know would not hurt me in any way. Right
now it's pizza or some other god awful take out. Soylent is not what I want to
eat every day but I could definitely see it as useful at times.

------
jgillman
I wholly agree with what you're saying. It seems too many people think of
Soylet as a "total food replacement" which is pretty extreme. Your "taking a
road trip versus driving to work" comparison is right on!

------
enraged_camel
I fully sympathize with Rob's frustration. Conventional wisdom can take an
incredibly long amount of time to dislodge, especially when it is mixed with
tradition. A big part of our culture revolves around food, its preparation and
consumption. So naturally there is going to be a lot of resistance to the
claim that we don't actually need it, and can instead consume this gooey
substance that is even better.

I have never tried Soylent myself, but I find the concept intriguing. I hope
it takes off.

------
paxtonab
Viewing Soylent as a replacement for every single meal would be scary and
potentially dangerous. However, I think it would be difficult to compare the
nutritional value of a meal comprised of McDonalds and Coke to a meal of
Soylent and to find the Soylent wanting or not superior in every way.

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.

------
jere
Tim's response:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/9684046788/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/9684046788/)

------
clamprecht
He says "My thoughts are clearer, my body leaner", presumbably after eating
soylent.

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?

~~~
xvedejas
Maybe you could take what the person would normally eat — hamburgers, pasta,
beans, whatever — and blend them until they create a soylent-like consistency.
I can't imagine it would taste that much like soylent, but then again, how
would they know?

------
stephengillie
I can only explain the negativity surrounding Soylent with 2 causes:

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.

[0] [http://xkcd.com/546/](http://xkcd.com/546/)

~~~
mattzito
I posted elsewhere - I'm neither indignant, nor concerned that food will be
replaced by soylent.

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".

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Well... don't most start-up launch pages that make it to the HN front page
have the same "We have solved the problem" attitude? Isn't that how you sell
yourself?

~~~
dasil003
Most newly announced startups solve tiny problems.

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.

