Rex, the appropriateness (or not) of my earlier analogy to Brix in soft
drinks aside, from my POV your reply involved enough misinterpretations
and/or distortions of what I was trying to say that I am not going to
attempt to respond point-by-point. Instead I'll just begin at the beginning
again here at the risk of repeating myself. But as I said earlier, I only
have so much time for this, and need to keep things to a few posts, and
can't afford any further lengthy followup posts like this one. (Debates on
listgroups can be such a time-draining tarbaby that this is going to have
to pretty much be it for me other than one or two one-paragraph responses
if necessary in followups.)

That "Brix = Quality" may be true to the extent it measures the quality of
*individual* food(s). That much I have no problem with accepting, for the
sake of debate, at least. But I stand by the main point of my previous post
that the axiom "Brix = Quality" is at the same time a half-truth: It
doesn't take into account the proportions and amounts of various foods in
the diet, nor the fact that certain foods will never be as good sources of
certain nutrients as others because of genetic constraints governing each
different kind of plant's growth. (Or that certain foods may on the other
hand promote excesses of other substances in the diet, if the food or food
class is made the primary staple.)

Brix also doesn't address whether the nutrient array in a single food or
class of foods (whether high or low Brix) is appropriate--when made the
mainstay of a diet at the expense of other foods--toward meeting a
sufficient/ optimum overall balance of nutrients in an entire diet. Put to
the point of the absurdly obvious: a fruit is a fruit is a fruit, not a
fish or a nut or a seed; and the nutrient profile of a fruit is never going
to give you the nutrient profile of a cut of fish, for example, which
contains such things as EFAs or vitamin B-12 that fruits don't to any
meaningful degree, no matter what their Brix. And to expect that a food
like fruits, when overemphasized in the diet, can compensate for the
displacement of other foods that contain essential nutrients, or more
precisely sufficient amounts of them--ones that fruits don't contain in
appreciable quantities no matter what their Brix--is simply absurd.

Yet another consideration which is not (and cannot be) answered by the
"Brix = Quality" criterion alone is whether *more* nutrients in a specific
food because of higher Brix really has much bearing on what is *enough*
nutrients for a particular animal. That requires a whole host of
considerations about the animal's physiology and nutritional requirements
which so far haven't even been touched on in this discussion. Considering
Brix in a vacuum like this is ridiculous. I.e., what foods is the human
body best designed to thrive on by evolution, or by its physiological
design, etc.?

It seems to have completely escaped attention here that Brix is an isolated
criterion that focuses solely on *foods* while neglecting the necessary
accompanying attention to assessing what the *body's* nutritional needs and
requirements are in relation to all of this. One wouldn't speculate about
feeding a cow a diet of peanuts and raisins and then expect others to take
seriously the speculation that it might be able to thrive on such a diet
rather than the diet of grass like it was designed to. Brix concerns are
tangential in that kind of situation, which parallels the human situation
with fruitarianism. All available scientific evidence on human evolution as
well as physiology indicates the human body isn't designed to thrive on
just fruits no matter what their quality, no matter what some crank-science
(and I use the term descriptively here) theorizers on the Forum may claim.

In the end, however, the degree to which high Brix might be able to
compensate for a narrow diet is something that has to be evaluated
empirically/ experimentally by looking at the actual results people get.
Thus, if you can't accept that fruitarians have for 30-40 years tried the
diet to the best of their ability with few if any successes (those
investigated virtually invariably turn out to be false), and you truly are
asserting no one has ever had access to good-enough quality fruit in all
that time to constitute a fair test despite concerted efforts like Tom's
(as one example) and others, then your position appears all the more
unreasonable.

Your stated position is that people on the list aren't considering enough
that quality can make a big difference in diet. I disagree. I believe they
do consider it. What I'm pointing out, though, is that no matter what the
quality level of specific *individual* foods, or kinds of foods, in the
case of fruit/fruitarianism--as a good case study--the extreme (im)balance
of foodstuffs in the *overall* diet overshadows such concerns. (Also, no, I
wasn't equating Brix with sugar content as you suggested--my point was that
fruits are a relatively high-sugar food regardless of specific Brix level,
and therefore skew the diet considerably because of the sugar overload in a
predominantly fruitarian diet, among other serious imbalances of fruitarian
diets.)

Also, I think it's probably safe to say that regardless of its status as a
convenient whipping boy for some on the list, one reason why people are
focusing on fruitarianism in response to your contentions is that it is a
diet with a lengthy (and abysmal) track record--one that can be used to
clearly gauge the validity of the idea that Brix or quality in a single
class of foods might be able to compensate for lack of other important
foods in the diet. I don't doubt that the idea, generally, has some
validity. But the key point is that its validity depends on how far, and to
what extremes, one goes with the idea. If you can't see that fruitarianism
takes it considerably past the bounds of validity no matter how good the
quality of fruit, then again, you appear impossible to reason with.

Rex, if you can't handle strong disagreement with your views (which people
understandably, it seems to me, will find tiresome because of the
repetitiveness and apparent irascibility with which they are stated), then
instead of grandstanding by calling it "censorship," you do have the
alternative of taking your arguments to another list where the people you
talk with aren't so eager to question assumptions. Disagreement (even
strong disagreement, like mine) expressed civilly, if forcefully, without
threats isn't censorship, it's just a clash of opinion. There is always the
option of finding another place where people are content to agree with you
without raking through the assumptions like we're doing here, or where
there is not so much clash of opinion if you don't like it here.

Ward Nicholson
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