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by affinehat
3228 days ago
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I disagree with your assertion that it is "extremely risky" to apply current nutrition knowledge. Since we don't understand the effects of the "traditional" diet, it's not clear whether it is helping or hurting us. Yes, we have empirical evidence, but as you said it is poorly controlled. So all we can know is that if we eat a "traditional" diet, we will probably live close to the average lifespan and have average health issues as has been observed for traditional diets. Additionally, there are a wide variety of traditional diets that cover very different foods. Since everything in the body interacts in complicated ways, we cannot even generalize specific foods as being "non-risky" to eat, since the empirical evidence we have only applies to the interactions of each food with the rest of the diet. So it's not clear what would actually constitute a definitive "traditional" diet; the best we could do would be to try and mimic a specific traditional diet as closely as possible, which still doesn't take into account the interactions caused by non-diet aspects of health like amount of exercise. There is value in that kind of stability, but by incorporating mainstream nutrition research into your diet you can trade increased risk for what is likely to be a better average result. I say likely to be better than average because, as incomplete as nutrition data is, some data is still better than no data. It doesn't make sense to ignore what we know in the moment just because it might be wrong later. As long as you research carefully and stick to the most well studied aspects of nutrition, risk is minimal. It's also worth pointing out that the normal person's diet today is already a large departure from traditional diets. So even if we assume a "traditional" diet is the goal, it does not follow that that Soylent would be better or worse than the normal person's diet today. It's likely that the human body is adaptable enough to handle whatever you eat. |
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I also happen to think that Soylent is definitely not a wise application of our current knowledge. The sophomoric notion that we already understand nutrition well enough to create a full fledged meal replacement with everything that the body requires is false, misleading, and highly irresponsible.
From their front page:
> Protein, carbohydrates, lipids, and micronutrients: each Soylent product contains a complete blend of everything the body needs to thrive.
The micronutrients claim in particular invites scrutiny -- we definitely don't know yet whether we've succeeded in identifying every micronutrient that the body needs for survival, much less to 'thrive'.
I mean, they actually sickened a whole bunch of people with some algae powder ingredient, not realizing it would be problematic ahead of time. If they can't design a food product that avoids acute illness, why should you have confidence that they have something that is safe and healthy to use long term?