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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

#321

Post by mamoswined »

I'm kind of the opposite of this guy, in that I'm probably a "foodie", I'm a member of slow food, etc. But I have thought about something like this. The thing is that I love food and eating, but I don't get a lot of enjoyment from meals that I eat alone at home, which are usually breakfast and lunch. I would love to just not think about them at all and that would also free up additional money for better meals and drinks with friends and dates.

I don't think the liquid approach he is going for a good one though from a mechanical anatomical view. Bulk provides important functions, especially in the colon. Not having it in the diet could mean if he did end up with a girlfriend, that first date could be spent in the bathroom.

I think my approach would be more along the lines of a porridge with some supplements added in.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#322

Post by mikeash »

stouset wrote: post #319
mikeash wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there any reason to think that "separately" is the preferred way? As for not knowing the components of a healthy diet, that objection applies equally to taking in food the normal way, so I really don't see the relevance. If we don't know enough to build a proper slurry that contains everything, then we don't know enough to build a proper normal diet that contains everything.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#323

Post by DanBC »

zeteo wrote: post #317
a_p wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Some people are geniuses (or close enough). Other people? Not so much.

This guy pretty much falls into the not so much category.

He forgot to include iron!

Did Musk forget to include $ROCKETRY_COMPONENT?

I'm glad that there are people willing to do interesting new stuff. I'm glad that some of these people are happy to experiment on themselves. I'm even glad if some of these people turn out to be idiots.

I get a bit unhappy when someone who doesn't appear to know what they're talking about (and who has demonstrated their ignorance) goes on to say that they've got some answer that other people should be listening to. When these people say "It worked for me! You need to try this!" all sorts of bells start ringing.

Asking people not to push their uninformed experimental pseudo-science is not the same as asking very clever people to not be clever in other fields.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#324

Post by jessaustin »

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…

But if [he gets some] analogue of scurvy or something, I... will probably even have nontrivial schadenfreude.

That is the most conservative thing I've heard in at least a year, and I live in the Midwest. With a mindset so diametrically opposed to that of the hacker, how can you stomach HN?

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#325

Post by dougk16 »

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.

Well, I could link you to a bunch of studies that say otherwise, but then you would tell me all the reasons that those studies are bogus, and then show me a bunch of studies that show there is no connection (probably sponsored by those peddling chemotherapy et al.), so I guess we'll just avoid the rathole and stay convinced of our own opinions :)

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#326

Post by reycharles »

ceejayoz wrote: post #156
phil wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_aging

If you're eating aged beef, you're going to know about it, because it's going to be $30/pound... and this is hardly the sort of processing people should be concerned about.

I thought all beef was aged. I have heard the taste is unpalatable at best if it's not aged at all. I'm really curious.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#327

Post by prodigal_erik »

tn13 wrote: post #79

Doesn't make sense to me at all. Yes, it is really good thing to be really busy with something in life. But are you really that busy that you dont have time to enjoy a good healthy meal? What abut sex ? What about girlfriend or wife ? Hey and is sleeping is also waste of time ? Well, there are always pathological cases like this particular man in question but I dont think anyone else should even try this sort of stuf…

I got fat, unattractive, and out of shape by overeating. Food is a visceral experience that it's not healthy for me to be too attached to, and I'm more than willing to sacrifice it in return for more of all the others. I'm already alternating between small meals and protein shakes (plus fiber) to dull my carb cravings and lose weight.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#328

Post by gph »

dasil003 wrote: post #209
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…

> 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. Nutrition science is in its infancy. It's clear that the complexity of the interaction of food as it is digested and interacting with our organism has barely had the surface scratched. Also, if you look at the rise of processed foods alo…

>Also, if you look at the rise of processed foods along with obesity, diabetes, and other health problems that have increased over the past century it's clear that there are some serious problems, and they haven't been explained conclusively by this or that macro-nutrient trend.

>So given the state of the evidence, a vague evolutionary assertion that whole foods are generally healthier than a distilled diet of completely isolated nutrients is not granola flag-waving woowoo nonsense, it's a perfectly reasonable belief based on imperfect evidence.

Isn't it possible that this is more indicative of the rise in an imbalanced diet? Processed foods may have lead the majority of people into having an imbalanced diet, but if they were instead eating a perfectly balanced diet of processed materials like this man is doing, isn't it possible there wouldn't be the whole diabetes, obesity, etc. health crisis?

To put it bluntly, is there actually evidence that a balanced processed diet is any worse than a balanced whole foods diet?

If not, I think professionals should attempt to recreate this type of experiment to find out, obviously safely on animals first. The whole principal of science is that you don't hold onto preconceived opinions when testing theories. Holding onto a "processed foods are bad, because look what's been happening" POV is very unscientific and harmful.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#329

Post by DanBC »

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…

This optimisation is about removing everything except nutrients from food.

Thus he removes taste, texture, price, familiarity, ethical sourcing, halal-ness or kosher-ness, everything except the nutrient.

We know it's a premature optimisation because we already have liquid feeds, and use is restricted to a few niche communities. (Cancer patients; anorexics being force fed; dieters; body builders.) There's nothing stopping you walking into a shop and buying high quality liquid feed today. Very few people do it because it's a lousy way of getting nutrients. People like eating food.

Perhaps I just misunderstand what you mean about optimisation?

The rest of this post is just me ranting, and isn't directed at you, but HN threads about food drive me mental and I need to get this out and my "save to draft" plugin broke (and I haven't fixed it yet) so here it is.

I just have no idea why anyone thinks this guy is doing anything new or exciting.

Some people seem to think that creating a liquid food is neat. It's kind of neat, but he's clearly an idiot and his product is a ham-fisted attempt to recreate something that already exists.

Some people seem to think that living on liquid, and removing the need to eat, is neat. Well, I have a lot more sympathy for that view point because it's about their opinions and feelings and etc. If that's what they want then good on 'em. I'd gently suggest that if they want to try it they're probably better off buying something created in clean labs with known properties, rather than some guy's weird glop.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#330

Post by driverdan »

grecy wrote: post #38
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 wonder if it's an efficiency thing. Maybe the human body is not efficient when eating heavy, processed things like bread, steak, etc. etc. Is it possible that by eating only what is essential, and in the right balances, the body is more efficient and can extract more useable energy from what goes in? And obviously the mix is different for every person / body type / activity level etc. You can't do this kind of thin…

25% of calories are wasted digesting protein, <5% for everything else.
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