If Silicon Valley was a friend of yours, you would be mounting an intervention into their eating habits right now.
Every fad diet, odd food trend and even potentially lethal drink on the self-help shelf has eager devotees among the upper echelons of the Valley, all gathered under the tattered banner of biohacking.
Ray Kurzweil spends a ‘few thousand dollars per day’ on supplements and eats only whole grain when it comes to carbs and yet, amongst start-up founders and venture capitalists, his ‘immortality diet’ is almost mundane.
Digg founder Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss – investor and author of The 4-hour body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman – swear by the keto diet, all-you-can-eat fat but no more than 50 grams a day of carbs, equivalent to a cup of white rice.
Paolo Alto surgeon Dr Bradford Rabin’s LiveLight program, meanwhile, relies on small, daily doses of phentermine, a substituted amphetamine, followed by protein shakes – of Rabin’s own design – and a low-fat, low-carb diet.
“Silicon Valley is a group of highly motivated and entitled people who think anything can be reverse engineered,” explains long time Valley resident observer and former Rabin client Josh Quittner. “These diet fads say to them what they want to hear – you can be as strong or smart as you want to be and go on to live forever. There’s a belief in pseudo-science out there which is fertile ground for biohacking.”
Phil Libin – the former CEO of Evernote and current CEO of AI studio All Turtle – is a case in point. He chairs an intermittent fasting WhatsApp group of two dozen Valley grandees including Y Combinator’s Daniel Gross and LeWeb co-founder Loic Le Meur. Participants stop eating for between two and eight days in a row. Libin insists it gives him focus. If he goes out to dinner during a fast he only sips water. “People think it’s torture but it’s actually really pleasant. I get the social interaction, I can see the food and smell it. All of those things are pleasant,” he said. “I usually leave a dinner where I eat nothing feeling kind of full.”
Binge eating, starving yourself and feeling full after no food is not a diet, Mr Libin, that’s Eating Disorder 3.0. King of them all is the suitably-named purveyor of woo-woo science Geoff Woo. Woo leads a WeFast group, fasts for up to 18 hours a day and drinks his company’s Ketone drink, which is supposed to mimic the fat burning effects of fasting. So, he’s mimicking fasting but he’s still fasting? Yep. Still fasting.
And that’s before we get on to the odd and, in some cases, downright dangerous fads for things no sane person would consume unless their lives were already on the line. Soggy cardboard meal replacement drink Soylent will shortly be on sale in US 7-Elevens despite withdrawing its food bars and remixing its formula when customers started vomiting.
Failed startup Juicero’s cofounder Doug Evans, meanwhile, went to Burning Man on a ten day fast using only ‘raw water’ supplied by Live Water directly from springs and streams without any intervening treatment despite the outcry from nutritionists who point out unfiltered, untreated water can contain animal faeces, E.coli, parasites like giardia and cryptosporidium, Hepatitis A and cholera.
All of this, according to psychologist Deanne Jade – who runs the National Centre for Eating Disorders in the UK and has a daughter who’s just returned from working in marketing in Silicon Valley – is a cry for help.
“We’ve all lost the affiliations of family, church and village that bonded us – but in Silicon Valley, which has people from all over the world working in intense pressured environments, the loss of the old support systems is destabilising,” she explains. “Human beings are social animals. Sharing common cultural currency helps people decide if they’re in or out of a group, so micro worlds – where people share values and behaviours – are becoming our way of belonging. Food has always been the crucible of relationships and Silicon Valley people want to be in the loop – so no matter how bizarre the pseudo-science behind a diet they become attached to it like a religion.”
It's not very Ayn Rand to say this, but founders, there are better ways of making friends. Join a softball team, do a bit of voluntary work or take up a new hobby – because who wants to live forever if you spend your life lonely and hungry?
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
