As a science geek I love this. As a marketer, this name is unfortunate. Interested in the outcomes though. keep it up.
Indeed, you don't want people screaming "Soylent Green is people!"
Soylent Month Three
161–170 of 207 posts
Re: Soylent Month Three
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I encourage you to research what a croissant is and then find and devour one. This comment makes me feel like you're missing out on that.
A croissant is also about the most amount of butter you can possibly fit into a pastry.
This should be the OED definition.
Re: Soylent Month Three
#163A guy on reddit who said he was a medical student (and sounded like he really was) said that the nutrients may be fine, but the digestive system needs solid food. Patients stuck on liquid diets tend not to do well long-term, and they try to get them on solid food as fast as they can. He had a technical explanation I don't remember well enough to repeat. I asked how the Soylent guy would do if he converted the stuff i…
From the subject post: "I made a rather significant change to the formula... I've replaced half of the maltodextrin carbohydrates with oat powder, which ... dramatically increases the fiber content ... I underestimated the importance of fiber in a diet, and went from consuming 1.2g / day to 40g / day."
Fiber mixed with a nutrient soup is not solid food.
Re: Soylent Month Three
#164I'm amazed with how much response this guy gets. This is nothing new. My mother used Herbalife protein powder back in the 90's and it was packed with nutrients, minerals and vitamins. It was advertised for weight loss but could also be your nutrition base depending on dosage. I am sure they weren't the only company to offer something like this, there must be plenty.
If I remember correctly, someone addressed this pretty early on with an argument that hinged on economics. I'm going from memory, but I think that living off of the prepackaged predecessors would be either unworkable (not comprehensive nutrition) or prohibitively expensive (treated as medical supplies rather than food).
Re: Soylent Month Three
#165I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as Ensure. Want to replace a meal with something similar? Throw some milk, oats, protein powder and peanut butter in a blender. Drink it down with a multi-vitamin and a fish oil capsule or two.
Or throw brown rice, lentils/beans, and mixed frozen vegetables in a rice cooker. Add a can of tuna twice a week. For breakfast, prepare a green smoothie with frozen fruit, kale, and maybe some flaxseed.
The only slightly annoying or difficult part of this is cleaning up.
Re: Soylent Month Three
#166He missed the sixth most abundant element in the human body, and, now that it's there, he is sure everything is OK? I can only say, "Wow".
I really believe that if an actual scientific study[1] was done on this, it would rank right next to a pure fast food diet. It's not that it isn't theoretically possible to make something that is "perfect" nutrition, it's that we don't know enough today to say definitively whether carbs or fat causes metabolic syndrome[2], much less how all the various micronutrients interact with macronutrients, gut biota, and phases of the moon.
Until we understand every piece of the nutrition puzzle, this is just dangerous. That he wants to take it out to others is even more frightening.
Until we get to where we really understand what the body needs at an individual level, I'm sticking with whole foods. I really hope this guy doesn't do long-term damage to himself, or anyone else, for that matter.
1. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to double-blind whether you get a Big Mac or a cup of gray stuff. This isn't just a problem with Soykent, it is a problem with every attempt to perform nutritional experiments. It is really hard to perform good, predictive science in this space.
2. We need to know like chemists know how chemicals will react and physicists know how forces will behave. We don't.
Re: Soylent Month Three
#167"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally." This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck. We've seen his po…
>This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients [but] this is still a huge mystery to science If "no uncertainty" was the golden standard, we'd never do anything new (except perhaps mathematics). Yes, there is uncertainty in what he's doing, as there is always when trying something truly novel. But I'm sure glad someone is making the attempt. Nutrients are…
It is really easy to figure things out at the cellular level because you can easily build experiments containing controls and the turn-around time on iterations is fast.
The human body has trillions of cells and even more symbiotic bacteria. We are clueless how the system functions as a whole. We know some simple things (iron and calcium compete for absorption in the intestine), but only the "big" stuff.
Maybe if you eat 20% of your RDA of Vitamin E at every meal, it makes your intestines toxic to a particular strand of gut biota that regulates half your body[1]. The space we know nothing about is huge, and jumping in with a product for the masses with so little respect for that is, IMO, very dangerous.
1. There is evidence that people suffering metabolic syndrome have significantly different gut biota than those who aren't and when "normal" biota is reintroduced, their health improves. My hypothetical is not an impossibility.
Re: Soylent Month Three
#168He missed the sixth most abundant element in the human body, and, now that it's there, he is sure everything is OK? I can only say, "Wow". I really believe that if an actual scientific study[1] was done on this, it would rank right next to a pure fast food diet. It's not that it isn't theoretically possible to make something that is "perfect" nutrition, it's that we don't know enough today to say definitively whether…
I have to agree with you, but I wonder will it ever be feasible to really understand that in a way that helps individuals? There's an amazing amount of hidden complexity.
For me this experiment is a testament to the variety of human individuality, and the resilience of the human organism.
I can't imagine wanting to replace most of my food with a powder shake, and I drink them fairly regularly post-gym. Beyond that, I think the author's self-testing and self-evaluations are so lost in noise, and so subjective, that they have virtually no measurement value. Finally, his method of picking out what he needs seems ad-hoc and partial.
While we can show lots of things are wrong with chronically bad diets, the human body is surprisingly good at dealing with sub-optimal quantities and qualities of food. The 'perfect' diet is a curious notion really, since the body is a dynamic system that responds to input.
Re: Soylent Month Three
#169"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally." This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck. We've seen his po…
So the way I look at this critique is that most people in the US are running a parallel experiment with their bodies, only instead of the input being Soylent, it's garbage like fast food. It's true, we don't understand how the human body operates - whether you're eating McDonald's, or organic, or Soylent. So given that the baseline seems to be an equally untested and probably more detrimental food choice, this comple…
If proper studies were done on this, we could actually know if it is better or worse than burgers and pizza. From what I know of how the human body works (serious amateur interest), I'm exceedingly doubtful.
I really believe the combination of long-term liquid diet and an extreme uniformity of diet will be the cause of significant health problems. I also think we will find a bunch of "nanonutrients" that are critical to long-term health that we have no idea are important today.
There is no easy answer today for nutrition. If there was, the thousands of food technicians working everywhere from universities to food companies to NASA and the military would have already come up with it. They all have compelling reasons to try.
Re: Soylent Month Three
#170You do realise that mastication is REQUIRED for healthy teeth and gums right?
You may not become malnutritioned, but you will suffer from various oral problems due to lack of mastication. This may take a year or even a few years to present itself - by then it will be too late to react.