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> 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 st

> 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 latter. It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods, but I doubt that anyone alive today knows how to do it. He may see "good" results on some metrics due to a lack of any desire to go hypercaloric -- i.e. there's probably no artificially boosted food reward[1] mechanisms in his glop. But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies. So an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have whipped up a drink that eliminates all that. A task that specialists have so far failed at. > "I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient." I've seen this enough to be sick of it; it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset gone badly wrong. The supplement and meal replacement powder/drink industry is a multi-billion dollar market. First sanity check: _no_ staff scientists for any of these companies thought to go look at a textbook and the intertubes and do the same thing? DOH! Egg's on them! Another example of this failure: when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science (e.g. human subjects) without _any_ training in how to do experiment design, data collection, or analysis. "Just ask 'em some questions!" The general form of the problem seems to be a blindness to the depths of domain knowledge required to be effective in other disciplines.

jgj 14y ago
First off, thanks for dampening the enthusiasm I was feeling after reading the OP. I would love to hear your thoughts on what, specifically, his formula is/may be missing. I can think of nothing more amazing than to consume a magic glass of nutrition a day and be done, and your post has given me pause.
- CapitalistCartr 14y ago
  The biggest problem isn't what he's clearly missing; its what he's missing that we don't know about, and won't suffer any consequences for years. Saidajigumi's comment about whole foods is appropriate: whole foods have better results than any manufactured powder or drink made, but its not clear why. And how long will it take before he experiences the results?
  - Retric 14y ago
    You base that on what study?
    - andrewflnr 14y ago
      The point is that there aren't any studies yet because we don't know what to study. You can't say "show me the science" when the point is there is no science yet, or not enough. That's just a cop-out.
- jgoney 14y ago
  Does he get enough fiber? I had always understood that the lower digestive system requires adequate fiber to function correctly. And less relevant, I had to chuckle at the "if I had any money or a girlfriend" part. He's not doing anything to break any stereotypes, there.
  - oscilloscope 14y ago
    It's definitely more nutritious than packaged ramen, at the least.
  - jessaustin 14y ago
    He has adjusted the fiber portion to meet his alimentary needs. That might not have been the most pleasant part of this experiment, but it wouldn't be difficult.
unix-dude 14y ago
Though I dont share quite the same level of negativity towards the idea (Personally, I think it'd be amazing to be able to give up food for something that is nutritious and safe), I definitely share your concerns. It is possible that the nutrient powder (and similar) industry hasn't given much thought to this idea because its radical and potentially risky, especially as a business venture where legal liability might be very, very high (all it takes is one person to die or be seriously injured as a result of this drink, and they are in big trouble). I'd say that IF any of these supplement producers did consider this type of drink, they probably dismissed it as too risky (both legally and financially, as I don't see the demand exploding for this). Also, he's not claiming that he has solved any problem. He's only claiming that after some research, he whipped up this drink, and that it seems to be working fine for his body chemistry. In fact, he's pretty clear about this being experimental and potentially dangerous (Though apparently there have been no negative effects as of now). I think its a really interesting idea, but nonetheless, I'd feel much better if he was a scientist focusing on a similar field. This seems like the exact kind of thing where small, seemingly unimportant details may propagate into significant risk. I seriously wish him well though. Personally, I wouldn't do much more than use this as a supplement (perhaps to replace lunch), but Im not the risky type when it comes to things like this.
- jgj 14y ago
  > It is possible that the nutrient powder (and similar) industry hasn't given much thought to this idea because its radical and potentially risky It may also be the case that "drink one of these a day and lose weight" is more marketable than "drink one of these a day and never eat real food again" ;)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Shorel 14y ago
  > It is possible that the nutrient powder (and similar) industry hasn't given much thought to this idea because its radical and potentially risky, especially as a business venture where legal liability might be very, very high. The stuff bodybuilders consume is not as well controlled as anything called 'food'. In fact, bodybuilding forums are full of 'I bought brand X and it was mostly filler, better stick to brand Y'.
criley 14y ago
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 the best results? When in reality, the human GI evolved to support an extremely broad range of inputs as it's most significant factor. With humans all over the earth eating an extremely disparate diet pre-civilization (and even post), the most significant factor of the human GI was it's ability to handle the wide variety of chemically diverse inputs and provide a consistent, reliable output. So why do you approach this, which is nothing more than a new input, and claim that the output is going to be different? Dangerous? Impossible? Seems to me like you're indignant with a touch of ego: "How dare he pretend to do my job. It's an insult to me that he is doing this!" That's the feeling I get from you reading this post.
- halcyondaze 14y ago
  > People look at the human GI totally wrong anyway. They think, what can I put in to get the best results? When in reality, the human GI evolved to support an extremely broad range of inputs as it's most significant factor. That doesn't mean that there isn't something you can put in to get the best results for yourself.
  - criley 14y ago
    That doesn't mean that there isn't something you can put in to get the best results for yourself. My point is that there are likely very many things you can put in to achieve a similar optimal result.
- yanowitz 14y ago
  I think that's a total misreading of the criticisms. This actually is a hard problem and the science well short of consensus. The surface area of the problem seems to grow every year as scientists publish new research. That seems like a good indication that the odds of this (relatively) uninformed approach being a great one is low.
JPKab 14y ago
Agreed. You said it all. One fair point (in defense of the Scrawny Pale Guy Diet he is advocating) is that the food industry in general devotes a large majority of its funding to making foods that TASTE really really good. If that gets in the way of nutrition, taste wins every time. But you are correct in the fact that this is crazy. Hell, I drank and smoked a lot when I was 24, and still looked healthier than this guy. Does that mean that I stumbled across an amazing new diet of beer, burgers, and weed when I was 24?
- pilgrim689 14y ago
  > still looked healthier than this guy What makes you think he's unhealthy? Because he has whiter complexion and he isn't bulky?
  - DanBC 14y ago
    > isn't bulky? What? He looks a bit chunky to me. Does he list his height / weight anywhere? (Yes, I'm aware that BMI is flawed. You have olympic athletes with almost no body fat but 'obese' BMIs. This guy? He's no athlete.)
    - jessaustin 14y ago
      Chunky? You should travel to the Midwest and Southern USA. It might blow your mind. BMI is very flawed as a measure of any imaginable health outcome. You'd be better served to ask about blood pressure, pulse, blood glucose, albumin, etc.
      - DanBC 14y ago
        This is the scary thing about obesity. Bariatric patients skew reality. People weighing over 500 pounds are obese; people over 250 pounds are now just overweight. The perfectly healthy "curvy" is now applied to people who are not just curvy, but very overweight, and sometimes in the obese range of overweight. I am wrong to call him chunky. (Although I do wonder if he's a thin-fat person, with all the fat around internal organs. But this is just noodling, and has nothing to do with anything he's said.) And I strongly agree about your BMI comment. I should have been a bit more careful - BMI is only useful as a guide that a person may be overweight. (If that person doesn't do any kind of exercise.)
zeteo 14y ago
>an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have [succeeded with a] task that specialists have so far failed at The guy who invented the spreadsheet didn't have to absorb all available accounting literature first, and Elon Musk didn't spend 30 years in the Apollo program before being allowed to send his own rocket to space. Nutrition is a field full of pseudoscience and highly susceptible to disruption. People should be encouraged to try new things here. If this guy is wrong it's at his own cost, and if right the potential benefits are enormous.
- baak 14y ago
  Elon Musk designed the rocket? All by himself? Wow! What a renaissance man. I figured he had physicists, engineers, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and you name it. But I guess he just read a few books on his weekends and that was enough to design and launch the rocket. This guy is a hobbyist who is claiming his diet has cured most of his ails. You aren't the least bit suspicious of that claim?
  - zeteo 14y ago
    >I guess [Musk] just read a few books on his weekends and that was enough to design and launch the rocket Ah, I love it when people think they're sarcastic but they're correct: >"I was sitting behind [Elon Musk] on the flight back to London when he looked at me over the seat and said, 'I think we can build a rocket ourselves.'" He showed Cantrell the spreadsheet he'd been working on. "I looked at it and said, I'll be damned — that's why he's been borrowing all my books. He'd been borrowing all my college textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, 'I read books.' Well, it's true. He devoured those books. He knew everything. He's the smartest guy I've ever met, and he'd been planning to build a rocket all along. [1] [1]http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-interview-1212-2 http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-int...
    - baak 14y ago
      ...didn't he have a Bachelor's in Physics? Either way, he didn't build/design the rocket himself. There was an enormous team.
rosser 14y ago
But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies. Exactly. Yeah, he seems to have done a pretty good job of making sure his glop includes all the things we know we need. It includes exactly zero of the things we don't know we need.
- learc83 14y ago
  Ignoring the processed/liquid aspect--maybe you could randomize the recipe a bit each time to account for our incomplete understanding.
- fc2 14y ago
  What makes you think there are things we don't know we need?
papsosouid 14y ago
>We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) What does the food industry have to do with anything? They aren't trying to get nutrition "right", they are trying to sell their products. This is the same reason people who don't know anything about nutritional science claim that "science doesn't really know anything about nutrition, one day fat is good, the next day it is bad". Science never said fat was good or bad, marketing weasels for food companies deliberately misrepresent research to support unsubstantiated claims. >finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods Except, there is no evidence to support that claim at all. >It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods Not just theoretically, but practically too. What exactly do you think they are feeding people on feeding tubes? It isn't salads. http://abbottnutrition.com/Adult/Adult-Tube-Feeding-Products.aspx http://abbottnutrition.com/Adult/Adult-Tube-Feeding-Products...
csomar 14y ago
Look, as a Medical student, I agree with what you are saying regarding the challenges that faces solving such a problem. But, being stupid help solve BIG problems. This guy is risking his health for the sake of science. He has a very high risk/reward ratio. I don't think he is not serious. He is not even trying in animals (which I thought he was doing before reading the rest of the article). He's obviously stupid when it comes to experimentation, but this is when it yields interesting results.
- mark-r 14y ago
  > being stupid help solve BIG problems. Many new things were invented by people who had no idea how large the problems were when they started.
derleth 14y ago
> the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy.
- ctchocula 14y ago
  The naturalistic fallacy is only relevant when dealing with ethics.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    No it isn't. "Good" is not a strictly ethical question. In this case, someone is wrongly pretending that whatever is "natural" to eat is also "healthy" to eat, and thus "good".
    - ctchocula 14y ago
      On second look, I agree with you that my statement (while true) does not apply to the grandparent, because as you explained the naturalistic fallacy does seem to apply here.
jlgreco 14y ago
> it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset > when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science... When a random nutter makes some woo, we just call them random nutters and ignore them. ...But when that random nutter happens to be a software engineer during the day, suddenly it is game on for slagging engineers? Clearly it must be indicative of some sort of common hubris in the industry? There is some selection bias going on here.
fc2 14y ago
Do you have any actual evidence that ingesting all nutrients known to be essential in powder form will lead to a nutritional deficiency or was your fallacious appeal to authority your whole argument?
mikeash 14y ago
I don't understand this. Let's say you took all the components of a healthy diet, then blended them together into a drink like this and consumed it. How would that be any different from eating the components separately? Your intestines don't know or care that a blender got to the food first. Maybe this particular example is missing something, I don't know. But you seem opposed to the very concept, which makes no sense to me. Why does it matter whether you take your food in as a bland mix or as individual pre-blended components?
- stouset 14y ago
  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 have significantly different effects. Calories in also doesn't necessarily equal calories absorbed. It's a crappy analogy, but imagine this guy was trying to construct a human body out of parts. He's wired up a brain, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, a lymphatic system, and all the rest to a skeletal system. What do you think his chances of success would be?
  - mikeash 14y ago
    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.
    - bravo 14y ago
      This is just a small example, but I know that Vitamin C inhibits calcium absorption. That's pretty well known among athletes.
    - 14y ago
lolcraft 14y ago
Dude. He's just some guy that built up some (not very useful but fun) shit, and is very cautious (explicitly!) about what it will do. He will even do an experiment, even if it's a very limited one. Give him a break, FFS. It's not like he's claiming his newly-developed pee cures cancer, or something. Incidentally, all you have shown in this thread is some bullshit about "processed foods" and "mitochondria", plus some TEDx talk "based on personal narrative" that shows all signs of being made by a fucking crank, about how your mitochondrial bullshit will, in fact, cure cancer. Well, not really. Just multiple sclerosis. (... are you fucking kidding me...? To think I had upvoted you at first... )
thoradam 14y ago
Could you please define "highly processed foods"?
inopinatus 14y ago
I have upvoted your remarks, not because I agree, but because they are a classic example of head-in-the-sand thinking and should be paraded as such. As a young developer I was often told "you can't do that" or "stop jumping to solutions" and as a now much, much older and very slightly wiser man I recognise that these were the knee-jerk fears of threatened reactionaries stuck in their ways, not the wise voices of experience that they thought they were. As someone else implied, the appeal to authority is one of the least credible forms of supporting argument.
notdrunkatall 14y ago
Yeah, the guy's testing on himself. We'll see in a year.
specialist 14y ago
A word of support... About 18 months ago I gave the Four Hour Body diet a whirl, primarily to lose weight. I was very surprised to notice that my psoriasis improved. A lot. While I was eating well. Took a stressful contract gig, resumed eating poorly, psoriasis came back with a vengeance. So I tried harder to stick the diet and my skin's health improved. Maybe 9 months ago I saw Dr Terry Wahls TEDx talk. I thought "Aha!" I'm a software guy, not a nutritionist. And I really just want to know what I'm supposed to do, the bullet points, not really needing the details. Since then I've tried very hard to eat like Wahls suggests. My psoriasis is now about 2/3rd gone. From bleeding breaking skin plagues back to normal skin mixed with flakiness. I see my dermatologist next week for my yearly. I'm quite eager to see if he notices the improvement. I've been dealing with this stuff for 10+ years and have gone to great lengths to treat it. I'm a bit chagrinned (grumpy) that all I had to do is eat more vegetables. So I believe, but cannot prove, that I lacked the proper nutrition and now that I'm eating a very diverse diet my health has improved. It's pretty uncontroversial. I'm impressed by the commenters who take great exception to your points. Like my scientist cousin is fond of asking skeptics (e.g. creationists, climate change, economics) "What level of proof do you require?"
_pmf_ 14y ago
It would generally be interesting to know why this kind of hybris is so common in our field.
Kim_Bruning 14y ago
Eh? It's early days, and he's approaching it more like an engineer than a scientist; but it looks like he has the right end of the stick (for some sort of stick). He's synthesizing his food de novo, so it's very easy to control the inputs and eliminate confounding factors. He's also doing occasional measurements (albeit not regularly enough for Proper Science, perhaps), and he is offering his replacement for free to other people on the condition that they do the same measurements. His hypotheses are not ideal, because he's not a domain expert yet, but that just means he's going to be a bit slower until he reads more papers and starts avoiding other people's mistakes ;-) One key thing I learned in university: Once you start reading papers, you're quickly going to turn into the world's leading expert on the tiny corner of science that you're reading on. (Of course, this has nothing to do with being a genius, and everything to do with no one else ever having cared about that corner before. :-P )
Selfcommit 14y ago
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple”.
jkarni 14y ago
Yeah, I've also seen this pattern often enough to wonder what the underlying reasons for it are. My inchoate thoughts: When you study, say, biology, you'll probably learn about all the wrong turns that very smart people made along the road to where we currently stand: self-moving principles in Aristotle; vitalism; spontaneous generation; enzymes as living organism; and many many more. That background gives you a sense of how hard it is to be right, and the importance of modesty and self-doubt. Whereas with computer science, what you learn about is the (relatively short, historically speaking) string of amazing successes in the field. And the more practical side of it (e.g., what software we produce for consumers) is even more unique in having this underlying exponential growth (Moore's law) foisting it up, and drastically changing at every moment what is possible, so that in fact there are very many opportunities that no one thought about simply because they weren't opportunities three years earlier. And then programmers start thinking that, not only is improvement easy in all fields, but also the fact that other fields don't have as much to show for themselves by way of these improvements (whereas they do) just indicates how much better and smarter and innovative they are, and how in light of this it really isn't surprising at all that they may, even as outsiders, have a lot to contribute to any given field.
csmatt 14y ago
I am a software engineer and do tend to look at things as just simple, solvable problems... Then I met my girlfriend who is completing her masters in Public Health. She has taught me of the great importance of what you mentioned (experiment design, data collection, and analysis). You can't account for all factors, but if you haven't even considered what the most important ones are, you're doing it wrong. That being said, I hate that stories like this get more attention because everyone here is irate over how obviously wrong it is while someone's great Show HN project gets passed over.

jgj 14y ago

First off, thanks for dampening the enthusiasm I was feeling after reading the OP. I would love to hear your thoughts on what, specifically, his formula is/may be missing. I can think of nothing more amazing than to consume a magic glass of nutrition a day and be done, and your post has given me pause.

CapitalistCartr 14y ago
The biggest problem isn't what he's clearly missing; its what he's missing that we don't know about, and won't suffer any consequences for years. Saidajigumi's comment about whole foods is appropriate: whole foods have better results than any manufactured powder or drink made, but its not clear why. And how long will it take before he experiences the results?
- Retric 14y ago
  You base that on what study?
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    The point is that there aren't any studies yet because we don't know what to study. You can't say "show me the science" when the point is there is no science yet, or not enough. That's just a cop-out.
jgoney 14y ago
Does he get enough fiber? I had always understood that the lower digestive system requires adequate fiber to function correctly. And less relevant, I had to chuckle at the "if I had any money or a girlfriend" part. He's not doing anything to break any stereotypes, there.
- oscilloscope 14y ago
  It's definitely more nutritious than packaged ramen, at the least.
- jessaustin 14y ago
  He has adjusted the fiber portion to meet his alimentary needs. That might not have been the most pleasant part of this experiment, but it wouldn't be difficult.

unix-dude 14y ago

Though I dont share quite the same level of negativity towards the idea (Personally, I think it'd be amazing to be able to give up food for something that is nutritious and safe), I definitely share your concerns. It is possible that the nutrient powder (and similar) industry hasn't given much thought to this idea because its radical and potentially risky, especially as a business venture where legal liability might be very, very high (all it takes is one person to die or be seriously injured as a result of this drink, and they are in big trouble). I'd say that IF any of these supplement producers did consider this type of drink, they probably dismissed it as too risky (both legally and financially, as I don't see the demand exploding for this). Also, he's not claiming that he has solved any problem. He's only claiming that after some research, he whipped up this drink, and that it seems to be working fine for his body chemistry. In fact, he's pretty clear about this being experimental and potentially dangerous (Though apparently there have been no negative effects as of now). I think its a really interesting idea, but nonetheless, I'd feel much better if he was a scientist focusing on a similar field. This seems like the exact kind of thing where small, seemingly unimportant details may propagate into significant risk. I seriously wish him well though. Personally, I wouldn't do much more than use this as a supplement (perhaps to replace lunch), but Im not the risky type when it comes to things like this.

jgj 14y ago
> It is possible that the nutrient powder (and similar) industry hasn't given much thought to this idea because its radical and potentially risky It may also be the case that "drink one of these a day and lose weight" is more marketable than "drink one of these a day and never eat real food again" ;)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Shorel 14y ago
> It is possible that the nutrient powder (and similar) industry hasn't given much thought to this idea because its radical and potentially risky, especially as a business venture where legal liability might be very, very high. The stuff bodybuilders consume is not as well controlled as anything called 'food'. In fact, bodybuilding forums are full of 'I bought brand X and it was mostly filler, better stick to brand Y'.

criley 14y ago

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 the best results? When in reality, the human GI evolved to support an extremely broad range of inputs as it's most significant factor. With humans all over the earth eating an extremely disparate diet pre-civilization (and even post), the most significant factor of the human GI was it's ability to handle the wide variety of chemically diverse inputs and provide a consistent, reliable output. So why do you approach this, which is nothing more than a new input, and claim that the output is going to be different? Dangerous? Impossible? Seems to me like you're indignant with a touch of ego: "How dare he pretend to do my job. It's an insult to me that he is doing this!" That's the feeling I get from you reading this post.

halcyondaze 14y ago
> People look at the human GI totally wrong anyway. They think, what can I put in to get the best results? When in reality, the human GI evolved to support an extremely broad range of inputs as it's most significant factor. That doesn't mean that there isn't something you can put in to get the best results for yourself.
- criley 14y ago
  That doesn't mean that there isn't something you can put in to get the best results for yourself. My point is that there are likely very many things you can put in to achieve a similar optimal result.
yanowitz 14y ago
I think that's a total misreading of the criticisms. This actually is a hard problem and the science well short of consensus. The surface area of the problem seems to grow every year as scientists publish new research. That seems like a good indication that the odds of this (relatively) uninformed approach being a great one is low.

JPKab 14y ago

Agreed. You said it all. One fair point (in defense of the Scrawny Pale Guy Diet he is advocating) is that the food industry in general devotes a large majority of its funding to making foods that TASTE really really good. If that gets in the way of nutrition, taste wins every time. But you are correct in the fact that this is crazy. Hell, I drank and smoked a lot when I was 24, and still looked healthier than this guy. Does that mean that I stumbled across an amazing new diet of beer, burgers, and weed when I was 24?

pilgrim689 14y ago
> still looked healthier than this guy What makes you think he's unhealthy? Because he has whiter complexion and he isn't bulky?
- DanBC 14y ago
  > isn't bulky? What? He looks a bit chunky to me. Does he list his height / weight anywhere? (Yes, I'm aware that BMI is flawed. You have olympic athletes with almost no body fat but 'obese' BMIs. This guy? He's no athlete.)
  - jessaustin 14y ago
    Chunky? You should travel to the Midwest and Southern USA. It might blow your mind. BMI is very flawed as a measure of any imaginable health outcome. You'd be better served to ask about blood pressure, pulse, blood glucose, albumin, etc.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      This is the scary thing about obesity. Bariatric patients skew reality. People weighing over 500 pounds are obese; people over 250 pounds are now just overweight. The perfectly healthy "curvy" is now applied to people who are not just curvy, but very overweight, and sometimes in the obese range of overweight. I am wrong to call him chunky. (Although I do wonder if he's a thin-fat person, with all the fat around internal organs. But this is just noodling, and has nothing to do with anything he's said.) And I strongly agree about your BMI comment. I should have been a bit more careful - BMI is only useful as a guide that a person may be overweight. (If that person doesn't do any kind of exercise.)

zeteo 14y ago

>an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have [succeeded with a] task that specialists have so far failed at The guy who invented the spreadsheet didn't have to absorb all available accounting literature first, and Elon Musk didn't spend 30 years in the Apollo program before being allowed to send his own rocket to space. Nutrition is a field full of pseudoscience and highly susceptible to disruption. People should be encouraged to try new things here. If this guy is wrong it's at his own cost, and if right the potential benefits are enormous.

baak 14y ago
Elon Musk designed the rocket? All by himself? Wow! What a renaissance man. I figured he had physicists, engineers, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and you name it. But I guess he just read a few books on his weekends and that was enough to design and launch the rocket. This guy is a hobbyist who is claiming his diet has cured most of his ails. You aren't the least bit suspicious of that claim?
- zeteo 14y ago
  >I guess [Musk] just read a few books on his weekends and that was enough to design and launch the rocket Ah, I love it when people think they're sarcastic but they're correct: >"I was sitting behind [Elon Musk] on the flight back to London when he looked at me over the seat and said, 'I think we can build a rocket ourselves.'" He showed Cantrell the spreadsheet he'd been working on. "I looked at it and said, I'll be damned — that's why he's been borrowing all my books. He'd been borrowing all my college textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, 'I read books.' Well, it's true. He devoured those books. He knew everything. He's the smartest guy I've ever met, and he'd been planning to build a rocket all along. [1] [1]http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-interview-1212-2 http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-int...
  - baak 14y ago
    ...didn't he have a Bachelor's in Physics? Either way, he didn't build/design the rocket himself. There was an enormous team.

rosser 14y ago

But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies. Exactly. Yeah, he seems to have done a pretty good job of making sure his glop includes all the things we know we need. It includes exactly zero of the things we don't know we need.

learc83 14y ago
Ignoring the processed/liquid aspect--maybe you could randomize the recipe a bit each time to account for our incomplete understanding.
fc2 14y ago
What makes you think there are things we don't know we need?

papsosouid 14y ago

>We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) What does the food industry have to do with anything? They aren't trying to get nutrition "right", they are trying to sell their products. This is the same reason people who don't know anything about nutritional science claim that "science doesn't really know anything about nutrition, one day fat is good, the next day it is bad". Science never said fat was good or bad, marketing weasels for food companies deliberately misrepresent research to support unsubstantiated claims. >finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods Except, there is no evidence to support that claim at all. >It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods Not just theoretically, but practically too. What exactly do you think they are feeding people on feeding tubes? It isn't salads. http://abbottnutrition.com/Adult/Adult-Tube-Feeding-Products.aspx http://abbottnutrition.com/Adult/Adult-Tube-Feeding-Products...

csomar 14y ago

Look, as a Medical student, I agree with what you are saying regarding the challenges that faces solving such a problem. But, being stupid help solve BIG problems. This guy is risking his health for the sake of science. He has a very high risk/reward ratio. I don't think he is not serious. He is not even trying in animals (which I thought he was doing before reading the rest of the article). He's obviously stupid when it comes to experimentation, but this is when it yields interesting results.

mark-r 14y ago
> being stupid help solve BIG problems. Many new things were invented by people who had no idea how large the problems were when they started.

derleth 14y ago

> the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy.

ctchocula 14y ago
The naturalistic fallacy is only relevant when dealing with ethics.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  No it isn't. "Good" is not a strictly ethical question. In this case, someone is wrongly pretending that whatever is "natural" to eat is also "healthy" to eat, and thus "good".
  - ctchocula 14y ago
    On second look, I agree with you that my statement (while true) does not apply to the grandparent, because as you explained the naturalistic fallacy does seem to apply here.

jlgreco 14y ago

> it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset > when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science... When a random nutter makes some woo, we just call them random nutters and ignore them. ...But when that random nutter happens to be a software engineer during the day, suddenly it is game on for slagging engineers? Clearly it must be indicative of some sort of common hubris in the industry? There is some selection bias going on here.

fc2 14y ago

Do you have any actual evidence that ingesting all nutrients known to be essential in powder form will lead to a nutritional deficiency or was your fallacious appeal to authority your whole argument?

mikeash 14y ago

I don't understand this. Let's say you took all the components of a healthy diet, then blended them together into a drink like this and consumed it. How would that be any different from eating the components separately? Your intestines don't know or care that a blender got to the food first. Maybe this particular example is missing something, I don't know. But you seem opposed to the very concept, which makes no sense to me. Why does it matter whether you take your food in as a bland mix or as individual pre-blended components?

stouset 14y ago
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 have significantly different effects. Calories in also doesn't necessarily equal calories absorbed. It's a crappy analogy, but imagine this guy was trying to construct a human body out of parts. He's wired up a brain, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, a lymphatic system, and all the rest to a skeletal system. What do you think his chances of success would be?
- mikeash 14y ago
  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.
  - bravo 14y ago
    This is just a small example, but I know that Vitamin C inhibits calcium absorption. That's pretty well known among athletes.
  - 14y ago

lolcraft 14y ago

Dude. He's just some guy that built up some (not very useful but fun) shit, and is very cautious (explicitly!) about what it will do. He will even do an experiment, even if it's a very limited one. Give him a break, FFS. It's not like he's claiming his newly-developed pee cures cancer, or something. Incidentally, all you have shown in this thread is some bullshit about "processed foods" and "mitochondria", plus some TEDx talk "based on personal narrative" that shows all signs of being made by a fucking crank, about how your mitochondrial bullshit will, in fact, cure cancer. Well, not really. Just multiple sclerosis. (... are you fucking kidding me...? To think I had upvoted you at first... )

thoradam 14y ago

Could you please define "highly processed foods"?

inopinatus 14y ago

I have upvoted your remarks, not because I agree, but because they are a classic example of head-in-the-sand thinking and should be paraded as such. As a young developer I was often told "you can't do that" or "stop jumping to solutions" and as a now much, much older and very slightly wiser man I recognise that these were the knee-jerk fears of threatened reactionaries stuck in their ways, not the wise voices of experience that they thought they were. As someone else implied, the appeal to authority is one of the least credible forms of supporting argument.

notdrunkatall 14y ago

Yeah, the guy's testing on himself. We'll see in a year.

specialist 14y ago

A word of support... About 18 months ago I gave the Four Hour Body diet a whirl, primarily to lose weight. I was very surprised to notice that my psoriasis improved. A lot. While I was eating well. Took a stressful contract gig, resumed eating poorly, psoriasis came back with a vengeance. So I tried harder to stick the diet and my skin's health improved. Maybe 9 months ago I saw Dr Terry Wahls TEDx talk. I thought "Aha!" I'm a software guy, not a nutritionist. And I really just want to know what I'm supposed to do, the bullet points, not really needing the details. Since then I've tried very hard to eat like Wahls suggests. My psoriasis is now about 2/3rd gone. From bleeding breaking skin plagues back to normal skin mixed with flakiness. I see my dermatologist next week for my yearly. I'm quite eager to see if he notices the improvement. I've been dealing with this stuff for 10+ years and have gone to great lengths to treat it. I'm a bit chagrinned (grumpy) that all I had to do is eat more vegetables. So I believe, but cannot prove, that I lacked the proper nutrition and now that I'm eating a very diverse diet my health has improved. It's pretty uncontroversial. I'm impressed by the commenters who take great exception to your points. Like my scientist cousin is fond of asking skeptics (e.g. creationists, climate change, economics) "What level of proof do you require?"

_pmf_ 14y ago

It would generally be interesting to know why this kind of hybris is so common in our field.

Kim_Bruning 14y ago

Eh? It's early days, and he's approaching it more like an engineer than a scientist; but it looks like he has the right end of the stick (for some sort of stick). He's synthesizing his food de novo, so it's very easy to control the inputs and eliminate confounding factors. He's also doing occasional measurements (albeit not regularly enough for Proper Science, perhaps), and he is offering his replacement for free to other people on the condition that they do the same measurements. His hypotheses are not ideal, because he's not a domain expert yet, but that just means he's going to be a bit slower until he reads more papers and starts avoiding other people's mistakes ;-) One key thing I learned in university: Once you start reading papers, you're quickly going to turn into the world's leading expert on the tiny corner of science that you're reading on. (Of course, this has nothing to do with being a genius, and everything to do with no one else ever having cared about that corner before. :-P )

Selfcommit 14y ago

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple”.

jkarni 14y ago

Yeah, I've also seen this pattern often enough to wonder what the underlying reasons for it are. My inchoate thoughts: When you study, say, biology, you'll probably learn about all the wrong turns that very smart people made along the road to where we currently stand: self-moving principles in Aristotle; vitalism; spontaneous generation; enzymes as living organism; and many many more. That background gives you a sense of how hard it is to be right, and the importance of modesty and self-doubt. Whereas with computer science, what you learn about is the (relatively short, historically speaking) string of amazing successes in the field. And the more practical side of it (e.g., what software we produce for consumers) is even more unique in having this underlying exponential growth (Moore's law) foisting it up, and drastically changing at every moment what is possible, so that in fact there are very many opportunities that no one thought about simply because they weren't opportunities three years earlier. And then programmers start thinking that, not only is improvement easy in all fields, but also the fact that other fields don't have as much to show for themselves by way of these improvements (whereas they do) just indicates how much better and smarter and innovative they are, and how in light of this it really isn't surprising at all that they may, even as outsiders, have a lot to contribute to any given field.

csmatt 14y ago

I am a software engineer and do tend to look at things as just simple, solvable problems... Then I met my girlfriend who is completing her masters in Public Health. She has taught me of the great importance of what you mentioned (experiment design, data collection, and analysis). You can't account for all factors, but if you haven't even considered what the most important ones are, you're doing it wrong. That being said, I hate that stories like this get more attention because everyone here is irate over how obviously wrong it is while someone's great Show HN project gets passed over.