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Soylent Month Three

robrhinehart.com

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Re: Soylent Month Three

#121

Post by XorNot »

corresation wrote: post #112
nemo1618 wrote: post #44

Soylent is certainly polarizing on HN, and pretty much everywhere else as well. This will only be resolved once it's widely available and people can confirm/contest Rob's results. Personally, I'm very curious to give it a trial run. It certainly can't be any worse than what I eat now. Rob said it best: >I'm touched so many people are concerned about my intake of possible unknown essential nutrients. No one seemed to…

No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients. This sort of nonsensical dichotomy seems to infect discussions of this. Yesterday I had a Burger KingTM Whopper (it was, after all, Whopper Wednesday). The day before I had a spring-mix salad with added tomatoes, green onions, and cucumber, and a cucumber dressing, in a day that I also had…

Except its not nonsense - doctors deal with people with this type of narrow diet all the time. Or, not sufficiently varied diet on a day to day basis.

Humans are also awful statisticians - fat people don't think they eat much. Thin people think they eat tons of food. Nobody accurately assesses what they do and don't eat, and our entire society is negatively geared towards maintaining healthy eating patterns anyway (your above example of variety will get blown to hell for most people past a few stressful weeks).

Yes, technically this is unnecessary but that's hardly the point.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#122

Post by XorNot »

adambard wrote: post #75
zeteo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even freshly baked croissants were once an odd novelty.

I encourage you to research what a croissant is and then find and devour one. This comment makes me feel like you're missing out on that.

A croissant is also about the most amount of butter you can possibly fit into a pastry.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#123

Post by XorNot »

jere wrote: post #47

>We don’t live anything like our ancestors. We don’t work like them, talk like them, think like them, travel like them, or fight like them. Why on earth would we want to eat like them? >After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did . I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. I like the doublethink here. Reductionism works fine except when it doesn't. And surely…

A transistor is nowhere near the complexity of a neuron, but networks of them do computational mathematics faster then any human in existence can.

We don't eat cells - we consume relatively simple nutrients from them. Our bodies carry around a strong acid hydrolysis system for the exact purpose of obliterating all that "sophisticated" internal structure.

For that matter, we have no idea what our ancestors were adapted to. The human body has spanned the range and breadth of ecosystems on this planet, and the survivors of that have passed down what they think is safe to eat by tradition, not science.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#124

Post by agilescale »

rafski wrote: post #46

I'm amazed with how much response this guy gets. This is nothing new. My mother used Herbalife protein powder back in the 90's and it was packed with nutrients, minerals and vitamins. It was advertised for weight loss but could also be your nutrition base depending on dosage. I am sure they weren't the only company to offer something like this, there must be plenty.

It must be because:

a. Somebody bothered to post the initial announcement of this guy

b. He describes his process in detail

c. He's a Software Engineer; it would be disingenuous to think that the fact that he's a peer for the members of this audience isn't a factor

Re: Soylent Month Three

#125

Post by itchyouch »

DanBC wrote: post #61
jjcm wrote: post #9

I get lost in my work/play quite a bit and often forget about meals. I'd definitely be interested in trying soylent simply as a meal replacement, especially if ingestion/preparation of it is quick enough not to break my workflow.

There are a bunch of different liquid feeds available. Well known brands include Ensure and Fortisip. ( https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip// ) ( http://ensure.com/ ) These have the advantage of careful preparation and high standards of QA.

Looking at Ensure, it's $42.50 for 24 bottles with 350 calories each. At ~2000/calories per day (6 bottles), it looks to be something that would cost ~$320/month to replace most meals with.

I'd imagine that Soylent's sales success will lie with its price point reaching around ~120-150/month price point. Going much higher than that, and the financial incentive would be lost.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#126

Post by itchyouch »

manmal wrote: post #80

While I would be more than a bit anxious that I miss some nutrient (just like the missing MSM/sulphur) because soylent is a blend of raw earths and isolated ingredients - Rob's mentions of increased focus and better sleep really inspire me to check on what major nutrients I could be missing, and fix that by either supplementing or changing food habits. [I understand that Rob's motivations for using chemically produce…

I've definitely noticed this. If at all anything it's really just provided a framework for thinking about the nutrition that we typically lack on a daily basis.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#127

Post by DennisP »

A guy on reddit who said he was a medical student (and sounded like he really was) said that the nutrients may be fine, but the digestive system needs solid food. Patients stuck on liquid diets tend not to do well long-term, and they try to get them on solid food as fast as they can. He had a technical explanation I don't remember well enough to repeat.

I asked how the Soylent guy would do if he converted the stuff into some kind of solid food bar, and the med student said "Probably much better!"

Re: Soylent Month Three

#128

Post by djcapelis »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #69

I'm concerned less with the long term health effects of this diet as it relates to missing nutrients, and much more concerned about quality control of the individual ingredients themselves. Who's actually checking that, say, the vitamin A palmitate coming from a supplier actually contains the dose requested, and additionally that it contains no other contaminates? The supplement world is like the wild west as far as…

This is a major concern for me as well and one I haven't found out how to mitigate at all outside of just testing most of the components to find out which suppliers are good and which aren't.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#129

Post by kaens »

corresation wrote: post #110
orclev wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He isn't pushing it as a product, he asked for volunteers to help test its suitability as a food substitute. This is research, not marketing.

He isn't pushing it as a product Everything has been pivoting into a kickstarter campaign. He is trying to turn this into a business. Which is all very weird. There are a number of "nutritionally complete" meal supplements on the market. I do not understand why this particular one, with rather quackish supporting claims, gets attention here.

It's probably more like he's trying to turn it into something that can sustain himself while he works on something he's passionate about, which happens to take the form of a business because there aren't many other choices at the moment.

Could be a sham. He's (as far as anyone can tell) dogfooding though, which is, in this case, behavior you'd expect from either a very dedicated sham, or someone who wants to make sure something that they think is a potentially very good idea isn't going to make people terribly sick in three months time.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#130

Post by conjecTech »

jere wrote: post #47

>We don’t live anything like our ancestors. We don’t work like them, talk like them, think like them, travel like them, or fight like them. Why on earth would we want to eat like them? >After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did . I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. I like the doublethink here. Reductionism works fine except when it doesn't. And surely…

>When you try to invent your own environment to live in, there's a good chance you won't be well adapted to that environment.

I guess this statement would necessarily include wearing clothes, living in houses, using glasses, taking antibiotics, and anything else we do to actively counter forces of nature. I'd say we do quite well at that.

I'd like to point out that the rest of that paragraph is simply a strawman argument and is of absolutely no value to this discussion.

Finally, you obviously do not come close to understanding the complexity of transistors if you think that it can be summarized by the number of terminals it has. That is like saying the programming behind an API is simplistic because the API only consists three functions. I've taken multiple semesters of classes specifically on transistors and logic design have never even come close to using the mathematical and physical techniques they use for designing single transistors, let alone large integrated circuits consisting of billions of them. I agree with your point that the complexity is not on par with biological systems, but you are trivializing something far more complex than you think. We are not that helpless.

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