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How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

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Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#141

Post by lowboy »

jlgreco wrote: post #132
lowboy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going back to lawnmowers, it would be like not wrapping the handle with leather for comfort because we can't prove that it's safe for the lawnmower. We think it's safe, we're pretty sure from our understanding that it's safe, but we can't prove it. I say give it a try. Let's wrap the handle, observe in operation, and then react when we have more data.

Back to your hyper-relaxed "the human body is no more complicated or serious than a machine" thing? I can't believe I have not made myself clear on this already, but I'll give it one more go: You can fuck around with lawn mowers because breaking one typically doesn't fucking kill somebody. If you break your fucking lawnmower, you buy a new one. You don't get to buy another human. Such a lazy attitude towards human sa…

It's only a problem if it harms a human suddenly and irreversibly. I'm guessing that anyone who was suffering problems from a dietary change would have time to correct.

Show me some evidence or even some indication that Soylent will result in an irreversible and sudden decline in health.

I'm guessing that you won't, or can't.

Your argument is "We don't know, so let's not risk it". The risk here is minimal. If it fails to live up to the hype, it's reversible.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#142

Post by Tarrosion »

I found this very troubling:

"I wasn’t drinking enough water. At the factory, Rob told me that was a common mistake; since Soylent is a shake, people figure they don’t have to drink extra water—an easy way to get dehydrated."

Failing so thoroughly to communicate how to use your product that users become dehydrated within two days is a serious mistake, though thankfully not a common one.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#143

Post by freyrs3 »

tolmasky wrote: post #115
yuvadam wrote: post #69

Soylent might, technically, work. It might be safe and healthy, it definitely looks simple and allows you to forget anything related to grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up afterwards. But thinking about the prospect of the future makes me sick to my stomach. Soylent paints a disgustingly frightening dystopia where humans are fed 100% "correct" food to allow them to continue being cogs in the business machine, n…

Its funny because we already live in this dystopia and you simply don't notice it because the plastic food we eat "looks real" and "tastes good". What is the difference between the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds and Soylent? The fact that its basically "molded" to look like the real food we used to eat? The reality is that we long ago crossed the line into having a society that mostly eats ab…

> let's tell everyone carbohydrates are the most important staple to eat and let's put corn and sugar in everything

Seems to be conflating two parties here. The USDA guidelines are written by government nutritionists and there are sound scientific reasons for recommending the base of any diet be grains. Though being a free country, whether or not the private sector decides to put corn syrup in everything is their own prerogative and unrelated to government guidelines.

> At least Soylent is trying to harness this machine for good.

Soylent is a private company, not an aid organization. Barring them irresponsibly marketing their product as a "total food replacement" I wouldn't call what they are doing good or bad.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#144

Post by ogreyonder »

moocowduckquack wrote: post #66
tzakrajs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the mold occurred when the packaging was compromised -- this is not related to the conditions of the manufacturing.

It might be related to the rat.

You might be a literate orangutan.

Figured I'd join in on the speculation while it's fresh.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#145

Post by Pxtl »

lowboy wrote: post #85
Pxtl wrote: post #68

> “You’re not going to feed a booming population with organic farms,” Rob says. This is a popular misconception. While organic farming requires far more labour than conventional farming and the yields are lower for the same land, it's not actually that much lower. We're talking about a 5-30% drop in yield. Not great, but not "OMG mass worldwide starvation" change. And that's while being vastly more efficient with fre…

Organic growing techniques use "vastly" less water? How so? I'm guessing that there's a correlation between farmers who choose to grow organic and those who try to conserve water, but I can't see how one is "vastly" different.

... yeah, I might've overstated that, which is particularly hypocritical given the thrust of my post.

Anyhow, I can't find the original article, but the idea is that organic farming techniques produce soil that's far better at retaining water and preventing wasteful evaporation.

Also, there's the secondary matter of fertilizer runoff contaminating local ground-water.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#146

Post by tolmasky »

derleth wrote: post #125
tolmasky wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its funny because we already live in this dystopia and you simply don't notice it because the plastic food we eat "looks real" and "tastes good". What is the difference between the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds and Soylent? The fact that its basically "molded" to look like the real food we used to eat? The reality is that we long ago crossed the line into having a society that mostly eats ab…

> the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds Define 'completely artificial' here. It's meat, it's bread, it's vegetables and condiments.

There's a difference between "meat", and grain-fed, antibiotic treated cow meat. And last time I made bread, it didn't magically develop high fructose corn syrup or ammonium chloride, and yet, somehow it appears in the "bread" of a McDonalds hamburger. It goes without saying that the condiments are more or less by definition artificial processed foods. And let's not even get into the amount of sodium in this thing. You'll also notice there's basically no fiber in this thing (that's why it lasts so long).

Define "completely artificial"? At least as artificial as Soylent.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#147

Post by abuehrle »

justin66 wrote: post #121
abuehrle wrote: post #82

The three NYC food critics (11:20 in the video) really bugged me. Their immediate smug dismissal of the product and idea was predetermined. Maybe I'm reading too much into what was shown, but I got the impression that there was no possible world in which they give Soylent a chance. I'm not necessarily a believer, but I'm noticing this behavior more and more often as I get older and it's increasingly bothering me.

> Their immediate smug dismissal of the product and idea was predetermined. Maybe I'm reading too much into what was shown, but I got the impression that there was no possible world in which they give Soylent a chance. Why would they? The best possible case is that it tastes like a milkshake or malt or something good like that. At which point, they're still arguing against a monoculture of millions of identical milks…

I believe no one associated with Soylent has ever claimed it to be a culinary delight, and no one is trying to stop people from enjoying food when they want to eat for that purpose. To have these critics evaluating Soylent by their usual metrics in a pseudo-experimental setting is disingenuous. The guy critic even used the word "stupid". It's not a stupid, it's just not good at something it never claimed to be good at.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#148

Post by timr »

lowboy wrote: post #137
jckt wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe not as violent, but a bad diet can quickly lead to disease. We never see it in the affluent West but micronutrient disease was and still is a pretty big problem -- you are getting enough food energy, so while you're not starving, you're still dying from your diet. We've only begun to start understanding some of these diseases (like Pellagra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellagra#Epidemiology ), and we don't rea…

Yeah, I agree that there's a lot that we don't know about the human body, and I disliked any claims by Soylent that overreached in this way. But we do know about nutrients and have a good idea of the proportion of them for the avg human. I think my main problem with the backlash is with the argument that boils down to "We don't know, so let's not risk it". I don't see why we can't try it, and then monitor and react.…

"But we do know about nutrients and have a good idea of the proportion of them for the avg human."

We really, really don't. You could be excused for thinking we've got it all figured out if you listened only to news reporting on nutrition studies, but there's so much contradictory information out there that it's difficult to know which end is up.

For example: Soylent, according to the story, is partially fish oil. Did you know that there's a study out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center that strongly suggests that fish oil supplementation increases the incidence of aggressive, fatal prostate cancers? What was once a nutrient panacea is likely now contraindicated in men.

Does this mean that Soylent shouldn't be using fish oil? Hard to say. I doubt that even the creators have any idea.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#149

Post by berberous »

pionar wrote: post #122
nightski wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The food industry as a whole is one big hack, even with it's fancy regulations and bureaucracy. People are dying constantly due to the failures of the industry. It is nice to see fresh ideas.

>People are dying constantly due to the failures of the industry. Wait, what? Not even anywhere near true[1]. The CDC says 3,000 people in the US die every year from foodborne illnesses. That's .1%, one-tenth of a percent. I'd say that's a pretty good track record. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/

I think he probably means things like the diabetes or obesity epidemics, which in large part are caused by the failures of the industry, and their reliance on things like HFCS.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#150

Post by MLfan »

fredsters_s wrote: post #49
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #32

EDIT: Unbelievable. Both the title and the link to the article I commented on have been swapped from the PandoDaily article ( http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/12/vice-investigates-soylent-f... ) to the Vice article which PandoDaily referred to, but that tries to give it a positive spin. This goes well beyond whatever policy pg was trying to defend recently. This is deeply manipulative. --- It looks a scam, it sounds lik…

As a long-time beta user I can tell you that it works as described.

Have you also tried Sports Nutrition, they also have shakes and powders –some proteins, the ingredients can be similar. The whole article sounds like a fancy way to reinvent a bike. What’s new in this substitution food endeavor? One can live for 30 days on shakes and sports nutrition, or it can be used as a supplement to traditional food. One can even leave with No food at all if drinking a lot of water and juices for 30 days, some people do that. Why investing several millions in it? To create another hype?
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