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Two Months of Soylent

robrhinehart.com

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Re: Two Months of Soylent

#121

Post by tassl »

nawitus wrote: post #25
bsmith wrote: post #7

> Some people tell me going "ketogenic", or reducing carbs is healthy. I am now skeptical of this claim as lowering carbs makes me feel hungry and tired, and the drink taste less sweet. Perhaps it would be possible after an unpleasant transition period, but I don’t see the ultimate gain... Their advice seems to fall in line with the paleo/primal philosophies—in a nutshell: man only started eating a significant amount…

10k years is plenty enough: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/10/paleofantasy_stone_age_delus... In fact, 10k years is enough for dogs to have evolved to digest carbs a lot better. There's even specific genes that are known to help that.

10K years hasn't been enough for cats, apparently. Plus, the lifespan of a dog is ~7 times shorter than the lifespan of a man, which will give them at least 7 generations more to adapt.

Obviously there has been some adaptation to the change of diet, and it is also obvious that this diet was not letal to human (or nobody would have adopt it), but this does not implies that it is optimal for human consumption. Most people in my region are not lactose intolerant... but do you know what? I threw up every time that my mother had me drink a glass of milk because it was "healthy" and good for my bones. If adaptation depends that much between humans (the % of lactose intolerant or lactase persistent is not the same in the US than in China or Africa, for example), trying to correlate anything with animals seem completely off to me.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#122

Post by Centigonal »

Semaphor wrote: post #52
username111 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried just the fizzy flavored water you can buy at the grocery store? The taste takes some getting used to (not really sweet when compared to cokes) but I've found that what I liked most about soda is the fizz. After dropping soda I can't even drink half a can because of the sweetness but YMMV.

I like the slightly bitter taste of cola and of course the caffeine.

You should try making your own. The Coke recipe is actually pretty simple -- most of the "super secret formula" stuff is for marketing. A quick Google will bring up a bunch of different versions, like the ones on this[1] helpful page.

You can order the ingredients whenever you're sure you want to try it (most of them keep for a long time). Then, when you get a few hours free on the weekend, you can make a batch of soda syrup. You can experiment with the ingredients and fine-tune it to be perfect.

If you want to try something slightly different (which, unfortunately, requires processed sugars AFAICT), you can try making ginger ale at home! Here's a simple and practical guide[2] that I used to learn how to make some, which serendipitously was written by a San Francisco tech startups guy.

[1]: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/427/o... [2]: http://tashian.com/carl/archives/2009/03/ginger_ale.php

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#123

Post by jongraehl »

gnaritas wrote: post #115
gwern wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's rather the point of Soylent, to deliver a well balanced diet. Comparing a well-balanced diet with Soylent is not a waste of time: if nothing else, it's evidence for the debate about whether all the micronutrients and random stuff in 'real' food is subjectively noticeable in the short-term or whether you really can get away with just macronutrients and a few other chemicals.

I don't see how what you said related in any way to what I said. Where did I say anything was a waste of time?

To recap, m_d wishes to see a comparison at the same protein+fat+carbs (normal non-junk food) vs. soylent.

gnaritas objects.

gwern supports m_d.

gnaritas has an opportunity to qualify his objection, but chooses not to.

(fwiw, I'm also extremely interested in all manner of "are there valuable yet-to-be-identified substances in real food" experiments.)

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#124

Post by jff »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #116
jff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could keep myself fully nourished for $5/day ($150/month), I'd be pretty damn happy. We don't even have to talk about the third world to see possible benefits. We're always hearing about how America's poor don't have time to prepare food and are thus "forced" to buy, essentially, McDonald's. Well, you can feed yourself 3 sandwiches off the dollar menu a day on that budget, or for $5/day you can get (theoreticall…

You may or may not be old enough to remember "instant breakfast" [1] but it was a "week 2" meal in my dorm in college, meaning if your stipend/outside income was limited to a bi-weekly paycheck you could "get by" if some of last few meals in week 2 were just instant breakfast. Rice/beans/tortillas were a better choice but had more prep time. That said, it's an interesting question on the market for food products the…

Yep, I've had "instant breakfast", it can even be tasty if you don't have it very often.

When writing my comment, I wasn't really considering the sociological implications of where I was going, I was simply thinking that I, if living on a $5/day food budget, would be pretty happy with something like Soylent, especially since I presumably wouldn't get that general feeling of malaise that overtakes you after a few McDonald's meals in a row.

You're right, you can't simply go in and say, "Dear poor people, please consume this nutritious gloop". It could be effective as a form of rations in case of emergency, but attempting to put it out there as a basic staple food would be more challenging.

If Soylent is actually as awesome as the creator makes it sound, and it were available in a tub or in pouches at the grocery store, I'd definitely buy it.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#125

Post by jaggederest »

electronvolt wrote: post #90
jaggederest wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, clearly nobody could ever do it then. Wait, no, people study those things all the time. They're difficult, but maybe he has unknown prior background in math, or is gifted in that regard. It's not as though he achieved something that no human ever has before. It's a reasonably routine though difficult task - akin to perhaps completing a marathon.

Using your marathon analogy: A marathon is usually run in about four and a half hours. The best marathon runners in the world (i.e. current record holders) ran one in about 2 hours. The university that I'm at has about 45-48 hours of classroom instruction per semester; you're expected to spend between two and three times that preparing; that's an assumption of between 135 and 192 hours of work per semester. I find th…

> The take away is that it's very easy to fool yourself into thinking you've learned a lot from a math book when you're reading it like a novel. In practice, though, if you aren't doing the exercises (or if they don't exist, working through your own), then you probably aren't actually engaging with the material in any deep and significant way.

Agreed. That doesn't mean he didn't read it and glean a little from it though.

> I actually think this is in line with many of his other claims: he seems to be a person who seems to believe he has learned everything important about a field in a relatively short amount of research time, without having a deep background in it already, either through reading a single textbook or by spending a few hours/days/weeks researching and reading. I think most of his claims should probably be considered in that light.

Agreed, it just smacked of elitism to say that it's not possible to read a textbook without interpretation or instruction. That sort of doctrinaire thinking is just bad policy.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#126

Post by dangero »

gojomo wrote: post #105
dangero wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Intermittent fasting is good." Can you provide a reference for that and define what you mean by "intermittent", "fasting", and "good"?

"Fasting" is not eating. It's usually done for the span of a few meals, or a full day (24-hour period or simply daytime), or even a few days. "Intermittent" might mean fasting once every few weeks, or once a week, or every other day, or even every daytime (as for Muslims during Ramadan). "Good" means a longer life with fewer diseases and less physical or mental decline. Some references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F…

Thank you.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#127

Post by jaggederest »

cheeseprocedure wrote: post #88
abecedarius wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat experiment. If the cod liver oil's for vitamins, I think cooking will mess that up.

It would be really handy to have a table of common raw ingredients, the temperatures at which they become safe to eat (if applicable), and the temperature at which their various nutrients denature.

> the temperatures at which they become safe to eat (if applicable)

Most modern food can be eaten raw. Or lightly seared to kill surface bacteria. Modern food safety is pretty neat. It probably won't taste great though.

NB this does not apply to raw processed meat - for example, ground beef/pork/chicken is probably a bad bet. Surface area to volume ratios are key.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#128

Post by benaiah »

geoka9 wrote: post #12

Sorry, but after reading the following (elsewhere on that blog), I'm hard-pressed not to dismiss this as an elaborate troll. "I read a book on Number Theory in one sitting, a Differential Geometry book in a weekend, filling up a notebook in the process."

Did he actually say he read textbooks? I was under the impression that he was referring to something that would be more suited to the average or even just uninitiated reader. I know a bit about the concepts of quantum mechanics, just from reading various books of varying difficulties on the subject, but I wouldn't claim that it was equivalent to actually taking a course on them or going through a textbook, even when I did take notes.

I realize it's right next to when he says "[I] can read my textbooks twice as long without mental fatigue", but that seems coincidental juxtaposition, rather than him referring to the same books.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't really seem that implausible, if that's the case.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#129

Post by jaggederest »

recuter wrote: post #86
Steko wrote: post #71

Via Wonkblog: For those of us who generally don’t like food, consider it an annoyance, and yearn for a way to avoid eating it, Soylent sounds immensely promising. But is it safe? Surprisingly, the answer from nutrition experts seems to be, “Yeah, probably.” Jay Mirtallo is a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State and the immediate past president of American Society for Parental Enteral Nutrition, which focuses on the sc…

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5369778 Nestle produces something called Modulen specifically for people with IBD. The idea is for people with Crohn's to switch to a liquid diet during bad flare ups to settle things down as digesting food causes inflammation. It is rather expensive. Luckily for me, my insurance covered it (I'm from Israel, so YMMV). The hard part is that you have to pound a…

> I'm the only one my doctors know of who actually was able to adhere to a liquid only diet for a stretch of multiple months, people simply don't have the willpower

My experience was due to jaw surgery: 1 week clear liquid, 4 weeks completely liquid diet, 1 week extremely soft food (baby food).

I lost 30 pounds over that 6 weeks (incidentally, more than should have been possible on a complete fast. Healing is energetically expensive.) . I actually found by the end that I didn't really want to go back to solid food - it was extremely convenient having everything set up for me.

On the other hand, I also essentially lost my sense of taste for that six weeks too - probably made it easier when there's functionally no incentive.

However, when I did return to solid food (after my sense of taste returned), dear god the first bite of mashed potatoes were the best food I have ever eaten.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#130

Post by markerdmann »

MrBra wrote: post #118
markerdmann wrote: post #64

After reading the first Soylent post, I felt inspired to try and come up with a recipe for a "nutritionally complete" soup. I used an online tool that calculates the total nutrients for a recipe and came up with this: 3 potatoes 1 onion 500 grams of wild alaskan salmon 1/2 cup of mushrooms 3.5 tbsp of olive oil 30 grams of sunflower seeds 1 tbsp of dried parsley 2 tbsp of ground thyme 50 grams of parmesan cheese 3 cl…

Could you share the name of the online tool you used? Thanks

Sure, it's at:

http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

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