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I had hemorrhoids that would flair up from soy/almond milk or large quantities of corn chips. However, I never had blood loss and it was mostly gone by the tim

I had hemorrhoids that would flair up from soy/almond milk or large quantities of corn chips. However, I never had blood loss and it was mostly gone by the time I tried Soylent. After having one drink made with powder version 1.2 or 1.3, I lost about a liter of blood and couldn't move or work on anything that week. Had to switch to yogurt for a month to eat normally again. I think it has to do with jagged precipitates that remain after going through the large intestine. I love the idea of the product, but unnatural food like this has potential to cause unforeseen side effects.

Meegul 10y ago
What do you mean by unnatural? What is in Soylent that isn't natural? Food in and of itself is just a mix of different chemicals - be they from plants, animals, or other sources. But at the end of the day, a molecule of glucose from a plant is identical to a molecule of glucose created synthetically.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  If you grind beans and rice into a powder, with other stuff, and cook them, do you think that that's the same as cooking whole beans and whole rice with the other stuff? The answer is no. It's not just about molecules.
  - cknoxrun 10y ago
    Can you please expand on how they are different? A powdered bean or powdered rice contains the same macro and micronutrients. Perhaps the quality of the fiber would be different?
    - greglindahl 10y ago
      I don't understand why you would think they are the same. Cooking a whole bean vs cooking a powdered bean is different. Digesting a whole, chewed bean is different from digesting a powdered bean. And what happens at the end of your gut is different. An example of a related principle is "need" vs "what's needed when it's needed". How much vitamin C do you "need"? Oh, wait, it affects iron absorption.
      - dimino 10y ago
        You literally don't understand how someone could draw the conclusion that the same materials produce the same energy, regardless of form? That concept utterly eludes you?
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - Karlozkiller 10y ago
      To begin with the uptake rate would be different. If you eat a whole bean your body will have to break it down into smaller parts (by chewing initially and so on) and in the end you'll get different amounts of whatever is in it in your system at different times if you eat it whole or grouns up. another example would be certain seeds. Many seeds contain cyanide (well known poison!?), which is not dangerous in the seed because the amount you'll get into your system is miniscule. however if you ground the seed up, you'd get more cyanide taken up by your body, which could be bad for you. (I can't say how big the difference would be but it is theoretically sound)
      - cknoxrun 10y ago
        That makes sense. I guess my followup question would be whether this impacts how healthy the food is. I guess soy beans and tofu and metabolized differently, but it's my understanding that tofu is still very good for you. Same with peanut/almond butter. Anyways, thanks for the detailed explanation, it does make a lot of sense.
    - TheCoelacanth 10y ago
      You don't fully absorb the foods you eat. You pass them through your body while absorbing parts. Anything that makes it easier or harder to absorb parts of the food will affect what you get out of the food.
- charlesism 10y ago
  I will speculate that eating liquid food for a prolonged amount of time doesn't do your teeth and gums any favors. Whether Soylent qualifies as "unnatural" depends on whether its ingredients, and the amounts of them, are nutritious and not poisonous. Humanity hasn't yet reached a point where we have definite answers to questions like that.
- dasil003 10y ago
  This attitude is exactly bothered me about the CEO of Soylent when he was first doing PR about the product years ago. It's not a question of being "natural" per se, it's the question of trace elements and how our body metabolizes food. Food is not just a pile of molecules, it's a particular organization of molecules. How your body digests it matters. A bunch of milled and refined powders of macronutrients is simply not the same as anything we've evolved to eat over the last X million years. How different is it? That's hard to say, but when the CEO is so dismissive of the fact that there are real subtleties here and nutrition science still has a long way to go, it's not confidence inspiring. The reason that oft-derided-as-woo-woo granola crowd is actually making the logicallly sound choice here is because given the lack of conclusive science, the default assumption should be that a diet closer to what our ancestors ate is a safer bet than a brand new diet that we fabricate based on incomplete and presumptive knowledge.
  - lmm 10y ago
    Given that a) our ancestors lived a very different lifestyle and b) we would like to live long past child-raising age, which is where evolutionary benefits to longevity would mostly end, a diet similar to our ancestors is by no means a safe option.
    - azernik 10y ago
      s/ancestors/parents. They seem to be living decently long lives, so I'll let someone else experiment with liquid meal replacements for a decade or two, thank you very much.
      - lmm 10y ago
        Decent, yes. On the other hand, if diet changes were able to increase life expectancy by say 10 years (which is what some people claim agriculture reduced it by) then I'd jump at that.
  - wirrbel 10y ago
    The main problem with most dietary recommendations is that they oversimplify in a skewed and wrongful way. From a very basic, we can be quite sure that a very simple model roughly describes the system (as in "there are calories and the human body is bound by the laws of thermodynamics"). We also no that it is not that simple, because a biological organism is a very, very complex machine. Everything else is mostly the attempt to find a "simpler model" than "its a complex biological machine and we need very large empirical studies to understand it" and mostly fails. In that sense, soylent is on a similar level as the "detox" crowd. Pretty sure their mission statement is not right. They might get some stuff right by accident. Other stuff is wrong. Of course thinking in "right" and "wrong" is also an oversimplification, as we should probably use "better on the average population" or "worse on average population". The stone-age crowd has a point in using kind of an evolutionary explanation for what food to choose. On the other hand their premise "we eat what our ancestors ate, because thats what our body has optimized for" is seriously flawed in its own logic, because we won't reproduce the hunter-gatherer environment when switching diets, and they don't account for the adaptability of the genome, as well as the variance of diets among hunter-gatherer cultures and early stone age farmers.
- laser 10y ago
  That's like saying a puddle of human molecular composition is the same thing as a human. As far as biological interactions are concerned, even in digestion, it doesn't appear that molecular quantities behave identically independent of molecular arrangement.
- nomoch 10y ago
  OP shat a litre of blood. That seems a pretty unnatural reaction to food.
Latty 10y ago
"Natural" is a terrible word for describing things when you are trying to make a point. It doesn't mean anything. Natural things can be safe or unsafe, well tested or unknown, healthy or unhealthy, better or worse. I really wish people would use the actual comparison they are trying to make when they use "natural" - say "food that people haven't tried living on for extended periods" or whatever. Natural has become an advertising buzzword designed to trick people into thinking something is good because people associate it with a bunch of stuff that "Natural" does not imply.

Meegul 10y ago

What do you mean by unnatural? What is in Soylent that isn't natural? Food in and of itself is just a mix of different chemicals - be they from plants, animals, or other sources. But at the end of the day, a molecule of glucose from a plant is identical to a molecule of glucose created synthetically.

greglindahl 10y ago
If you grind beans and rice into a powder, with other stuff, and cook them, do you think that that's the same as cooking whole beans and whole rice with the other stuff? The answer is no. It's not just about molecules.
- cknoxrun 10y ago
  Can you please expand on how they are different? A powdered bean or powdered rice contains the same macro and micronutrients. Perhaps the quality of the fiber would be different?
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    I don't understand why you would think they are the same. Cooking a whole bean vs cooking a powdered bean is different. Digesting a whole, chewed bean is different from digesting a powdered bean. And what happens at the end of your gut is different. An example of a related principle is "need" vs "what's needed when it's needed". How much vitamin C do you "need"? Oh, wait, it affects iron absorption.
    - dimino 10y ago
      You literally don't understand how someone could draw the conclusion that the same materials produce the same energy, regardless of form? That concept utterly eludes you?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - Karlozkiller 10y ago
    To begin with the uptake rate would be different. If you eat a whole bean your body will have to break it down into smaller parts (by chewing initially and so on) and in the end you'll get different amounts of whatever is in it in your system at different times if you eat it whole or grouns up. another example would be certain seeds. Many seeds contain cyanide (well known poison!?), which is not dangerous in the seed because the amount you'll get into your system is miniscule. however if you ground the seed up, you'd get more cyanide taken up by your body, which could be bad for you. (I can't say how big the difference would be but it is theoretically sound)
    - cknoxrun 10y ago
      That makes sense. I guess my followup question would be whether this impacts how healthy the food is. I guess soy beans and tofu and metabolized differently, but it's my understanding that tofu is still very good for you. Same with peanut/almond butter. Anyways, thanks for the detailed explanation, it does make a lot of sense.
  - TheCoelacanth 10y ago
    You don't fully absorb the foods you eat. You pass them through your body while absorbing parts. Anything that makes it easier or harder to absorb parts of the food will affect what you get out of the food.
charlesism 10y ago
I will speculate that eating liquid food for a prolonged amount of time doesn't do your teeth and gums any favors. Whether Soylent qualifies as "unnatural" depends on whether its ingredients, and the amounts of them, are nutritious and not poisonous. Humanity hasn't yet reached a point where we have definite answers to questions like that.
dasil003 10y ago
This attitude is exactly bothered me about the CEO of Soylent when he was first doing PR about the product years ago. It's not a question of being "natural" per se, it's the question of trace elements and how our body metabolizes food. Food is not just a pile of molecules, it's a particular organization of molecules. How your body digests it matters. A bunch of milled and refined powders of macronutrients is simply not the same as anything we've evolved to eat over the last X million years. How different is it? That's hard to say, but when the CEO is so dismissive of the fact that there are real subtleties here and nutrition science still has a long way to go, it's not confidence inspiring. The reason that oft-derided-as-woo-woo granola crowd is actually making the logicallly sound choice here is because given the lack of conclusive science, the default assumption should be that a diet closer to what our ancestors ate is a safer bet than a brand new diet that we fabricate based on incomplete and presumptive knowledge.
- lmm 10y ago
  Given that a) our ancestors lived a very different lifestyle and b) we would like to live long past child-raising age, which is where evolutionary benefits to longevity would mostly end, a diet similar to our ancestors is by no means a safe option.
  - azernik 10y ago
    s/ancestors/parents. They seem to be living decently long lives, so I'll let someone else experiment with liquid meal replacements for a decade or two, thank you very much.
    - lmm 10y ago
      Decent, yes. On the other hand, if diet changes were able to increase life expectancy by say 10 years (which is what some people claim agriculture reduced it by) then I'd jump at that.
- wirrbel 10y ago
  The main problem with most dietary recommendations is that they oversimplify in a skewed and wrongful way. From a very basic, we can be quite sure that a very simple model roughly describes the system (as in "there are calories and the human body is bound by the laws of thermodynamics"). We also no that it is not that simple, because a biological organism is a very, very complex machine. Everything else is mostly the attempt to find a "simpler model" than "its a complex biological machine and we need very large empirical studies to understand it" and mostly fails. In that sense, soylent is on a similar level as the "detox" crowd. Pretty sure their mission statement is not right. They might get some stuff right by accident. Other stuff is wrong. Of course thinking in "right" and "wrong" is also an oversimplification, as we should probably use "better on the average population" or "worse on average population". The stone-age crowd has a point in using kind of an evolutionary explanation for what food to choose. On the other hand their premise "we eat what our ancestors ate, because thats what our body has optimized for" is seriously flawed in its own logic, because we won't reproduce the hunter-gatherer environment when switching diets, and they don't account for the adaptability of the genome, as well as the variance of diets among hunter-gatherer cultures and early stone age farmers.
laser 10y ago
That's like saying a puddle of human molecular composition is the same thing as a human. As far as biological interactions are concerned, even in digestion, it doesn't appear that molecular quantities behave identically independent of molecular arrangement.
nomoch 10y ago
OP shat a litre of blood. That seems a pretty unnatural reaction to food.

Latty 10y ago

"Natural" is a terrible word for describing things when you are trying to make a point. It doesn't mean anything. Natural things can be safe or unsafe, well tested or unknown, healthy or unhealthy, better or worse. I really wish people would use the actual comparison they are trying to make when they use "natural" - say "food that people haven't tried living on for extended periods" or whatever. Natural has become an advertising buzzword designed to trick people into thinking something is good because people associate it with a bunch of stuff that "Natural" does not imply.