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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

#311

Post by Evgeny »

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.

As mentioned, there are too many "unknown unknowns" to say for sure. So I'll refer to an anecdote:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-us/201106/wh...

In her early 30's, Staci's health started going downhill. After twelve years of strict vegetarianism, she began to suffer from anemia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and she experienced stomach pains for two hours after every meal. "I was completely debilitated," she tells me. "Then I changed the way I ate."

The point here is not to bash vegetarianism, but to point out that it took her 12 years to develop health issues. And that's with vegetarianism, that is often considered a very healthy way to eat. So I would expect more potential hazards from something new, untried and untested.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#312

Post by thoradam »

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…

Could you please define "highly processed foods"?

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#313

Post by pifflesnort »

dougk16 wrote: post #307
Goronmon wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 certa…

No, you can't. This is quack science.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#314

Post by Blahah »

mst wrote: post #293
VLM wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How much time is needed to ensure this method of feeding is viable for humans?" Yes ha ha. (For those who don't get the joke there's long been available a liquid meal replacement called "Ensure(tm)" as with many "tech" novelty stories a supposed inventor is actually just walking on very well trodden ground rather than inventing anything.)

A quick google suggests that ensure is marketed as a high calorie product designed to help you gain weight. Is there another version of it that's nutritionally complete and low calorie like Soylent (supposedly) is that I'm missing?

Yes: http://abbottnutrition.com/Products/jevity-1-cal

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#315

Post by jlgreco »

pifflesnort wrote: post #313
dougk16 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 certa…

No, you can't. This is quack science.

Dangerous quack science. Convincing people of it has the very real potential to kill people.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#316

Post by tantalor »

rosser wrote: post #302
jessaustin wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 !), an…

Hypothesis: "soylent" contains everything your body needs.

If consumption of "soylent" reveals some nutritional deficiency, then you should be surprised, because that means our hypothesis is incorrect! Your expectation should confirm the hypothesis, not negate it.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#317

Post by zeteo »

a_p wrote: post #305
zeteo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 v…

Bricklin's background in business was minimal, but he created a product that revolutionized business processes more than thousands of acclaimed gurus.

Musk absorbed a few books on rocketry (see my related comment) and constructed an accurate theoretical model before hiring anyone.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#318

Post by [deleted] »

tantalor wrote: post #316
rosser wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 !), an…

Hypothesis: "soylent" contains everything your body needs. If consumption of "soylent" reveals some nutritional deficiency, then you should be surprised, because that means our hypothesis is incorrect! Your expectation should confirm the hypothesis, not negate it.

[deleted]

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#319

Post by stouset »

mikeash wrote: post #286
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…

I don't understand this. Let's say you took all the components of a healthy diet, then blended them together into a drink like this and consumed it. How would that be any different from eating the components separately? Your intestines don't know or care that a blender got to the food first. Maybe this particular example is missing something, I don't know. But you seem opposed to the very concept , which makes no sen…

First, we don't know what the components of a healthy diet are. We thought we did decades ago, but were blissfully unaware of micronutrients (and, as I understand it, infant formula from around this time made a bunch of babies have developmental disorders as a result). Second, we're quickly realizing that nutrition is significantly more than the sum of its parts. Nutrients taken together as opposed to separately can have significantly different effects. Calories in also doesn't necessarily equal calories absorbed.

It's a crappy analogy, but imagine this guy was trying to construct a human body out of parts. He's wired up a brain, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, a lymphatic system, and all the rest to a skeletal system. What do you think his chances of success would be?

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#320

Post by inopinatus »

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…

I have upvoted your remarks, not because I agree, but because they are a classic example of head-in-the-sand thinking and should be paraded as such.

As a young developer I was often told "you can't do that" or "stop jumping to solutions" and as a now much, much older and very slightly wiser man I recognise that these were the knee-jerk fears of threatened reactionaries stuck in their ways, not the wise voices of experience that they thought they were.

As someone else implied, the appeal to authority is one of the least credible forms of supporting argument.

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