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This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

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Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#191

Post by zorpner »

pbreit wrote: post #176
saidajigumi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You sound like an industry-insider explaining why a new startup will fail. I certainly don't want to rain on some new visionary's parade, but I spend a lot of time tracking folks who I consider to be the real visionaries in this field. As in we are currently in the midst of the greatest revolution in human health of our lives, and this guy is running in the wrong direction. We're seeing astonishing results with die…

Jeez, man, chill out. History is littered with amateurs making breakthroughs. You're take down is uncompelling. Processing for health is a bit different from processing for cost.

> Processing for health is a bit different from processing for cost.

In the sense that history is littered with people attempting to apply cross-domain knowledge to processing for health and failing utterly, that's absolutely true.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#192

Post by elbear »

grecy wrote: post #146
mathteacher1729 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For anyone that doesn't understand that statement, I recommend taking a few years off work, where you spend your time getting up early every day, doing something all day (hiking, walking, gardening, building, whatever) and go to bed late in the evening (i.e. Full days of activities you want to be doing). I spent 2 years doing this [...] How did you afford this, financially? What was the before/during/after story of…

I saved for ~18 months, then spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina, because I wanted to. I blogged the whole time at http://theroadchoseme.com All the financial details are at http://theroadchoseme.com/the-price-of-adventure You'll be interested to note I only spent $1200/mo on the road, which is almost exactly what I was spending month-to-month to go to work every day. I'm currently back working as a Soft…

Nice. I'm more or less in the same boat in that I'm trying to save some money but don't want to spend so much time working to do it. The problem is that most companies are looking for long-term employees, so it's more difficult to find something on a shorter term.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#193

Post by klipt »

yasth wrote: post #173
criley wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like an industry-insider explaining why a new startup will fail. "They're too young!" "They don't have the experience" "We've devoted our LIVES to figuring this out, one kid in his basement didn't do it in a few weeks!" Etc etc No offense but we've heard the exact same thing about every successful idea. And what's more: People look at the human GI totally wrong anyway. They think, what can I put in to get t…

Except this isn't new software. There is an actual answer to what this purports to be, i.e. a complete nutritional food. It is a very hard question to answer, and even if you had the absolute top minds of the industry making a food source in this manner you'd be provably messing up badly as recently as ten years ago. You'd probably be messing up today but we don't even know how at the moment. I mean look at the warni…

Yeah, it seems to me that the first problem with not giving your GI tract food is that it could make your GI tract atrophy. (His blog suggests he barely poops on this diet.)

As much as I share the fantasy of perfectly balanced, easy to prepare "bachelor chow", I hope he doesn't damage himself.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#194

Post by criley »

acqq wrote: post #186
criley wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof, or GTFO." > "I see this guy's protocol as nothing but poisonous in the long run." You place a burden of evidence on him that you yourself in this very post violated on a number of occasions. You CANNOT call his diet poisonous simply because you disagree with it. You admitted it yourself: > "Current research is showing that we are only just beginning to gain understanding…

Please read this to understand: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5370816 If nobody has a right nutrition model today(1), including exeprts doing this whole life, somebody who just read a few books has no chance to cover everything that has to be covered long term. Or in other words, don't you think that military with practically infinite funds wouldn't already use his drink or equivalent for all extreme circumsta…

This is one of the weakest defenses I've seen yet. It's complicated so we shouldn't try is basically the excuse.

In my opinion: the use of supplemented food like this will only improve our understanding and increase the speed at which those models are made.

By approaching the problem from BOTH sides we can create the most full expression of what is needed and why.

Still I dislike this excuse because: you run the risk of missing micronutrients every single day on a traditional diet, too.

Your body doesn't care if you forgot a micronutrient due to carelessness or if it simply wasn't in the profile of the whole foods you ate. Missing is missing. Eating popcorn, soda and fast food for a week straight means you miss a lot of important nutrients. And yet you survive.

Let the pioneers have fun and play and learn, that's what I say!

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#196

Post by rosser »

tantalor wrote: post #153
rosser wrote: post #139

This seems like an appropriate place to quote Knuth. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

The field of food preparation has been around for tens if not hundreds of millennia. We've been trying to optimize it for a long time. See also: Invention of Fire.

This optimization is premature in that he's trying to optimize for time and effort when we haven't yet nailed — in terms of fully understanding — the whole "optimal nutrition" thing.

Optimizing for performance before you have a fully working implementation is exactly what Knuth was decrying.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#197

Post by Thrall »

tocomment wrote: post #74
mjmahone17 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, it might weaken your teeth, in a similar way as being in space weakens your bones, while running helps build bone mass.

You could still chew gum to make sure your teeth and jaw get exercised. In fact you probably should?

This was my first thought. If you don't have to chew your food, your jaw muscles will atrophy (and I believe teeth and gums may also suffer from lack of use).

If you have to chew gum to make up for this, you're starting to lose the simplicity which was one of the idea's main selling points. A bit like switching from cycling to work to driving to work to save 10 minutes, then having to spend an hour in the gym to make up for the lack of exercise.

I can't help thinking there will turn out to be many more subtle effects to compensate for. Yes, I am a sceptic.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#198

Post by VLM »

auctiontheory wrote: post #47

His approach assumes (among other things) that we know absolutely EVERYTHING there is to know about nutrition. I'm fairly confident that that's not a good assumption. And that a long-term diet of his soylent will lead to some nasty deficiency. (Of course, if he's willing to be the research guinea pig for the rest of us, more power to him.)

"I'm fairly confident that that's not a good assumption."

Consider the diet of livestock and pets. Not unusual for multiple generations to eat the same product.

If livestock and pets were generally scrawny and sickly you would have a point, but they generally seem to live much longer and healthier than in the wild, usually by a pretty large multiple. I've often wondered if I'd be willing to drink "ensure" for 240 years, much as serving meow mix to a cat seems to result in a extremely long feline lifetime. It might be boring... but 240 years might make it worthwhile.

Binary thinking always strikes HN pretty hard. This is a tar baby or minefield for startup thinkers. It doesn't have to beat the best possible diet definable, for all people in the entire world... it merely needs to be better than J6Packs average diet. And that's a very low metric to achieve. Sad to say that Meow Mix probably would be better than the average american diet... And this is before we go 3rd world and compare to the average Somalian. I think its not very controversial that the average inner city kid would probably be better off with soylent than a big mac or a school lunch.

That brings up the interesting point that we live in a nearly completely centrally controlled economy WRT food production as opposed to an actual free market and lots of people make a lot of money selling vastly inferior product, and they're not going to be too happy about this.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#199

Post by lucaspiller »

jinushaun wrote: post #67
Zimahl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who instantly thought of Futurama. This does seem like a food product for people who are too lazy to make even a simple meal and clean afterwards.

It's not a matter of being lazy. Cooking and eating consumes hours in my day. At least four hours a day, and typically six hrs a day if I get fancy with cooking.

Wow, you need to optimise! I spent less than an hour today cooking and eating a healthy breakfast in the morning, and a healthy dinner (with leftovers) this evening. I bought prepared food for lunch, but it wouldn't have taken me three hours to cook and eat something else...

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#200

Post by tghw »

JPKab wrote: post #97
zck wrote: post #25

>Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced diet, but with just a third of the calories... This worries me. It's not a misquote, either. From his blog^0 : >...I get all the nutrition and energy I need with about 1/3 the calories the average American consumes... The average American consumes 2,757 calories^2 . There's a term called the Basal Metabolic Rate. It is the amount of calories your body ne…

I'm sorry, but the dude doesn't exactly look like the portrait of health, either. I don't think the Scrawny Pale Guy Diet would sell well. Not that it would be remotely scientific to judge the diet based on a sample of 1. Which is essentially what the article is doing. And let me also point out something: Why didn't the journalist think to ask what the diet costs him per week/day/month? I'm interested.

He looks far healthier than the majority of Americans.
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