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This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

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Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#391

Post by jlees »

mst wrote: post #293
VLM wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How much time is needed to ensure this method of feeding is viable for humans?" Yes ha ha. (For those who don't get the joke there's long been available a liquid meal replacement called "Ensure(tm)" as with many "tech" novelty stories a supposed inventor is actually just walking on very well trodden ground rather than inventing anything.)

A quick google suggests that ensure is marketed as a high calorie product designed to help you gain weight. Is there another version of it that's nutritionally complete and low calorie like Soylent (supposedly) is that I'm missing?

There are several meal replacement programs sold in the dieting community. I was on one for three months where I could choose to consume zero solid food and get all my nutrition from powdered soups and shakes; the US equivalent seems to be Medifast, though that includes a single food meal daily. It was not a healthy plan, but my energy levels were great and I lost a significant amount of weight in that time (45 pounds or so). The composition was designed to induce and keep participants in ketosis, but I don't see why a little more carbohydrate couldn't be added to avoid this.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#392

Post by XorNot »

Evgeny wrote: post #371
tedks wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that study, about 20% of vegetarians who go back to eating flesh do so for perceived health reasons. After 12 years of no health issues, and with a low general reason to believe that vegetarianism causes health issues, I'd be slow to attribute the reversal to the thing the person thinks worked. (I would also expect more potential hazards from something new, untried, and untested, but I've signed up because I lik…

Just to clarify - that was an example. Whatever will be wrong with Soylent, will probably be something no one considered. What do we know about completely eliminating fiber from the diet for an extended period of time? Or what do we know about chewing food being beneficial for dental health? It was mentioned he hardly poops on Soylent - were there prolonged studies on this subject? Willingness to risk is something I…

The diet of the Inuit was widely believed to be impossible for some time (and probably still is) because no one thought it was possible they could subsist solely on fish meat.

When put to the test by a pair of scientists who replicated the diet though, they found few ill-effects - except at one point where they were hitting a nutritional deficiency, but corrected it by putting semi-rotten fish product (which is a dish in Inuit cooking) into their diet - because it turns out that provided certain key nutrients.

The human body can handle some surprising and varied diets, a lot simply evolved by trial and error over a long period. With modern technology, we should be able to "fail fast" over a much shorter time.

Probably more importantly: anyone putting that much thought into what they eat, what the effects of it are etc. is already doing 10x the thinking of most people about their nutrition.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#393

Post by jtheory »

ddoolin wrote: post #295

This idea would probably be better when given to children who are just getting over formula or breastmilk, albeit with proper modifications are they grow. Babies do just fine on a liquid diet with breastmilk essentially just containing the necessary nutrients. Assuming they kept this liquid-nutrition diet (adjustingly accordingly), it sounds more viable. However, a grown man whose body is used to solid foods probably…

Speaking of breastmilk -- I don't know about this guy's particular formula, but I can chip in that my daughter was solely breastfed for 9 months or so, and it was pretty clearly extremely efficiently processed.

I wasn't eager for her to start eating solid foods, actually, because I did most of the diaper changes, and while she was still on a breastmilk-only diet (and once her digestive system was developed enough, after 6 months or so), she wasn't constipated, but would simply only poop once or twice a week (and it wasn't even unpleasant-smelling).

I haven't researched the subject, but anecdotally other parents who nursed their children for more than a few months have similar accounts.

My concerns about a similar diet for adults, though, is that it's a serious tangent from the eating habits humans have evolved with.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that people switching to a liquid-only diet like this saw a jump in colon cancer, or something like that.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#395

Post by coldtea »

criley wrote: post #103
saidajigumi wrote: post #75

> a 24-year-old software engineer > ... > Soylent contains all of the nutritive components of a balanced diet What utter bollocks. We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latte…

You sound like an industry-insider explaining why a new startup will fail. "They're too young!" "They don't have the experience" "We've devoted our LIVES to figuring this out, one kid in his basement didn't do it in a few weeks!" Etc etc No offense but we've heard the exact same thing about every successful idea. And what's more: People look at the human GI totally wrong anyway. They think, what can I put in to get t…

>You sound like an industry-insider explaining why a new startup will fail. "They're too young!" "They don't have the experience" "We've devoted our LIVES to figuring this out, one kid in his basement didn't do it in a few weeks!" Etc etc No offense but we've heard the exact same thing about every successful idea.

We also heard the exact same thing about every kook, and his idea of a "perpetual motion engine", "cold fusion in my backyard" etc idea.

And that has happened far too many more times than the "successful idea" thing -- so much, that "the idea being shot down by critics" && "it being successful" case is like statistical noise.

Which is also true about your startup example. Most startups DO fail. A staggering majority of them actually.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#396

Post by phil »

reycharles wrote: post #326
ceejayoz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're eating aged beef, you're going to know about it, because it's going to be $30/pound... and this is hardly the sort of processing people should be concerned about.

I thought all beef was aged. I have heard the taste is unpalatable at best if it's not aged at all. I'm really curious.

I looked into this a year ago. You're right: "dry-aged beef" is the fancy expensive stuff your yuppie butcher is selling you. "Wet-aged" is everything else -- they pretty much stick it in a plastic bag in a brine that breaks down tissue. If you don't do anything what you have is a curiously tough meat product.

Wet aging is cheaper because you raise the water content (and thus the weight) a little, whereas in dry aging you lose a bunch of moisture, and because it only takes a week or so.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#397

Post by benatkin »

saidajigumi wrote: post #157
criley wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like an industry-insider explaining why a new startup will fail. "They're too young!" "They don't have the experience" "We've devoted our LIVES to figuring this out, one kid in his basement didn't do it in a few weeks!" Etc etc No offense but we've heard the exact same thing about every successful idea. And what's more: People look at the human GI totally wrong anyway. They think, what can I put in to get t…

> You sound like an industry-insider explaining why a new startup will fail. I certainly don't want to rain on some new visionary's parade, but I spend a lot of time tracking folks who I consider to be the real visionaries in this field. As in we are currently in the midst of the greatest revolution in human health of our lives, and this guy is running in the wrong direction. We're seeing astonishing results with die…

Hmm, you do have a point. What this world needs most is billions of people eating a pound each of fresh leafy green vegetables every day.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#398

Post by [deleted] »

dasil003 wrote: post #209
criley wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof, or GTFO." > "I see this guy's protocol as nothing but poisonous in the long run." You place a burden of evidence on him that you yourself in this very post violated on a number of occasions. You CANNOT call his diet poisonous simply because you disagree with it. You admitted it yourself: > "Current research is showing that we are only just beginning to gain understanding…

> You place a burden of evidence on him that you yourself in this very post violated on a number of occasions. You CANNOT call his diet poisonous simply because you disagree with it. Nutrition science is in its infancy. It's clear that the complexity of the interaction of food as it is digested and interacting with our organism has barely had the surface scratched. Also, if you look at the rise of processed foods alo…

[deleted]

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#399

Post by robotresearcher »

dougk16 wrote: post #307
Goronmon wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no cure for MS, so if the video does make that claim, it's pretty ridiculous. It's the equivalent of saying you could cure cancer with diet.

You can cure cancer with diet, along with generally healthy living. "Cure" perhaps isn't the best word though, because bad diet (combined with other things like stress, lack of exercise, etc.) is frequently the cause of cancer in the first place. EDIT: I didn't mean to say that changing to a healthy diet/lifestyle after being diagnosed will magically cure you (if that's why I'm being downvoted) but I believe it certa…

Steve Jobs observed very strict diets which he believed would keep him super healthy. Result: dead at 56 despite essentially unlimited resources.

Re: This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

#400

Post by bravo »

mikeash wrote: post #322
stouset wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, we don't know what the components of a healthy diet are. We thought we did decades ago, but were blissfully unaware of micronutrients (and, as I understand it, infant formula from around this time made a bunch of babies have developmental disorders as a result). Second, we're quickly realizing that nutrition is significantly more than the sum of its parts. Nutrients taken together as opposed to separately can…

Is there any reason to think that "separately" is the preferred way? As for not knowing the components of a healthy diet, that objection applies equally to taking in food the normal way, so I really don't see the relevance. If we don't know enough to build a proper slurry that contains everything, then we don't know enough to build a proper normal diet that contains everything.

This is just a small example, but I know that Vitamin C inhibits calcium absorption. That's pretty well known among athletes.
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