What Is Quality? (Part 1)
"You are what you like."
- Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect (2015)
Whenever we consume a product, there is an implicit or explicit decision happening. As I discussed in my previous post, each person’s weighting system for making such decisions will vary based on nurture, nature and cultural factors (I refer to this set of factors as ‘personality’ to simplify going forward). In Part 1, my goal is to tease out why an individual’s determination of ‘quality’ (or optimal for themselves balancing taste, cost, nutritional value and other factors) is extremely difficult in the long-run. In Part 2, I talk about trust, nuance and evolution in the context of dietary choices.
Often, our daily consumption decisions align with what Daniel Kahneman calls Type 1 decision making, which is fast and appropriately called “gut instinct”. Type 2 decision making is slow and methodical1. Adding another layer, even someone’s approach to consumption decisions will reflect their personality. For example, most people deliberately want to make Type 1 decisions about breakfast and lunch. If possible, my dad always wants a sandwich, potato chips and iced tea for lunch. Among US households, it is still quite common for men to rely on women to do the meal planning and decision making2. If you are a Type 1 decision maker and/or outsource your meal decisions, please don’t let my ramblings on Type 2 decisions distract you. Taste is personal!
Analysis paralysis
For most of us, we live in an age of relative abundance. Walmart sells approximately 150,000 different products in its stores in a marvel of industrial efficiency. As an early-stage investor, it’s bewildering to walk around the store and still have conviction that any early-stage brand can cut through the noise.
Among food and beverage options alone, consumers are balancing perceived:
taste (including deliciousness, texture, mouthfeel, etc)
price
convenience
nutritional value or general efficacy (e.g. caffeine)
brand identity / story
other factors
Other factors could include ethical (e.g. horse or dog meat passes muster on #1-4 above in certain parts of the world), environmental3 (e.g. a decision to bring a reusable water bottle to the gym or drive a hybrid / electric car), or smell.
Of the 6 dimensions listed above, taste (#1) is usually paramount although highly subjective per my previous post. Price (#2) and convenience (#3) are much more objective than subjective. Brand identity (#5) is extremely important and the subject of a future post.
I will focus on nutritional value (#4) since I believe it is the most controversial and personally it’s the most interesting to me. My goal with this geeky post is certainly not to persuade anyone to buy ‘more quality’ products – rather, it is to explore some hard questions and offer a framework to other geeks like me.
Why can’t science just tell us the right answer?
In podcast land, I often hear a host ask the obligatory question “what is the best diet for my audience?” to some health coach / guru. The true answer is 1) we actually have very little data to support broadly generalized nutrition guidance and 2) it 100% depends on the individual’s circumstances (e.g. body type, nutritional quality and quantity, exercise, sleep, microbiome, metabolism, etc). For what it’s worth, my favorite answer so far is this 6 minute summary by Dr. Peter Attia.
The human body, including the brian, is the most complex known system in the universe. There are ~37 trillion cells in the human body and *each* cell undergoes approximately a billion biochemical reactions each second4. Subconsciously, that means there are ~37 billion trillion chemical reactions occurring each second. This complexity explains why modern science still knows relatively little about biology in relation to other fields of science like physics5.
Another reason studying human nutrition is particularly challenging is the lack of subject conformity in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and the length of time required to observe changes. Said another way, researchers cannot force large quantities of human subjects to consume certain foods and beverages each day for 24 hours over multiple years. The human body also has a remarkable dampening effect on nutrients consumed meaning that some major changes are only measurable over the course of years. This leads to most nutritional research coming in the form of epidemiological studies. These studies can occur over many years but are often criticized for not controlling for confounding factors or other study design flaws – making their headline-grabbing findings (e.g. red wine is healthy!) unreliable6.
What can we learn from other animals?
Biological complexity leads to specialization and a fragmented universe of doctors, researchers, and labs. Many researchers use lab mice to study a particular nutrient consumed by humans, although the limitations of extrapolating from mouse to human is the subject of debate7.
One researcher at Utah State University, Fred Provenza, has made it his life’s work to determine what we can learn about the taste-brain-gut axis from larger mammals in their natural habitats. Relative to human studies, it is far more ethical and cost-effective to run studies on outdoor goats and other ruminants, which he’s done for over 4 decades. Also, studying larger mammals in their natural habitat may be more compelling than mice in a lab. Provenza published a summary of his findings in 2018 in the book Nourishment.
Provenza’s main finding is that when ruminants forage on a landscape that has a high degree of plant and phytochemical8 diversity, there is a causal relationship leading to better health outcomes for the animals (as opposed to say cows that primarily eat corn in confined areas). Additionally, he believes that these animals have learned (as opposed to inherited knowledge) which plants to graze on at specific times in order to persevere through the seasons. Even further, he thinks there are strong parallels for humans.
I doubt that large quantities of humans will ever “rediscover their nutritional wisdom” given the hyperpalatability of our modern diet9. That said, if there is even a chance that livestock can learn to identify quality nutrients, then it’s a worthwhile effort for some humans to entertain. In Part 2, I dig deeper into how trust and nuance play an important role in determining quality.
For a good summary of this research, see Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011)
For a light anecdote on this comparison, see the chapter “A Map of the Cat?” in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Feynman, 1985)
A group of biologically active compounds found in plants
For a longer discussion of hyperpalatability, see The Dorito Effect (Schatzker, 2015). See research here.