I’ve been watching for several years now (I adopted the diet myself in 2010), and all of the negative critiques tend to fall into (a) critiques from non-experts, (b) critiques from experts in unrelated fields, (c) health experts who agree that his recommendations have merit, but that they’re impractical for the general public to follow.
I produce for you a book written by a relevant expert with ~2.5 times as many references as The China Study (2034 vs 758) who advocates eating an ancestral diet (lean unprocessed meat/fish, fruit, nuts, vegetables/root vegatables) (1). A list of individuals with relevant graduate degrees who more-or-less agree with him can be found in this list of speakers at a paleo conference he spoke at. His recommendations are at least as similar to the recommendations the Mayo clinic returned for me as Campbell’s.
That is, I can make a symmetrical argument for a significantly different diet (2), complete with experts and evidence and stuff.
So, to address your questions directly: you should believe that nutrition is a young and complex field, and therefore shouldn’t have everything all figured out; my take is that you may do well to replace grains with root vegetables, since that’s something everyone agrees is good (plus they’re really tasty!); this isn’t good enough to inform your dietary choices because I just used a symmetrical argument for a diet that has nonnegligible discrepancies with the diet Campbell recommends; and I don’t know how to dig out a signal that experts, to my knowledge, haven’t managed to dig out without becoming an expert.
(FWIW, I spent about 5 years as a vegetarian, followed by 1.5 years doing the paleo thing, and now subsist entirely off DIY soylent, which combines the virtues of deriving all its protein from animal sources and being processed.)
(1) Interestingly, Campbell’s and Lindeberg’s diets can be eaten simultaneously, and this intersection is 100% in-line with what the Mayo clinic recommended me. The difference is that Campbell allows grains and beans, and Lindeberg allows (unprocessed) lean meats, fish, and eggs.
(2) Again, there’s substantial overlap, but also substantial disagreement: Lindeberg, for instance, observe the Inuit derive something like 98% of their calories from animal sources and are virtually untouched by Western disease, and concludes that very high consumption of (unprocessed) animals is perfectly fine, whereas Campbell claims that humans should eat minimal amounts of animal.
the Inuit derive something like 98% of their calories from animal sources and are virtually untouched by Western disease, and concludes that very high consumption of (unprocessed) animals is perfectly fine
Just how genetically isolated are the Inuit?
I am thinking of things like the evolution of adult lactose tolerance, and wondering if what’s good for the Inuit might be different from what’s good for the rest of us. I’d expect the ability to consume large amounts of meat without ill effects would be pretty powerfully selected for, in an environment where nearly all calories come from meat.
The selective pressure on being able to digest lactose as an adult is stronger than the selective pressure to not develop heart disease from eating too much meat, since the former kills you before you can reproduce. Lindeberg claims that humans have sufficiently recent common ancestry that, in absence of the kill-you-before-you-reach-childbearing-age selective pressures, we’re able to generalize from group-to-group fairly well. Non-Inuit probably do worse than Inuit on Inuit diets, and bool is_Inuit is a useful input in a program to produce an optimal soylent blend for someone, but the selective pressure isn’t strong enough for the Inuit to be mostly devoid of heart disease [1] simply because it was selected for.
Also, many other hunter-gatherers from all over eat large amounts of meat (though as much as the Inuit) and are just as devoid of Western disease as are the Kitavans, who consume relatively little, which supports the hypothesis that Inuit aren’t mostly devoid of heart disease because they’re genetically unusual.
[1] IIRC Inuit do suffer from slightly more Western disease than Kitavans (most calories from plants), but not by a very impressive margin.
And also, where the Inuit live it’s frigging cold, and maybe a protein-rich diet like theirs is only healthy in cold weather (and a protein-poor diet like pre-WW2 Okinawans’ is only healthy in warm weather) for some reason or another. (Anecdotally I tend to eat much less meat during the summer, which may or may not have something to do with that.)
(FWIW, I spent about 5 years as a vegetarian, followed by 1.5 years doing the paleo thing, and now subsist entirely off DIY soylent, which combines the virtues of deriving all its protein from animal sources and being processed.)
What I find alarming about soylent-like diets is the idea that you can completely capture human nutritional needs as a table of micronutrients quantities to fill, and then go out and source those individual micronutrients, combine them, and drink.
Aren’t you discounting the importance of the configuration of these micronutrients as they arrive in their natural packages? That is, you can certainly decompose an apple into fructose, fiber, vitamins, minerals and water (and etc), but I find it hard to accept that shopping for these individual components, blending, and pouring down your throat is just as good (or better) than eating the apple. Surely we do not completely understand everything nature has done in building us this apple.
This discussion has already happened at great length here.
To summarize my stance: there’s risks, but considering that everyone I’ve read on discourse.soylent.me has had positive results across the board, from body composition to semen taste. I get noticeably improved mental clarity (along with getting so lean I’d be scared I was undereating if I didn’t know precisely how many calories I was eating and clearer skin), which makes me willing to accept those risks. Also, because soylent might be safe and come with a load of benefits, there’s data-generating value in taking individual components, blending, and pouring them down my throat to see if anything bad happens. (Julia Galef on tradition as it pertains to social systems, that happens to be applicable here.)
But I’m not very worried; I have trouble imagining a food that has positive effects of “improve body comp, improve mental clarity, clear skin, make semen taste good” and no known negative effects and is biochemically plausible to actually be bad in the long term. Certainly not impossible, but not very probable, I think.
Makes sense, thanks for the link and your summary.
I’ve taken a keen interest in soylent but am happy to let others beta test long-term effects for me before I give it a shot :)
FWIW, the way soylent people describe their results is more or less how I describe what happened to me when I adopted a whole food plant-based diet (the “china study diet”): BF% dropped/I got leaner, various body odors improved, huge reduction in acne, became a morning person, was able to stop taking ADHD meds, and felt no negative effects at all. Except for maybe I now have so much energy I just had to pick up distance running and ultimately hurt my ankle. :P
I’m specifically trying to avoid weighing the actual science or studies myself, because I don’t think nutrition is linear enough for me to just dive in and read contradictory studies and start making informed decisions about my diet. So, all I’m really electing to do here is try to valuate experts. In that vein...
I produce for you a book written by a relevant expert
According to Wikipedia the author of that book, Staffan Lindeberg, is “M.D., Ph.D., (born 1950) is Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Department of Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden. He is a practicing GP at St Lars Primary Health Care Center, Lund, Sweden.”
I agree he’s a health expert. I even agree he’s more qualified to judge nutrition science than me. But shouldn’t a nutrition scientist like Campbell be even more qualified to evaluate nutrition literature than a professor of Family Medicine?
He may be right, and Campbell completely wrong but I don’t see a good way to figure this out for myself unless, say, someone can make an extremely good case that Campbell is either a rogue in nutrition science, or that nutrition science shouldn’t be trusted. Getting to your next point...
So, to address your questions directly: you should believe that nutrition is a young and complex field, and therefore shouldn’t have everything all figured out
Why wouldn’t nutrition scientists studying nutrition come to a similar conclusion about how young, murky, and complicated nutrition is? Shouldn’t they on average know this better than anyone and only make very careful and strongly supported recommendations?
If you can’t trust nutrition scientists to judge the literature properly, why should you trust scientists outside of the field or layman attempting to dive into the field would be better?
Why wouldn’t nutrition scientists studying nutrition come to a similar conclusion about how young, murky, and complicated nutrition is? Shouldn’t they on average know this better than anyone and only make very careful and strongly supported recommendations?
They have very strong incentives (ie earning money and building a career and having patients) to pretend to be certain. People don’t want to pay for honest but vague guesses.
If you can’t trust nutrition scientists to judge the literature properly, why should you trust scientists outside of the field or layman attempting to dive into the field would be better?
You shouldn’t really trust scientists outside the field to talk about the entire field of nutrition but insofar as experts in older and more reliable fields like chemistry or biology disagree with specific nutritional claims you should probably agree with the actual scientists.
They have very strong incentives (ie earning money and building a career and having patients) to pretend to be certain. People don’t want to pay for honest but vague guesses.
I would expect consensus (or the lack thereof) is an important signaler for exposing this kind of bias?
Maybe? It’s a lot safer to be certain if you’re saying the same thing as the consensus. Then at worst you can say you had the same opinion as a lot of other providers.
Lindeberg is a nutrition researcher (conducts studies, co-authors papers) coming from a medical background, which makes him just as much an expert as a nutrition researcher coming from a biochemistry background.
Why wouldn’t nutrition scientists studying nutrition come to a similar conclusion about how young, murky, and complicated nutrition is and only make very conservative, very strongly supported recommendations?
We can measure how much a field has progressed by its predictive power, and nutrition is already making concrete predictions with high confidence. Not a lot, not with the confidence of, say, Newtonian mechanics but, given how very much literature there is and how very complicated things are, the level of consensus across researchers who are coming at the problem from disparate-but-legitimate approaches (e.g. biochemical, evolutionary) is sufficiently impressive that I do trust them to judge the literature properly. Humans are biased, so it’s unsurprising that we don’t yet have a consensus as broad as, say, existence of the golgi apparatus, but the world looks exactly as we’d expect it if nutrition scientists were doing good work in a complicated field.
To summarize: Lindeberg, like Campbell, is an experienced nutrition researcher with impressive and relevant credentials. Nutrition is a young and complex field, so there’s no broad consensus about everything—although there is broad consensus about some things—but nutrition scientists are doing a decent enough job of figuring things out that I trust them to judge the literature properly.
Lindeberg is a nutrition researcher (conducts studies, co-authors papers) coming from a medical background, which makes him just as much an expert as a nutrition researcher coming from a biochemistry background
Am I asking for too much by insisting on a nutrition researcher from a biochemistry background to refute Campbell? Or are you saying they can both be right within the framework of their fields?
To summarize: Lindeberg, like Campbell, is an experienced nutrition researcher with impressive and relevant credentials. Nutrition is a young and complex field, so there’s no broad consensus about everything—although there is broad consensus about some things—but nutrition scientists are doing a decent enough job of figuring things out that I trust them to judge the literature properly.
I am moved enough by your insight and your persistence to give Lindeberg’s book a read. :)
I produce for you a book written by a relevant expert with ~2.5 times as many references as The China Study (2034 vs 758) who advocates eating an ancestral diet (lean unprocessed meat/fish, fruit, nuts, vegetables/root vegatables) (1). A list of individuals with relevant graduate degrees who more-or-less agree with him can be found in this list of speakers at a paleo conference he spoke at. His recommendations are at least as similar to the recommendations the Mayo clinic returned for me as Campbell’s.
That is, I can make a symmetrical argument for a significantly different diet (2), complete with experts and evidence and stuff.
So, to address your questions directly: you should believe that nutrition is a young and complex field, and therefore shouldn’t have everything all figured out; my take is that you may do well to replace grains with root vegetables, since that’s something everyone agrees is good (plus they’re really tasty!); this isn’t good enough to inform your dietary choices because I just used a symmetrical argument for a diet that has nonnegligible discrepancies with the diet Campbell recommends; and I don’t know how to dig out a signal that experts, to my knowledge, haven’t managed to dig out without becoming an expert.
(FWIW, I spent about 5 years as a vegetarian, followed by 1.5 years doing the paleo thing, and now subsist entirely off DIY soylent, which combines the virtues of deriving all its protein from animal sources and being processed.)
(1) Interestingly, Campbell’s and Lindeberg’s diets can be eaten simultaneously, and this intersection is 100% in-line with what the Mayo clinic recommended me. The difference is that Campbell allows grains and beans, and Lindeberg allows (unprocessed) lean meats, fish, and eggs.
(2) Again, there’s substantial overlap, but also substantial disagreement: Lindeberg, for instance, observe the Inuit derive something like 98% of their calories from animal sources and are virtually untouched by Western disease, and concludes that very high consumption of (unprocessed) animals is perfectly fine, whereas Campbell claims that humans should eat minimal amounts of animal.
Just how genetically isolated are the Inuit?
I am thinking of things like the evolution of adult lactose tolerance, and wondering if what’s good for the Inuit might be different from what’s good for the rest of us. I’d expect the ability to consume large amounts of meat without ill effects would be pretty powerfully selected for, in an environment where nearly all calories come from meat.
The selective pressure on being able to digest lactose as an adult is stronger than the selective pressure to not develop heart disease from eating too much meat, since the former kills you before you can reproduce. Lindeberg claims that humans have sufficiently recent common ancestry that, in absence of the kill-you-before-you-reach-childbearing-age selective pressures, we’re able to generalize from group-to-group fairly well. Non-Inuit probably do worse than Inuit on Inuit diets, and bool is_Inuit is a useful input in a program to produce an optimal soylent blend for someone, but the selective pressure isn’t strong enough for the Inuit to be mostly devoid of heart disease [1] simply because it was selected for.
Also, many other hunter-gatherers from all over eat large amounts of meat (though as much as the Inuit) and are just as devoid of Western disease as are the Kitavans, who consume relatively little, which supports the hypothesis that Inuit aren’t mostly devoid of heart disease because they’re genetically unusual.
[1] IIRC Inuit do suffer from slightly more Western disease than Kitavans (most calories from plants), but not by a very impressive margin.
And also, where the Inuit live it’s frigging cold, and maybe a protein-rich diet like theirs is only healthy in cold weather (and a protein-poor diet like pre-WW2 Okinawans’ is only healthy in warm weather) for some reason or another. (Anecdotally I tend to eat much less meat during the summer, which may or may not have something to do with that.)
Separate topic!
What I find alarming about soylent-like diets is the idea that you can completely capture human nutritional needs as a table of micronutrients quantities to fill, and then go out and source those individual micronutrients, combine them, and drink.
Aren’t you discounting the importance of the configuration of these micronutrients as they arrive in their natural packages? That is, you can certainly decompose an apple into fructose, fiber, vitamins, minerals and water (and etc), but I find it hard to accept that shopping for these individual components, blending, and pouring down your throat is just as good (or better) than eating the apple. Surely we do not completely understand everything nature has done in building us this apple.
This discussion has already happened at great length here.
To summarize my stance: there’s risks, but considering that everyone I’ve read on discourse.soylent.me has had positive results across the board, from body composition to semen taste. I get noticeably improved mental clarity (along with getting so lean I’d be scared I was undereating if I didn’t know precisely how many calories I was eating and clearer skin), which makes me willing to accept those risks. Also, because soylent might be safe and come with a load of benefits, there’s data-generating value in taking individual components, blending, and pouring them down my throat to see if anything bad happens. (Julia Galef on tradition as it pertains to social systems, that happens to be applicable here.)
But I’m not very worried; I have trouble imagining a food that has positive effects of “improve body comp, improve mental clarity, clear skin, make semen taste good” and no known negative effects and is biochemically plausible to actually be bad in the long term. Certainly not impossible, but not very probable, I think.
Makes sense, thanks for the link and your summary.
I’ve taken a keen interest in soylent but am happy to let others beta test long-term effects for me before I give it a shot :)
FWIW, the way soylent people describe their results is more or less how I describe what happened to me when I adopted a whole food plant-based diet (the “china study diet”): BF% dropped/I got leaner, various body odors improved, huge reduction in acne, became a morning person, was able to stop taking ADHD meds, and felt no negative effects at all. Except for maybe I now have so much energy I just had to pick up distance running and ultimately hurt my ankle. :P
I’m specifically trying to avoid weighing the actual science or studies myself, because I don’t think nutrition is linear enough for me to just dive in and read contradictory studies and start making informed decisions about my diet. So, all I’m really electing to do here is try to valuate experts. In that vein...
According to Wikipedia the author of that book, Staffan Lindeberg, is “M.D., Ph.D., (born 1950) is Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the Department of Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden. He is a practicing GP at St Lars Primary Health Care Center, Lund, Sweden.”
I agree he’s a health expert. I even agree he’s more qualified to judge nutrition science than me. But shouldn’t a nutrition scientist like Campbell be even more qualified to evaluate nutrition literature than a professor of Family Medicine?
He may be right, and Campbell completely wrong but I don’t see a good way to figure this out for myself unless, say, someone can make an extremely good case that Campbell is either a rogue in nutrition science, or that nutrition science shouldn’t be trusted. Getting to your next point...
Why wouldn’t nutrition scientists studying nutrition come to a similar conclusion about how young, murky, and complicated nutrition is? Shouldn’t they on average know this better than anyone and only make very careful and strongly supported recommendations?
If you can’t trust nutrition scientists to judge the literature properly, why should you trust scientists outside of the field or layman attempting to dive into the field would be better?
They have very strong incentives (ie earning money and building a career and having patients) to pretend to be certain. People don’t want to pay for honest but vague guesses.
You shouldn’t really trust scientists outside the field to talk about the entire field of nutrition but insofar as experts in older and more reliable fields like chemistry or biology disagree with specific nutritional claims you should probably agree with the actual scientists.
I would expect consensus (or the lack thereof) is an important signaler for exposing this kind of bias?
Maybe? It’s a lot safer to be certain if you’re saying the same thing as the consensus. Then at worst you can say you had the same opinion as a lot of other providers.
Lindeberg is a nutrition researcher (conducts studies, co-authors papers) coming from a medical background, which makes him just as much an expert as a nutrition researcher coming from a biochemistry background.
We can measure how much a field has progressed by its predictive power, and nutrition is already making concrete predictions with high confidence. Not a lot, not with the confidence of, say, Newtonian mechanics but, given how very much literature there is and how very complicated things are, the level of consensus across researchers who are coming at the problem from disparate-but-legitimate approaches (e.g. biochemical, evolutionary) is sufficiently impressive that I do trust them to judge the literature properly. Humans are biased, so it’s unsurprising that we don’t yet have a consensus as broad as, say, existence of the golgi apparatus, but the world looks exactly as we’d expect it if nutrition scientists were doing good work in a complicated field.
To summarize: Lindeberg, like Campbell, is an experienced nutrition researcher with impressive and relevant credentials. Nutrition is a young and complex field, so there’s no broad consensus about everything—although there is broad consensus about some things—but nutrition scientists are doing a decent enough job of figuring things out that I trust them to judge the literature properly.
Am I asking for too much by insisting on a nutrition researcher from a biochemistry background to refute Campbell? Or are you saying they can both be right within the framework of their fields?
I am moved enough by your insight and your persistence to give Lindeberg’s book a read. :)