I certainly don't want to rain on some new visionary's parade, but I spend a lot of time tracking folks who I consider to be the real visionaries in this field. As in we are currently in the midst of the greatest revolution in human health of our lives, and this guy is running in the wrong direction. We're seeing astonishing results with dietary remediation of a vast array of conditions that were previously considered unrelated. And this isn't just "remedial eating", it's discovering that our current ways of eating are killing us but that diet can likewise help heal us. It's a Khunian revolution out of "the pill and the scalpel" mindset and into a deeper understanding of root causes of wide classes of disease and general unhealthiness in 21st century society. I must certainly be writing in an aggressive posture, for which I'll apologize. I'll have to account my overenthusiasm to the long-term health and well-being of literally everyone I've ever met being at stake.
Current research is showing that we are only just beginning to gain understanding of the complexity and health of the GI. An analogy is that our GI and GI microbiota are essentially a recently discovered vital organ. One which the industrialized western diet (now well exported globally) has been systematically destroying. Diet has direct and immense impact on GI health, which in turn impacts such matters as: chronic systemic inflammation, autoimmunity, hyperinsulinism, neurotransmitter production (a vast amount of which happens .. in the gut!), hunger signalling, and more.
I don't have time to put the references in here that this deserves, but I'll leave you all with this to whet appetites, as it were.
Dr. Terry Wahls, "Minding Your Mitochondria":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc
Watch that, so my bluntness to follow makes sense. I see this guy's protocol as nothing but poisonous in the long run. He's off and created yet another processed food product that must be assumed to fail to meet the needs of the human body. Current research hammers home the idea that we don't yet have a complete and constructive model of nutrition, so why in the heck should I believe a nonspecialist that claims otherwise? 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 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.
You admitted it yourself:
>"Current research is showing that we are only just beginning to gain understanding of the complexity and health of the GI."
So no offense, but you have literally no ground to say that this is poisonous in the short OR long term, no evidence to back that up, and you cannot rely on a field that cannot support your view.
You have a view on this, congratulations, but it is nothing more than a well-informed opinion. It is not fact, it is not supported by fact and as you've admitted -- it CANNOT at this point be supported by fact that does not yet exist.
Even your link to a TEDX (aka, unvetted content) states upfront: "This talk is a personal narrative and is not yet backed by larger experimentation."
I'm sorry, but you've been consistently and narrow-mindedly against what the OP has put forth. You dismiss his views for their lack of credibility but turn around and post sources that themselves have no credibility (admit to being anecdotal).
You seem to have picked what is correct and are now looking for evidence to support your preconceived notion. You also seem to be falling for the naturalism fallacy by pretending that since his food is "pill and scalpel" it is therefore wrong/bad.
Just my conclusions: obviously he hasn't posted data or even analyzed it, but you present many issues in your posts that I disagree with more strongly than what he puts forth (and I'm not a layman).
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.
>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.
Isn't it possible that this is more indicative of the rise in an imbalanced diet? Processed foods may have lead the majority of people into having an imbalanced diet, but if they were instead eating a perfectly balanced diet of processed materials like this man is doing, isn't it possible there wouldn't be the whole diabetes, obesity, etc. health crisis?
To put it bluntly, is there actually evidence that a balanced processed diet is any worse than a balanced whole foods diet?
If not, I think professionals should attempt to recreate this type of experiment to find out, obviously safely on animals first. The whole principal of science is that you don't hold onto preconceived opinions when testing theories. Holding onto a "processed foods are bad, because look what's been happening" POV is very unscientific and harmful.
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.
What I'm wondering is is this any more risky than, let's say - eating at McDonalds instead of drinking this stuff?
"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.
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/
The shake may well not be an optimal awesome diet -- I'd bet it won't be -- but billions of humans survive on non-optimal, awesome diets. The idea that the incredibly varied, constantly evolving, often appalling diets of the whole world all fulfill whatever criteria are necessary for human survival, but that this shake doesn't is magical thinking.
Especially when you consider that -- thread title notwithstanding -- the guy eats a few regular meals a week. What are these magical micronutrients that we don't know about, that are present in sufficient quantities to sustain humans in all traditional diets, but which are needed in such quantities that shake guy isn't going to get them?
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!
> 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.
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.
She needs some reputation management, because at the moment there's a bunch of flags that make her sound less than reputable.
1) "Mitochondra" - unless this is a peer reviewed respected journal most people using htis word are cranks.
2) TEDx - Sadly, now tainted as home of cranks.
3) Cured MS through diet - ridiculous claim
etc etc.
Mitochondria raise flags because of people like the UK Dr Ruth Myhill. She claims to be a researcher on chronic fatigue syndrome. CFS is real, but sadly is an area rife with cranks. Myhill appears to have a lot of crank-like beliefs. Her "research" is hopeless, and amounts to unlicensed unethical experimentation on desperate people.
I guess, although I have no supporting evidence, that the word mitochondria is used more often by cranks than other organelles.
There are lots of drugs, for example, which are useless because although they target the right protein and have the desired effect they can't actually get to it via normal metabolism and the like.
It's the equivalent of saying you could cure cancer with diet.
In general when someone says "I cured this chronic, uncurable, disease through diet" I need to read what they say very carefully. At best it's an overblown claim and they actually mean "this food has a strong evidence base to help you manage your illness and reduce relapse". At worst it's evil people cynically cashing in by selling nonsense to desperate dying people.
In the sense that history is littered with people attempting to apply cross-domain knowledge to processing for health and failing utterly, that's absolutely true.
so stop.
