Why Limited Adoption?
Why No One Listens?
Conclusions
- Personality + Pleasure Trap + Technology
- Winners And Losers
- Not Everyone Can
Family And Friends
- After adopting and experiencing the benefits of whole food plant based diet, the most normal thing is to want to tell all your family and friends.
- A handful of super persuasive people have changed the lives of many of their family and friends.
- Most people fail to change even their spouses and family.
- After denial, resistance and rejection many times, most give up and shut up.
My Family and Friends
- Does my experience match any hypothesis above?
- My parents and brothers eat mostly the same as always.
- My wife eats mostly the same as always. Perhaps more whole foods and fruits and vegetables.
- My kids eat mostly whole food plant based, but only because I cook most of the food.
- Friends and neighbors continue to eat mostly meat and junk.
Limited Adoption
- Low despite evidence and benefits.
- Depending on definition: 1. plant based, 2. whole food plant based, 3. whole food plant based, mostly starch, fruits and vegetables, 4. low sugar, low salt, no oil, or 5. no sugar, no salt, no oil.
- 1-5%.
Amazing Benefits
- The benefits are so numerous, curiosity and adoption should be off the charts.
Visionaries and Seriously Sick Cohort
- Yet adoption is mostly a handful of the seriously obese and chronic sick.
Hypothesis Why Limited Adoption
- Money
- Technology
- Human Nature: Pleasure Trap
- Personality: Five Factors
- Certification-Authority-Evidence
Money
Essentially corrupted decision making by conflict of interests. Producers and providers have powerful interest in money, and chose to hurt customers and patients. Producers claim to provide what customers want. May bring in corruption in advertising, corruption in regulation, etc. Money is inanimate thing, however. Behind money is human nature: status, greed, addiction, etc. Smoking and alcohol markets and industries face similar issues.
Technology (Food Environment)
Technology, from hunting tools to agriculture to industry, makes previously scarce foods abundant. Sometimes called the food environment.
Human Nature (Pleasure Trap)
Essentially artificial foods are mildly to powerfully addictive, and both producers and customers are just responding to human nature. What was once scarce in the natural world is now abundant. Once the technology is available, the genie is out of the bottle, and humans will abuse the technology. Artificial food is similar to alcohol and tobacco markets, just not commonly understood yet.
Personality (Big Five)
Essentially some people are better able to succeed than others. Intelligent, conscientious, disagreeable and stable. These people are smart, disciplined, leaders. Those with less of these traits are less likely to succeed: the stupid, lazy, impulsive suckers are more likely to follow deceptive advertising and peer pressure. Because human nature and personality are fixed, there will be winners and losers. This tends to imply fixed cohorts. Another interpretation could be personality sorts into adoption cohorts: visionaries, leaders, early majority, late majority and laggards.
Certification-Authority-Evidence
Need more evidence, coming from government, doctors, etc., and confirmed by peers, friends and neighbors.
Credible vs Incredible? (Most of us are not credible sources. We are telling incredible stores.)
Status (Status Symbol)
Scarce goods, including scarce foods, are natural status symbols. Scarce foods, including animal foods, nuts and seeds, become status tokens for mating and survival. Original motivation behind nobility, clergy and wealthy who primarily ate diet rich in animal foods and pastries, quite different diet than poor, who primarily ate naturally abundant plant foods.
My grandmother was proud to feed her family meat with every meal, here in the New World, America, unlike the Old Country, Bohemia.
Is meat a status food throughout all cultures? Are status foods humn nature or ideology? If human nature, then separate from pleasure trap.
Ideology (Beliefs, Myths)
Humans are omnivores.
Humans are hunters.
Protein makes muscles.
Ideology represents a knowledge state. Like money, not a motivation.
Approach, Message or Expectation?
- Is the approach wrong? Lighthouse or megaphone?
- Is the message wrong? Better sales and marketing? Sales funnel. Adoption cohorts. Target markets. More exageration and summary? Less science and detail? More youth and sex. Less disease and medicine? Crossing the Chasm?
- Is the expectation wrong? Everybody vs Winners and Losers?
Changes
- Not fixed. Slowly increasing.
More Media
- Books: These have always been around. China Study, Starch Solution, etc.
- Documentaries: Forks Over Knives, Game Changers, etc.
- YouTube channels:
- Podcasts: Rich Roll, PCRM Exam Room, Plant Proof, etc.
- Recipe blogs.
- Web sites: Dr McDougall, PCRM, FOK, Game Changers, etc.
More Organization
- PCRM: medical professionals and animal rights activists
- Plantrician Project: conferences
- Journals:
- American College of Lifestyle Medicine: certification
Michael Swarm 