551–560 of 608 posts
"Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition." Bull-fucking-shit. This is a product made by four twenty-somethings, none of whom appears to have a background in nutrition or any kind of health studies. To trust your health to these people would be fucking stupid. Jesus. Also:…
I read this initially assuming it to be a clever spoof on the whole startup / crowdsourcing scene, because of the name: pick something that is obviously a joke product ("Soylent Green is people!") and run with it - start piling on impressive claims, include startup-y backgrounds for the founders, and be really vague about what the product actually is. Given my initial interpretation, I thought the "Is soylent vegan a…
I mean, in Soylent Green it's all about "freeing your body" as well.
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Will it? Plenty of pseudoscientific snake oil products get sold for decades without research and evidence behind it. Colon cleanses, homeopathy, etc.
Look how much scrutiny Soylent is receiving already. It has the potential to fully or nearly fully replace food. This won't go unnoticed and untested for long. What the heck are snake oils? I've never heard of that.
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>people might think they can eat Soylent and nothing else. Isn't that the intent? Rob Rhinehart (creator) lived for a period of one month eating Soylent and nothing else. My understanding is that Soylent is intended to be a meal replacement , not a supplement of some kind.
He's still eating Soylent, and has been consuming it for now 4 months I think.
While I'd love for this to be a safe, reliable option, and might even try it as a replacement for some proportion of meals if/when it becomes more widely available, their marketing claims far exceeds what they have evidence for so far.
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I don't have a scientific background but I still manage to do okay choosing my own food at the grocery store. Soylent doesn't have to be the pinnacle of human nutrition, it just has to be better than burritos and ramen and freezer pizza.
> I still manage to do okay choosing my own food at the grocery store That's because the FDA regulates food. Read The Jungle [0] if you want to know how things were before the FDA existed. These guys need to understand that biotech is nothing like tech and shut this shit down before they kill someone. There's a good reason why you don't see uneducated teenagers "disrupting" the food and drug industries. This isn't li…
Unless you are claiming that these guys are likely to put dangerous, non-FDA approved substances in their product?
The comment you respond to makes the point that while there's plenty of possibilities for dangerously deficient diets at any grocery store, and lot of people do choose diets - from regular grocery stores - that are extremely limited, most of us do ok.
And that is what Soylent needs to match or beat in order to avoid doing harm. The bar is extremely low considering some of the stuff I've survived on for extensive periods of time, and the type of diets I see others manage on.
That's not to say that they shouldn't aim higher, but there are a lot of people here that seems to be completely oblivious to just how shitty diets a lot of people live on.
That said, I think their marketing claims are well in excess of what they have evidence for, and it saddens me a bit that they feel that hyperbole is necessary. I also hope they put a lot more effort into testing.
Guys, please don't do this. We've met at YC, and I think you are great guys, but some things in the video are false. Soylent is definitely not "perfectly tailored to your body" and it probably isn't "everything the body needs", for the simple reason that nobody has any idea what the body needs, let alone how to tailor a perfect diet. Nutrition research is extremely complex and fraught with false findings. When John I…
Soylent is the sort of thing that could seriously damage your health. I know that several people have trialled it over the course of a few months, but nutritional deficiencies can take much longer to develop. For example I don't recall ever reading that oral health was being monitored during the trials - when you're not chewing anything, your teeth will fall out.
I'm sorry but I truly do believe that selling Soylent would be dangerous and irresponsible. Please, don't sell Soylent to anybody until you've done some proper clinical trials.