13 ms·

>"Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof, or GTFO." >"I see this guy's protocol as nothing but poisonous in the long run." You place a burden of evidence o

• acgourley 14y ago
  The burden of evidence should be on the person claiming to have a miracle drink. The burdon of evidence should be even greater when it's a non-natural source, as Nassim Taleb argues in Antifragile, "The "non-natural" has to prove its harmlessness." If you don't take this viewpoint, you end up with cigarettes, transfat and radium jewelry.
  • Dylan16807 14y ago
    But he doesn't have a 'miracle drink'. He has a generic food mash and his only claim is 'contains basic nutrients and calories'.
    • droopyEyelids 14y ago
      It's a curious statement about our society where the idea that the fuel for the human body could be simple. "Basic nutrients and calories" It's all produced by self replicating lifeforms we've only begun to comprehend, right?
      • Kim_Bruning 14y ago
        Right, but those sophisticated replicators are so sophisticated that they tend to be rather tolerant of their input. There's no reason to think we can't science out what that input needs to be, or at least to be able to find one or more valid subsets of input. This is a rather large improvement over what most people do; one typically applies little to no science whatsoever. :-P
        • pyre 14y ago
          The liver is pretty tolerate of alcohol, but a lifetime of alcohol use can cause liver issues.
          • Kim_Bruning 14y ago
            Right; the downside of a tolerant system is that it does not fail hard. This does not, however, preclude finding the system limits by use of the scientific method. It just makes it a tad trickier at times. I'm getting the idea that people profess a "belief in science" in the general case, but then absolutely deny its applicability in the specific case here. ;-)
    • damoncali 14y ago
      He says it contains all the nutrients the body needs. That is a big claim.
      • vidarh 14y ago
        Given that he is asking for feedback from others who decide to try it, and on his blog warns that he is not sure how it might work for others, and is offering to provide samples to people who agree to have blood work done before and after trying it for a week, he seems acutely aware that while he thinks it contains all he needs, he does not yet have sufficient evidence to be sure. He's not written a scientific paper - don't assume that every single word he has written is meant to be interpreted in the strictest way possible. By all means be sceptical, but while he might very well be wrong, at least he appears to be earnestly looking to identify and correct any flaws which already puts him far above a lot of charlatans selling risky diets.
  • vidarh 14y ago
    He seems to be very conscious that this is in effect an experiment, that might be risky as well. E.g. from his site ( http://robrhinehart.com/ http://robrhinehart.com/): "I am reticent to provide exact brand names and instructions because I am not fully convinced of the diet's safety for a physiology different than mine. What if I missed something that's essential for someone of a different race or age group" But he is interested in actually gathering more data, even if not exactly formally enough for a proper study: "So…I'll just ship you some of my batch. If you are willing to consume exclusively soylent, and get a CBC, chem panel, and lipid blood test before and after the week and share your results with me it's on the house. Bonus points for getting a psych evaluation before and after. The brain is an organ. I can ship it worldwide but it would be nice if you were in San Francisco so we can meet in person." Further down on his blog, he has also posted PDF's of his bloodwork. While he certainly does not have sufficient evidence of general safety and effect, he is aware of that and seems to be actively interested in learning about any flaws in what he's done so far. > The burdon of evidence should be even greater when it's a non-natural source, as Nassim Taleb argues in Antifragile This, to me, is ridiculous. A vast range of dangerous poisons are readily avaiable in nature. I used to pick a lot of mushrooms, and can safely identify perhaps a dozen types common where I grew up. But every year there are people who die agonizing deaths from consuming various nasty toxins because they didn't pay close enough attention to what they picked. And the safety of most mushrooms is unknown - we simply don't have data, and the effects can take a long time to show. In some cases, popular mushrooms are known to be toxic, such as false morels that contains gyromitrin. They are seemingly safe after boiling. Except there is still gyromitrin in the mushroom, just in small enough quantities that you're ok as long as you don't ingest too much. It's typical to recommend no more than one meal per season, as the poison is stored. But many mushrooms contains compounds we don't know the effect of, and where it is perfectly possible that no effect would be noticeable for a very long time - properly cooked false morels for example, might have no effect on you for years, until you get a bit careless with the cooking (a common way for people to get poisoned by false morels is to stand over the pot while boiling it...) Nature has an abundant supply of horribly nasty toxic substances that might pass for food for a while. This is before getting into what "natural" even means. Everything has to prove its harmlessness. It's just that some things we have a lot of existing data for that at least demonstrates a certain level of safety. But in the absence of data, I'm no more going to be willing to chew on some random "natural" substance than I'd be willing to ingest some random synthetic substance.
  • theyare 14y ago
    What is not natural with cigarettes?
• acqq 14y ago
  Please read this to understand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5370816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5370816 If nobody has a right nutrition model today(1), including exeprts doing this whole life, somebody who just read a few books has no chance to cover everything that has to be covered long term. Or in other words, don't you think that military with practically infinite funds wouldn't already use his drink or equivalent for all extreme circumstances, if something like that were enough? (1) Because biology is darn complicated, like in "we still don't even know all the bacteria that live in our bodies." Not to mention organic chemistry 3-d effects like in http://folding.stanford.edu/ http://folding.stanford.edu/
  • criley 14y ago
    This is one of the weakest defenses I've seen yet. It's complicated so we shouldn't try is basically the excuse. In my opinion: the use of supplemented food like this will only improve our understanding and increase the speed at which those models are made. By approaching the problem from BOTH sides we can create the most full expression of what is needed and why. Still I dislike this excuse because: you run the risk of missing micronutrients every single day on a traditional diet, too. Your body doesn't care if you forgot a micronutrient due to carelessness or if it simply wasn't in the profile of the whole foods you ate. Missing is missing. Eating popcorn, soda and fast food for a week straight means you miss a lot of important nutrients. And yet you survive. Let the pioneers have fun and play and learn, that's what I say!
    • roc 14y ago
      > "It's complicated so we shouldn't try is basically the excuse." I think the actual criticism is more along the lines of "It's so complicated that it's incredibly unlikely this guy has been truly successful." > "Let the pioneers have fun and play and learn, that's what I say!" Which is all well and good when they're merely experimenting on themselves. But this guy has gone from tinkering to claiming success and safety and begun distribution. That's beyond tinkering and well into tampering. He should absolutely feel free to tinker and explore and even publish his recipes and personal data for anyone similarly-motivated to build upon. But there's a line between doing that and doing what he's begun, the way he's begun it.
• dasil003 14y ago
  > You place a burden of evidence on him that you yourself in this very post violated on a number of occasions. You CANNOT call his diet poisonous simply because you disagree with it. Nutrition science is in its infancy. It's clear that the complexity of the interaction of food as it is digested and interacting with our organism has barely had the surface scratched. Also, if you look at the rise of processed foods along with obesity, diabetes, and other health problems that have increased over the past century it's clear that there are some serious problems, and they haven't been explained conclusively by this or that macro-nutrient trend. So given the state of the evidence, a vague evolutionary assertion that whole foods are generally healthier than a distilled diet of completely isolated nutrients is not granola flag-waving woowoo nonsense, it's a perfectly reasonable belief based on imperfect evidence. Put another way, the idea the ability to construct a perfect diet given the knowledge we have is likely to fail due to the overwhelming number of unknown details that simply aren't an issue when you're eating whole foods. If this guy wants to experiment on himself than I'm happy to reap the benefits, but I do believe it's risky. Let's not whitewash common sense just because of "a lack of data". The fact that we have imperfect data does not make all approaches equal, and the fact that this guy is an engineer and wants to follow a scientific approach does automatically make his ideas superior to someone who holds certain nutritional beliefs for slightly more hand-wavy reasons.
  • A1kmm 14y ago
    It sounds like the drink is made from natural sources, so it probably contains compounds that he isn't aware of. The risk (and the value of the experimental results) would probably be higher if he had found a way to isolate the compounds in the drink so he could enumerate the exact chemical composition. If there is a risk, it is that his diet is potentially more homogenous than a typical diet, and doesn't include anything from some class of foods that nearly everyone on a more heterogeneous diet eats occasionally.
    • marknutter 14y ago
      But he said he does eat out occasionally.
  • 14y ago
• lyudmil 14y ago
  I'm not a person whose opinion on the subject matter should matter to anyone, so I'm not commenting because of a vested interest in this argument. I'm commenting because I think you're misapplying the principles of the scientific method, which makes your criticism unfair. > You place a burden of evidence on him... It isn't saidajigumi placing the burden of proof on him, it's the scientific method. Everything we know about nutrition tells us that we don't understand it enough to pull something like this off. It would be a breakthrough if it turned out we can, but the null hypothesis is that it won't work, so that's what our position should be. If our default position is that this doesn't work, and the guy is really relying on his mix for most of his sustenance, that means we think he's going to experience adverse health effects because of his diet. Perhaps we have no evidence to suggest they'll be adverse enough to qualify his diet as "poisonous", but the assumption isn't completely baseless, as you've asserted. Again, I have no idea who's right and who's wrong, but the two claims are certainly not equally likely.
  • orclev 14y ago
    The problem was in how the argument was stated. The post essentially claimed that his diet is dangerous until proven otherwise and therefore everyone should follow a "natural" diet of whole foods instead. It's a false dichotomy, even if his diet proves to be lacking or unhealthy in some way that does not make a "natural" diet automatically healthy. Furthermore he makes the mistake of assuming correlation is causation. I.E. he claims the recent rise of processed foods and the increased incidence of poor health are a cause and effect relationship when in fact no evidence to such a connection exists other than the very weak correlation between them. He then goes on to extrapolate from this false causation that what he perceives as the opposite of processed foods, I.E. whole foods, are therefore inherently healthy. The fact is whole foods are not special in any regard, being unprocessed does not magically confer health benefits on them. There are plenty of unprocessed substances, including various plants that are unhealthy or in many cases poisonous. What the man in the article is attempting is a vital first step in better understanding human nutritional requirements. By breaking down nutritional inputs to carefully controlled individual compounds and then monitoring the results we can gain a much better understanding of what the real nutritional requirements of the human body are.
• dpatrick86 14y ago
  As services like services like WellnessFX become more sophisticated (NOT affiliated) it will ultimately lead to people being better able to both self-experiment and provide evidence after an initial baseline to demonstrate what they're arguing. Exciting times ahead, I think.