31–40 of 70 posts
Another "stop liking what I don't like" view. You could make similar arguments against fast food and other products of convenience.
Why "live on it"? I don't live on exclusively on anything else. It's a cool idea and I hope it replaces "some" meals because occasionally I just don't have the time and it has to be better (and more convenient) than fast food. Why do we have to take good things to extremes and set up unnecessary "all or nothings"?
I think having a "standard diet" which takes food out of the picture would make it much easier to figure out how all the other pieces fit together.
I'm working on the website Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your poop like?
Fairly normal, maybe a bit paler.
What prompted the question is the recent spate of articles on gut flora. That was the first thing I thought of when I heard of Soylent--what does it do to your microbiome? If anyone can speak or speculate knowledgeably on the topic, I'm curious.
From the article: Rhinehart is well aware of the fact that Soylent isn’t the first beverage designed to replace meals. He considered using Ensure for his initial no-eating experiment, but found it much too expensive, too sugary, too unpalatable, and sub-optimal in its ingredient make-up. The differentiating factor seems to be in the intended purpose. Meal-replacement shakes have never been presented as a food — somet…
The primary reason is that there are almost zero proper clinical trials and interventional studies. We have thousands of cohort studies which prove almost nothing.
For example, for 60 years saturated fat has been considered the enemy of cardiovascular health (because of some poorly conducted cohort studies in the 60's and 70's). Just this March, BMJ published a major meta study that showing that there are no proven causal links between saturated fat and heart disease. In fact it is now being suggested that avoiding saturated fat has been detrimental because Americans have replaced fat intake with high glycemic index foods causing obesity and T2D.
Personally I have no doubt that Soylent will fail to provide some required nutrient or fail to induce a certain hormonal or chemical response which is obtained via natural food intake. We simply don't understand nutrition well enough to check all the boxes. That said, if Soylent wanted to follow the scientific method and conduct a proper interventional clinical trial with a control group, adequate study population and duration I would be happy to consider the results.
I'm seriously considering it, at least as an experiment. I have type 1 diabetes, so I'm constantly trying to figure out how much insulin to take -- and I don't always get it right. This is mostly a matter of judging the food I'm consuming, but not completely; there's also endocrine issues which affect blood glucose levels (usually pushing them up), and exercise usually pulls blood glucose levels down. I think having…