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Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

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Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#101

Post by oblique63 »

applecore wrote: post #90
graeme wrote: post #2

I just posted this to Tim's Blog: --------------------- It seems probable that soylent is better than much of the manufactured food on the market. It also seems unlikely that soylent is better than quality whole food. I take Nassim Taleb's approach. We don’t know what we don’t know about food. I’d like to address two of Shane’s points. I'm listing the objections Shane raises, then his reply: Shane's first point: Obje…

> We have thousands of years of history of humans doing well on whole foods, and zero evidence that the human body can do as well on artificial foods. We had thousands of years of history of humans doing well on earth, and zero evidence that the human body could survive in space. How do you find out without testing?

I don't know why people downvoted you, but it's true that you need testing to explore these things. Unfortunately, it's one of those things where you can't just prove the absence of something (in this case: danger).

I found the preceding comment equally odd:

> We can nonetheless have a strong presumption that the body does best on whole foods.

Not really. The commenter even said it himself: "we don't know what we don't know about food". We can acknowledge that 'whole foods' are adequately sustainable for humans, but extrapolating any additional meaning from their traditional role is baseless without further study. Thus, saying that 'adequate' == 'best' is making a huge leap of logic in an area that we haven't even figured out enough to begin optimizing it yet.

I don't support soylent, and I don't believe any other MRPs are fully adequate either, but that doesn't mean we should throw out the baby with the bathwater here...

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#102

Post by carbocation »

marze wrote: post #84
alphaoverlord wrote: post #9

I'm all for people having the freedom to eat whatever they want and I really like the quantified self aspect of seeing how diet affects how they feel and metrics of health, but I have to say the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data. I'm not going to comment on the drink, but rather on his misunderstanding of medicine. First, EGFR is not "Epidermal Growth Factor R…

Nice job missing the forest but spotting a few trees. I see some promising initial signs given the short duration of the trial. Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. The guy doesn't claim to be a medical expert, he just did his best to report the results of a bunch of miscellaneous tests that were sug…

Imagine that there was a drug that reduced your renal function by 25% in two weeks.[1]

People will see in this what they want to see. This is why case reports are evidence of the lowest grade. This is more a curio than it is evidence, and there is nothing wrong with writing a blog post about a curio.

1 = I think the creatinine bump is quite likely due to stochastic fluctuation, but if for discussion's sake we attribute all positive changes to Soylent, we should do the same for the negative ones.

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#103

Post by pbreit »

krrrh wrote: post #42
nbouscal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not see a problem, but over 10,000 backers (myself included) do. I'd be happy to go into more detail about why if you would like.

I'm curious. Specifically about what you think Soylent offers that the wide variety of MRPs rhat have been on the market dor decades don't. Is it the concept of literally replacing all of your meals? To me it seems that there are dozens of existing MRPs that beat Soylent on price, flavor, and quality. But I have rarely seen any manufacturer claim that you can replace every meal with their product, and when they do it…

Can you name 2 or 3 (1?) that are marketed for 15-21 meals per week?

I don't think anyone is expecting to replace all 21 meals per week with Soylent (including the creator, who specifically said that his regular meals have become more delightful).

For me, the aspects that resonate are: 1) weight management, 2) ease and time savings, 3) cost savings & 4) increased alertness & energy.

If you have any suggestions on what I should consider until Soylent is ready, I'm all ears.

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#104

Post by bobzimuta »

jurassic wrote: post #59
cup wrote: post #6

Soylent aside, im amazed at how terrible his traditional normal days meal is? I mean hes eating a processed breakfast subsitute in the morning, take away mexican food with a soft drink for lunch and more take away for dinner. You don't need to be a nutritionist to know thats going to have a terrible impact on his life later down the track. Postnote: Now that Ive read the whole article, I wonder if all the benefits he…

What's the big deal? What this guy is eating already is definitely above average in quality. A Chipotle burrito bol (fresh whole ingredients, sans tortilla) is a legit meal. Other than dental impacts from the carbonation, health hysteria about diet soda and aspartame has been debunked. I don't know about the take-out Thai, but at least it's real food and not some preservative-laden packaged food product from the groc…

Above average in quality? He was taking in nearly twice the daily recommended intake of sodium [1] and nearly all of his self reported vitamin/mineral intake was about 1/3 of the daily recommended levels.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsSodium/

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#105

Post by beagle3 »

w1ntermute wrote: post #41
alphaoverlord wrote: post #9

I'm all for people having the freedom to eat whatever they want and I really like the quantified self aspect of seeing how diet affects how they feel and metrics of health, but I have to say the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data. I'm not going to comment on the drink, but rather on his misunderstanding of medicine. First, EGFR is not "Epidermal Growth Factor R…

One of the best parts about this whole Soylent debacle is getting to watch well-known people make complete fools of themselves by commenting on things that they clearly know absolutely nothing about, but still feel like they have the right to make authoritative statements on.

That's true, from both the "for" and "against sides". Anyone who things that only happens on one of the sides should check their confirmation bias.

And no, this is not an "every opinion deserves equal airtime" claim. The vast majority of nutrition and health experts draw on a mix of science, pseudo science and superstition, and assume it is all science.

(Quick check: Think salt intake causes hypertension? That dietary cholesterol (and cholesterol in general) is bad for you? That you can only get B-12 from meat, or that cows make it? If you answered "yes", your answers are not based on science)

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#106

Post by jacques_chester »

nbouscal wrote: post #83
jacques_chester wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of things were invented for "lazy" people so they could save time to do other more important things. Those things were invented to avoid displeasure . Most people find eating pleasurable , it's something they actively seek to do. It's like saying "guys, I've invented a way to have children without that boring orgasm nonsense". For some small segment of the population, that is the best news ever . But I don't…

No, it's more like if you were forced to have sex three times a day every single day, and most of those times it was with someone you weren't attracted to. Every time I eat fast food or takeout because I'm either too tired from work to cook or don't have enough time to, I feel terrible, I spend too much money, and I damage my body. If I can replace that experience with something reasonably healthful, affordable, and…

> Soylent is a fantastic alternative.

This is where you lose me.

Extending my analogy, you're replacing sex thrice daily with anorgasmic sex, thrice daily.

I'm not seeing the upside.

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#107

Post by marze »

alphaoverlord wrote: post #99
marze wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice job missing the forest but spotting a few trees. I see some promising initial signs given the short duration of the trial. Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. The guy doesn't claim to be a medical expert, he just did his best to report the results of a bunch of miscellaneous tests that were sug…

Again, my first paragraph is: > I'm all for people having the freedom to eat whatever they want and I really like the quantified self aspect of seeing how diet affects how they feel and metrics of health, but I have to say the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data. I'm not going to comment on the drink, but rather on his misunderstanding of medicine. I'm not tryin…

"Self experimentation might be useful, but only if you understand the metrics you measure and whether its stochastic noise or meaningful results."

I feel you miss the whole point of self experimentation. If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know.

A low-risk food product (such as this) can simply be trialed in a n=1 trial. If the results are positive, great. If not, go back to what you were doing before.

All the studies in the world only suggest how something might work for you. It is only the n=1 test that matters.

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#108

Post by c0rtex »

It would be very exciting to see some long-term study results on this.

Also: Q: As long as we're food hacking, why not open-source it and post it on GitHub? A: It's a liquid. You can't fork it.

But seriously, the open-source version of this could be the nutritional version of the OLPC.

Re: Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

#109

Post by visakanv »

jlgreco wrote: post #86
jacques_chester wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, that's the whole pitch for Soylent. "I'm just a smart guy with a fresh pair of eyes who spent a few weekends reading undergrad textbooks and skimming pubmed". Not: "we're a large company with deeply-interested professionals who've made this their life's work, our own multi-million dollar labs and decades of accumulated experience in the development, testing, validation and manufacture of temporary foo…

This Soylent thing is literally the SV techie equivalent of those "This School Teacher(tm) found one weird trick to [BLANK]... [BLANKERS] hate her!" advertisements that we all like to make fun of. Why do those ads use "school teachers"? Because it is relatable to the target audience and sufficiently anti-authoritarian that they don't question the credentials.

Well it's like that story of Colonel H. McMaster, who DID technically find "one weird trick", and the Army DID pass him over for promotions, etc...

I'm not for or against Soylent, and I usually find this kind of advertising annoying, but it's also entirely possible that people further down the chain of command in any system discover things that people higher-up won't or can't.

That's part of the entire premise of why startups work, no?

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