9 ms·

Soylent isn’t Healthy (2017)

84 points by ecliptik 6y ago

unwoundmouse 6y ago
This article states that minimizing grains is ideal but never defends that point. Does anyone have data defending that?
- pricci 6y ago
  I thought the same while reading the article. My understanding is that carbohydrates are not really bad, especially unrefined ones. Examine.com has this to say: https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/#summary2 https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/#summary... At the end of the day, no one knows I guess.
- andor 6y ago
  The author is confusing highly-processed white bread and sugary cereals with the grains themselves. Whole grains are some of the healthiest foods one can eat. https://nutritionfacts.org https://nutritionfacts.org has a lot of information on evidence-based nutrition, sadly it's mostly videos.
dkdk8283 6y ago
Soy is bad for you - high amounts of estrogen.
- unwoundmouse 6y ago
  False actually. This study states that the isoflavones in soy don’t affect serum T levels. https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/fulltext https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/full...
- JohnGB 6y ago
  That's not quite accurate. Soy contains phytoestrogen, which is a plant estrogen, not a human estrogen. It's similar in many ways and does have (in a much weaker form) some of the effects of human estrogen. However, just calling it "estrogen" implies that it's the same as human estrogen. It isn't.
  - 127 6y ago
    From anecdotal evidence it seems for some people the phytoestrogen still activates estrogen pathways. Probably has genetic variation on the effects.
    - AlexandrB 6y ago
      Anecdotal evidence? How does someone anecdotally detect that their estrogen pathway has been activated?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - 127 6y ago
        By growing big moobs.
        evanextreme 6y ago
        then why is that not the case for countries with a significantly higher proportion of soy in their diets such as countries in Asia? if what you said is true then once would expect to notice it
        127 6y ago
        Like I said, genetic variation.
        evanextreme 6y ago
        so you suspect that some gene (evidence for which also exists "anecdotally") triggers a genetic response only in countries where this type of food isn't regularly consumed? because then this sounds like a wild guess prompted by suspicions and pseudoscience
- draw_down 6y ago
  I also know who Alex Jones is
- waynecochran 6y ago
  As soon as I heard "man boobs" and "soy protein" I was out. This may be completely false, but truth is hard to come by these days. No need to risk it here when there are plenty of other good sources of protein. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18558591/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18558591/
- MFogleman 6y ago
  I dont have citations on hand, but my understanding is that this claim is largely attributed to a single/small amount of studies of dubious validity funded by US Beef industry, and that when you look at populations that have much higher soy intake, their estrogen levels are not elevated/are lower than similar US populations. Grain of salt and all that, just offering a lead for those curious of the counter argument
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  If that were true, we'd have seen significant effects in the peoples of Asia by now, where soy consumption is high.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- andor 6y ago
  Did you know that cow milk contains actual estrogen and other hormones?
staplers 6y ago
As a product designer, it's easy to see through the trend of repackaging old products with new "minimal" branding. Soylent is PediaLyte or Ensure for millenials. You see it in every industry now not just tech.
- jefftk 6y ago
  PediaLyte and Ensure had far more sugar pre-Soylent
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  I think it misrepresents Soylent to claim it’s essentially a repackaged Pedialyte/Ensure - it had a very, very different product development process and it ostensibly has different goals.
- ctrl-j 6y ago
  Uhhh.. PediaLyte and Ensure are vastly different products. Ensure is a weight gain meal replacement drink and PediaLyte is fancy gatorade. Soylent is somewhere between Slimfast and Ensure. I'm not positive there's a quality calorically balanced meal replacement drink out there? Maybe there is, but whatever that is, Soylent is the branded version of that. Not PediaLyte or Ensure.
jeff-davis 6y ago
It doesn't need to be perfectly healthy to serve its purpose to me. It helps me avoid time-and-money-wasting bad meals. If you are out somewhere busy, sometimes you just want to keep going but you are hungry. But all the food options might be overpriced junk food that you have to wait for. Drink a soylent and skip that meal. When you get home eat real food that you actually want to eat. Soylent kills food cravings and keeps your mood even for hours.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > But all the food options might be overpriced junk food... Isn't the point of the article that Soylent is overpriced junk food?
  - saluki 6y ago
    Try carrying a couple of granola bars, dried fruit and nuts when you're out.
    - 67868018 6y ago
      One serving of Soylent gives me 14g of fat and 13g of protein. Better than a granola bar and some fruit and nuts, which tend to be only carb heavy with some protein.
      - jiofih 6y ago
        It also gives you 37g of carbs. Read the label.
    - jeff-davis 6y ago
      It's a fine idea and I do eat a lot of nuts. But it's pretty hard to match the convenience and effectiveness of a soylent. Basically, if you ever have cravings or moodiness due to food, that can be solved by a soylent in about 60 seconds. Maybe nuts can solve it too, but a lot of people don't do that, and end up eating junk instead.
  - 6y ago
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Title: "No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why." Heading of the conclusion: "The Core Problem: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know" Most sections could be summarized as "We don't know that Soylent is doing things right therefore it might be unhealthy." It's just a FUD piece.
- cultus 6y ago
  The human body is incredibly complicated and we really don't know what we don't know. It's really not necessarily true that drinking a nutrient rich slurry like Soylent is a good substitute for a conventional healthy diet. It literally is an unknown. There's good prior reason to believe it is not significantly better. It probably isn't a whole lot worse either, certainly better than many people's diets. Thus, unknown benefit or harm which probably isn't huge either way. It's like taking an untested drug that probably isn't dangerous but probably doesn't have a huge effect either. The precautionary principle is the usual rule with such things. To really know, we'd need multi-decade longitudinal studies of large numbers of people. Soylent obviously doesn't have that kind of evidence.
- isoskeles 6y ago
  I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy." Maybe we're going too far into a discussion on epistemology here, but I don't think it is FUD to call out that we cannot clearly say the same thing about Soylent that we say about a serving of cruciferous vegetables. One is healthy and the other is unknown and ambiguous. However, if we still want to call this FUD, I'd argue that maybe FUD is necessary when thinking about what we put into our bodies. I'd also practice FUD when thinking through whether I should approach a mountain lion, and I'd encourage everyone else to do the same.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    > I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy." There's a difference between _knowing_ and _believing_. You _believe_ this, it's not an absolute truth. It's the same as most people believe they must drink 2L of water a day, where in reality there's zero scientific basis for the assertion. It could be that there is scientific basis that ground up plant material of which Soylent is comprised is not nutritionally similar to "leafy green vegetables", but you don't _know_ that. You merely _believe_ it. I'm not even a soylent fan (although I did try it), but I am a fan of critical thinking.
ncmncm 6y ago
"Soylent: because some of us really like people."
macksd 6y ago
As others have commented, this article is a little bit FUD-ish and doesn't back up all it's claims that much better than Soylent. But personally what I was attracted to in Soylent, I found in better in Huel. Real nutritionists, who share great content about their choices, etc. Very interesting to follow, and I'm a big fan of their powder for breakfast and their "Hot & Savory" for lunches. My diet is now almost entirely plant-based, there are noticeable health improvements, and it's as cheap and efficient as Soylent.
- marliechiller 6y ago
  I would second huel. its made my shift to veganism much, much more pleasant and practical and has allowed me to hit my macros for hypertrophy in a more manageable way
- tmikaeld 6y ago
  My fiancé and me have been on it for ~2 years, replacing the meal at work with it. In the evening we eat home-made food. It's been amazing, we both feel more energized and the stool have been better (probably due to the large amount of fibers in huel).
  - macksd 6y ago
    The stool is better, ONCE YOUR BODY IS USED TO IT! One of the main reasons I'm able to be so disciplined about keeping it in my diet heavily is I don't want to subject my wife to the first few weeks back on a mostly-Huel diet :) The poor dear...
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
This whole article has a much too assured tone about itself than is actually warranted. The one thing I can agree with when it comes to nutrition science are: 1. There are a huge amount of unknowns in nutrition science. 2. We have multiple examples where highly processed foods (e.g. trans fats, refined sugars, low fiber) have been proven bad for you, so eating whole foods is generally a safer bet, but regardless it tastes better, too.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
My car is product of evolution of a couple hundred years, evolving to lubricate with refined petroleum oil in its engine. Today I,m making oil change, too busy to get petroleum 10-30 oil, figure some canola should be just as good, it,s just oil, guys.
- ryeights 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil
lucb1e 6y ago
> in the Silicon Valley world where everyone ought to spend 16 hours a day coding, food was a waste of time Any more straw men you want to knock down before talking about the content people clicked for? I don't have to agree with the lifestyle of working >8 hours a day or not taking breaks to find it a convenient food without having to worry about, y'know, the 'snack' being healthy. > this is pretty much entirely nonsense and caused significant harm to an entire generation of Americans, likely leading to much of the modern obesity epidemic Everyone adhering to the food pyramid is why Americans got obese? Really? But okay whatever, I'm not here for this discussion, I'm here for Soylent. Let me read on. > the sugar-industry-funded food pyramid [citation needed]. This kind of advice is given all around the world and doesn't seem to vary by the amount the sugar industry has control over each country's particular food agencies. But feel free to tell me of a country where it's significantly different, I will readily admit not to having checked every single one, but then I'm also not writing an article about how bad this pyramid (or disc, as it is in the Netherlands and probably other countries) is. To be clear, I know the sugar industry shifted blame to fats. Yes, that is a thing. But not all of this can be solely blamed on the sugar industry and it's not all 100% lies by the government either. But we're coming up on the first actual content, let me not waste more time. > "[Soylent has no] excess amounts of sugars, saturated fats, or cholesterol." [...] There’s no good evidence suggesting that saturated fats are bad for you, only that they aren’t quite as good for you as monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. [...] eating cholesterol does not raise your cholesterol in the simple ways we used to believe, and that eating some cholesterol is important for your brain and for sexual health So Soylent says their food doesn't contain much of these two things, and it's debatable to what degree those two things are undesirable... but does that mean they should have included more of something suspected to be bad? They just don't include, as you cited, excess amounts. > This is a problem for Soylent. No, this is a problem for you. You're taking issue with their wording, not their actual contents so far. I haven't seen a single ingredient being mentioned that is in excess or too little. > you could be at higher risk for neurodegenerative disease, memory loss, decreased sexual function, and other problems. That's a huge leap. Yeah, yeah, weasel word "could be" is in there, author's grace is saved... it's unhelpful at best. The next point being made is about sugar in a specific product I hadn't even heard about, Coffeist. The variant of Soylent I buy also has added flavoring and sugars, I think it's obvious to everyone buying this that it's not as good as the real, original thing. The core is the part we're trusting to be free of unhealthy things. > Odds are good that we don’t know everything about what we get from food, just what we know so far. This imperfect information about vitamins and minerals is problematic, because while a lime probably has some other [unknown good stuff, dubbed Vitamin X], Soylent doesn’t. Wait, leap: we don't know -> thus soylent has to be incomplete. You literally just said you don't know that. If don't know which foods have Vitamin X, you can call into question literally every diet. The only solution would be to eat a little of everything, including unhealthy things, because perhaps there is a helpful mystery ingredient we don't know about. If an argument applies equally to the food you're trying to determine the healthiness of as well as the control group, it's not an argument against the food in question. > when you stop eating vegetables and start drinking magical silicon valley food powder… Yeah, this pretty much speaks for itself. Nobody ever said the former. > It may have all of the vitamins and minerals you need, but do you absorb them the same way? The only way you would know is to consume only Soylent and nothing else and get your levels tested after a few months, maybe longer Woa smartypants, guess what people did? I didn't research this topic, this is just regular news. You don't have to look far to find this. Top hit for my first guess at a search query, "blood test soylent", is "Blood test results. 100% Soylent 2.0 for 1 year". The results "were all within the normal ranges except for sodium and chlorine. Doctor asked about water intake and it was determined I drank way too much water". What's the top reply in that thread? "I am also on a 80%+ Soylent diet for 24 months and my blood tests came back as normal too! Except for a vitamin D deficiency." People did this. And I'm still waiting for the first unhealthy or missing/deficit ingredient. You did literally zero research for this opinion piece. > as an animal that evolved to eat other animals We didn't evolve specifically to survive in space either, so let's not go there using artificial means? What an argument. If you're saying there are non-vegetarian (let alone vegan) ingredients that we absolutely cannot miss, then please do say which ones because there are a lot of vegans and vegetarians trying to live healthy lives that would love to hear your well-founded research. > Soylent 2.0 has a glycemic index of 49, which is about the same as orange juice, Snickers bars, and spaghetti. That’s not so bad on its own, but if it’s all you’re consuming, then every meal is hitting your blood sugar the same way as a sweet drink or plate full of pasta would. That’s not good. Okay so here is something I can't comment on. I'm no nutritionist (neither does the author claim to be), so far everything was just common sense and plain logic. I don't know if sugar spikes cause diabetes or something. Let's read on! ... but no, that is the end of that topic. Nothing further about what issue(s) this might cause. So a "not good" glycemic index is the sole argument of the entire post that is relevant to most Soylent eaters. The other argument is "we don't know what we don't know". As if we're unaware of that. People get blood tests because of that. They're actively developing the formula because of that. So, is it objectively not healthy, as you claim in the headline? Should I not have this as a snack or single meal replacement, or are you really just warning against "don't eat this 100% of the time for 30 years because it might give you a higher chance of cancer; we don't know, and I definitely can't tell you"?
jyu 6y ago
Soylent is not healthy. Does anyone remember how Rob Rhinehart gave himself heart palpitations? How he hired a bunch of marketers, branders, engineers before any nutritionists and medical advisors? https://soylent.com/pages/careers https://soylent.com/pages/careers He is still making the same mistake by not prominently showing nutritional consultants, medical experts and hiding behind the claim that this is a nutritional supplement. Please correct me if Soylent has changed their MO of "move fast and break things" with people's nutrition. I would love to be wrong. edit: The idea of a fast, easy, nutritious paste is great. Nutrition, however, does not often fit into a piecemeal ready to eat box for all your meals. I ended up taking personal nutrition seriously when I realized my dietary choices were undermining my health. You only get one run at this life. Please take the gravity of your health and who you abdicate your health decisions with the respect those consequences deserve.
- dsizzle 6y ago
  I read this and assumed he got heart palpitations from Soylent. The closest I could find was this article https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-who-would-make-eating-obsolete/361058/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-w... that mentions that he had heart arrhythmia -- but while developing Soylent early on and _deviating_ from the USDA recommendations (specifically with the amount of potassium). From that he concluded that Soylent should adhere to the USDA recommended values, which it does.
petargyurov 6y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but I have an issue with "liquid" food. My concern with products like Soylent and Huel is whether the nutruients they claim to provide are actually absorbed by your body. Solid food that has been liquidised is not the same as solid food: nutrient absorbption is affected by rate of digestion - more solid food, especially if it is fibrous, gives our bodies more time to absorb nutrients. It's the same way a fruit smoothie is actually worse for you than just eating the solid contents (disregarding the insane sugar content you would consume).
- cwkoss 6y ago
  I think solid food takes longer to digest because it takes our bodies longer to absorb the ingredients. Liquid foods are much more bioavailable, so I would expect them to be better absorbed than solid foods. If the liquid food has bad stuff in it (ex. bunch of sugar in a smoothie) that could be a negative thing, but for good stuff that would be a good thing.
abeppu 6y ago
I don't use soylent, but use a similar product in the same space. I hope very few people are using these to replace _all_ of their diet. But as a tool, I find meal replacement mixes to be useful in multiple contexts: - when traveling somewhere and I expect the options which meet my dietary requirements to be limited - when trying to fit extra calories to gain weight - when the other low-effort option would be snacks I won't feel good about (this used to mean the office) Especially if you have a dietary restriction and a metabolism that requires a lot of calories to avoid unintended weight loss, arranging to always have nutritious _real_ food can require a lot of effort and planning, and I can't always be bothered. If the other options are eating too few calories, eating crappy snacks, or picking something at a geographically convenient restaurant, a meal replacement shake can quickly become best easy option.
- closetohome 6y ago
  Criticism of Soylent does often seem to imply that the alternative is a home-cooked meal of leafy greens.
artagnon 6y ago
I've experimented with Soylent for almost 1.5 years, and here are my main takeaways: 1. It's far from perfect, but can serve as a substitute for junk food. After six months of switching to Soylent, the cholesterol in my blood had dropped significantly, as verified by blood tests. 2. It's much easier to moderate food intake with Soylent. If you eat out, especially in the US, the portions tend to be huge, and there's often a post-meal slump. Soylent makes it possible to continuously consume little amounts of food. 3. Your body loses the ability to process solid food if you have too much Soylent. It's possible to get addicted to Soylent, and develop an aversion for regular food, and this is unhealthy, to say the least. 4. Cooking and eating home-cooked meals is an essential part of overall well-being. For snacking on-the-go, smoothies are a good substitute. With yoghurt, seeds, and protein powder blended it, it's arguably healthier than Soylent. Conclusion: Soylent is like one of those fruit juices you might pick up at the supermarket, when you fancy it. Getting cartons of it shipped home every month is harmful to overall well-being.
- knrz 6y ago
  I’ve started using Coffiest as a substitute for Soy Milk and protein powder. Coffiest Frozen Bananas Ice Frozen Cauliflower & Avocado Chia Seeds Hemp Hearts Cocoa Cacao Assorted nuts (Cashews, Pistachios, Walnuts, Almonds)
stevespang 6y ago
FAKE NEWS ALERT: Cholesterol IS bad (The China study) Saturated Fat IS Bad, especially animal based fats Excess sugars are bad in Soylent Soy Protein is chock full of oxalates, kidney stone forming anti-nutrient
post_below 6y ago
I've read a lot of comments about unsourced claims and the like. I expected that after reading the article, the tone is more matter of fact than it has a right to be based on it's citations. Or at least it didn't present a credible argument for a crowd like HN. Despite that, from my perspective, having long followed the research in fields that relate to health, almost all of the points are the most likely explanation based on what we know (which isn't enough). Backing that up is of course a big ask, big enough that you'd have to decide between spending a few hours on a post or spending weeks compiling sources, then writing a brief history of health policy and practice. I can understand going with option one. All of that aside, I think this point is important: >The default for evaluating some food that isn’t found in nature shouldn’t be that it’s “healthy until proven bad,” rather, bad until proven healthy. We've co-evolved with our environment for 25 million years (if you count from the earliest evidence of hominoids). It's hard to argue that it doesn't make sense to approach anything that falls outside of that evolutionary relationship with healthy skepticism.
cwhiz 6y ago
>We know that synthetic supplements are not absorbed the same way as when we get them in real food, so even though Soylent has everything, we’re likely not using all of it the same way since it’s not in its original form. In that case, “100%” may be more like 20%, since we can only use some of it. Anecdotally, I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels from deficient to 57 ng/mL. Blood tested three times to confirm stability at or around that level. I've heard numerous times that vitamin supplements don't work, or aren't absorbed the way same, but the blood tests don't lie.
- PhantomGremlin 6y ago
  I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels That's just one vitamin. I'd venture that the micronutrients you need all have different absorption profiles. For example, someone I know had an iron deficiency. It turns out there are lots of different ways to attack that, with quite different effectiveness.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    I'm sure. I just think the blanket statement is obviously not true. There was a linked study or article, but because the article is so old, the link is dead.
y2bd 6y ago
I wish it wasn't bulked with maltodextrin.
jdofaz 6y ago
I tried Soylent for a while a few years ago, I always felt a little off after drinking it. Nothing extreme but I decided it wasn't for me.
tbran 6y ago
If you're into it, there are many user-submitted DIY Soylent recipes at completefoods.co [1]. There are recipes for Keto Chow (costs $7.15/day) [2], a super low-cost Soylent (costs $1.51/day) [3], AgroVittles solid bars (costs $14.15/day) [4], and Eldar Bread, also solid (costs $1.79/day) [5]. I'm not really interested in replacing all my meals with a drink (and I doubt many people really do that long term), but I think some of these options are a good way to get things I probably lack. [1]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes [2]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/keto-chow-150-master-rich-chocolate https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/keto-chow-150-maste... [3]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/brets-soylent-corn-oat-wheat-protein-complete-low-price https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/brets-soylent-corn-... [4]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/agrovittles-electric-green-energy-bars-v20-full-spectrum https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/agrovittles-electri... [5]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/eldar-flour https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/eldar-flour
bigbossman 6y ago
These kinds of posts always make me think of Jay-Z - "What you eat don't make me shit"
t0mbstone 6y ago
Soylent is full of sugar (which will cause your insulin levels to spike) and has crappy fat in it from stuff like canola oil. It's objectively a terribly unhealthy beverage. A much better alternative is Orgain, which uses monkfruit for sweetener (which won't affect your insulin if you are diabetic), and has a bunch of vegetables in it, plus protein from peas.
- m463 6y ago
  I had a subscription for soylent for years. I remember someone asking me if I could go 100%. I said NO WAY. maybe 10% of your diet, more is not great. I treated it as a snack replacement because -- hey, it's better than reaching for something really bad, right? In the end I think it IS a snack. It was better than eating donuts, or hotdogs all day, but is only by a matter of degree. It is a highly processed food, which is not great. I see it a little like the emergency room - it will prevent you from dying today. But it will not help you with a healthy and thriving lifestyle.
ykevinator 6y ago
Eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol
dwrodri 6y ago
I am a graduate student with ADHD-PI who lives alone. Keeping my apartment in acceptable condition and taking care of myself can be quite difficult at times. It can take hours for me to fold laundry, do the dishes, or cook meals because I struggle following through with tasks. I am not bound from ever feeling like a functional human, I have my good days and my bad days, same as everyone else. Prior to soylent, I was ordering food multiple times a week and keeping lots of junk food in the house, in case I hyperfocused through the time that I should be cooking dinner, which was quite often. I'm not here to defend the contents of Soylent, and I'm only loyal to the brand to the extent that I find it tasting not bad. But the concept of an instant meal replacement which I can prepare in a matter of seconds has had a huge positive benefit to my life. If anyone else has any tips for how they managed to deal with this (besides Soylent), I'm all ears. For what it's worth, I try to keep Soylent to one a day and always have a "real" meal otherwise

84 points by ecliptik 6y ago

unwoundmouse 6y ago

This article states that minimizing grains is ideal but never defends that point. Does anyone have data defending that?

pricci 6y ago
I thought the same while reading the article. My understanding is that carbohydrates are not really bad, especially unrefined ones. Examine.com has this to say: https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/#summary2 https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/#summary... At the end of the day, no one knows I guess.
andor 6y ago
The author is confusing highly-processed white bread and sugary cereals with the grains themselves. Whole grains are some of the healthiest foods one can eat. https://nutritionfacts.org https://nutritionfacts.org has a lot of information on evidence-based nutrition, sadly it's mostly videos.

dkdk8283 6y ago

Soy is bad for you - high amounts of estrogen.

unwoundmouse 6y ago
False actually. This study states that the isoflavones in soy don’t affect serum T levels. https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/fulltext https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/full...
JohnGB 6y ago
That's not quite accurate. Soy contains phytoestrogen, which is a plant estrogen, not a human estrogen. It's similar in many ways and does have (in a much weaker form) some of the effects of human estrogen. However, just calling it "estrogen" implies that it's the same as human estrogen. It isn't.
- 127 6y ago
  From anecdotal evidence it seems for some people the phytoestrogen still activates estrogen pathways. Probably has genetic variation on the effects.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    Anecdotal evidence? How does someone anecdotally detect that their estrogen pathway has been activated?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 127 6y ago
      By growing big moobs.
      - evanextreme 6y ago
        then why is that not the case for countries with a significantly higher proportion of soy in their diets such as countries in Asia? if what you said is true then once would expect to notice it
        127 6y ago
        Like I said, genetic variation.
        evanextreme 6y ago
        so you suspect that some gene (evidence for which also exists "anecdotally") triggers a genetic response only in countries where this type of food isn't regularly consumed? because then this sounds like a wild guess prompted by suspicions and pseudoscience
draw_down 6y ago
I also know who Alex Jones is
waynecochran 6y ago
As soon as I heard "man boobs" and "soy protein" I was out. This may be completely false, but truth is hard to come by these days. No need to risk it here when there are plenty of other good sources of protein. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18558591/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18558591/
MFogleman 6y ago
I dont have citations on hand, but my understanding is that this claim is largely attributed to a single/small amount of studies of dubious validity funded by US Beef industry, and that when you look at populations that have much higher soy intake, their estrogen levels are not elevated/are lower than similar US populations. Grain of salt and all that, just offering a lead for those curious of the counter argument
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
If that were true, we'd have seen significant effects in the peoples of Asia by now, where soy consumption is high.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
andor 6y ago
Did you know that cow milk contains actual estrogen and other hormones?

staplers 6y ago

As a product designer, it's easy to see through the trend of repackaging old products with new "minimal" branding. Soylent is PediaLyte or Ensure for millenials. You see it in every industry now not just tech.

jefftk 6y ago
PediaLyte and Ensure had far more sugar pre-Soylent
DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
I think it misrepresents Soylent to claim it’s essentially a repackaged Pedialyte/Ensure - it had a very, very different product development process and it ostensibly has different goals.
ctrl-j 6y ago
Uhhh.. PediaLyte and Ensure are vastly different products. Ensure is a weight gain meal replacement drink and PediaLyte is fancy gatorade. Soylent is somewhere between Slimfast and Ensure. I'm not positive there's a quality calorically balanced meal replacement drink out there? Maybe there is, but whatever that is, Soylent is the branded version of that. Not PediaLyte or Ensure.

jeff-davis 6y ago

It doesn't need to be perfectly healthy to serve its purpose to me. It helps me avoid time-and-money-wasting bad meals. If you are out somewhere busy, sometimes you just want to keep going but you are hungry. But all the food options might be overpriced junk food that you have to wait for. Drink a soylent and skip that meal. When you get home eat real food that you actually want to eat. Soylent kills food cravings and keeps your mood even for hours.

ceejayoz 6y ago
> But all the food options might be overpriced junk food... Isn't the point of the article that Soylent is overpriced junk food?
- saluki 6y ago
  Try carrying a couple of granola bars, dried fruit and nuts when you're out.
  - 67868018 6y ago
    One serving of Soylent gives me 14g of fat and 13g of protein. Better than a granola bar and some fruit and nuts, which tend to be only carb heavy with some protein.
    - jiofih 6y ago
      It also gives you 37g of carbs. Read the label.
  - jeff-davis 6y ago
    It's a fine idea and I do eat a lot of nuts. But it's pretty hard to match the convenience and effectiveness of a soylent. Basically, if you ever have cravings or moodiness due to food, that can be solved by a soylent in about 60 seconds. Maybe nuts can solve it too, but a lot of people don't do that, and end up eating junk instead.
- 6y ago

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

Title: "No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why." Heading of the conclusion: "The Core Problem: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know" Most sections could be summarized as "We don't know that Soylent is doing things right therefore it might be unhealthy." It's just a FUD piece.

cultus 6y ago
The human body is incredibly complicated and we really don't know what we don't know. It's really not necessarily true that drinking a nutrient rich slurry like Soylent is a good substitute for a conventional healthy diet. It literally is an unknown. There's good prior reason to believe it is not significantly better. It probably isn't a whole lot worse either, certainly better than many people's diets. Thus, unknown benefit or harm which probably isn't huge either way. It's like taking an untested drug that probably isn't dangerous but probably doesn't have a huge effect either. The precautionary principle is the usual rule with such things. To really know, we'd need multi-decade longitudinal studies of large numbers of people. Soylent obviously doesn't have that kind of evidence.
isoskeles 6y ago
I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy." Maybe we're going too far into a discussion on epistemology here, but I don't think it is FUD to call out that we cannot clearly say the same thing about Soylent that we say about a serving of cruciferous vegetables. One is healthy and the other is unknown and ambiguous. However, if we still want to call this FUD, I'd argue that maybe FUD is necessary when thinking about what we put into our bodies. I'd also practice FUD when thinking through whether I should approach a mountain lion, and I'd encourage everyone else to do the same.
- m0zg 6y ago
  > I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy." There's a difference between _knowing_ and _believing_. You _believe_ this, it's not an absolute truth. It's the same as most people believe they must drink 2L of water a day, where in reality there's zero scientific basis for the assertion. It could be that there is scientific basis that ground up plant material of which Soylent is comprised is not nutritionally similar to "leafy green vegetables", but you don't _know_ that. You merely _believe_ it. I'm not even a soylent fan (although I did try it), but I am a fan of critical thinking.

ncmncm 6y ago

"Soylent: because some of us really like people."

macksd 6y ago

As others have commented, this article is a little bit FUD-ish and doesn't back up all it's claims that much better than Soylent. But personally what I was attracted to in Soylent, I found in better in Huel. Real nutritionists, who share great content about their choices, etc. Very interesting to follow, and I'm a big fan of their powder for breakfast and their "Hot & Savory" for lunches. My diet is now almost entirely plant-based, there are noticeable health improvements, and it's as cheap and efficient as Soylent.

marliechiller 6y ago
I would second huel. its made my shift to veganism much, much more pleasant and practical and has allowed me to hit my macros for hypertrophy in a more manageable way
tmikaeld 6y ago
My fiancé and me have been on it for ~2 years, replacing the meal at work with it. In the evening we eat home-made food. It's been amazing, we both feel more energized and the stool have been better (probably due to the large amount of fibers in huel).
- macksd 6y ago
  The stool is better, ONCE YOUR BODY IS USED TO IT! One of the main reasons I'm able to be so disciplined about keeping it in my diet heavily is I don't want to subject my wife to the first few weeks back on a mostly-Huel diet :) The poor dear...

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

This whole article has a much too assured tone about itself than is actually warranted. The one thing I can agree with when it comes to nutrition science are: 1. There are a huge amount of unknowns in nutrition science. 2. We have multiple examples where highly processed foods (e.g. trans fats, refined sugars, low fiber) have been proven bad for you, so eating whole foods is generally a safer bet, but regardless it tastes better, too.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

My car is product of evolution of a couple hundred years, evolving to lubricate with refined petroleum oil in its engine. Today I,m making oil change, too busy to get petroleum 10-30 oil, figure some canola should be just as good, it,s just oil, guys.

ryeights 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil

lucb1e 6y ago

> in the Silicon Valley world where everyone ought to spend 16 hours a day coding, food was a waste of time Any more straw men you want to knock down before talking about the content people clicked for? I don't have to agree with the lifestyle of working >8 hours a day or not taking breaks to find it a convenient food without having to worry about, y'know, the 'snack' being healthy. > this is pretty much entirely nonsense and caused significant harm to an entire generation of Americans, likely leading to much of the modern obesity epidemic Everyone adhering to the food pyramid is why Americans got obese? Really? But okay whatever, I'm not here for this discussion, I'm here for Soylent. Let me read on. > the sugar-industry-funded food pyramid [citation needed]. This kind of advice is given all around the world and doesn't seem to vary by the amount the sugar industry has control over each country's particular food agencies. But feel free to tell me of a country where it's significantly different, I will readily admit not to having checked every single one, but then I'm also not writing an article about how bad this pyramid (or disc, as it is in the Netherlands and probably other countries) is. To be clear, I know the sugar industry shifted blame to fats. Yes, that is a thing. But not all of this can be solely blamed on the sugar industry and it's not all 100% lies by the government either. But we're coming up on the first actual content, let me not waste more time. > "[Soylent has no] excess amounts of sugars, saturated fats, or cholesterol." [...] There’s no good evidence suggesting that saturated fats are bad for you, only that they aren’t quite as good for you as monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. [...] eating cholesterol does not raise your cholesterol in the simple ways we used to believe, and that eating some cholesterol is important for your brain and for sexual health So Soylent says their food doesn't contain much of these two things, and it's debatable to what degree those two things are undesirable... but does that mean they should have included more of something suspected to be bad? They just don't include, as you cited, excess amounts. > This is a problem for Soylent. No, this is a problem for you. You're taking issue with their wording, not their actual contents so far. I haven't seen a single ingredient being mentioned that is in excess or too little. > you could be at higher risk for neurodegenerative disease, memory loss, decreased sexual function, and other problems. That's a huge leap. Yeah, yeah, weasel word "could be" is in there, author's grace is saved... it's unhelpful at best. The next point being made is about sugar in a specific product I hadn't even heard about, Coffeist. The variant of Soylent I buy also has added flavoring and sugars, I think it's obvious to everyone buying this that it's not as good as the real, original thing. The core is the part we're trusting to be free of unhealthy things. > Odds are good that we don’t know everything about what we get from food, just what we know so far. This imperfect information about vitamins and minerals is problematic, because while a lime probably has some other [unknown good stuff, dubbed Vitamin X], Soylent doesn’t. Wait, leap: we don't know -> thus soylent has to be incomplete. You literally just said you don't know that. If don't know which foods have Vitamin X, you can call into question literally every diet. The only solution would be to eat a little of everything, including unhealthy things, because perhaps there is a helpful mystery ingredient we don't know about. If an argument applies equally to the food you're trying to determine the healthiness of as well as the control group, it's not an argument against the food in question. > when you stop eating vegetables and start drinking magical silicon valley food powder… Yeah, this pretty much speaks for itself. Nobody ever said the former. > It may have all of the vitamins and minerals you need, but do you absorb them the same way? The only way you would know is to consume only Soylent and nothing else and get your levels tested after a few months, maybe longer Woa smartypants, guess what people did? I didn't research this topic, this is just regular news. You don't have to look far to find this. Top hit for my first guess at a search query, "blood test soylent", is "Blood test results. 100% Soylent 2.0 for 1 year". The results "were all within the normal ranges except for sodium and chlorine. Doctor asked about water intake and it was determined I drank way too much water". What's the top reply in that thread? "I am also on a 80%+ Soylent diet for 24 months and my blood tests came back as normal too! Except for a vitamin D deficiency." People did this. And I'm still waiting for the first unhealthy or missing/deficit ingredient. You did literally zero research for this opinion piece. > as an animal that evolved to eat other animals We didn't evolve specifically to survive in space either, so let's not go there using artificial means? What an argument. If you're saying there are non-vegetarian (let alone vegan) ingredients that we absolutely cannot miss, then please do say which ones because there are a lot of vegans and vegetarians trying to live healthy lives that would love to hear your well-founded research. > Soylent 2.0 has a glycemic index of 49, which is about the same as orange juice, Snickers bars, and spaghetti. That’s not so bad on its own, but if it’s all you’re consuming, then every meal is hitting your blood sugar the same way as a sweet drink or plate full of pasta would. That’s not good. Okay so here is something I can't comment on. I'm no nutritionist (neither does the author claim to be), so far everything was just common sense and plain logic. I don't know if sugar spikes cause diabetes or something. Let's read on! ... but no, that is the end of that topic. Nothing further about what issue(s) this might cause. So a "not good" glycemic index is the sole argument of the entire post that is relevant to most Soylent eaters. The other argument is "we don't know what we don't know". As if we're unaware of that. People get blood tests because of that. They're actively developing the formula because of that. So, is it objectively not healthy, as you claim in the headline? Should I not have this as a snack or single meal replacement, or are you really just warning against "don't eat this 100% of the time for 30 years because it might give you a higher chance of cancer; we don't know, and I definitely can't tell you"?

jyu 6y ago

Soylent is not healthy. Does anyone remember how Rob Rhinehart gave himself heart palpitations? How he hired a bunch of marketers, branders, engineers before any nutritionists and medical advisors? https://soylent.com/pages/careers https://soylent.com/pages/careers He is still making the same mistake by not prominently showing nutritional consultants, medical experts and hiding behind the claim that this is a nutritional supplement. Please correct me if Soylent has changed their MO of "move fast and break things" with people's nutrition. I would love to be wrong. edit: The idea of a fast, easy, nutritious paste is great. Nutrition, however, does not often fit into a piecemeal ready to eat box for all your meals. I ended up taking personal nutrition seriously when I realized my dietary choices were undermining my health. You only get one run at this life. Please take the gravity of your health and who you abdicate your health decisions with the respect those consequences deserve.

dsizzle 6y ago
I read this and assumed he got heart palpitations from Soylent. The closest I could find was this article https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-who-would-make-eating-obsolete/361058/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-w... that mentions that he had heart arrhythmia -- but while developing Soylent early on and _deviating_ from the USDA recommendations (specifically with the amount of potassium). From that he concluded that Soylent should adhere to the USDA recommended values, which it does.

petargyurov 6y ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but I have an issue with "liquid" food. My concern with products like Soylent and Huel is whether the nutruients they claim to provide are actually absorbed by your body. Solid food that has been liquidised is not the same as solid food: nutrient absorbption is affected by rate of digestion - more solid food, especially if it is fibrous, gives our bodies more time to absorb nutrients. It's the same way a fruit smoothie is actually worse for you than just eating the solid contents (disregarding the insane sugar content you would consume).

cwkoss 6y ago
I think solid food takes longer to digest because it takes our bodies longer to absorb the ingredients. Liquid foods are much more bioavailable, so I would expect them to be better absorbed than solid foods. If the liquid food has bad stuff in it (ex. bunch of sugar in a smoothie) that could be a negative thing, but for good stuff that would be a good thing.

abeppu 6y ago

I don't use soylent, but use a similar product in the same space. I hope very few people are using these to replace _all_ of their diet. But as a tool, I find meal replacement mixes to be useful in multiple contexts: - when traveling somewhere and I expect the options which meet my dietary requirements to be limited - when trying to fit extra calories to gain weight - when the other low-effort option would be snacks I won't feel good about (this used to mean the office) Especially if you have a dietary restriction and a metabolism that requires a lot of calories to avoid unintended weight loss, arranging to always have nutritious _real_ food can require a lot of effort and planning, and I can't always be bothered. If the other options are eating too few calories, eating crappy snacks, or picking something at a geographically convenient restaurant, a meal replacement shake can quickly become best easy option.

closetohome 6y ago
Criticism of Soylent does often seem to imply that the alternative is a home-cooked meal of leafy greens.

artagnon 6y ago

I've experimented with Soylent for almost 1.5 years, and here are my main takeaways: 1. It's far from perfect, but can serve as a substitute for junk food. After six months of switching to Soylent, the cholesterol in my blood had dropped significantly, as verified by blood tests. 2. It's much easier to moderate food intake with Soylent. If you eat out, especially in the US, the portions tend to be huge, and there's often a post-meal slump. Soylent makes it possible to continuously consume little amounts of food. 3. Your body loses the ability to process solid food if you have too much Soylent. It's possible to get addicted to Soylent, and develop an aversion for regular food, and this is unhealthy, to say the least. 4. Cooking and eating home-cooked meals is an essential part of overall well-being. For snacking on-the-go, smoothies are a good substitute. With yoghurt, seeds, and protein powder blended it, it's arguably healthier than Soylent. Conclusion: Soylent is like one of those fruit juices you might pick up at the supermarket, when you fancy it. Getting cartons of it shipped home every month is harmful to overall well-being.

knrz 6y ago
I’ve started using Coffiest as a substitute for Soy Milk and protein powder. Coffiest Frozen Bananas Ice Frozen Cauliflower & Avocado Chia Seeds Hemp Hearts Cocoa Cacao Assorted nuts (Cashews, Pistachios, Walnuts, Almonds)

stevespang 6y ago

FAKE NEWS ALERT: Cholesterol IS bad (The China study) Saturated Fat IS Bad, especially animal based fats Excess sugars are bad in Soylent Soy Protein is chock full of oxalates, kidney stone forming anti-nutrient

post_below 6y ago

I've read a lot of comments about unsourced claims and the like. I expected that after reading the article, the tone is more matter of fact than it has a right to be based on it's citations. Or at least it didn't present a credible argument for a crowd like HN. Despite that, from my perspective, having long followed the research in fields that relate to health, almost all of the points are the most likely explanation based on what we know (which isn't enough). Backing that up is of course a big ask, big enough that you'd have to decide between spending a few hours on a post or spending weeks compiling sources, then writing a brief history of health policy and practice. I can understand going with option one. All of that aside, I think this point is important: >The default for evaluating some food that isn’t found in nature shouldn’t be that it’s “healthy until proven bad,” rather, bad until proven healthy. We've co-evolved with our environment for 25 million years (if you count from the earliest evidence of hominoids). It's hard to argue that it doesn't make sense to approach anything that falls outside of that evolutionary relationship with healthy skepticism.

cwhiz 6y ago

>We know that synthetic supplements are not absorbed the same way as when we get them in real food, so even though Soylent has everything, we’re likely not using all of it the same way since it’s not in its original form. In that case, “100%” may be more like 20%, since we can only use some of it. Anecdotally, I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels from deficient to 57 ng/mL. Blood tested three times to confirm stability at or around that level. I've heard numerous times that vitamin supplements don't work, or aren't absorbed the way same, but the blood tests don't lie.

PhantomGremlin 6y ago
I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels That's just one vitamin. I'd venture that the micronutrients you need all have different absorption profiles. For example, someone I know had an iron deficiency. It turns out there are lots of different ways to attack that, with quite different effectiveness.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  I'm sure. I just think the blanket statement is obviously not true. There was a linked study or article, but because the article is so old, the link is dead.

y2bd 6y ago

I wish it wasn't bulked with maltodextrin.

jdofaz 6y ago

I tried Soylent for a while a few years ago, I always felt a little off after drinking it. Nothing extreme but I decided it wasn't for me.

tbran 6y ago

If you're into it, there are many user-submitted DIY Soylent recipes at completefoods.co [1]. There are recipes for Keto Chow (costs $7.15/day) [2], a super low-cost Soylent (costs $1.51/day) [3], AgroVittles solid bars (costs $14.15/day) [4], and Eldar Bread, also solid (costs $1.79/day) [5]. I'm not really interested in replacing all my meals with a drink (and I doubt many people really do that long term), but I think some of these options are a good way to get things I probably lack. [1]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes [2]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/keto-chow-150-master-rich-chocolate https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/keto-chow-150-maste... [3]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/brets-soylent-corn-oat-wheat-protein-complete-low-price https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/brets-soylent-corn-... [4]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/agrovittles-electric-green-energy-bars-v20-full-spectrum https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/agrovittles-electri... [5]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/eldar-flour https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/eldar-flour

bigbossman 6y ago

These kinds of posts always make me think of Jay-Z - "What you eat don't make me shit"

t0mbstone 6y ago

Soylent is full of sugar (which will cause your insulin levels to spike) and has crappy fat in it from stuff like canola oil. It's objectively a terribly unhealthy beverage. A much better alternative is Orgain, which uses monkfruit for sweetener (which won't affect your insulin if you are diabetic), and has a bunch of vegetables in it, plus protein from peas.

m463 6y ago
I had a subscription for soylent for years. I remember someone asking me if I could go 100%. I said NO WAY. maybe 10% of your diet, more is not great. I treated it as a snack replacement because -- hey, it's better than reaching for something really bad, right? In the end I think it IS a snack. It was better than eating donuts, or hotdogs all day, but is only by a matter of degree. It is a highly processed food, which is not great. I see it a little like the emergency room - it will prevent you from dying today. But it will not help you with a healthy and thriving lifestyle.

ykevinator 6y ago

Eating cholesterol raises your cholesterol

dwrodri 6y ago

I am a graduate student with ADHD-PI who lives alone. Keeping my apartment in acceptable condition and taking care of myself can be quite difficult at times. It can take hours for me to fold laundry, do the dishes, or cook meals because I struggle following through with tasks. I am not bound from ever feeling like a functional human, I have my good days and my bad days, same as everyone else. Prior to soylent, I was ordering food multiple times a week and keeping lots of junk food in the house, in case I hyperfocused through the time that I should be cooking dinner, which was quite often. I'm not here to defend the contents of Soylent, and I'm only loyal to the brand to the extent that I find it tasting not bad. But the concept of an instant meal replacement which I can prepare in a matter of seconds has had a huge positive benefit to my life. If anyone else has any tips for how they managed to deal with this (besides Soylent), I'm all ears. For what it's worth, I try to keep Soylent to one a day and always have a "real" meal otherwise