Earlier quoted context omitted.
[deleted]
Change your diet to anything different for that amount of time and your body will feel better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me I thought we were lovers of Science on this site? I thought we believed in testing claims through evidence, not some slick marketing video. The founder has blogged in detail about the evolution of the recipe and effects on his body, http://robrhinehart.com/ (site currently appears…
Soylent Campaign
411–420 of 608 posts
Re: Soylent Campaign
#412Let people take risks. They can die if they'd like.
Re: Soylent Campaign
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Soylent has none of the complex/unnecessary/unhealthy chemical substances tradional diets (milk,bread,nuts,fish) have that are the frequent object of intolerances. One of the key "milk" allergies is allergy to whey, which from what has been posted in this thread is the protein source for Soylent..
Oh I thought people were mostly lactose intolerant. I guess you're right, but the nice thing about Soylent is that you can actually replace ingredients rather easily. In his blogs he mentioned that in his head this could ultimately be a drink tailormade for your specific needs, so someone with whey allergy could swap the whey proteins for meat or fish proteins (if those are readibly available at all)
> Oh I thought people were mostly lactose intolerant.
People (and, really, adult mammals that aren't humans of European descent) mostly are lactose intolerant, which is a non-immune issue (and thus not an allergy.) Milk allergies (allergies to one or more of whey, cassein, or other milk proteins) are a different issue, but also a real thing.
Re: Soylent Campaign
#414I read this initially assuming it to be a clever spoof on the whole startup / crowdsourcing scene, because of the name: pick something that is obviously a joke product ("Soylent Green is people!") and run with it - start piling on impressive claims, include startup-y backgrounds for the founders, and be really vague about what the product actually is. Given my initial interpretation, I thought the "Is soylent vegan a…
Yep, I thought it was a joke at first, too. Since the term soylent is widely understood to mean human remains masquerading as food, the name suggests pretense. He wrote: Before I rarely had enough energy to go to the gym, but this day I had plenty so I decided to put the diet to the test. I'd been running off and on for several months, never able to do more than a mile straight, but this day I ran 3.14 miles non-stop…
> Want to bet on the results of a double blind study?
Unfortunately, I don't think such a study is runnable. How do you blind 'oil-sludge' against 'real food'?
That said, randomizable is perfectly doable: Rhinehart could flip a coin each week to decide whether to eat real food or Soylent. I suggested as much on his blog a while ago, but he never responded.
Re: Soylent Campaign
#415[deleted]
It's just _food_, it's not like any other food product in modern history was ever extensively tested before it was put in the market as a part of our daily diet.
Real food has the advantage of millions of years of natural selection and relationships to our genome we have only begun to understand.
Re: Soylent Campaign
#416I think HN's hatred of Soylent has been increasing exponentially as we get closer to a mass-market release. What's with all the negativity? If you don't like it, don't buy it -- easy as that. It may not be the perfect product, but at least it's pushing some boundaries. I, for one, am excited to get my hands on a batch and let the results speak for themselves.
What boundaries is it pushing? Liquid feed is not new.
Right? Medifast. Optifast. Slimfast. There are literally thousands of options.
Re: Soylent Campaign
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Maybe Soylent is okay. Maybe. But there are well established, scientific methods to evaluate these claims. I know it tempting to want to believe the claims in the video, but they have done NONE of this!" That sounds like a pretty reasonable argument to me. Pointing out that the soylent proponent's "evidence" does not stand up to scientific scrutiny does not sound like "argument from authority".
I agree that it should stand up to scientific scrutiny before being able to claim that it is safe, but the argument he was making before he deleted all his posts was that Soylent was most definitely unsafe solely because it was made by "some computer kids".
And that's a very valid point too. If you wanted me to completely give up my entire diet and consume just one product for the rest of my life -- here's what you need to do:
1) Have some (at least one) long term, large cohort, controlled studies proving the efficacy of this diet.
2) Be someone I can trust with being careful and honest with your scientific method over a long period of time.
So saying that you shouldn't trust some mixture put together by some computer programmers in their 20's is just a shortcut to the the two statements above. He (assuming gender here) was absolutely right in his assertion.
Re: Soylent Campaign
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
PBS and Science Magazine allegedly got some facts wrong. Regardless, the WHO is talking about three billion indoor fires in primitive homes. In most of these cases, there is no distinction between a "cooking stove" and "heating stove" and whether these families require heating year round or not, cooking is not a seasonal activity. Splitting hairs on this point is dumb, though. The point of citing it at all is to illu…
> They want to solve the entire world's food problem. Isn't that scale of vision why we're all here? That's an amazing vision. Soylent shows little to no understanding of the actual problems of food security. There doesn't appear to be any research into the causes of food scarcity, or who is affected by food scarcity, or what a sensible solution would be. Soylent glop doesn't seem to do anything to increase local ind…
Prior art on the link between food waste and world hunger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeoa0-U8-Yw
The concept of Soylent is orthogonal to the slow food movement, but it isn't incompatible with local production by definition.
None of your objections make any real sense. This is an early prototype of balanced-diet-in-a-pill, but because they haven't solved the problem of clean water across the globe, they're the cynical ones?
Re: Soylent Campaign
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
It appears as if only one of the founding individuals has a degree in anything remotely pertaining to nutrition (David Renteln, degree in "Human Evolutionary Biology"). Speaking as a biochemist who works in the biotech industry, this looks to be like a gigantic train wreck just waiting to happen. At first glance, I would be convinced these individuals know very little about the science behind their product. They all…
I don't have a scientific background but I still manage to do okay choosing my own food at the grocery store. Soylent doesn't have to be the pinnacle of human nutrition, it just has to be better than burritos and ramen and freezer pizza.
> Soylent doesn't have to be the pinnacle of human nutrition, it just has to be better than burritos and ramen and freezer pizza.
People who care to do better than burritos and ramen and freezer pizza already can do better than burritos and ramen and freezer pizza with minimal effort.
So, no, I don't think that the bar Soylent needs to pass to be offering an improvement over current options is quite that low.
Re: Soylent Campaign
#420[deleted]
I'm sitting this one out for a year. I expected Rob to run longer and more detailed trails than it appears he has. As in a few hundred people eating nothing but Soylent for a year. There will be problems with the initial manufacture, and he highlights them in the risks section. But I notice the lack of anyone from say a pharma QC background who would be able to control the risk of overdosing on an ingredient by prope…
You can do a lot of really bad stuff to your body for a year with few noticeable external affects, especially in your 20s. A good decade of testing sounds about on target.