Thanks for sharing this! The Balluch curve is very much aligned with how I think about effort, and I like that he explores in depth how advocacy can reshape the landscape over time, thereby effectively changing our empirical assumptions. I especially like the visual intuition of people “rolling” towards the local minimum. A very elegant way of thinking about the curves. :)
The only point I’d qualify is the assumption that a balanced mixed diet and a vegan diet are roughly equally healthy. I discuss this in a bit more detail in the section on health risk:
More generally, there is greater uncertainty about the health outcomes of dietary patterns that substantially restrict or eliminate food groups that have formed part of the human diet throughout evolution, particularly with regard to long-term health and critical life stages such as pregnancy, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. This reflects both the limited evidence base for comparatively novel and rare dietary patterns and the broader methodological limitations of nutrition science. A greater health risk is therefore assigned to dietary patterns at either extreme of the spectrum.
For that reason, I think health risk may be just as decisive as effort, depending on how people weight the different objectives.
Thanks for sharing this! The Balluch curve is very much aligned with how I think about effort, and I like that he explores in depth how advocacy can reshape the landscape over time, thereby effectively changing our empirical assumptions. I especially like the visual intuition of people “rolling” towards the local minimum. A very elegant way of thinking about the curves. :)
The only point I’d qualify is the assumption that a balanced mixed diet and a vegan diet are roughly equally healthy. I discuss this in a bit more detail in the section on health risk:
For that reason, I think health risk may be just as decisive as effort, depending on how people weight the different objectives.