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The Whole Food Fallacy

• paxtonab 13y ago
  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.
• nornagon 13y ago
  Whole Food, not Whole Foods, lest one confuse this for the hip organic grocery store.
• xutopia 13y ago
  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.
• voyou 13y ago
  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.
  • molecule 13y ago
    It's a strawman: "objections are Vitalism, Vitalism is false, therefore Soylent is good."
  • steveklabnik 13y ago
    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.
  • codahale 13y ago
    Structurally, it's denying the antecedent: If Vitalism is true, Soylent is a bad idea. Vitalism is false, therefore Soylent is a good idea. Vitalism and Soylent can both be crap ideas.
  • mattstocum 13y ago
    That's a bit of a false dichotomy, the implication that one of either vitalism or Soylent must be true. Of course, I'd say you're committing a bit of a straw-man fallacy by claiming that the author stated that.
• jgillman 13y ago
  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!
• jere 13y ago
  >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.
  • scotty79 13y ago
    > 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 Who tried to make permanent, complete meal replacement and failed?
    • jere 13y ago
      I'd be pretty surprised if no one has created a complete meal replacement before, but really I was getting at how every blog post seems to be about how Soylent is not just convenient, but nutritionally superior to other diets. Perhaps Rhinehart doesn't feel that way, but it's the vibe I get.
  • jlas 13y ago
    As a fellow hacker who has spent a significant amount of time trying to understand how diet, exercise, and nutrition work - especially within my own body - I can confirm the Soylent campaign's "know it all" attitude is off-putting. But then again, it seems like these days being pretentious helps to sell.
    • diydsp 13y ago
      At least for those we can't or haven't been trained to see through it, cockiness does help sell. This article was posted here a few weeks ago. It widened my perspective considerably: "... 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_men.html 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.
• zdean 13y ago
  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
• stephengillie 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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?
      • mattzito 13y ago
        They mostly say they've solved the problem of how you and your friends will find each other at the concert, or how you're going to deal with the back breaking hassle of getting your mail, and these types of things. Not real problems, in other words. Soylent proposes to replace the need for the human consumption of food. That's an extra level of chutzpah
      • dasil003 13y ago
        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.
• mattzito 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    > 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 13y ago
      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.
      • 13y ago
• jonnathanson 13y ago
  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.
  • steveklabnik 13y ago
    Can you help me grok the differences between > 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."
    • 13y ago
• smtddr 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
• clamprecht 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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?
• ryanbrunner 13y ago
  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.
• enraged_camel 13y ago
  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.
• Judson 13y ago
  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
• jere 13y ago
  Tim's response: http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/9684046788/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/9684046788/