[lyudmil]

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]

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.