Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

fourhourworkweek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 372 posts

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

#251

Post by jurassic »

rsynnott wrote: post #224
jurassic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the big deal? What this guy is eating already is definitely above average in quality. A Chipotle burrito bol (fresh whole ingredients, sans tortilla) is a legit meal. Other than dental impacts from the carbonation, health hysteria about diet soda and aspartame has been debunked. I don't know about the take-out Thai, but at least it's real food and not some preservative-laden packaged food product from the groc…

> Not everybody has 5 hours a day or a stay-at-home wife to cook their Whole Foods organic produce into a masterpiece of nutrition. I'm guessing from this that you've never cooked in your life? (Hint: Pretty much nobody cooks five hours a day unless it is their job. I mostly cook for myself, and I don't think I've ever really spent more than 30 minutes of active work on it).

From these humorless responses it seems the hyperbole of my last sentence has been lost, but I stand by the sentiment that educating yourself about healthy eating and then executing a varied and healthful diet (including the fully loaded time cost of planning, shopping more often for fresh ingredients, cooking, and cleaning up) is a serious undertaking that few people have the time or inclination to pull off on a regular basis. This is complicated by the reality that nutrition is a field of many opinions, conventional wisdom and anti-conventional health movements (raw foodism, veganism, vegetarianism, keto, paleo, etc), and almost no reliable truths.

Everyone here saying anything along the lines of "ZOMG, my healthy meals like toast+juice only take me 15 minutes each" has no idea what they are talking about. The list of healthy whole foods (those that don't come out of boxes or bags) that can be prepped and cooked and cleaned in 15 minutes is a short one. I know because I spend a lot of time planning, shopping, and cooking a variety of foods. If anyone cares, right now I eat 90% paleo with occasional dairy and legumes. For years I was involved in veganism/vegetarianism, but quit when I realized it was more like a food religion than a rational healthy choice.

Think of the average grocery store. All that crap lining the aisle shelves is going to get bought by somebody, and even if we allow for the longer "residence time" of packaged food products compared to fresh produce/meats we can infer that the average shopper is leaving with the preparations for a depressingly monotonous and nutritionally poor diet of mostly corn-derivatives, flour, and sugar. If you had to empty out a standard grocery store one cart at a time, the average haul would be far worse than anything the writer admits eating. As fun as it is to get self righteous about food ideology, anybody who actually thinks the writer's diet is poor in comparison to the average American diet isn't thinking far enough beyond their own experience.

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

#252

Post by will_work4tears »

beagle3 wrote: post #105
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.

That's true, from both the "for" and "against sides". Anyone who things that only happens on one of the sides should check their confirmation bias. And no, this is not an "every opinion deserves equal airtime" claim. The vast majority of nutrition and health experts draw on a mix of science, pseudo science and superstition, and assume it is all science. (Quick check: Think salt intake causes hypertension? That dietar…

"That you can only get B-12 from meat"

Well, maybe "meat sources (dairy products under the umbrella) are the only significant source of B-12 without supplementation" is more accurate.

Cereals are "fortified" so I count that as supplementation.

Sure, many yeasts contains B-12 too, some quite a bit. I'd even agree that it is significant, but it doesn't occur in foods people normally eat (maybe a guess here, but if that were true, vegans wouldn't need to supplement with yeast, etc), so it's taken as a supplemnt.

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

#253

Post by namdnay »

visakanv wrote: post #109
jlgreco wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Soylent thing is literally the SV techie equivalent of those "This School Teacher(tm) found one weird trick to [BLANK]... [BLANKERS] hate her!" advertisements that we all like to make fun of. Why do those ads use "school teachers"? Because it is relatable to the target audience and sufficiently anti-authoritarian that they don't question the credentials.

Well it's like that story of Colonel H. McMaster, who DID technically find "one weird trick", and the Army DID pass him over for promotions, etc... I'm not for or against Soylent, and I usually find this kind of advertising annoying, but it's also entirely possible that people further down the chain of command in any system discover things that people higher-up won't or can't. That's part of the entire premise of why…

> people further down the chain of command in any system

Here we're talking about people who aren't even in the same system!

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

#255

Post by homosaur »

jacques_chester wrote: post #149
samstave wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I have no ability to judge the veracity of the claims of Soylent.me -- let me tell you the only reason I am hopeful it works is for the same reason Jobs only wore black turtle-necks and jeans: simplicity. I want to be able to take a good fuel for my body and indulge in great food whenever I want. I want to be able to back-pack for a week with only a 4-pound food supply.

> I want to be able to take a good fuel for my body and indulge in great food whenever I want. Then eat some meat and some vegetables. > I want to be able to back-pack for a week with only a 4-pound food supply. Then take trail mix.

Trail mix is elementary school crap, we trail Nazis have all moved to pemmican. Better density and energy content.

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

#256

Post by homosaur »

marze wrote: post #107
alphaoverlord wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, my first paragraph is: > I'm all for people having the freedom to eat whatever they want and I really like the quantified self aspect of seeing how diet affects how they feel and metrics of health, but I have to say the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data. I'm not going to comment on the drink, but rather on his misunderstanding of medicine. I'm not tryin…

"Self experimentation might be useful, but only if you understand the metrics you measure and whether its stochastic noise or meaningful results." I feel you miss the whole point of self experimentation. If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know. A low-risk food product (such as this) can simply be trial…

This right here is how patent medicines and the like continue to sell. Placebo is powerful.

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

#258

Post by beagle3 »

will_work4tears wrote: post #252
beagle3 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, from both the "for" and "against sides". Anyone who things that only happens on one of the sides should check their confirmation bias. And no, this is not an "every opinion deserves equal airtime" claim. The vast majority of nutrition and health experts draw on a mix of science, pseudo science and superstition, and assume it is all science. (Quick check: Think salt intake causes hypertension? That dietar…

"That you can only get B-12 from meat" Well, maybe "meat sources (dairy products under the umbrella) are the only significant source of B-12 without supplementation" is more accurate. Cereals are "fortified" so I count that as supplementation. Sure, many yeasts contains B-12 too, some quite a bit. I'd even agree that it is significant, but it doesn't occur in foods people normally eat (maybe a guess here, but if that…

And now for the science: neither people nor animals make their own B12. Instead, we employ good bacteria in our gut to do that (and so do cows).

After the discovery of antibiotics, many people in the western world became B12 deficient - especially vegetarians. However cows and other animals are just as incapable of making it - and in the last 30 years or so, just as deficient as humans, as they've also been getting lots of antibiotics.

So we give them supplements. Thus they have enough B12, and meat eaters do too. According to some estimates, 80% of the world's B12 production goes to animals these days. So, likely, your B12 coming from meat is still from supplement, albeit one given to your hamburger while it was still alive.

I have no dietary sources of B12, and yet have good levels, way above population average. You might call me a liar, more then one MD did. But they usually apologize if they actually research this (Wikipedia B12 has enough info)

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

#259

Post by mberning »

bambax wrote: post #176
jurassic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the big deal? What this guy is eating already is definitely above average in quality. A Chipotle burrito bol (fresh whole ingredients, sans tortilla) is a legit meal. Other than dental impacts from the carbonation, health hysteria about diet soda and aspartame has been debunked. I don't know about the take-out Thai, but at least it's real food and not some preservative-laden packaged food product from the groc…

Cooking a real meal for one person takes less than 15 minutes each time, so that's a maximum of 30 minutes per day (lunch+dinner) + maybe 5 other minutes for breakfast, depending on ingredients (bread+butter+orange juice=zero cooking). I was also amazed by the cost of his daily diet: $24 per day, excluding restaurants on weekends?!? I eat natural, 'normal' food for much less than $10 per day, and I live in one of the…

The idea that you can consistently get away with 15 minutes of prep time for each meal is a pipe dream. Unless you are eating the most simple and monotonous diet imaginable. If you have any kind of variety in your diet you can expect that some meals take an hour or more to prepare.

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

#260

Post by king_jester »

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 %.

> There is no quantifiable definition of 'in shape' other than fat %.

This is not a way to determine someone's fitness or physical health. Body fat percentages are highly misleading.

Post reply on HN