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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

#241

Post by beagle3 »

mysterywhiteboy wrote: post #227
goostavos wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a young-ish person with hyper tension who was told to cut back on the salt, I would love to see you back up your claims. Could you link to a few relevant medical studies?

As someone else in the same position (young and mild hypertension) I too was told to cut back. I am a CS PhD and have no medical/nutritional background. Everything I know came from Google, PubMed, and my GP - so (for want of a better phrase) take what I say with a pinch of salt ;) The causal relationship between salt and blood pressure appears to have historically been under debate. I don't however think it should be…

By all means, if you already have hypertension, it is good advice to reduce salt intake - I don't know what the posterior probability for salt sensitive hypertension given hypertension, might be >50%, and it is definitely prudent especially since AFAIK there's no definite test for salt sensitivity.

However, iirc (can't review now), the data supports the following:

A) on average, if hypertension, reducing salt reduces blood pressure. But so does adding potassium.

B) despite that, there is a population with hypertension for which salt reduction does not reduce blood pressure.

C) In healthy individuals, increase of salt intake increases blood pressure slightly, but does not get to the hypertension realm.

But the often repeated meme "salt causes hypertension" is not supported by data. Furthermore, sodium deficiency is a serious condition, which was practically unheard of before the low sodium craze.

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

#242

Post by danparsonson »

shanedanger wrote: post #235
pron wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but you've collected no data, only noise. Eating rice for 2 weeks would have produced similar effects. As to your subjective experience – it's probably 100% placebo. If you want to call something an experiment, you should know how to conduct an experiment in that respective field. Your experiences only show how a product like Soylent induces magical thinking in its consumers. If you want to produce a singl…

So something is not an experiment unless you do it for 6 months? :)

I don't think you read the parent comment properly.

Of course it was "an experiment" but that doesn't mean you can automatically draw useful or even valid conclusions from it. If I ate nothing but peas for a day, my "experiment" wouldn't say much (if anything) about the effects of a pea-only diet on the human body, but if I did it for a year, I might get some useful data. Except that would still only be the effects of peas on my body, and may not generalise to other humans anyway.

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

#243

Post by StavrosK »

lsc wrote: post #207
StavrosK wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was indeed unaware of them, they sound good, thank you.

Yeah, I can't guarantee they are better than fast food. But, I bet you can find one that is similar to Soylent. It is more convenient than fast food. I actually kinda like the McDonald's salads. I mean, as far as you can like fast food at all. If you go easy on the dressing, (the dressing comes in a package that looks like a giant-size katsup packet, so you get to decide how much you eat.) I think it's probably prett…

Hmm, thanks. If they don't sate my hunger, there's no reason to them. I'll either keep cooking chicken breasts (you just pop them in the oven for an hour with minimal preparation and are delicious) or have milk with cereal, one cup of which keeps me full for 5-6 hours. Losing weight with that sort of diet has never been a problem, as I feel full all day and still manage to have a nicely-sized dinner.

About the targeting, either use incognito mode or opt out of targeted advertising (it's in your Google account preferences).

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

#244

Post by kamaal »

redacted wrote: post #209

"Rob is a Y Combinator alumnus with professional experience in electrical engineering, computer science and entrepreneurship. Lacking the means to produce cheap energy, he invented a form of fusion as a more efficient approach to powering his home and hopes to use it to reduce the global disparity of electrification." On one hand, the entire field of nutritional science (and several associated topics), coupled with a…

>>Lacking the means to produce cheap energy, he invented a form of fusion as a more efficient approach to powering his home and hopes to use it to reduce the global disparity of electrification.

I wonder what that is, and if he has written about it some where?

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

#245

Post by scotty79 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #51
w1ntermute wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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 food substitutes". Because that's boooorrrrinnnng.

I think it's not because it sounds boring but because it sounds like a marketing bullshit. Guy in a suit tells you "trust us, we have a whole basement of experts and years of experience" but when you check them out, the company was funded few months ago and only one employee doesn't have some sort of "manager" or "director" in his job title.

I guess openness of soylent and creator's low experience in bullshitting is what makes it attractive. Those of us who eat to live don't expect much from industry after McDonalds and sugar everywhere but we still desperately hope for something better. That hopes fuels enthusiasm for soylent.

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

#247

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

enscr wrote: post #237
hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a big problem with the "you might miss unknown-to-science micronutrients" argument. If that's the case with Soylent, it should also be the case for the average person's diet (...) And it is the case. But because most people vary their diets, the deficiencies are not so severe. For instance, most diets lack magnesium, but on average, people also rarely go long periods without eating something like fish or sea…

Are you saying that vegetarian diet is a fad. You need to step out from underneath that rock.

"restrictive diets AND other fads".

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

#248

Post by caw »

ars_technician wrote: post #175
graeme wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do all that and be 'mildly out of shape'. It depends on what your model is. Compared to the average person, he's more fit, but the average person is rather unfit, so it's a poor comparison. I think 'out of shape' out to be an objective measure, not a relative measure.

>I think 'out of shape' out to be an objective And you would be wrong. It's completely subjective. There is no quantifiable definition of 'in shape' other than fat %.

I'm pretty sure there's some more objective measures, like mile run times. There's charts for how long it should take you. There should be some more standard benchmarks for other activities.

I'd also like to suggest it's possible to be "mildly out of shape" and active. For example, if he was "out of shape" and recently started working out.

On the subjective lines, it's possible to be out of shape for certain activities due to the musculature you've built for the activities you do frequently. If all you do is bench weights, you'd be out of shape when you go to run a mile.

I'm like 8-10% body fat if I calculate it (electronic things say about 13%), would you consider me "in shape"? I wouldn't, not in any sort of normal means (running, lifting weights, whatever else).

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

#249

Post by Widdershin »

ogig wrote: post #229

When Soylent is talked about here i'm surprised by the amount of people who seems to like the idea. I couldn't understand why would anyone, at anytime pick a Soylent meal over something else. Then i read this article and see the picture of the author's normal everyday food, and reading the comments here others say this is in fact an average American diet. I don't want to sound harsh, but you are missing something big…

I think a lot of the people on HN who support it aren't necessarily suggesting that one should replace all meals with it, but simply as an alternative to cut down on some of the efforts involved in preparing meals. Personally, I love food, and I do enjoy cooking, but I also wish that I didn't have to do it all the time.

To elaborate on your sex metaphor, you could consider Soylent masturbation. Low effort, low consequence sexual gratification. That doesn't mean you can't still have awesome sex when you want.

(I definitely agree with you in regards to the people who would forgo food completely in favor of Soylent)

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

#250

Post by tocomment »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #216

I'll keep bumping my open source, whole food, cheaper alternative as long as soylent remains popular. I've been using this as about 40% of my calories for about a year now and my blood panel numbers are great. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...

That's pretty cool. How does it taste? How long does it last after prepared? Have you considered olive oil?
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