Made in Elements
Is an SOS-free diet necessary?
Published 8.25.2026: There is a new paper out that tries to show that a diet that is salt, oil, and sugar free, is best. The paper, which is linked in the main portion of this piece (I don’t want to have links on the front page) is published in the online journal, Nutrients. This article discusses the paper, and at least on the day of publication, the link to the article worked.
A new paper that claims SOS free vegan diets are the best. What is an SOS-free diet? A diet based on whole food plants that doesn’t used salt, sugar, and fat (meaning oil. This paper seems to be published in a pay for play journal. Nutrients may be “increasing in impact” but I don’t think this is a highly desired journal. I might be wrong though. But a quick Google search shows me that I am NOT wrong. The authors DID have to pay to get this work published. Take that for what it’s worth.
I found this paper on Chef AJ’s YouTube channel, where she only does livestreams. She used to have a show, but since being diagnosed with cancer she’s only done livestreams. This paper is was based on True North Center, which is where they “water fast” people for a long time. The True North program is VERY expensive. AJ herself doesn’t fast, and doesn’t like it. Nor is she SOS-free any more (another change since her diagnosis.)
Am I vegan? No. Would I follow an SOS-free vegan diet if I became vegan? No. Still, I’m interested in the results of the paper. This paper is a narrative review, which means the authors had a point of view, and only used papers that demonstrated that. A narrative review isn’t a meta-analysis, which looks for all the papers then applies search criteria to all of them. They set out looking for SOS-free results, and when they didn’t find them they used Medelian randomization (which I don’t understand the concept of Mendelian randomization at all).
Basically, they used a narrative search because an SOS-free diet has never been researched and test for outcomes. So they used what they had and trials are going to be all over the place. And reading through the Materials and Methods section that much becomes plain at once. No one tests whether or not an SOS-free diet is best, at best they cut fat (form oils) or salt, or in a completely different trail they might cut sugar. Positive results occur for most of these interventions, but they don’t cut all three at once.
Not sure this is the slam dunk that AJ thinks it is— or even the chiropractor Alan Goldhammer (who is on the paper). Joel Fuhrman doesn’t cut fat (although he doesn’t use oils) as much as these people and he gets good results— at least that’s what people who follow his Nutritarian way of eating say. I don’t know. I know that giving up meat is a big thing for most people, giving up salt, oil, and sugar (some people include simple carbohydrates) would make the vegan diet too hard to follow. Fuhrman’s diet is very low fat (except that he eats nuts and seeds).
Jeff Nelson (of Veg Source) would say low fat (without supplementation) is what required to reverse disease, but his evidence of his wife’s recovery is not data (something that he would acknowledge). It’s plain from results that cutting saturated fats from the diet and replacing them with plant oils (especially oilve and soy) are heathful— despite what Trump’s Food and Drug Administration tells you. What’s less clear is if fat itself, in whatever form it takes is the enemy.
The same could be said about salt. some people get better (lower blood pressure) if they limit salt, other people don’t. Sugar is a bugaboo of sorts of mine. I don’t think it’s as EBIL as low-carbers make it out to be. I think the average American eats too much, period, and a lot of that food has a ton of sugar. Salt, sugar, and fat are the trinity of hyper-palatability after all. So it makes all the sense in the world that limiting any or all of that trinity would be good for health. Not sure this paper demonstrates that.
They do eventually discuss hyper-palatable foods and how they lead to passive consumption of food. Their big thing with sugar is sugar sweetend beverages (SSBs) and there you should read soda. Of couse, they hate artificial sweeneners too. Not sure this paper really contributed anything. They end by saying there was any systematic search criteria, and no on has done SOS-free studies anyway (can you imagine recruiting for one?)