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From the "recipe"[1]: This mechanism can also metabolize protein and fat, but the brain can only use Glucose for energy. In fact, the brain uses 25% of the body's glucose, though it accounts for only 2% of its weight. This would have me concerned if I were considering this. While 100% true, it neglects the entire ketone metabolic pathway[2], which the brain will use fine instead of glucose. If this something big like…
It would also be interesting to see the effect of this on gut microbes, which are seem to be increasing in importance in the formula of overall health [1,2]. I wish him the best of luck, but it's not something I'll be doing.
[1] http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ismej...
[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120815174902.ht...
Setting aside the question of whether the subject is actually feeding his body everything he needs (a question that he appears to readily acknowledge as "good skepticism"), I have to wonder about the consistency of statements like these: we'll have to give up many traditional foodstuffs like fresh fruits and veggies, which are incompatible with food processing and scale. Soylent can largely be produced from the produ…
I'd be really curious to learn how his teeth and gums are doing. If you can find a way to eat without ever having food touch your teeth or gums, I'd imagine you'd have incredible oral health. Thoughts?
Alternatively, it might weaken your teeth, in a similar way as being in space weakens your bones, while running helps build bone mass.
What utter bollocks. We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter. It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods, but I doubt that anyone alive today knows how to do it. He may see "good" results on some metrics due to a lack of any desire to go hypercaloric -- i.e. there's probably no artificially boosted food reward[1] mechanisms in his glop. But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies.
So an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have whipped up a drink that eliminates all that. A task that specialists have so far failed at.
> "I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient."
I've seen this enough to be sick of it; it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset gone badly wrong. The supplement and meal replacement powder/drink industry is a multi-billion dollar market. First sanity check: _no_ staff scientists for any of these companies thought to go look at a textbook and the intertubes and do the same thing? DOH! Egg's on them!
Another example of this failure: when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science (e.g. human subjects) without _any_ training in how to do experiment design, data collection, or analysis. "Just ask 'em some questions!" The general form of the problem seems to be a blindness to the depths of domain knowledge required to be effective in other disciplines.
I'd be really curious to learn how his teeth and gums are doing. If you can find a way to eat without ever having food touch your teeth or gums, I'd imagine you'd have incredible oral health. Thoughts?
Myself, I eat almost exclusively low carb. Salads, chicken, various low carb veggies, eggs, cheese, etc. I supplement with a lot of protein shakes to increase muscle mass from working out. I feel fantastic, I have very little body fat, and my mind stays much clearer than when I'm carbing.
I think the whole low-carb trend showed us that the dogma surrounding foods and diet has been a load of crap. There are lots of approaches to eating that can work, and many are far superior to the "food pyramid" nonsense that has practically ruined the health of America.
Experiments like this one in eating (er, not eating) may show us things about our metabolisms that we never realized.
I, for one, would love to get rid of most food preparation, save money, and maybe even be healthier. Kudos to Rob Rhinehart for looking for a new approach to the problem of sustenance.
Well, there are always pathological cases like this particular man in question but I dont think anyone else should even try this sort of stuff.
Secondly, our body has evolved not just to digest nutrients but also normal food which may contain many other essential things science is not yet fully aware of. So this sort of artificial diet is risky and it might cut your life by few years. Is it worth it ?
Call me superstitious, but I believe there are unknown unknowns in our understanding of nutrition. The human body evolved eating various fibrous things. I'm not going to run that kind of experiment on myself.
I think it's something that should be tested in a scientifically rigorous way. Trying to hack your body like this is bold but if it fails it will fail in a very public way that might tarnish the idea for a long time.