31–40 of 372 posts
Soylent aside, im amazed at how terrible his traditional normal days meal is? I mean hes eating a processed breakfast subsitute in the morning, take away mexican food with a soft drink for lunch and more take away for dinner. You don't need to be a nutritionist to know thats going to have a terrible impact on his life later down the track. Postnote: Now that Ive read the whole article, I wonder if all the benefits he…
Soylent fans would argue that this alone is a valid benefit of Soylent - reasonable, healthy nutrition that takes no planning or decision-making, and is cheap and easy. Getting people to eat better is not an easy problem to fix. (BTW, it's also easy to paint restaurant food as bad, without actually examining why. It's also easy to make unhealthy home-cooked organic food.)
You can't say it's cheap because it's not being sold to consumers. There's a promotional price that works out to $10 a day which is cheap but not out of line with similar products.
"reasonable, healthy nutrition" give the benefit of the doubt here.
"no planning" - doubtful, it's a powder mix you make into shakes. That requires some planning.
"no decision making" - identical to any "eat only x" diet, many people would not consider this a selling point.
"easy" Ok, we'll give them a pass here. Not the easiest though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently the target market is lazy people who don't like food. And let's be honest, nearly everyone likes real food. Keto works great for weight loss, and moderation is usually sufficient for a healthy maintenance diet. Loaded with carbohydrates as it is, Soylent is particularly uninteresting for anyone trying to reduce body fat.
A lot of things were invented for "lazy" people so they could save time to do other more important things. Like my electric razor, I have my safety razor too, but it's so much faster to use my electric. A coworker has a beard so he can save 5 minutes in the morning, is it lazy to want time to do other things?
I was irritated from that point on-wards.
The guy claim himself to be a "mildly out of shape 28 year old", and then state: "I consider myself a pretty health-conscious person. No alcohol. No meat. Slow-carbs when possible. Run three miles, three times a week. Pull-ups, push-ups on the days I don’t run" which indicates he's more active than 90% of the population (I just made that stat up) I was irritated from that point on-wards.
I just posted this to Tim's Blog: --------------------- It seems probable that soylent is better than much of the manufactured food on the market. It also seems unlikely that soylent is better than quality whole food. I take Nassim Taleb's approach. We don’t know what we don’t know about food. I’d like to address two of Shane’s points. I'm listing the objections Shane raises, then his reply: Shane's first point: Obje…
>That’s not a good reason to not try to innovate. Innovation only really works if you're solving a problem. I don't really see much of a problem with our food/nutrition system as is. Yes, there are parts of the world where people are starving, so maybe there is an application for this there, but if the aim is to test this product out in the Bay Area, I don't really see it going anywhere. I could be wrong, but that's…
I'm withholding judgement on this Soylent thing because there seems to be quite a bit of controversy, but I can't say I agree that it isn't solving a problem.
I'd rather get all my protein, fat, carbs, vitamins, etc and potentially miss an unknown nutrient than eat what I currently do.