Food Chemistry and the Narrative Fallacy

"... far too often, we scientists focus on details while ignoring the larger context... we pin our efforts and our hopes on one isolated nutrient at a time... We oversimplify and disregard the infinite complexity of nature." - Colin T. Campbell, The China Study (pp. 19-20)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is no chump. The Times calls his book, The Black Swan, one of the 12 most influential since World War II. The popularly revered author Malcolm Gladwell credits him as a central influence. Taleb cast warnings all the way up to the 2008 financial crisis, and then made a fortune from it. It's an irony that such a wise mind's message to the world is that the world is unwise. In his own words:

We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Française, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.

Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information.

At the core of this philosophical abstraction is one very key point: We don't know, but want to know so badly that we force it. We need to own complex information so badly that the truth is lost in translation. You see this in the financial world all the time: "The Dow Jones fell today

due to rising oil cost in the Middle East." The truth is that the Dow went through a myriad of unpredictable events that depended on a myriad of unpredictable environments so complex that no mathematical model could describe it. But the next day oil costs will fall and the Dow will too, so they'll try to find some other factor to explain it all. This is oversimplification, an arrogant display of command over information when the simple truth is that we will never truly control intricately complex systems like world financial economics or, as I'm arguing, food chemistry and its interaction with the human body.

To pompously declare that we can test tube our way to good health is to ignore the infinitely complex nature of food, the human body, and the synergistic effects of nutrient combinations. Science should be a part of the big picture, not the big picture itself. Thankfully, its beginning to sound like people are waking up to a better paradigm.

"People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods. And foods can behave quite differently from the nutrients that they contain... But while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it’s important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets… Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished." -Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food