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> 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.

>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.

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.

This guy lost 27lbs on a balanced diet of nothing but junk food snack cakes, cookies, and Doritos.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

Ahem:

> Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

And of course, "he lost weight" doesn't unequivocally mean "he got healthier".

I don't think you can't really establish a correlation between animal and human diet, and how a specific "balanced" diet might affect them. The difference in diet and life span are two important factors that might affect any study.

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.

But he said he does eat out occasionally.

> If this guy wants to experiment on himself than I'm happy to reap the benefits, but I do believe it's risky.

What I'm wondering is is this any more risky than, let's say - eating at McDonalds instead of drinking this stuff?

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.

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/):

"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.

I really must defer to Taleb on this, I'll simply say he means natural in a more specific way than "all substances that exist in nature," and something more like, "the culture and patterns mankind has successfully practiced in relationship to nature for thousands of years with proven success."

That doesn't sound specific at all to me, but rather extremely vague and open to whatever interpretations might suit... What "culture and patterns" have we "successfully practised" "in relationship to nature for thousands of years"?

Diets vary crazily much, even within small geographical areas. Things like lactose intolerance is something we only "recently" started seeing on the wane, and it is wildly dependent on your heritage. I'm Scandiavian, and growing up I didn't even know there were people who had problems with dairy, as it was a total non-issue. I used to drink about a litre a day of milk on average growing up.... It was first as an adult I realised there are large parts of the world where people pretty much don't drink milk.

At the same time, I also consumed vast quantities of Scandinavian salted licquorice candy. Except most of if is ammonium chloride based. I doubt that would fit very well into the idea of something "natural", but it is an integral part of Scandinavian culture.

As is fish dissolved in caustic soda an integral part of Norwegian culture, and something we have "successfully practiced" for a very long time.

And processing such as hanging/drying, burying (until half rotted in some cases) and salting various types of food have been an essential part of human culture for a very long time.

And, yes, picking mushrooms and facing the risk of poison have been integral to our culture for a very long time as well, even though many of the most poisonous mushrooms keep claiming deaths up to this day.

Many of the traditional "natural" foods I grew up with are significantly less healthy than a modern heavily processed microwave meal, or the protein powder I use to supplement for my weight lifting.

This might be a different tack, but what if you take Mr. Taleb's "nature" to be human nature [1]? People don't tend to eat poison mushrooms as a rule.

In that case, his rule would be a good one. If you drift in to a new area of human endevour, the people who follow you out there are taking a risk until the area is well-traveled

[1] In the Aristotelian sense: human nature is the proportionate sum of all human activity. We mostly eat, drink, sleep, walk, talk, etc. so that makes up the bulk of our nature. Cannibalism and incest are acted out much, much less often, so that is a much, much smaller part of our nature, though it is tucked in there.

You define nature as activities that people perform most? By that reasoning the culture with the largest population is representative of typical human nature. That just seems wrong.

There are almost 2 billion Chinese. They love to eat chicken paws and cow intestines. So that is human's natural diet?

Chicken feet and cow intestines taste great. I'm not Chinese. My favorite dish when visiting Beijing a few years back was spicy duck intestines. Looked like noodles.

Yep, I'm saying if you generalize about all of us, that's how you'd do it.

Your point is dead on: if you make a generalization that broad, you lose a lot of information.

Not sure what makes chicken breast better than paws and cow rump better than intestines. All are animal parts.

But he doesn't have a 'miracle drink'. He has a generic food mash and his only claim is 'contains basic nutrients and calories'.

He says it contains all the nutrients the body needs. That is a big claim.

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.

No, he says it has all of the ones we know about. He emphasizes the fact that there stands to be a lot of learning to do and bugs to work out.

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?

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

The liver is pretty tolerate of alcohol, but a lifetime of alcohol use can cause liver issues.

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. ;-)

What is not natural with cigarettes?

Please read this to understand: 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/

If human GI systems are so fragile that this shake could conceivably be considered "poisonous," how come people aren't dropping dead all over the world from such "poisons"?

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?

I have to agree.. there are people that go for years on Mountain Dew and Top Ramen... I don't think the shake is any worse.. and probably could be as cost effective, and far better.

I, personally love food way too much for this to work for me... I've been working on my diet, and getting to a point where some of my Metabolic Syndrom issues are now getting better (can feel my feet again)... most of that has been from a pretty high fiber, low carb intake. Almost no processed sugars or rich starches (bread/pasta/rice/potatoes). I do have a savory crepe a couple times a week (essentially a low-carb sandwich wrap. I also eat lots of greens, and have been eating 2-3 pieces of fruit a day. It's hard enough not binging out on pasta, let alone only eating a couple times a week.

> but billions of humans survive on non-optimal, awesome diets

Billions of people get sick because they don't have a diet varied enogh. Specific, well studied examples abound.

Sure. Specific, well-studied examples abound. You can get scurvy, or gout, or type II diabetes, or other problems from your diet. But "billions" of people don't get scurvy or gout.

If you want to use some kind of idiosyncratic definition of "sick" that pronounces somewhere between a substantial minority and a majority of the world as "sick" at any given time, I guess I can't stop you. But as a practical matter, we're comparing shake-guy's food to the other foods that people actually eat, not to whatever your idea of the best diet in the world is.

Historically speaking, I don't think that man ate too much of a variety over the course of a given day, maybe weeks... And the guy mentions he does eat a couple times a week. I couldn't do it... but without high yield GM crops, we couldn't even feed 1/2 of the world's population, anything that stretches that isn't a bad thing...

I don't see why this has to be perfect. I know a lot of people who live off of potato chips, cookies, and soda. Surely this diet would be better than that.

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!

> "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.

Or even "It's so complicated that it's certain this guy fails." We know for sure that he can't include all the stuff that we know that exists but for which we absolutely don't know how we can avoid eating the real things.

Well, that's what science is for. If something is complicated and we don't understand it, we need to develop hypotheses and experiment. Over time our understanding grows.

What we don't do is go all "hurr durr it's too complicated, let's not even try".

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.

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.

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.