This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again • Hacker News Board

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#301

Post by l0c0b0x » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 11:48 PM UTC

A few months ago, I had the realization that on most days I only ate because I HAD TO. I find it extremely frustrating having to spend lots of time thinking about what to eat e.v.e.r.y.d.a.y.

On average, I might like only 20-40% of what I eat. Mainly because good/tasty food is expensive, hard to find, and/or prone to change in taste due to various elements. I really believe if there was balanced nutritious drink out there that gives me what my body needs, tastes ok, and costs relatively cheap, I would be one happy customer.

I'm keeping my eye on news like these from now on.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#302

Post by rosser » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 11:48 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #287

DanBC wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet every single chef in every single restaurant and every single cook in every single home also optimizes for performance, No they don't - they often optimise for taste. Some people accidentally get adequate nutrition because they eat so much food, and some of that food is fortified with micronutrients.

optimise for taste ...and texture, and price, and familiarity, and ethical sourcing, and religious approval, and cetera, and cetera. Maybe you don't care about halal or free-range, but some people do. Like I said, Soylent Dude is more exclusive in his optimization, but I still contradict the proposition that, "This optimization is premature..." How could it be premature when every human food preparer has been doing i…

Because his optimization is at the expense of all other considerations. He even admits to being pleasantly surprised that his glop tastes good. That means he'd have consumed it even if it didn't — taste is secondary to convenience.

He's taking what we currently believe to be true about the human body's nutritional requirements, dumping that into a blender all chemistry-set-style (it even has oligosaccharides!), and calling it good, because he thinks eating like a human takes too much time and effort.

Maybe it will work out for him. I'm certainly interested to see what happens. But if what happens turns out to be some previously unknown (because everyone else has been busy eating at least some actual food) analogue of scurvy or something, I'm not going to be the least bit surprised. I'll probably even have nontrivial schadenfreude.

Simply, we do not know enough about nutrition at this point to be making this kind of optimization. It's therefore premature.

(Edited)

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#303

Post by Eva_Peron » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 11:51 PM UTC

They will take the soylent from his cold, dead hands! :-)

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#304

Post by axelf » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 11:52 PM UTC

I don't understand why everyone on this thread is making it seem like this impossible. I feed my dog the same food and portion every single day. He is lean, muscular, and full of energy all day. We're both mammals, how different could it be?

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#305

Post by a_p » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 11:53 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #109

saidajigumi wrote: post #75

> a 24-year-old software engineer > ... > Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced diet 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 latte…

>an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have [succeeded with a] task that specialists have so far failed at The guy who invented the spreadsheet didn't have to absorb all available accounting literature first, and Elon Musk didn't spend 30 years in the Apollo program before being allowed to send his own rocket to space. Nutrition is a field full of pseudoscience and highly susceptible to disruptio…

>The guy who invented the spreadsheet didn't have to absorb all available accounting literature first, and Elon Musk didn't spend 30 years in the Apollo program before being allowed to send his own rocket to space.

Both of your examples are poor.

Dan Bricklin had earned a B.S in computer science from MIT and was studying for an MBA at Harvard when he wrote a software program that was useful for businesses. He had a very good background for the product that he created.

Elon Musk was able to send his rocket into space after he hired a team of smart engineers to build it for him. His engineers benefited from the knowledge gained from NASA research that cost (when adjusted for inflation) hundreds of billions of dollars.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#306

Post by pbreit » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 11:56 PM UTC

zorpner wrote: post #191

pbreit wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A citation would be nice.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#307

Post by dougk16 » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 11:57 PM UTC

Goronmon wrote: post #296

nitrogen wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is 3 a ridiculous claim? I agree that there should be evidence presented that the demyelination of MS has been reversed, but why do the words "Cured MS through diet" alone constitute a "ridiculous claim"?

There is no cure for MS, so if the video does make that claim, it's pretty ridiculous. It's the equivalent of saying you could cure cancer with diet.

You can cure cancer with diet, along with generally healthy living. "Cure" perhaps isn't the best word though, because bad diet (combined with other things like stress, lack of exercise, etc.) is frequently the cause of cancer in the first place.

EDIT: I didn't mean to say that changing to a healthy diet/lifestyle after being diagnosed will magically cure you (if that's why I'm being downvoted) but I believe it certainly can in some cases. If it's for lack of references, well, when it comes to cancer, you can find a study to support just about any view you want.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#308

Post by doctorstupid » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 12:03 AM UTC

> I started wondering why something as simple and important as food was still so inefficient

It's inefficient because it's important. The production and consumption of food is one of the most ritualized aspects of humanity, and most cultures define themselves in no small part by their culinary traditions.

To humans, food is far, far more than simply the output of some nutritional optimization technique.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#309

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 12:05 AM UTC

qu4z-2 wrote: post #273

scott_s wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. - Carl Sagan Sure, he could be on to something. But we also need an enormous amount of skepticism when evaluating it, just as we do when evaluating any large claim. What pings my radar is that we're still trying to understand how our body processes "whole food" as opposed to vitamins in supp…

In fairness, Columbus was also wrong. If they hadn't happened across the Americas, they would all have died. India was nowhere near where he thought it was, and almost exactly where the common knowledge of the time (and Eratosthenes) said it was. Sorry. It's just a pet peeve of mine when people think Columbus was somehow right, or even worse, that people believed the world was flat pre-Columbus. EDIT: To be clear, I'…

And Colombus believed, till his death, that he had reached India. He never realized this was another continent altogether.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#310

Post by stouset » Thu, Mar 14, 2013, 12:08 AM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #261

Evgeny wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope he doesn't damage himself Bad as it sounds, I hope he does. That would be the equivalent of "failing fast", I guess. Here's the worse outcome: he goes happily for some time, inspires some people to follow his lead, the group grows ... 5 or 10 years down the line - bam, they all end up with some irreparable damage to their health ...

What mechanism can you imagine that would produce such a nightmare scenario? Is there a fat-soluble (or otherwise stored) nutrient of which most human bodies contain a five to ten year supply? No I didn't think so. If Soylent Dude and his merry band of poor cooks can prove our current nutritional understanding wrong by dying five to ten years from now, then they should.

Are you kidding?

It's not about your body suddenly running out of a nutrient five years down the line. It's about your body starting to repair and build structures that need to last for years while missing key ingredients.

As a random example, people can develop osteoporosis after years of drinking diet soda.