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How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

motherboard.vice.com

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Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#251

Post by nsxwolf »

quantumpotato_ wrote: post #222
nsxwolf wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not following. In what way is a McDonalds hamburger artificial? It's bread. It's meat. Even if there are mechanically separated parts of the meat, they're still meat. Even if it's as artificial as you say, isn't food that "looks real" and "tastes good" better than food that "looks like deplorable shit" and "tastes like deplorable shit" and is unapologetically named after something horrible from a 1970s dystopian…

Read this: http://www.amazon.com/Fast-Food-Nation-Dark-All-American/dp/... and tell me if you want to eat at McDonald's again.

I've read Fast Food Nation (and have seen the Richard Linklater adaptation) and it didn't give me pause at all.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#252

Post by trentmb »

pyrocat wrote: post #234
trentmb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the earliest signs of scurvy start at the one month mark, I don't consider suspicion of a 30 day trial to be overly cautious.

What are the early signs of scurvy? I didn't see mention of that in the Vice article.

A feeling of general crumminess, tired all the time. Then comes the breathing problems and bone aches.

Per usual, there's a very informative wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#Symptoms

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#253

Post by aianus »

ceejayoz wrote: post #209
pbreit wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reports so far are that it definitely has an impact on happiness and mental well-being: a positive one.

The reports are mostly involved parties and early adopter types. Not only is there a lot of potential bias involved, but a proper study has all sorts of important elements - double-blindness, valid controls, ethics boards, etc.

I don't think it's possible to do a double-blind study on Soylent.

I guess you could blend up normal food and water it down to the same consistency but it would still taste like food so I don't think it would fool anyone.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#255

Post by smsm42 »

berberous wrote: post #149
pionar wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

They are not. They are caused by unhealthy lifestyles maintained by people. It is convenient blaming everything on HFCS, but the truth is, if you eat cheeseburgers with cola daily and not expel extra calories with vigorous work, that's what is producing diabetes and obesity, not HFCS. Shifting responsibility from personal to "shady corporations made me fat" is bullshit.

And, btw, the reason food industry is using HFCS is not because they are evil, but because agrisector lobbied high tariffs on sugar imports, while at the same time subsidizing corn. Which makes using HFCS produced from cheap corn practical alternative to buying sugar with its artificially inflated prices. So even if you intend to place blame of HFCS, you chose wrong industry to blame.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#256

Post by dragontamer »

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.…

The backlash is "We don't know, and you dumbass without a degree are trying to figure this out without any formal training".

I welcome doctors, researchers, and people who know what they are doing to experiment with the human body. But when a computer science major armed with nothing but a few textbooks in body chemistry claims that he has "figured the body out", I am going to assume otherwise.

Does he have any cooking experience? What is his medical background?

Its not so much that "we don't know", but "the creator of Soylent clearly doesn't know", and yet he wants us to believe that he does.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#257

Post by smsm42 »

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…

Why would I eat a rubber meat on rubber bread in McD if I can get real meat with real veggies next door? Yes, I'd probably have to spend whole whopping $10 or so on such a meal. But given that it takes only 75 minutes of work even on minimum wage to earn such meal, I don't think it's inaccessible.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#258

Post by KeliNorth »

foobarqux wrote: post #202
KeliNorth wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a real fan of chewing food, but having done a similar diet before I prefer it. Turns out that even though me and food don't always get along, after 3 weeks on a liquid diet the cravings for real food for me come back. There are plenty of weightlifters who have done similar full-liquid diets for years before soylent, this data exists but has been largely ignored since it's from a different kind of community. A…

> There are plenty of weightlifters who have done similar full-liquid diets for years before soylent Name one competitive weightlifter, powerlifter or bodybuilder that lived primarily on a shake made from powder for years.

As in people doing these diets years before soylent, not years on said diet. My grammar might not've been clear enough.

EDIT: Specifically I'm thinking of the hundreds (if not thousands by now) of people on T-Nation/Testosterone Nation who've done the 1-month Velocity diet, which is (or was, I haven't been there in years, but that particular diet has been around for at least 5 years+), a protein shake diet with very little solid food. There are years of people doing it for a month and relating their experiences, highlights and downfalls, and I'm sure there are several more experiences in that world that would provide better data points. However, it has the issue of being mostly anecdotal evidence.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#259

Post by smsm42 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #178
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…

I'm not following. In what way is a McDonalds hamburger artificial? It's bread. It's meat. Even if there are mechanically separated parts of the meat, they're still meat. Even if it's as artificial as you say, isn't food that "looks real" and "tastes good" better than food that "looks like deplorable shit" and "tastes like deplorable shit" and is unapologetically named after something horrible from a 1970s dystopian…

Well, whatever is called "bread" in most of the US, especially things served in fast food, etc. have very distant relationship with real bread. Anybody who tried the real thing would never agree that the real thing and the spongy rubbery tasteless thing served in fast food should be even named with the same word.

Re: How I Ate No Food for 30 Days

#260

Post by obstacle1 »

w1ntermute wrote: post #226
obstacle1 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried to submit the investigation article, too, and the same happened to me. Worrisome. Is YCombinator invested in Soylent?

The CEO, Rob Rhinehart, is a YC alum.

Well, that makes sense. Also someone upthread mentioned that YC Partners does indeed own a stake in Soylent [1].

[1] - http://blog.soylent.me/post/64789154918/soylent-funding-anno...

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