571–580 of 1001 posts
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Why would you be pleasantly surprised? They have a product that's making people sick - telling you not to eat it is literally the bare minimum they could do. They haven't even issued a recall, given refunds...
It's 0.1% of customers, not a samsung s7. If they are willing to pull their product for 0.1% of customers they will probably announce a refund, give it a week .
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I don't advocate for or against liquid diets necessarily - and I realize this is overtly a throwaway account - but this sounds pretty pseudo-sciency to me, anecdote notwithstanding. At bare minimum, include some citation here.
You have it exactly backwards. Anyone suggesting Soylent is safe with arguments like "glucose is glucose" and "it has the right macronutrient ratios" is spouting pseudo-science. If you have insufficient evidence that something is safe and a strong anecdote suggesting otherwise the logical option is to abstain. Attempting to bring science into the decision making process when the science has not been done is pseudo-sc…
I would call either argument pseudo-science, but only one was presented here and it's the one I responded to.
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> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…
Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction. The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work a…
In all seriousness, this is tremendously unhealthy. Get up and go for a walk, a light jog, something. The health consequences of even just being sedentary for that long are terrible (to say nothing of the psychological consequences of deceiving yourself into thinking that work is the only thing of value in life).
Move fast and break things, including people's GI tracts. The fact that Soylent powder is at "version 1.6" and causing these problems points to gross version number inflation. This is a showstopper. Rob Rhinehart asserts that the human body is "just chemicals," yet a vat of elemental hydrogen, oxygen, carbon etc. would seem to behave a little differently from a human body composed of reproducing cells and structured…
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Every time Soylent is on HN people say this. Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals. I order a box of Soylent bottles every few weeks—they come in handy while working or for a quick breakfast or if I have little time and am hungry. I also cook meals with my girlfriend a few times a week…
Why do you buy Soylent instead of Ensure? https://ensure.com/nutrition-products/protein-shakes-healthy... Is it cheaper? More complete? Dehydrated?
I was on a liquid diet for a while for medical reasons. Ensure (and other drinks in that space) are horrifyingly sugary, and even their "diabetic" formula is disgustingly sweet and high in simple processed carbs that are a half step up from sucrose. They're also extremely low in fiber.
Additionally, though the vitamins and minerals are balanced for consuming four per day, you'd have to drink 8-10 of them daily to fill the caloric needs of a healthy and not particularly active adult. Sugar is a surprisingly inefficient source of calories on the scale of an adult's daily metabolic needs.
Soylent has a very neutral flavor that can be seasoned for a sweet or savory effect, and a bottle has roughly the right amount of calories for a meal for an adult. If you're moderately active and eating nothing else, around 5 per day will suffice.
Even on a liquid diet, I ate other things besides soylent, and I struggled to consume enough calories to meet my basal metabolic rate - below which your body will start consuming itself for energy. (Forget maintaining your original weight on a liquid diet at all.) Whole milk, you say? I was forbidden to consume significant amounts of lactose.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of options were either extremely sweet or would fill your stomach without providing meaningful nutrition (a cup of chicken broth has 10 calories!) Despite usually being a chocolate hound, after two weeks of that I would gag at the thought of a m&m. Soylent at least was neutral and would keep me feeling full for a little while.
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I have to agree. I'm not saying that people on liquid diets don't have digestion problems, but the liquid diet alone likely didn't cause it. Even if you eat no food, you'll still have bowel movements as your intestines shed cells and mucus. If you have a colostomy done (intestines no longer connect to your rectum) you'll still pass small small amounts of stool out the normal way (anus).
Your bowels are muscle. Like any muscle, if it doesn't get used much, it wastes. Just because you're passing some stool, doesn't mean you're in good digestive shape, no more than an irregular heartbeat is healthy "because at least the heart is beating"
The fact that people have gone on extended fasts and then broke them without much trouble suggests a "breakdown" of digestive function is a weak argument.
I would say that a change in the biome of the digestive tract is probably more responsible for any digestive upset after breaking a fast than "muscle breakdown".
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I have two young kids and a startup. The idea that I should view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed is honestly a pipe dream right now. I enjoy as many of my meals as I can with my family. But when the kids are sick or I'm running behind and have a meeting, I grab a soylent and I feel like it's a lot healthier than picking up sugary junk or other alternatives.
Soylent has nine grams of sugar per serving. It is sugary junk.