Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

The article never actually established what made food healthy. Just because something is "natural" does not make it good (and conversely, something being "unnatural" does not make it bad). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

It made brief mention of a few chemicals the author claimed "processing" disrupted, but didn't really expand on that.

If the food has all the chemicals we need, what does it matter if it's "low quality" by the author's standard? If the food doesn't have all the chemicals we need and this isn't obvious, that's a failure of our nutrient tracking scheme.

View on HN

See the comment about broccoli. Today's science doesn't known the chemicals required in a healthy diet, missing some may lead to health problems like cancer. Indeed, this is one of the problems with products like Soylent as long-term risk (for example, cancer) remains poorly understood. You don't want to be eating the stuff for 10 years and realize you doubled your risk for cancer.

>"You dont want to be eating the stuff for 10 years and realize you doubled your risk for cancer."

I'm not following... How does that not apply to "natural" foods as well? Without resorting to an appeal to nature.

There is a difference between "appeal to nature" and the idea that there may be more compounds and nutrients in whole foods, perhaps acting in tandem, in ways that we haven't yet figured out.

I don't think this article is particularly well written or argued, but at the same time, I don't see any appeals to animism or mysticism in it. The author is simply suggesting, albeit not as clearly as he could have, that we have focused in isolation on only a subset of the nutrients we actually need. Obviously, the responsible "next step" to that sort of argument would be to form hypotheses and undertake further study. But that's not really the function of the article, as far as I'm aware.

Consider the broccoli example mentioned in the article:

"A 2011 study on broccoli, for example, found that giving subjects fresh broccoli florets led them to absorb and metabolize seven times more of the anticancer compounds known as glucosinolates, present in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, than when glucosinolates were given in straight capsule form. The researchers hypothesized that this might be because the whole broccoli contained other compounds that helped people’s bodies put the anticancer chemicals to use."

Now, the "appeal to nature" argument here would be that there is something fundamentally irreducible or non-replicable in broccoli that we just can't reproduce in a lab, because nature. That's not what the article says. Instead, it says that researchers hypothesized that there may be more components to broccoli than we've yet figured out. That's science. Science is always probing at the edges of what we haven't yet figured out, or revising what we think we have figured out.

The author does his point no favors by harping about synthetic vitamins. I'll grant you that. But he's not advancing any magical thinking.

You could just as easily hypothesize that there are components in broccoli that are unhealthy. The science isn't the hypothesis, it's the experimentation. Without experimental evidence you just have a guess, and in this case you can prefer the one "from nature" without evidence to suggest one or the other is correct. This is exactly the "appeal to nature" fallacy. You really need to compare cancer incidence in different populations to get a full idea.

> the "appeal to nature" argument here would be that there is something fundamentally irreducible or non-replicable in broccoli that we just can't reproduce in a lab, because nature

This is a huge strawman.

> This is exactly the "appeal to nature" fallacy.

The more dangerous "fallacy" is the idea that all food is equivalent until rigorously experimented and proven otherwise. This is the mentality that the food industry hangs its hat on to continue producing the worst possible products that still somehow meet FDA and public approval. It's dangerous because these foods are engineered primarily to appeal to convenience and taste sensibilities which give people an emotional connection to these substandard foods so that they will be more willing accept any evidence that said foods are acceptable.

The idea that eating whole foods which have traditionally been cultivated or gathered by humans is generally preferable to a manufactured alternative is not a bad or fallacious principle. It isn't "because nature", it's because we've been eating those things a long time with a good deal of success, and conversely, in the last 70-80 years of explosion of heavily processed convenience foods we've seen an explosion in diet related health problems. Waiting for conclusive scientific proof of the mechanisms of all these problems instead of using Occam's razor and some common sense is a phenomenally stupid thing to do.

> The more dangerous "fallacy" is the idea that all food is equivalent until rigorously experimented and proven otherwise.

OK, so even if we accept based on no evidence that it isn't, why should we prefer so-called 'natural' foods. And please tell me how GMOs such as corn (maize) and apples are natural, BTW.

> This is the mentality that the food industry hangs its hat on to continue producing the worst possible products that still somehow meet FDA and public approval.

Appeal to 'corporations are evil' is also a rather dangerous fallacy.

> The idea that eating whole foods which have traditionally been cultivated or gathered by humans is generally preferable to a manufactured alternative is not a bad or fallacious principle.

Without evidence it is. This bald assertion does your side no favors.

> It isn't "because nature", it's because we've been eating those things a long time with a good deal of success

Not really. Look at how common deficiency disorders were, back before such horrible modern artificial nonsense such as refrigeration and food preservation.

Besides, what my ancestors ate is not the same as what your ancestors ate, most likely, so which is better? Which diet should we follow? And my ancestors didn't all come from the same place, so which of my ancestors' diets should I follow?

Don't put words in my mouth. Where did I say corn and apples are healthy? Where did I say corporations are evil? Where did I split us into two groups, my side and your side?

You are arguing a stereotype rather than my actual statements.

>>The science isn't the hypothesis, it's the experimentation.

Its both! Without a model we don't know what an experiment is testing, indeed a pure experiment is unconvincing for example Ohm's eponymous law were ridiculed as a "web of naked fallacies", and only accepted after a model was proposed.

Or consider my theory that Canadian Geese take summer with them when they migrate south. My experiment shows that after they leave it gets really cold, but nobody believes my model!

>>in broccoli that are unhealthy

Quite possibly, what is your hypothesis?

It does. One of the differences is that our parents, grandparents and great grandparents have eaten "natural" foods as well so while they aren't completely undestood we often know a whole lot more about those risks.

(I guess I should mention, as far as I understand we now know that some of the natural ones increase cancer risk quite a bit, yes.)

> How does that not apply to "natural" foods as well? Without resorting to an appeal to nature.

Good point. You hit the nail on the head.

Just because those two things are poorly understood (and I think you massively underestimate how much we do know about both cancer and diet) doesn't mean that you should worry about solyent doubling your cancer risk. The same logic of having no good information to go on would have you simultaneously optimistic about it halving it. Missing knowledge doesn't define risk, it defines error bars.

> "Today's science doesn't known the chemicals required in a healthy diet"

This is quite ridiculous. We've mapped the nutrients required by our cells down to a molecular level. We've even got a thorough understanding of the interaction between the food we eat and how the microbial ecosystem in our digestive system breaks down our food as we digest it.

We have less understanding of the "natural" foods we eat. We've only mapped only a few genomes of the stable foods, let alone a complex break down of the exotic foods in the grocery store isle. The cocktail of organic molecules in the average fruit or vegetable is overwhelming, and many of them have been proved to be highly carcinogenic. Apples for example contain arsenic, amongst other poisonous chemicals. You get diarrhoea after eating too many fruits because of this. You also have pesticides, fertilisers, preservatives, and packaging contamination in 'natural' food.

I'm not against eating healthy, but the "we don't know if it causes cancer" banter is quite arrogant.

The concept of Soylent is great as it can be tailored for human requirements.

>> We've mapped the nutrients required by our cells down to a molecular level. We've even got a thorough understanding of the interaction between the food we eat and how the microbial ecosystem in our digestive system breaks down our food as we digest it.

This belief, in a nutshell, is the problem with nutrition. We have done no such thing, but we've convinced ourselves that we have. I have no doubt that we aren't even capable of understanding half the shit that goes on to turn food into energy.

At one point, society killed people who dared claim that the Earth revolved around the sun. We should never think, even for a second, that we have all the answers, and we should be immediately suspicious of any claim that we do.

> I have no doubt that we aren't even capable of understanding half the shit that goes on to turn food into energy.

Why? What physical property of the universe precludes us from understanding metabolism?

This is explicitly addressed:

"The problem with this approach to nutrition is not that there’s anything inherently wrong with synthetic vitamins — it’s the shortsighted nutritional philosophy that our obsession with vitamins encourages. Sure, our easy access to synthetic vitamins means that we’re no longer likely to die from acute vitamin deficiency diseases. But extra vitamins do not protect us from the long-term “diseases of civilization” that are currently ravaging our country, including obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes — many of which are strongly associated with diet."

There is no appeal to nature anywhere in this article, but a general concern that hubris with regards to our knowledge of nutrition is dangerous, especially given that we have obvious serious health problems going on that our approach has caused.

"The article never actually established what made food healthy"

"If the food has all the chemicals we need"

Well, this is complicated.

You won't die if you take all the needed vitamins and have the needed intake of macronutrients (proteins and fats, carbs are not "needed")

However, it's not healthy for the following reasons:

- Fibers. Not exactly needed, but healthy.

- Electrolytes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-electrolyte_imbalance (You can die from this)

- Other substances that have an effect even though they're not necessarily a nutrient, like the Broccoli one.

- Foreign substances coming from processed foods and that are not present in natural foods (or just synthetic ones, conservatives, colouring, etc)

> If the food has all the chemicals we need, what does it matter if it's "low quality" by the author's standard? If the food doesn't have all the chemicals we need and this isn't obvious, that's a failure of our nutrient tracking scheme.

Our 'nutrient tracking scheme' does not claim to be 100% complete, any more than any other science. I feel it's legitimate to discuss differences between 'naturally' healthy food, and food that is notably deficient being 'fortified' with our best guess as to what's missing.

The author is talking like a chemist or a chemical engineer WRT "low quality feedstock" "low quality source" and language like that.

Here's a typical journal article about Vit C stability while stored. Sealed, its actually pretty stable... assuming your seal is really good.

http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jac/papers/vol2-issue4/D024...

There is another way to talk about "low quality" which is WRT discourse. There's a widely held belief that there is a constant fixed long term demand for certain substances that is invariant between people with the possible exception of demographics (prenatal vitamins, and advertising campaigns relying on selling higher priced mens/womens products to men/women). Then that compounds with liberal arts grad types thinking vitamin / mineral / supplement / medication are mere synonyms that can be freely safely interchanged to sound good in written prose. Finally experimental data shows that regardless of what was sealed into the package at the factory or farm or factory farm, somewhere between a little bit and practically all of the vitamin decays before you eat it (also cooking destroys / leaches out nutrients, etc)

This all leads to the engineering comedy of your food having 3 sig figs of "percent of US RDA of vitamin C for an imaginary person eating an imaginary 200 calorie diet". When in reality its closer to 1 sig fig at best and all we really know for sure is completely removing it from your diet for a couple months or eating months of the supply at one sitting will make you really sick. Oh and another thing we know for certain, is a lot of people make a lot of money by making sure the public is poorly informed and anxious about the topic, but that's also a given in all the other areas of the consumer economy.

The article mentions that it's not just a matter of having 20 grams of X, and 100% of our daily requirement of Y - a lot of these things seem to work together in concert, as catalysts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com