This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

Let me expound on that: with a few exceptions, most scholarly papers on diet, metabolism, gut function and disorders, metabolic syndrome, etc. are difficult to digest in isolation. Interpreting and critically reviewing new results often requires a large amount of domain knowledge and context by way of other research results.

"I am reticent to provide exact brand names and instructions because I am not fully convinced of the diet's safety for a physiology different than mine. What if I missed something that's essential for someone of a different race or age group"

But he is interested in actually gathering more data, even if not exactly formally enough for a proper study:

"So…I'll just ship you some of my batch. If you are willing to consume exclusively soylent, and get a CBC, chem panel, and lipid blood test before and after the week and share your results with me it's on the house. Bonus points for getting a psych evaluation before and after. The brain is an organ. I can ship it worldwide but it would be nice if you were in San Francisco so we can meet in person."

Further down on his blog, he has also posted PDF's of his bloodwork.

While he certainly does not have sufficient evidence of general safety and effect, he is aware of that and seems to be actively interested in learning about any flaws in what he's done so far.

> The burdon of evidence should be even greater when it's a non-natural source, as Nassim Taleb argues in Antifragile

This, to me, is ridiculous. A vast range of dangerous poisons are readily avaiable in nature.

I used to pick a lot of mushrooms, and can safely identify perhaps a dozen types common where I grew up. But every year there are people who die agonizing deaths from consuming various nasty toxins because they didn't pay close enough attention to what they picked. And the safety of most mushrooms is unknown - we simply don't have data, and the effects can take a long time to show.

In some cases, popular mushrooms are known to be toxic, such as false morels that contains gyromitrin. They are seemingly safe after boiling. Except there is still gyromitrin in the mushroom, just in small enough quantities that you're ok as long as you don't ingest too much. It's typical to recommend no more than one meal per season, as the poison is stored. But many mushrooms contains compounds we don't know the effect of, and where it is perfectly possible that no effect would be noticeable for a very long time - properly cooked false morels for example, might have no effect on you for years, until you get a bit careless with the cooking (a common way for people to get poisoned by false morels is to stand over the pot while boiling it...)

Nature has an abundant supply of horribly nasty toxic substances that might pass for food for a while.

This is before getting into what "natural" even means.

Everything has to prove its harmlessness. It's just that some things we have a lot of existing data for that at least demonstrates a certain level of safety.

But in the absence of data, I'm no more going to be willing to chew on some random "natural" substance than I'd be willing to ingest some random synthetic substance.

I, for one, hope that he proves everyone wrong, and a year from now, I'm mixing up my own Soylent, because though I do love a good meal, I'm a busy person, and I often find myself eating simply to sate hunger. If I could replace that footlong sub with a glass of soylent, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

So I'm "conservative" and have "a mindset diametrically opposed to that of a hacker" because I think someone is more likely than not to get shit wrong in trying to replace the human diet, evolved over aeons, with something he makes in his blender?

I'm all for challenging convention, disruption, experimentation, growth, and such. More than a little revolution, more than merely now and then, is more than just a good thing, in my book. Frankly, I think there are more human institutions that are moribund at best — and more likely actively harmful to the human condition — and desperately in need of replacement than not.

IMO, diet — or at least a healthy diet, where one eats actual food — is not among those things. It seems pretty clear to me that eating plants, and to a lesser extent, things that eat plants, or things that eat things that eat plants... is what our bodies have evolved to do, and correlates very strongly with health and longevity. It's equally clear that eating processed things correlates incredibly highly with all kinds of malady and morbidity.

Now, along comes someone who thinks he knows better than that. I wish him luck. I really, honestly do. I just don't have high hopes for his experiment. And, yes, while I probably will have some schadenfreudey, "Well, you probably should have seen that coming" if he gets it wrong badly enough to suffer some harm, I most certainly don't actually wish that upon him.

We see on practically a weekly basis some new and exciting way in which our understanding of human nutrition has been wrong all along. "Soylent Dude" is basing his recipe on that understanding, which has been demonstrated over and over and over again to be incomplete, misguided, based on faulty information — and even deliberate misinformation — and just plain wrong.

Given all that, please tell me how he's not likely to be missing something, getting something wrong, and potentially doing serious harm to himself, because I just don't see it.

Anyway, world hunger right now is not a problem of there not being enough food, it is a problem of food distribution. There is enough arable land in the Democratic Republic of Congo to feed all of Africa, but wars, greed, and other things stop it from happening.