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Soylent Month Three

238 points by septerr 13y ago

huhtenberg 13y ago
At the risk of stating the obvious - this is all good and the experiment he's running is very interesting, but - no. I really like eating tasty food. Not for the nutrients, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like sleeping in a comfortable bed and taking a hot shower daily even though, technically, I can rest as well on a bare floor and shower once a week. To each his own, but some things are just too unorthodox.
- Jacob4u2 13y ago
  I don't think that's a fair comparison. What if sleeping on the floor and not showering made you think better and your body healthier? It's not simply a privation technique, he seems to be doing it to hack his body for better performance. Although kind of anecdotal evidence, the article mentions several mood and energy changes when not on the soylent diet (I think those things could just as likely be a change in environment/routine though).
  - corresation 13y ago
    What if sleeping on the floor and not showering made you think better and your body healthier? There is almost certainly someone, somewhere, claiming that sleeping on the floor and/or not showering makes you think better and your body healthier ("The Cave Man Sleep Technique....we didn't evolve in cushy beds now did we?") 99% of these sorts of stories are outrageous pseudo-science looking for an easy fix. Mood/energy changes from diet are interesting reading, but hold astonishingly little value because of the Hawthorne effect, and the simple reality that again people want easy fixes: His description of the perilous decline of his mental capacities when he regressed to normal food sounds like the standard nonsense you hear from people pushing energy bracelets. Like the GP, food is one of the glorious luxuries of life. Next he'll be chemically castrating himself to save the annoying time waste of sexual congress.
    - Jacob4u2 13y ago
      Like the GP, food is one of the glorious luxuries of life. The great thing about having values is that each person can value what she/he wants. You and GP value food, soylent green dude seems to value experimenting and optimizing his body/brain with food (lack/substitution of food?). I'm not hating on either one of your values, but pretty much everyone thinks "food is good" (to put it simply) so that isn't really gonna pique everyones interest like soylent green guy over there.
    - bjourne 13y ago
      > There is almost certainly someone, somewhere, claiming that sleeping on the floor and/or not showering makes you think better and your body healthier ("The Cave Man Sleep Technique....we didn't evolve in cushy beds now did we?") On the internet, of course there is :) http://www.paleodietandliving.com/paleo-living/sleep/sleep-which-surface-is-best/ http://www.paleodietandliving.com/paleo-living/sleep/sleep-w... Oh and showering to often is linked with everything from fungal infections, dandrufs, psoriasis and acne. Definitely not healthy according to lots of lifestyle strategists out there.
  - huhtenberg 13y ago
    What-if I'd exercise and drink less coffee? It would help me both feel and sleep better. Am I doing either? You bet I don't. Point being that people derive pleasure from things that aren't rational, so rationalizing a soylent diet ain't going do a thing to facilitate its adoption (which was iirc one of his stated goals). It's a truly interesting experiment, but it's from the same category as a polyphasic sleep.
- aprescott 13y ago
  This seems to be a common complaint, and the response seems to frequently be: you don't need to replace all your food intake. 50% of the time you eat you might find it tedious and boring, so you can leave the other 50% for pleasurable eating and cooking or whatever else you enjoy about non-clinical cuisine!
  - huhtenberg 13y ago
    > 50% of the time you eat you might find it tedious and boring - I hate cats. All that fur, the smell... - Oh, you just don't know a good recipe Learn to cook, damn it :)
    - chc 13y ago
      Unfortunately, learning to cook doesn't make it not tedious and boring if all you want is to get something in your belly and move on to the night's activity.
    - yew 13y ago
      I know how to cook, but don't often have time to cook. I don't even always have access to a kitchen! I used to have more time, and might again in the future - and if that happens, I'll go back to spending a few hours preparing dinner. Until then, I'd absolutely love to be able to eat a magic nutrition pill instead of grabbing a badly-made sandwich from the nearest shop. Especially if it's cheaper, too.
  - ImprovedSilence 13y ago
    Finally, someone else gets it! This drink has the total package, much more so than any ensure or power bar. If I could wipe out breakfast and lunch, and enjoy normal dinners, and be healtheir, hell yeah. or skip lunch, and eat a light dinner, and a glass of solyent in hte evening, money. You don't need to go whole hog on this, but it's a fantastic idea to try to optimise you nutrient intake regardless. Plus ease and connivence, win win win.
- willholloway 13y ago
  I created my own version of soylent (primarily made of a combo of hemp and whey protein powder, canola oil and vitamins, chocolate flavored and sweetned with sucralose and stevia) because I liked the idea so much. Its a great tasting chocolate shake and I look forward to each one. A liquid shake lunch doesn't have to taste bad.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  He addressed this point in the interview posted a month or two ago. He compared it to going to the movies. You can love movies without wanting to go see one three times a day. He still eats real meals occasionally.
- zeteo 13y ago
  "This automobile business is all good and interesting, but - no. I really like riding in a horse buggy. Not for the speed, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like candle light and wearing a top hat even though, technically, I could do as well with a baseball cap. To each his own, but some things are just too unorthodox."
  - huhtenberg 13y ago
    You are very forward thinking. Soylent is in the aisle one. Comfort and pleasure are subjective irrational metrics that have a lot of inertia, but that change with time. I'm sure it's plausible that people would love soylent just as much as a freshly baked croissant, but it takes time. The way things stand right now, soylent solves a problem that few people have and it comes at a price that is awful. So, yeah, it's unorthodox.
    - zeteo 13y ago
      Even freshly baked croissants were once an odd novelty.
      - adambard 13y ago
        I encourage you to research what a croissant is and then find and devour one. This comment makes me feel like you're missing out on that.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        XorNot 13y ago
        A croissant is also about the most amount of butter you can possibly fit into a pastry.
        kerno 13y ago
        This should be the OED definition.
- mistercow 13y ago
  I really like eating out at restaurants, but I mostly eat at home, and even if I could afford to eat out every meal, I wouldn't. There's no incompatibility with enjoying one thing while mostly choosing to do another.
- nathan_f77 13y ago
  I think you are missing the point. Rob is using this as a replacement for boring food. The same stuff you eat every day for breakfast and lunch. When he does choose to eat a tasty meal with friends or family, I think those meals would be even more delicious.
- pbreit 13y ago
  You might not have read the whole post but the OP mentions that he's now enjoying the regular food experience more than ever.
theyshookhands 13y ago
> No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. Wow. Talk about being disconnected from reality.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- zeteo 13y ago
  Next sentence is "it has all been automated", so clearly he means "not directly".
- abstractbill 13y ago
  The implicit "by hand" was pretty obvious to me, fwiw. I don't think that assertion is disconnected from reality at all.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    "No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel [by hand]." Wow, talk about being disconnected from reality.
    - epmatsw 13y ago
      Genuine question, is there a truly significant portion of American agriculture that is based on plowing by hand? I was under the impression that most food comes from commercial-level farms that use machinery to plow. My dad works on a pretty small farm, and they definitely don't do anything by hand at this point. I suppose that you could be referring to people who garden as a hobby, but I don't know if I'd count that.
      - rdouble 13y ago
        Plowing is not done by hand but picking is. Sugar beet field weeding used to be done by teams of migrant workers with handheld hoes. I think they've figured out how to not have the weeds in the first place with better pesticides. Most fruits and vegetables are picked by hand.
thangalin 13y ago
"If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself." Obesity might be partly genetic. http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/ http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  Partly in some people, but imho, ask a handful of people with obesity about their eating and exercise habits (and their psychological state etc) and do the maths.
- quannabe 13y ago
  Enough of this. We should fight the acceptance of obesity and externalizing blame. You alone are responsible for your weight, health, and life.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    Yes and no. There is a thin line to walk here. On the one hand, there is a definitely harmful component to the fat acceptance movement as you point out. On the other hand, discrimination and humiliation of obese people is wrong and counterproductive. But the fact is that there are some people for whom obesity is actually a medical problem that has nothing to do with self-control, and a statement like the one in the TFA demonstrates considerable privilege blindness.
- shaufler 13y ago
  Self-control, also, might be partly genetic[1]. Regardless, both obesity and self-control are influenced by environmental factors, so it's a noble effort that Rob is trying to do something about it. [1]http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/36/1/41.short http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/36/1/41.short
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Even, say, tendencies to sociopathy and violence are also partially genetic - if you have a genetic propensity towards obesity, it doesn't reduce your responsibility by a single inch, it simply means that you have to pay more attention and seriousness to avoid mangling your life.
mipapage 13y ago
My son and I watched Star Wars a New Hope this weekend and when that exact scene hit I thought of Soylent. Spooky!
jjcm 13y ago
I get lost in my work/play quite a bit and often forget about meals. I'd definitely be interested in trying soylent simply as a meal replacement, especially if ingestion/preparation of it is quick enough not to break my workflow.
- evgen 13y ago
  You are looking for a product called Ensure. You can find it in every mini-mart in the country. It has actually been scientifically developed and tested as a meal replacement and is based on real research by people who know what they are talking about rather than one guy who is making a lot of guesses...
  - bluedino 13y ago
    Except that it's really, really expensive per-calorie.
- huhtenberg 13y ago
  Consider SlimFast. Same sh#t, but in strawberry flavor.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    The main problem with SlimFast, as opposed to soylent, is that almost all of its carbs are sugars. On the other hand, it probably has a slightly better Omega-3:Omega-6 ratio.
    - javert 13y ago
      > The main problem with SlimFast, as opposed to soylent, is that almost all of its carbs are sugars Does that actually matter? (I know nothing, genuinely curious.)
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
rdouble 13y ago
I can't figure out if this is just an elaborate troll.
- abstractbill 13y ago
  Well, he's making something people want; I'm an existence proof, as are a few other commenters on this thread.
  - grhino 13y ago
    Will this be any different from Ensure or other meal replacement shakes but marketed differently? Is what he's doing any different from what's been done before?
    - lem72 13y ago
      I was looking into ensure after a few people mentioned it on this thread. Something ensure promotes is that it's good for in between meals but doesn't say outright that it is an entire meal replacement that I could see. I think the difference is Soylent is meant to be a complete diet replacement where Ensure is focused on being a supplement to your diet.
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      All the meal replacement shakes explicitly state that they are NOT full replacements but only as a part of a balanced diet. What I'm wondering is if that means that they are not trying to include 100% all nutrients, or is it just a legal claim to pretect them, since noone knows 100% all necessary nutrients.
webbruce 13y ago
"We no longer need big biceps". Well true, unless you want to attract women.
- Cthulhu_ 13y ago
  Depends on whether you want to attract women that are into large biceps or those that think men with large biceps are posers spend too much time at the gym.
  - scott_s 13y ago
    Luckily, there's a third category of guys who like being fit, and enjoy physical activity in general and strength training specifically.
  - apalmer 13y ago
    Isn't it better to attract them all and then pick the ones you want? I am 50 lbs over weight just saying...
    - ZenoArrow 13y ago
      It's not possible to "attract them all", different people find different things attractive, and honestly I don't think "attract them all" is a very desirable predicament, better to have a deep connection with one person than dealing with many shallow connections. Besides, and I know this is a cliche by now, but repeated so much because it's true... confidence (not to be confused with arrogance) is the most attractive quality. Be healthy, sure, but ultimately be comfortable in your own skin.
- baddox 13y ago
  Only people with big biceps have ever attracted women?
- tunesmith 13y ago
  Honestly, odds are that if you're not a big bicep type of guy, you're probably not going to like being involved with the women that like big bicep types of guys.
TheCapn 13y ago
"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally." This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck. We've seen his posts before and discussed it to great lengths, but the bottom line is if he's created something that is truly capable of sustaining health for the lifetime of a person he should be rewarded, but without scientific proof of longterm health this will never, and should never, be taken unquestionably.
- tolmasky 13y ago
  So the way I look at this critique is that most people in the US are running a parallel experiment with their bodies, only instead of the input being Soylent, it's garbage like fast food. It's true, we don't understand how the human body operates - whether you're eating McDonald's, or organic, or Soylent. So given that the baseline seems to be an equally untested and probably more detrimental food choice, this completely voluntary experiment doesn't seem so bad, it's not like the govt is teaching us to eat a certain way (which they have been known to do incorrectly). In other words, Soylent vs theoretically ideal diet (which we don't even know) - sure, bad choice. But the reality is for the target audience (such as myself) its Soylent vs pizza and burgers, which doesn't seem that bad.
  - jasallen 13y ago
    I think for this parallel to be valid he'd have to be eating McDonalds or what-have-you every day. The point is variety (mostly) ensures we get everything we need from somewhere. I think it's almost assured that in the long run 100% (or so) soylent will turn out to be more detrimental than even the 'average diets' out there. BTW, I'm kinduva healthy eating nut myself, but this just isn't 'healthy eating'.
    - tolmasky 13y ago
      Right, thats precisely my point: I think you underestimate how many people eat McDonalds or what-have-you every day. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that I think it takes place all over the spectrum: the poor do it as well as the rich. Perhaps you do not see this as much because you are a self-described health nut (and thus this diet probably isn't for you, the same way an Alienware computer isn't for someone who knows how to build a PC), but in my developer circle I see eating trash food every day for all meals quite often. And what I've found is often the problem is that you forget about food and then are starving and make a bad decision so you can keep working, not necessarily because you love pizza or whatever. If Soylent can deliver on immediateness, then it has a chance of competing with this lifestyle. And, if the end result is people thinking more about what they eat, it may be a win either way.
chuckwnelson 13y ago
As a science geek I love this. As a marketer, this name is unfortunate. Interested in the outcomes though. keep it up.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
  Indeed, you don't want people screaming "Soylent Green is people!"
bsimpson 13y ago
I'd be concerned about the long-term side effects of having little diversity in one's diet. It's been alleged that diabetes is caused by overconsumption of processed sugar and heart disease is caused by overconsumption of red meat. Either of those things in moderation is fine. Most people don't eat a consistent dose of for instance oat powder every day. It's likely that he's chosen at least one ingredient that is harmless in moderation, but is detrimental to your health over time. It's also quite possible that there are other things he's underdosing on and hasn't discovered yet (like sulphur before batch #7).
- mistercow 13y ago
  But the whole point is that soylent is moderation. Everything in it is balanced, so if you eat only soylent, then (in theory) you shouldn't be getting too much of anything. >It's likely that he's chosen at least one ingredient that is harmless in moderation, but is detrimental to your health over time. Why do you believe that that is likely? >It's also quite possible that there are other things he's underdosing on and hasn't discovered yet (like sulphur before batch #7). Yes, this does seem quite likely. There is probably a significant number of necessary nutrients that nobody even thinks about because they're ubiquitous.
  - bsimpson 13y ago
    Because there probably hasn't ever been a person who consumed a particular batch of refined nutrients for nearly every meal, and we don't know nearly enough about how the body processes food considering how long we, as a species, have been eating it. Admittedly, I don't know much about what's in soylent, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that eating refined XXX powder in every meal is bad for you, where XXX is an ingredient that he's using to get enough of a particular nutrient.
    - mistercow 13y ago
      The problem with that is that fortification is already rampant in premade foods, and so most first-worlders are already eating these refined ingredients in every meal. Moreover, many people take one-a-day multivitamins which in a single dose, contain the same amount (and sometimes more) of the same refined ingredients in a day's worth of soylent. Extensive studies have been done on the safety and efficacy of multivitamins, and while their utility for healthy people with balanced diets is a matter of debate, their safety (when taken at the recommended dose) is well established.
jasallen 13y ago
Futurama's Bachelor Chow
nemo1618 13y ago
Soylent is certainly polarizing on HN, and pretty much everywhere else as well. This will only be resolved once it's widely available and people can confirm/contest Rob's results. Personally, I'm very curious to give it a trial run. It certainly can't be any worse than what I eat now. Rob said it best: >I'm touched so many people are concerned about my intake of possible unknown essential nutrients. No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients.
- corresation 13y ago
  No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients. This sort of nonsensical dichotomy seems to infect discussions of this. Yesterday I had a Burger KingTM Whopper (it was, after all, Whopper Wednesday). The day before I had a spring-mix salad with added tomatoes, green onions, and cucumber, and a cucumber dressing, in a day that I also had a peanut butter sandwich... ...and on, and on. Such is any normal diet where people tend to eat lots of varied things, any of which, if the singular source of nutrients, would cause concern for anyone. The nonsense argument that it is either this or fast food, or ramen noodles, or whatever, just highlights how utterly ridiculous this is.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    Except its not nonsense - doctors deal with people with this type of narrow diet all the time. Or, not sufficiently varied diet on a day to day basis. Humans are also awful statisticians - fat people don't think they eat much. Thin people think they eat tons of food. Nobody accurately assesses what they do and don't eat, and our entire society is negatively geared towards maintaining healthy eating patterns anyway (your above example of variety will get blown to hell for most people past a few stressful weeks). Yes, technically this is unnecessary but that's hardly the point.
  - QuixoticChris 13y ago
    I think the point was less that people with healthy, varied diets should all switch to Soylent, and more that a potentially healthy meal replacement diet beats a definitely unhealthy fast food diet, hands down.
rafski 13y ago
I'm amazed with how much response this guy gets. This is nothing new. My mother used Herbalife protein powder back in the 90's and it was packed with nutrients, minerals and vitamins. It was advertised for weight loss but could also be your nutrition base depending on dosage. I am sure they weren't the only company to offer something like this, there must be plenty.
- zevyoura 13y ago
  I think a large part of its draw on this site is that he's packaged the ideas from the 'hacker' perspective. It's an interesting thought experiment to think of other slightly dated but mainstream activities could do with a similar treatment.
- lost_name 13y ago
  I am positively frustrated that more people don't realize this. Amazon has hundreds of results for "meal replacement shakes" right now.
- agilescale 13y ago
  It must be because: a. Somebody bothered to post the initial announcement of this guy b. He describes his process in detail c. He's a Software Engineer; it would be disingenuous to think that the fact that he's a peer for the members of this audience isn't a factor
- saulrh 13y ago
  If I remember correctly, someone addressed this pretty early on with an argument that hinged on economics. I'm going from memory, but I think that living off of the prepackaged predecessors would be either unworkable (not comprehensive nutrition) or prohibitively expensive (treated as medical supplies rather than food).
jere 13y ago
>We don’t live anything like our ancestors. We don’t work like them, talk like them, think like them, travel like them, or fight like them. Why on earth would we want to eat like them? >After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did. I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. I like the doublethink here. Reductionism works fine except when it doesn't. And surely the only important components of food are the ones I've identified after a few months of experimentation. You know, we should eat like our ancestors because that's what we're adapted to. When you try to invent your own environment to live in, there's a good chance you won't be well adapted to that environment. Rhinehart's logic is like asking "why should we want the same gravity as our ancestors? Wouldn't life be better without the hassle of gravity?" Actually, no. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does-spending-prolong http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does-sp... >If we can make transistors that are cheap, fast, and low power, surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally. This highlights the confusion. Does anyone think for a moment that a manmade device like a transistor is anywhere close to the complexity of a biological one such as a cell? This is laughable. A transistor is literally a device with THREE terminals.
- XorNot 13y ago
  A transistor is nowhere near the complexity of a neuron, but networks of them do computational mathematics faster then any human in existence can. We don't eat cells - we consume relatively simple nutrients from them. Our bodies carry around a strong acid hydrolysis system for the exact purpose of obliterating all that "sophisticated" internal structure. For that matter, we have no idea what our ancestors were adapted to. The human body has spanned the range and breadth of ecosystems on this planet, and the survivors of that have passed down what they think is safe to eat by tradition, not science.
- conjecTech 13y ago
  >When you try to invent your own environment to live in, there's a good chance you won't be well adapted to that environment. I guess this statement would necessarily include wearing clothes, living in houses, using glasses, taking antibiotics, and anything else we do to actively counter forces of nature. I'd say we do quite well at that. I'd like to point out that the rest of that paragraph is simply a strawman argument and is of absolutely no value to this discussion. Finally, you obviously do not come close to understanding the complexity of transistors if you think that it can be summarized by the number of terminals it has. That is like saying the programming behind an API is simplistic because the API only consists three functions. I've taken multiple semesters of classes specifically on transistors and logic design have never even come close to using the mathematical and physical techniques they use for designing single transistors, let alone large integrated circuits consisting of billions of them. I agree with your point that the complexity is not on par with biological systems, but you are trivializing something far more complex than you think. We are not that helpless.
nsxwolf 13y ago
Still sticking with that horrible name, eh? I guess if you don't care about a wider adoption...
hesdeadjim 13y ago
I'm concerned less with the long term health effects of this diet as it relates to missing nutrients, and much more concerned about quality control of the individual ingredients themselves. Who's actually checking that, say, the vitamin A palmitate coming from a supplier actually contains the dose requested, and additionally that it contains no other contaminates? The supplement world is like the wild west as far as this goes. And as attracted as I am to a meal replacement like this, the worry about getting accidentally dosed with high levels of arsenic or lead from a shitty supplier really concerns me.
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  You reminded me of the consumer reports review of whey.. not just small companies... EAS (a $300m division of Abbott labs (a $38b company)) exceeded the limit of arsenic and cadmium: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/06/protein-supplements-heavy-metal-consumer-reports.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/06/protei...
- nbdbvcrea 13y ago
  I would be most concerned about overdosing some vitamin or mineral powder, taken in miligram range. Just one pinch can cause serious and painful injury. Will it always be mixed evenly?
  - XorNot 13y ago
    Presumably this is a problem that's been long-solved in scale up manufacture, and something you should just be concerned with on the small scale. Generally though - yes - anything water-soluble is pretty easy to get very controlled concentrations of, since you can dilute until your in the operating range of your weighing machine.
    - antoko 13y ago
      I'm not much of a biologist and I may just be spouting what I've heard in the past, but I think all the water soluble vitamins and such are totally safe and impossible to OD on, it is the fat-soluble ones where there's the potential to OD. EDIT: Mostly correct! Fat-soluble vitamins build up in the fatty tissues and are much slower to release and are almost always responsible for Vitamin Poisoning, water-soluble vitamins are easily excreted in the obvious way. There are exceptions though, you can overdose on some of the B vitamins which are water-soluble, I didn't follow up to find out why that is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_poisoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_poisoning
nazgulnarsil 13y ago
Another shameless plug for Soylent Orange. It's gratifying to see him bump his recipe towards mine in switching to oats. If you've never seen this before SO is the off the shelf version. It doesn't quite hit the same optimal micronutrient profile, but it gets you close. I find this + one meat based meal per day works pretty well. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZYM012N0JZTzEtVk05MVF4dlZyZ2c&usp=drive_web https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ... I have yet to do a proper min-maxing of ingredients for optimal nutrients/calorie.
- GIFtheory 13y ago
  The author makes a good point in that what is perfectly safe for one person may be deadly to another. Off the top of my head, one example of this is how some people are congenital 'super-absorbers' of iron. These people can develop iron overload from ingesting levels of iron that have no effect on ordinary people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_overload http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_overload
manmal 13y ago
While I would be more than a bit anxious that I miss some nutrient (just like the missing MSM/sulphur) because soylent is a blend of raw earths and isolated ingredients - Rob's mentions of increased focus and better sleep really inspire me to check on what major nutrients I could be missing, and fix that by either supplementing or changing food habits. [I understand that Rob's motivations for using chemically produced ingredients are political and economical (resource consumption), but I'd rather eat live food as long as it's possible :)] E.g. I recently started increasing potassium (eating more lentils and potatoes, and the occasional powder/pill) and my focus increased so much. Two years ago, I discovered that keeping vitamin D up in winter stops me from getting sick all the time. And I think MSM helps me recover faster after workouts (interesting fact: cooking decreases MSM content radically, so one could eat raw stuff instead of drinking it in powder-form). Next step: Instead of swallowing pills, incorporate food that contains all that stuff. And have a deeper look at Soylent's more exotic ingredients.
- itchyouch 13y ago
  I've definitely noticed this. If at all anything it's really just provided a framework for thinking about the nutrition that we typically lack on a daily basis.
nhangen 13y ago
Is it me or does it seem like everything is now a giant lead into a Kickstarter marketing push? Is Kickstarter the new Internet marketing?
- GuiA 13y ago
  Good question; I am launching a kickstarter campaign next week to fund my next book, which will answer precisely that question :)
anigbrowl 13y ago
"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally." You're not convincing me. The idea of consuming a nutrient shake on a daily basis doesn't appeal in the least. I like chewing my food; texture is important to me. There's a reason that we have teeth and powerful jaw muscles. If we had evolved to consume our nutrients as a puree then we'd have mouth parts, like flies who squirt digestive juices onto their food and then suck up the partially-digested goop.
DennisP 13y ago
A guy on reddit who said he was a medical student (and sounded like he really was) said that the nutrients may be fine, but the digestive system needs solid food. Patients stuck on liquid diets tend not to do well long-term, and they try to get them on solid food as fast as they can. He had a technical explanation I don't remember well enough to repeat. I asked how the Soylent guy would do if he converted the stuff into some kind of solid food bar, and the med student said "Probably much better!"
- fernly 13y ago
  From the subject post: "I made a rather significant change to the formula... I've replaced half of the maltodextrin carbohydrates with oat powder, which ... dramatically increases the fiber content ... I underestimated the importance of fiber in a diet, and went from consuming 1.2g / day to 40g / day."
  - delackner 13y ago
    Fiber mixed with a nutrient soup is not solid food.
- smrtinsert 13y ago
  They've done studies yes. In Anatomy & Phys in college they noticed that recovering soldiers recovered mentally far faster from the solid food equivalent of a nutrient shake. In some cases, it was pivotal to survival.
calinet6 13y ago
"Practically everything has gotten better over the past century but food has gotten worse." I highly disagree. Food as an art form and as a science has gotten leagues better since 1913. Probably several orders of magnitude in whatever you're measuring. Except the French. They had it right the whole time. If you look at the extremes, the negative side of food has gone from shit (literally) to shit (figuratively) so not much change there either.
- o0-0o 13y ago
  Have you tasted frog legs?
GigabyteCoin 13y ago
I continue to read nothing but cautious words on HN when approaching Soylent. Let me remind you all that cautious and timid natures rarely pioneered anything throughout history.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
> We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. Pretty bad assumption. Exercise is important, as building muscle tissue stimulates hormone production (GH, melatonin) that affect even cognitive performance. This guy has a pretty extreme reductionist view on things like health and nutrition. No surprise he's trying to live on a nutrient shake, after all.
driverdan 13y ago
I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as Ensure. Want to replace a meal with something similar? Throw some milk, oats, protein powder and peanut butter in a blender. Drink it down with a multi-vitamin and a fish oil capsule or two.
- fooooobar 13y ago
  Can you live off of nothing but Ensure for weeks on end?
- TillE 13y ago
  Or throw brown rice, lentils/beans, and mixed frozen vegetables in a rice cooker. Add a can of tuna twice a week. For breakfast, prepare a green smoothie with frozen fruit, kale, and maybe some flaxseed. The only slightly annoying or difficult part of this is cleaning up.
- dpcx 13y ago
  > I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as Ensure. I read something yesterday that summed this up pretty much perfectly. If there's more than one of something, it means that it wasn't done right the first time. See: Cars, Computers, Telephones, Light Bulbs, etc...
mjmahone17 13y ago
Personally, I'm really excited to see what the end product will look like. Given he does enough trials beforehand, hopefully the purchase would look something like this: 1. Visit website. On the webpage, login and click "order 1-week supply." 2. If you're a new customer, then put in some basic metrics (height, sex, age, current weight, activity level, exceptional family diseases/allergies). Then, a "standard" supply will be shipped to you, optimizing the ingredients generally for what they think you'll need, with an ingredient list (how much of each ingredient is in one serving). 3. When logging in again, you're asked "Are you experiencing any symptoms?" Then, you can list anything that feels off, such as aching joints, cravings, etc. Then, the site would list common deficiencies/overdoses that would cause those symptoms, and give you the option to purchase, for instance, a temporary magnesium supplement, or recommend that, prior to receiving your next shipment, you consume one less serving per day. After using the supplement, you'd input whether the symptom improved, and the ingredient's quantity would be adjusted in your next shipment. The tricky bit about this system would be personalizing everyone's orders, at scale. But it should be pretty possible (says the developer without an understanding of manufacturing), and for far less than it would cost to order a full meal.
nicothieb 13y ago
Am I the only one depressed by this idea ? I mean I have no doubt one can craft a superior meal nutriment wise, but this is the fast track to abandoning cuisine and a huge part of my culture. Spend more time making your dreams come true. Yeah right, more facebook or more tv time !
- gordaco 13y ago
  No, you're not the only one. To me, this is also a fast way of ruining one of the best things about life. If "making your dreams come true" prevents you from enjoying a nice meals (which is not that much time-consuming, anyway), it may be time to reconsider if those dreams are worth it. Don't live just for a future that might not come, keep in mind your daily life.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  Some people enjoy coding more than dining. You are likely to find many of them here. While you are free to differ from them ("I enjoy cooking/dining way too much for this to work for me"), your insults (the idea causes depression, the slippery slope argument, your suggestion that dreams = facebook+tv) are quite uncalled for.
ricardobeat 13y ago
Nature has solved this for us long ago. Buy a handful of vegetables, vary them every week; slice them up, cook/grill/stir fry and eat them. Add meat once in a while. This will take you 20 minutes/day, maybe less if you make food in batches and freeze it, and it's been tested for the past few thousand years with pretty good results.
- mrb 13y ago
  20 minutes/day? 6.7 minutes per meal? I doubt it. Plus you forgot the time to buy groceries, wash dishes, eat (drinking something like soylent is 5x faster than chewing food), etc. The average adult probably spends 45min-1h per day doing something necessary for preparing food. The guy has a point: Soylent does save time: "I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner. For every meal at home I would then have to clean and dry the dishes. This does not include trips to the grocery store. Now I spend about 5 minutes in the evening preparing for the next day, and every meal takes a few seconds. I love order of magnitude improvements, and I certainly don't miss doing dishes. In fact I could get rid of the kitchen entirely, no fridge sucking down power, no constant cleaning or worrying about pests, and more living space. I just need a water source." Source: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298
  - rdouble 13y ago
    I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner It seems strange that it would take him 2 hours to cook a combination of eggs, a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger. These are foods that only take a few minutes to cook. Cooking either eggs or a quesadilla takes less than 1 minute. If cooked longer, they are ruined. One could cook a meal for two containing every one of those items in less than 20 minutes. He must have been taking a long lunch break. Any claim that this project arose from a need for time savings rings a bit hollow, because he has spent an order of magnitude more time on this than any non-foodie bachelor programmer person has ever spent cooking.
SoftwareMaven 13y ago
He missed the sixth most abundant element in the human body, and, now that it's there, he is sure everything is OK? I can only say, "Wow". I really believe that if an actual scientific study[1] was done on this, it would rank right next to a pure fast food diet. It's not that it isn't theoretically possible to make something that is "perfect" nutrition, it's that we don't know enough today to say definitively whether carbs or fat causes metabolic syndrome[2], much less how all the various micronutrients interact with macronutrients, gut biota, and phases of the moon. Until we understand every piece of the nutrition puzzle, this is just dangerous. That he wants to take it out to others is even more frightening. Until we get to where we really understand what the body needs at an individual level, I'm sticking with whole foods. I really hope this guy doesn't do long-term damage to himself, or anyone else, for that matter. 1. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to double-blind whether you get a Big Mac or a cup of gray stuff. This isn't just a problem with Soykent, it is a problem with every attempt to perform nutritional experiments. It is really hard to perform good, predictive science in this space. 2. We need to know like chemists know how chemicals will react and physicists know how forces will behave. We don't.
- uberalex 13y ago
  I have to agree with you, but I wonder will it ever be feasible to really understand that in a way that helps individuals? There's an amazing amount of hidden complexity. For me this experiment is a testament to the variety of human individuality, and the resilience of the human organism. I can't imagine wanting to replace most of my food with a powder shake, and I drink them fairly regularly post-gym. Beyond that, I think the author's self-testing and self-evaluations are so lost in noise, and so subjective, that they have virtually no measurement value. Finally, his method of picking out what he needs seems ad-hoc and partial. While we can show lots of things are wrong with chronically bad diets, the human body is surprisingly good at dealing with sub-optimal quantities and qualities of food. The 'perfect' diet is a curious notion really, since the body is a dynamic system that responds to input.
  - shubb 13y ago
    Anyone who ate this every meal for ever based on the current level of evidence is nuts sure. But this is awesome research. He is trying to do something awesome, at great personal risk. He has shown some integrity in not providing the recipe until it has been verified, and has stated that he will proceed to large scale trials before commercializing. I'm not saying I don't expect him to damage himself (and anyone else who eats this full time), but I don't really understand all the heat he's getting for trying. If this yields something cheap we can eat ~80% of meals in the long term, then that's a really great thing. There are people who eat an unhealthy and monotonous diet due to cost, even in the west. If that could be partly replaced with something a bit more healthy, that would be very socially valuable.
Mamady 13y ago
You do realise that mastication is REQUIRED for healthy teeth and gums right? You may not become malnutritioned, but you will suffer from various oral problems due to lack of mastication. This may take a year or even a few years to present itself - by then it will be too late to react.
nakedrobot2 13y ago
from the article: "No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated." And, I presume, no one in the world is poor. Nobody struggles. There is no murder or injustice anymore. Just which planet is this fellow living on?
cLeEOGPw 13y ago
Those who say that this is wrong because humans should eat like our ancestors because we evolved to eat in this way are on the same level with people that say only man and woman should have sex because nature made it this way. Naturalists are wrong from the very root because of assumption nature makes everything on purpose and in the only right way possible. This soylent thing exposes all the ignorance of the people in this regard.
juskrey 13y ago
This guy definitely will leave gene pool. I bet on diabetes.
tocomment 13y ago
Why is it so easy to make a food that dogs and cats can eat for every meal but so difficult for humans? Anyone know?
zacharyvoase 13y ago
* “Bacon is high in Oleic acid, the principal component of adipose (fat) tissue so it is great for increasing body fat.[...] By the way, an acid is anything that donates protons. Only a few have corrosive properties like sulfuric acid, and bases can be corrosive too.” So now I'm thinking, ‘does this guy even know what fats are, or how fat digestion, assimilation and metabolism works?’. * “We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated. We need mental strength.” Well, y'know, that's true until you're caught in a car accident, or a bombing, or a fight, or any kind of natural disaster which actually tests your ability to survive. It's simplistic and naïve to suggest that we've evolved beyond the need to even try to survive. * “If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself.” There's just so much incorrectness here, I don't know where to start. - - - Anyone can go ahead and try an experiment like this for themselves, and I support their right to document and share the experience. But seriously, anyone ignorant enough to try subsisting 100% on this 'soylent' concoction, in its current or future form, deserves all the health problems that await them.
- mamoswined 13y ago
  "I have no use for bulging biceps." For the past two years, I've relied on the fact that I walk a lot to take care of my exercise needs. But last year I started experiencing crippling neck and shoulder pain. A visit to the doctor and a referral to a physical therapist revealed that my upper body had atrophied to an alarming extent. Strength in the upper body affects your posture among other things. Muscle mass also affects your metabolism in a positive way. Now that I'm rebuilding I feel much better. Plus I look better!
jgrahamc 13y ago
There's no science here. This so-called experiment is worthless IMHO. Feeding people all-liquid diets to keep them alive is well known. That's what happens to coma patients and lots of work in creating enteral nutrition products has been done. Given that people's lives depend on this that's a good place to start (take a look at, for example, Jevity [3]). And the people who make that stuff worry about keeping your gastrointestinal system working, the right balance of everything needed to keep a (in this case, sick) person alive, how to keep the product from spoiling, etc. So, he's not creating something new. The other argument against the existing products is price. Here's a quick comparison. He claims that it costs him $155 per month [1]. If he were to live on Jevity 1.5 he'd need to drink 4.2 cans per day at a cost of $57/24 per can (it's sold in packs of 24 cans [2]) or $9.98 per day which is roughly $300 a month. (If he ups the kcal to 2,000 a day from the 1,500 he was on then he'd need to drink 5.6 cans a day which is $400 a month). So, he'd be spending 2 to 2.5 times what he currently is. But he'd be spending it on a product that's been quality controlled and tested. Is there any indication that he can fundamentally change the economics of this type of food? I don't think so. Especially when you factor in all the work that the makers of Jevity etc. are doing at that price point (the QA, the distribution, the packaging). And certainly not enough to meet all his other goals about solving world hunger. If a market for soylent emerges then I'd imagine that companies that make things like Jevity would step in. Oh wait, they already do. There's Ensure etc. Also, there's so much other crap in his blog posts about how soylent lasts forever [4], how no one need muscles anyway [5], how even stopping eating soylent for a week led to massive cognitive problems [5], that it's hard to take the whole thing seriously. And then there's this [1]: "I for one would not miss the stereotype of the housewife in the kitchen. Providing diverse, palatable, and nutritious meals for an entire family every day must be exhausting. What if taking a night off didn't mean unhealthy pizza or expensive take out? How wasteful society has been with its women! The endless hours spent cooking and cleaning in the kitchen could be replaced with socializing, study, or creative endeavors." Ah yes, soylent is not only going to solve world hunger, make us more healthy, save time, make us more creative, save money: it's going to emancipate women! But there's more [5]: "We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated. We need mental strength. We need creativity, patience, discipline, and humility. If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself. Perhaps companies would be more productive if managers had more humility and employees had more discipline." Yes, soylent will result in an increase in humility and all those fat people who lack self-discipline will be thin. Hooray. [1] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 [2] http://www.abbottstore.com/jevity+reg/jevity-15-cal-8-oz-can-case-of-24/invt/57333/ http://www.abbottstore.com/jevity+reg/jevity-15-cal-8-oz-can... [3] http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/jevity-1_5-cal http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/jevity-1_5-cal [4] http://www.soylent.me http://www.soylent.me claims it 'lasts for years' [5] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570

238 points by septerr 13y ago

At the risk of stating the obvious - this is all good and the experiment he's running is very interesting, but - no. I really like eating tasty food. Not for the nutrients, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like sleeping in a comfortable bed and taking a hot shower daily even though, technically, I can rest as well on a bare floor and shower once a week. To each his own, but some things are just too unorthodox.

Jacob4u2 13y ago
I don't think that's a fair comparison. What if sleeping on the floor and not showering made you think better and your body healthier? It's not simply a privation technique, he seems to be doing it to hack his body for better performance. Although kind of anecdotal evidence, the article mentions several mood and energy changes when not on the soylent diet (I think those things could just as likely be a change in environment/routine though).
- corresation 13y ago
  What if sleeping on the floor and not showering made you think better and your body healthier? There is almost certainly someone, somewhere, claiming that sleeping on the floor and/or not showering makes you think better and your body healthier ("The Cave Man Sleep Technique....we didn't evolve in cushy beds now did we?") 99% of these sorts of stories are outrageous pseudo-science looking for an easy fix. Mood/energy changes from diet are interesting reading, but hold astonishingly little value because of the Hawthorne effect, and the simple reality that again people want easy fixes: His description of the perilous decline of his mental capacities when he regressed to normal food sounds like the standard nonsense you hear from people pushing energy bracelets. Like the GP, food is one of the glorious luxuries of life. Next he'll be chemically castrating himself to save the annoying time waste of sexual congress.
  - Jacob4u2 13y ago
    Like the GP, food is one of the glorious luxuries of life. The great thing about having values is that each person can value what she/he wants. You and GP value food, soylent green dude seems to value experimenting and optimizing his body/brain with food (lack/substitution of food?). I'm not hating on either one of your values, but pretty much everyone thinks "food is good" (to put it simply) so that isn't really gonna pique everyones interest like soylent green guy over there.
  - bjourne 13y ago
    > There is almost certainly someone, somewhere, claiming that sleeping on the floor and/or not showering makes you think better and your body healthier ("The Cave Man Sleep Technique....we didn't evolve in cushy beds now did we?") On the internet, of course there is :) http://www.paleodietandliving.com/paleo-living/sleep/sleep-which-surface-is-best/ http://www.paleodietandliving.com/paleo-living/sleep/sleep-w... Oh and showering to often is linked with everything from fungal infections, dandrufs, psoriasis and acne. Definitely not healthy according to lots of lifestyle strategists out there.
- huhtenberg 13y ago
  What-if I'd exercise and drink less coffee? It would help me both feel and sleep better. Am I doing either? You bet I don't. Point being that people derive pleasure from things that aren't rational, so rationalizing a soylent diet ain't going do a thing to facilitate its adoption (which was iirc one of his stated goals). It's a truly interesting experiment, but it's from the same category as a polyphasic sleep.
aprescott 13y ago
This seems to be a common complaint, and the response seems to frequently be: you don't need to replace all your food intake. 50% of the time you eat you might find it tedious and boring, so you can leave the other 50% for pleasurable eating and cooking or whatever else you enjoy about non-clinical cuisine!
- huhtenberg 13y ago
  > 50% of the time you eat you might find it tedious and boring - I hate cats. All that fur, the smell... - Oh, you just don't know a good recipe Learn to cook, damn it :)
  - chc 13y ago
    Unfortunately, learning to cook doesn't make it not tedious and boring if all you want is to get something in your belly and move on to the night's activity.
  - yew 13y ago
    I know how to cook, but don't often have time to cook. I don't even always have access to a kitchen! I used to have more time, and might again in the future - and if that happens, I'll go back to spending a few hours preparing dinner. Until then, I'd absolutely love to be able to eat a magic nutrition pill instead of grabbing a badly-made sandwich from the nearest shop. Especially if it's cheaper, too.
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  Finally, someone else gets it! This drink has the total package, much more so than any ensure or power bar. If I could wipe out breakfast and lunch, and enjoy normal dinners, and be healtheir, hell yeah. or skip lunch, and eat a light dinner, and a glass of solyent in hte evening, money. You don't need to go whole hog on this, but it's a fantastic idea to try to optimise you nutrient intake regardless. Plus ease and connivence, win win win.
willholloway 13y ago
I created my own version of soylent (primarily made of a combo of hemp and whey protein powder, canola oil and vitamins, chocolate flavored and sweetned with sucralose and stevia) because I liked the idea so much. Its a great tasting chocolate shake and I look forward to each one. A liquid shake lunch doesn't have to taste bad.
fusiongyro 13y ago
He addressed this point in the interview posted a month or two ago. He compared it to going to the movies. You can love movies without wanting to go see one three times a day. He still eats real meals occasionally.
zeteo 13y ago
"This automobile business is all good and interesting, but - no. I really like riding in a horse buggy. Not for the speed, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like candle light and wearing a top hat even though, technically, I could do as well with a baseball cap. To each his own, but some things are just too unorthodox."
- huhtenberg 13y ago
  You are very forward thinking. Soylent is in the aisle one. Comfort and pleasure are subjective irrational metrics that have a lot of inertia, but that change with time. I'm sure it's plausible that people would love soylent just as much as a freshly baked croissant, but it takes time. The way things stand right now, soylent solves a problem that few people have and it comes at a price that is awful. So, yeah, it's unorthodox.
  - zeteo 13y ago
    Even freshly baked croissants were once an odd novelty.
    - adambard 13y ago
      I encourage you to research what a croissant is and then find and devour one. This comment makes me feel like you're missing out on that.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - XorNot 13y ago
        A croissant is also about the most amount of butter you can possibly fit into a pastry.
        kerno 13y ago
        This should be the OED definition.
mistercow 13y ago
I really like eating out at restaurants, but I mostly eat at home, and even if I could afford to eat out every meal, I wouldn't. There's no incompatibility with enjoying one thing while mostly choosing to do another.
nathan_f77 13y ago
I think you are missing the point. Rob is using this as a replacement for boring food. The same stuff you eat every day for breakfast and lunch. When he does choose to eat a tasty meal with friends or family, I think those meals would be even more delicious.
pbreit 13y ago
You might not have read the whole post but the OP mentions that he's now enjoying the regular food experience more than ever.

theyshookhands 13y ago

> No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. Wow. Talk about being disconnected from reality.

deleted 13y ago
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zeteo 13y ago
Next sentence is "it has all been automated", so clearly he means "not directly".
abstractbill 13y ago
The implicit "by hand" was pretty obvious to me, fwiw. I don't think that assertion is disconnected from reality at all.
- mcguire 13y ago
  "No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel [by hand]." Wow, talk about being disconnected from reality.
  - epmatsw 13y ago
    Genuine question, is there a truly significant portion of American agriculture that is based on plowing by hand? I was under the impression that most food comes from commercial-level farms that use machinery to plow. My dad works on a pretty small farm, and they definitely don't do anything by hand at this point. I suppose that you could be referring to people who garden as a hobby, but I don't know if I'd count that.
    - rdouble 13y ago
      Plowing is not done by hand but picking is. Sugar beet field weeding used to be done by teams of migrant workers with handheld hoes. I think they've figured out how to not have the weeds in the first place with better pesticides. Most fruits and vegetables are picked by hand.

thangalin 13y ago

"If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself." Obesity might be partly genetic. http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/ http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/

deleted 13y ago
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Cthulhu_ 13y ago
Partly in some people, but imho, ask a handful of people with obesity about their eating and exercise habits (and their psychological state etc) and do the maths.
quannabe 13y ago
Enough of this. We should fight the acceptance of obesity and externalizing blame. You alone are responsible for your weight, health, and life.
- mistercow 13y ago
  Yes and no. There is a thin line to walk here. On the one hand, there is a definitely harmful component to the fat acceptance movement as you point out. On the other hand, discrimination and humiliation of obese people is wrong and counterproductive. But the fact is that there are some people for whom obesity is actually a medical problem that has nothing to do with self-control, and a statement like the one in the TFA demonstrates considerable privilege blindness.
shaufler 13y ago
Self-control, also, might be partly genetic[1]. Regardless, both obesity and self-control are influenced by environmental factors, so it's a noble effort that Rob is trying to do something about it. [1]http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/36/1/41.short http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/36/1/41.short
PeterisP 13y ago
Even, say, tendencies to sociopathy and violence are also partially genetic - if you have a genetic propensity towards obesity, it doesn't reduce your responsibility by a single inch, it simply means that you have to pay more attention and seriousness to avoid mangling your life.

mipapage 13y ago

My son and I watched Star Wars a New Hope this weekend and when that exact scene hit I thought of Soylent. Spooky!

jjcm 13y ago

I get lost in my work/play quite a bit and often forget about meals. I'd definitely be interested in trying soylent simply as a meal replacement, especially if ingestion/preparation of it is quick enough not to break my workflow.

evgen 13y ago
You are looking for a product called Ensure. You can find it in every mini-mart in the country. It has actually been scientifically developed and tested as a meal replacement and is based on real research by people who know what they are talking about rather than one guy who is making a lot of guesses...
- bluedino 13y ago
  Except that it's really, really expensive per-calorie.
huhtenberg 13y ago
Consider SlimFast. Same sh#t, but in strawberry flavor.
- mistercow 13y ago
  The main problem with SlimFast, as opposed to soylent, is that almost all of its carbs are sugars. On the other hand, it probably has a slightly better Omega-3:Omega-6 ratio.
  - javert 13y ago
    > The main problem with SlimFast, as opposed to soylent, is that almost all of its carbs are sugars Does that actually matter? (I know nothing, genuinely curious.)
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]

rdouble 13y ago

I can't figure out if this is just an elaborate troll.

abstractbill 13y ago
Well, he's making something people want; I'm an existence proof, as are a few other commenters on this thread.
- grhino 13y ago
  Will this be any different from Ensure or other meal replacement shakes but marketed differently? Is what he's doing any different from what's been done before?
  - lem72 13y ago
    I was looking into ensure after a few people mentioned it on this thread. Something ensure promotes is that it's good for in between meals but doesn't say outright that it is an entire meal replacement that I could see. I think the difference is Soylent is meant to be a complete diet replacement where Ensure is focused on being a supplement to your diet.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    All the meal replacement shakes explicitly state that they are NOT full replacements but only as a part of a balanced diet. What I'm wondering is if that means that they are not trying to include 100% all nutrients, or is it just a legal claim to pretect them, since noone knows 100% all necessary nutrients.

webbruce 13y ago

"We no longer need big biceps". Well true, unless you want to attract women.

Cthulhu_ 13y ago
Depends on whether you want to attract women that are into large biceps or those that think men with large biceps are posers spend too much time at the gym.
- scott_s 13y ago
  Luckily, there's a third category of guys who like being fit, and enjoy physical activity in general and strength training specifically.
- apalmer 13y ago
  Isn't it better to attract them all and then pick the ones you want? I am 50 lbs over weight just saying...
  - ZenoArrow 13y ago
    It's not possible to "attract them all", different people find different things attractive, and honestly I don't think "attract them all" is a very desirable predicament, better to have a deep connection with one person than dealing with many shallow connections. Besides, and I know this is a cliche by now, but repeated so much because it's true... confidence (not to be confused with arrogance) is the most attractive quality. Be healthy, sure, but ultimately be comfortable in your own skin.
baddox 13y ago
Only people with big biceps have ever attracted women?
tunesmith 13y ago
Honestly, odds are that if you're not a big bicep type of guy, you're probably not going to like being involved with the women that like big bicep types of guys.

TheCapn 13y ago

"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally." This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck. We've seen his posts before and discussed it to great lengths, but the bottom line is if he's created something that is truly capable of sustaining health for the lifetime of a person he should be rewarded, but without scientific proof of longterm health this will never, and should never, be taken unquestionably.

tolmasky 13y ago
So the way I look at this critique is that most people in the US are running a parallel experiment with their bodies, only instead of the input being Soylent, it's garbage like fast food. It's true, we don't understand how the human body operates - whether you're eating McDonald's, or organic, or Soylent. So given that the baseline seems to be an equally untested and probably more detrimental food choice, this completely voluntary experiment doesn't seem so bad, it's not like the govt is teaching us to eat a certain way (which they have been known to do incorrectly). In other words, Soylent vs theoretically ideal diet (which we don't even know) - sure, bad choice. But the reality is for the target audience (such as myself) its Soylent vs pizza and burgers, which doesn't seem that bad.
- jasallen 13y ago
  I think for this parallel to be valid he'd have to be eating McDonalds or what-have-you every day. The point is variety (mostly) ensures we get everything we need from somewhere. I think it's almost assured that in the long run 100% (or so) soylent will turn out to be more detrimental than even the 'average diets' out there. BTW, I'm kinduva healthy eating nut myself, but this just isn't 'healthy eating'.
  - tolmasky 13y ago
    Right, thats precisely my point: I think you underestimate how many people eat McDonalds or what-have-you every day. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that I think it takes place all over the spectrum: the poor do it as well as the rich. Perhaps you do not see this as much because you are a self-described health nut (and thus this diet probably isn't for you, the same way an Alienware computer isn't for someone who knows how to build a PC), but in my developer circle I see eating trash food every day for all meals quite often. And what I've found is often the problem is that you forget about food and then are starving and make a bad decision so you can keep working, not necessarily because you love pizza or whatever. If Soylent can deliver on immediateness, then it has a chance of competing with this lifestyle. And, if the end result is people thinking more about what they eat, it may be a win either way.

chuckwnelson 13y ago

As a science geek I love this. As a marketer, this name is unfortunate. Interested in the outcomes though. keep it up.

TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
Indeed, you don't want people screaming "Soylent Green is people!"

bsimpson 13y ago

I'd be concerned about the long-term side effects of having little diversity in one's diet. It's been alleged that diabetes is caused by overconsumption of processed sugar and heart disease is caused by overconsumption of red meat. Either of those things in moderation is fine. Most people don't eat a consistent dose of for instance oat powder every day. It's likely that he's chosen at least one ingredient that is harmless in moderation, but is detrimental to your health over time. It's also quite possible that there are other things he's underdosing on and hasn't discovered yet (like sulphur before batch #7).

mistercow 13y ago
But the whole point is that soylent is moderation. Everything in it is balanced, so if you eat only soylent, then (in theory) you shouldn't be getting too much of anything. >It's likely that he's chosen at least one ingredient that is harmless in moderation, but is detrimental to your health over time. Why do you believe that that is likely? >It's also quite possible that there are other things he's underdosing on and hasn't discovered yet (like sulphur before batch #7). Yes, this does seem quite likely. There is probably a significant number of necessary nutrients that nobody even thinks about because they're ubiquitous.
- bsimpson 13y ago
  Because there probably hasn't ever been a person who consumed a particular batch of refined nutrients for nearly every meal, and we don't know nearly enough about how the body processes food considering how long we, as a species, have been eating it. Admittedly, I don't know much about what's in soylent, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that eating refined XXX powder in every meal is bad for you, where XXX is an ingredient that he's using to get enough of a particular nutrient.
  - mistercow 13y ago
    The problem with that is that fortification is already rampant in premade foods, and so most first-worlders are already eating these refined ingredients in every meal. Moreover, many people take one-a-day multivitamins which in a single dose, contain the same amount (and sometimes more) of the same refined ingredients in a day's worth of soylent. Extensive studies have been done on the safety and efficacy of multivitamins, and while their utility for healthy people with balanced diets is a matter of debate, their safety (when taken at the recommended dose) is well established.

jasallen 13y ago

Futurama's Bachelor Chow

nemo1618 13y ago

Soylent is certainly polarizing on HN, and pretty much everywhere else as well. This will only be resolved once it's widely available and people can confirm/contest Rob's results. Personally, I'm very curious to give it a trial run. It certainly can't be any worse than what I eat now. Rob said it best: >I'm touched so many people are concerned about my intake of possible unknown essential nutrients. No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients.

corresation 13y ago
No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients. This sort of nonsensical dichotomy seems to infect discussions of this. Yesterday I had a Burger KingTM Whopper (it was, after all, Whopper Wednesday). The day before I had a spring-mix salad with added tomatoes, green onions, and cucumber, and a cucumber dressing, in a day that I also had a peanut butter sandwich... ...and on, and on. Such is any normal diet where people tend to eat lots of varied things, any of which, if the singular source of nutrients, would cause concern for anyone. The nonsense argument that it is either this or fast food, or ramen noodles, or whatever, just highlights how utterly ridiculous this is.
- XorNot 13y ago
  Except its not nonsense - doctors deal with people with this type of narrow diet all the time. Or, not sufficiently varied diet on a day to day basis. Humans are also awful statisticians - fat people don't think they eat much. Thin people think they eat tons of food. Nobody accurately assesses what they do and don't eat, and our entire society is negatively geared towards maintaining healthy eating patterns anyway (your above example of variety will get blown to hell for most people past a few stressful weeks). Yes, technically this is unnecessary but that's hardly the point.
- QuixoticChris 13y ago
  I think the point was less that people with healthy, varied diets should all switch to Soylent, and more that a potentially healthy meal replacement diet beats a definitely unhealthy fast food diet, hands down.

rafski 13y ago

I'm amazed with how much response this guy gets. This is nothing new. My mother used Herbalife protein powder back in the 90's and it was packed with nutrients, minerals and vitamins. It was advertised for weight loss but could also be your nutrition base depending on dosage. I am sure they weren't the only company to offer something like this, there must be plenty.

zevyoura 13y ago
I think a large part of its draw on this site is that he's packaged the ideas from the 'hacker' perspective. It's an interesting thought experiment to think of other slightly dated but mainstream activities could do with a similar treatment.
lost_name 13y ago
I am positively frustrated that more people don't realize this. Amazon has hundreds of results for "meal replacement shakes" right now.
agilescale 13y ago
It must be because: a. Somebody bothered to post the initial announcement of this guy b. He describes his process in detail c. He's a Software Engineer; it would be disingenuous to think that the fact that he's a peer for the members of this audience isn't a factor
saulrh 13y ago
If I remember correctly, someone addressed this pretty early on with an argument that hinged on economics. I'm going from memory, but I think that living off of the prepackaged predecessors would be either unworkable (not comprehensive nutrition) or prohibitively expensive (treated as medical supplies rather than food).

jere 13y ago

>We don’t live anything like our ancestors. We don’t work like them, talk like them, think like them, travel like them, or fight like them. Why on earth would we want to eat like them? >After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did. I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. I like the doublethink here. Reductionism works fine except when it doesn't. And surely the only important components of food are the ones I've identified after a few months of experimentation. You know, we should eat like our ancestors because that's what we're adapted to. When you try to invent your own environment to live in, there's a good chance you won't be well adapted to that environment. Rhinehart's logic is like asking "why should we want the same gravity as our ancestors? Wouldn't life be better without the hassle of gravity?" Actually, no. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does-spending-prolong http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does-sp... >If we can make transistors that are cheap, fast, and low power, surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally. This highlights the confusion. Does anyone think for a moment that a manmade device like a transistor is anywhere close to the complexity of a biological one such as a cell? This is laughable. A transistor is literally a device with THREE terminals.

XorNot 13y ago
A transistor is nowhere near the complexity of a neuron, but networks of them do computational mathematics faster then any human in existence can. We don't eat cells - we consume relatively simple nutrients from them. Our bodies carry around a strong acid hydrolysis system for the exact purpose of obliterating all that "sophisticated" internal structure. For that matter, we have no idea what our ancestors were adapted to. The human body has spanned the range and breadth of ecosystems on this planet, and the survivors of that have passed down what they think is safe to eat by tradition, not science.
conjecTech 13y ago
>When you try to invent your own environment to live in, there's a good chance you won't be well adapted to that environment. I guess this statement would necessarily include wearing clothes, living in houses, using glasses, taking antibiotics, and anything else we do to actively counter forces of nature. I'd say we do quite well at that. I'd like to point out that the rest of that paragraph is simply a strawman argument and is of absolutely no value to this discussion. Finally, you obviously do not come close to understanding the complexity of transistors if you think that it can be summarized by the number of terminals it has. That is like saying the programming behind an API is simplistic because the API only consists three functions. I've taken multiple semesters of classes specifically on transistors and logic design have never even come close to using the mathematical and physical techniques they use for designing single transistors, let alone large integrated circuits consisting of billions of them. I agree with your point that the complexity is not on par with biological systems, but you are trivializing something far more complex than you think. We are not that helpless.

nsxwolf 13y ago

Still sticking with that horrible name, eh? I guess if you don't care about a wider adoption...

hesdeadjim 13y ago

I'm concerned less with the long term health effects of this diet as it relates to missing nutrients, and much more concerned about quality control of the individual ingredients themselves. Who's actually checking that, say, the vitamin A palmitate coming from a supplier actually contains the dose requested, and additionally that it contains no other contaminates? The supplement world is like the wild west as far as this goes. And as attracted as I am to a meal replacement like this, the worry about getting accidentally dosed with high levels of arsenic or lead from a shitty supplier really concerns me.

rgbrenner 13y ago
You reminded me of the consumer reports review of whey.. not just small companies... EAS (a $300m division of Abbott labs (a $38b company)) exceeded the limit of arsenic and cadmium: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/06/protein-supplements-heavy-metal-consumer-reports.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/06/protei...
nbdbvcrea 13y ago
I would be most concerned about overdosing some vitamin or mineral powder, taken in miligram range. Just one pinch can cause serious and painful injury. Will it always be mixed evenly?
- XorNot 13y ago
  Presumably this is a problem that's been long-solved in scale up manufacture, and something you should just be concerned with on the small scale. Generally though - yes - anything water-soluble is pretty easy to get very controlled concentrations of, since you can dilute until your in the operating range of your weighing machine.
  - antoko 13y ago
    I'm not much of a biologist and I may just be spouting what I've heard in the past, but I think all the water soluble vitamins and such are totally safe and impossible to OD on, it is the fat-soluble ones where there's the potential to OD. EDIT: Mostly correct! Fat-soluble vitamins build up in the fatty tissues and are much slower to release and are almost always responsible for Vitamin Poisoning, water-soluble vitamins are easily excreted in the obvious way. There are exceptions though, you can overdose on some of the B vitamins which are water-soluble, I didn't follow up to find out why that is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_poisoning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_poisoning

nazgulnarsil 13y ago

Another shameless plug for Soylent Orange. It's gratifying to see him bump his recipe towards mine in switching to oats. If you've never seen this before SO is the off the shelf version. It doesn't quite hit the same optimal micronutrient profile, but it gets you close. I find this + one meat based meal per day works pretty well. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZYM012N0JZTzEtVk05MVF4dlZyZ2c&usp=drive_web https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ... I have yet to do a proper min-maxing of ingredients for optimal nutrients/calorie.

GIFtheory 13y ago
The author makes a good point in that what is perfectly safe for one person may be deadly to another. Off the top of my head, one example of this is how some people are congenital 'super-absorbers' of iron. These people can develop iron overload from ingesting levels of iron that have no effect on ordinary people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_overload http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_overload

manmal 13y ago

While I would be more than a bit anxious that I miss some nutrient (just like the missing MSM/sulphur) because soylent is a blend of raw earths and isolated ingredients - Rob's mentions of increased focus and better sleep really inspire me to check on what major nutrients I could be missing, and fix that by either supplementing or changing food habits. [I understand that Rob's motivations for using chemically produced ingredients are political and economical (resource consumption), but I'd rather eat live food as long as it's possible :)] E.g. I recently started increasing potassium (eating more lentils and potatoes, and the occasional powder/pill) and my focus increased so much. Two years ago, I discovered that keeping vitamin D up in winter stops me from getting sick all the time. And I think MSM helps me recover faster after workouts (interesting fact: cooking decreases MSM content radically, so one could eat raw stuff instead of drinking it in powder-form). Next step: Instead of swallowing pills, incorporate food that contains all that stuff. And have a deeper look at Soylent's more exotic ingredients.

itchyouch 13y ago
I've definitely noticed this. If at all anything it's really just provided a framework for thinking about the nutrition that we typically lack on a daily basis.

nhangen 13y ago

Is it me or does it seem like everything is now a giant lead into a Kickstarter marketing push? Is Kickstarter the new Internet marketing?

GuiA 13y ago
Good question; I am launching a kickstarter campaign next week to fund my next book, which will answer precisely that question :)

anigbrowl 13y ago

"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally." You're not convincing me. The idea of consuming a nutrient shake on a daily basis doesn't appeal in the least. I like chewing my food; texture is important to me. There's a reason that we have teeth and powerful jaw muscles. If we had evolved to consume our nutrients as a puree then we'd have mouth parts, like flies who squirt digestive juices onto their food and then suck up the partially-digested goop.

DennisP 13y ago

A guy on reddit who said he was a medical student (and sounded like he really was) said that the nutrients may be fine, but the digestive system needs solid food. Patients stuck on liquid diets tend not to do well long-term, and they try to get them on solid food as fast as they can. He had a technical explanation I don't remember well enough to repeat. I asked how the Soylent guy would do if he converted the stuff into some kind of solid food bar, and the med student said "Probably much better!"

fernly 13y ago
From the subject post: "I made a rather significant change to the formula... I've replaced half of the maltodextrin carbohydrates with oat powder, which ... dramatically increases the fiber content ... I underestimated the importance of fiber in a diet, and went from consuming 1.2g / day to 40g / day."
- delackner 13y ago
  Fiber mixed with a nutrient soup is not solid food.
smrtinsert 13y ago
They've done studies yes. In Anatomy & Phys in college they noticed that recovering soldiers recovered mentally far faster from the solid food equivalent of a nutrient shake. In some cases, it was pivotal to survival.

calinet6 13y ago

"Practically everything has gotten better over the past century but food has gotten worse." I highly disagree. Food as an art form and as a science has gotten leagues better since 1913. Probably several orders of magnitude in whatever you're measuring. Except the French. They had it right the whole time. If you look at the extremes, the negative side of food has gone from shit (literally) to shit (figuratively) so not much change there either.

o0-0o 13y ago
Have you tasted frog legs?

GigabyteCoin 13y ago

I continue to read nothing but cautious words on HN when approaching Soylent. Let me remind you all that cautious and timid natures rarely pioneered anything throughout history.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

> We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. Pretty bad assumption. Exercise is important, as building muscle tissue stimulates hormone production (GH, melatonin) that affect even cognitive performance. This guy has a pretty extreme reductionist view on things like health and nutrition. No surprise he's trying to live on a nutrient shake, after all.

driverdan 13y ago

I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as Ensure. Want to replace a meal with something similar? Throw some milk, oats, protein powder and peanut butter in a blender. Drink it down with a multi-vitamin and a fish oil capsule or two.

fooooobar 13y ago
Can you live off of nothing but Ensure for weeks on end?
TillE 13y ago
Or throw brown rice, lentils/beans, and mixed frozen vegetables in a rice cooker. Add a can of tuna twice a week. For breakfast, prepare a green smoothie with frozen fruit, kale, and maybe some flaxseed. The only slightly annoying or difficult part of this is cleaning up.
dpcx 13y ago
> I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as Ensure. I read something yesterday that summed this up pretty much perfectly. If there's more than one of something, it means that it wasn't done right the first time. See: Cars, Computers, Telephones, Light Bulbs, etc...

mjmahone17 13y ago

Personally, I'm really excited to see what the end product will look like. Given he does enough trials beforehand, hopefully the purchase would look something like this: 1. Visit website. On the webpage, login and click "order 1-week supply." 2. If you're a new customer, then put in some basic metrics (height, sex, age, current weight, activity level, exceptional family diseases/allergies). Then, a "standard" supply will be shipped to you, optimizing the ingredients generally for what they think you'll need, with an ingredient list (how much of each ingredient is in one serving). 3. When logging in again, you're asked "Are you experiencing any symptoms?" Then, you can list anything that feels off, such as aching joints, cravings, etc. Then, the site would list common deficiencies/overdoses that would cause those symptoms, and give you the option to purchase, for instance, a temporary magnesium supplement, or recommend that, prior to receiving your next shipment, you consume one less serving per day. After using the supplement, you'd input whether the symptom improved, and the ingredient's quantity would be adjusted in your next shipment. The tricky bit about this system would be personalizing everyone's orders, at scale. But it should be pretty possible (says the developer without an understanding of manufacturing), and for far less than it would cost to order a full meal.

nicothieb 13y ago

Am I the only one depressed by this idea ? I mean I have no doubt one can craft a superior meal nutriment wise, but this is the fast track to abandoning cuisine and a huge part of my culture. Spend more time making your dreams come true. Yeah right, more facebook or more tv time !

gordaco 13y ago
No, you're not the only one. To me, this is also a fast way of ruining one of the best things about life. If "making your dreams come true" prevents you from enjoying a nice meals (which is not that much time-consuming, anyway), it may be time to reconsider if those dreams are worth it. Don't live just for a future that might not come, keep in mind your daily life.
jjoonathan 13y ago
Some people enjoy coding more than dining. You are likely to find many of them here. While you are free to differ from them ("I enjoy cooking/dining way too much for this to work for me"), your insults (the idea causes depression, the slippery slope argument, your suggestion that dreams = facebook+tv) are quite uncalled for.

ricardobeat 13y ago

Nature has solved this for us long ago. Buy a handful of vegetables, vary them every week; slice them up, cook/grill/stir fry and eat them. Add meat once in a while. This will take you 20 minutes/day, maybe less if you make food in batches and freeze it, and it's been tested for the past few thousand years with pretty good results.

mrb 13y ago
20 minutes/day? 6.7 minutes per meal? I doubt it. Plus you forgot the time to buy groceries, wash dishes, eat (drinking something like soylent is 5x faster than chewing food), etc. The average adult probably spends 45min-1h per day doing something necessary for preparing food. The guy has a point: Soylent does save time: "I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner. For every meal at home I would then have to clean and dry the dishes. This does not include trips to the grocery store. Now I spend about 5 minutes in the evening preparing for the next day, and every meal takes a few seconds. I love order of magnitude improvements, and I certainly don't miss doing dishes. In fact I could get rid of the kitchen entirely, no fridge sucking down power, no constant cleaning or worrying about pests, and more living space. I just need a water source." Source: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298
- rdouble 13y ago
  I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner It seems strange that it would take him 2 hours to cook a combination of eggs, a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger. These are foods that only take a few minutes to cook. Cooking either eggs or a quesadilla takes less than 1 minute. If cooked longer, they are ruined. One could cook a meal for two containing every one of those items in less than 20 minutes. He must have been taking a long lunch break. Any claim that this project arose from a need for time savings rings a bit hollow, because he has spent an order of magnitude more time on this than any non-foodie bachelor programmer person has ever spent cooking.

SoftwareMaven 13y ago

He missed the sixth most abundant element in the human body, and, now that it's there, he is sure everything is OK? I can only say, "Wow". I really believe that if an actual scientific study[1] was done on this, it would rank right next to a pure fast food diet. It's not that it isn't theoretically possible to make something that is "perfect" nutrition, it's that we don't know enough today to say definitively whether carbs or fat causes metabolic syndrome[2], much less how all the various micronutrients interact with macronutrients, gut biota, and phases of the moon. Until we understand every piece of the nutrition puzzle, this is just dangerous. That he wants to take it out to others is even more frightening. Until we get to where we really understand what the body needs at an individual level, I'm sticking with whole foods. I really hope this guy doesn't do long-term damage to himself, or anyone else, for that matter. 1. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to double-blind whether you get a Big Mac or a cup of gray stuff. This isn't just a problem with Soykent, it is a problem with every attempt to perform nutritional experiments. It is really hard to perform good, predictive science in this space. 2. We need to know like chemists know how chemicals will react and physicists know how forces will behave. We don't.

uberalex 13y ago
I have to agree with you, but I wonder will it ever be feasible to really understand that in a way that helps individuals? There's an amazing amount of hidden complexity. For me this experiment is a testament to the variety of human individuality, and the resilience of the human organism. I can't imagine wanting to replace most of my food with a powder shake, and I drink them fairly regularly post-gym. Beyond that, I think the author's self-testing and self-evaluations are so lost in noise, and so subjective, that they have virtually no measurement value. Finally, his method of picking out what he needs seems ad-hoc and partial. While we can show lots of things are wrong with chronically bad diets, the human body is surprisingly good at dealing with sub-optimal quantities and qualities of food. The 'perfect' diet is a curious notion really, since the body is a dynamic system that responds to input.
- shubb 13y ago
  Anyone who ate this every meal for ever based on the current level of evidence is nuts sure. But this is awesome research. He is trying to do something awesome, at great personal risk. He has shown some integrity in not providing the recipe until it has been verified, and has stated that he will proceed to large scale trials before commercializing. I'm not saying I don't expect him to damage himself (and anyone else who eats this full time), but I don't really understand all the heat he's getting for trying. If this yields something cheap we can eat ~80% of meals in the long term, then that's a really great thing. There are people who eat an unhealthy and monotonous diet due to cost, even in the west. If that could be partly replaced with something a bit more healthy, that would be very socially valuable.

Mamady 13y ago

You do realise that mastication is REQUIRED for healthy teeth and gums right? You may not become malnutritioned, but you will suffer from various oral problems due to lack of mastication. This may take a year or even a few years to present itself - by then it will be too late to react.

nakedrobot2 13y ago

from the article: "No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated." And, I presume, no one in the world is poor. Nobody struggles. There is no murder or injustice anymore. Just which planet is this fellow living on?

cLeEOGPw 13y ago

Those who say that this is wrong because humans should eat like our ancestors because we evolved to eat in this way are on the same level with people that say only man and woman should have sex because nature made it this way. Naturalists are wrong from the very root because of assumption nature makes everything on purpose and in the only right way possible. This soylent thing exposes all the ignorance of the people in this regard.

juskrey 13y ago

This guy definitely will leave gene pool. I bet on diabetes.

tocomment 13y ago

Why is it so easy to make a food that dogs and cats can eat for every meal but so difficult for humans? Anyone know?

zacharyvoase 13y ago

* “Bacon is high in Oleic acid, the principal component of adipose (fat) tissue so it is great for increasing body fat.[...] By the way, an acid is anything that donates protons. Only a few have corrosive properties like sulfuric acid, and bases can be corrosive too.” So now I'm thinking, ‘does this guy even know what fats are, or how fat digestion, assimilation and metabolism works?’. * “We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated. We need mental strength.” Well, y'know, that's true until you're caught in a car accident, or a bombing, or a fight, or any kind of natural disaster which actually tests your ability to survive. It's simplistic and naïve to suggest that we've evolved beyond the need to even try to survive. * “If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself.” There's just so much incorrectness here, I don't know where to start. - - - Anyone can go ahead and try an experiment like this for themselves, and I support their right to document and share the experience. But seriously, anyone ignorant enough to try subsisting 100% on this 'soylent' concoction, in its current or future form, deserves all the health problems that await them.

mamoswined 13y ago
"I have no use for bulging biceps." For the past two years, I've relied on the fact that I walk a lot to take care of my exercise needs. But last year I started experiencing crippling neck and shoulder pain. A visit to the doctor and a referral to a physical therapist revealed that my upper body had atrophied to an alarming extent. Strength in the upper body affects your posture among other things. Muscle mass also affects your metabolism in a positive way. Now that I'm rebuilding I feel much better. Plus I look better!

jgrahamc 13y ago

There's no science here. This so-called experiment is worthless IMHO. Feeding people all-liquid diets to keep them alive is well known. That's what happens to coma patients and lots of work in creating enteral nutrition products has been done. Given that people's lives depend on this that's a good place to start (take a look at, for example, Jevity [3]). And the people who make that stuff worry about keeping your gastrointestinal system working, the right balance of everything needed to keep a (in this case, sick) person alive, how to keep the product from spoiling, etc. So, he's not creating something new. The other argument against the existing products is price. Here's a quick comparison. He claims that it costs him $155 per month [1]. If he were to live on Jevity 1.5 he'd need to drink 4.2 cans per day at a cost of $57/24 per can (it's sold in packs of 24 cans [2]) or $9.98 per day which is roughly $300 a month. (If he ups the kcal to 2,000 a day from the 1,500 he was on then he'd need to drink 5.6 cans a day which is $400 a month). So, he'd be spending 2 to 2.5 times what he currently is. But he'd be spending it on a product that's been quality controlled and tested. Is there any indication that he can fundamentally change the economics of this type of food? I don't think so. Especially when you factor in all the work that the makers of Jevity etc. are doing at that price point (the QA, the distribution, the packaging). And certainly not enough to meet all his other goals about solving world hunger. If a market for soylent emerges then I'd imagine that companies that make things like Jevity would step in. Oh wait, they already do. There's Ensure etc. Also, there's so much other crap in his blog posts about how soylent lasts forever [4], how no one need muscles anyway [5], how even stopping eating soylent for a week led to massive cognitive problems [5], that it's hard to take the whole thing seriously. And then there's this [1]: "I for one would not miss the stereotype of the housewife in the kitchen. Providing diverse, palatable, and nutritious meals for an entire family every day must be exhausting. What if taking a night off didn't mean unhealthy pizza or expensive take out? How wasteful society has been with its women! The endless hours spent cooking and cleaning in the kitchen could be replaced with socializing, study, or creative endeavors." Ah yes, soylent is not only going to solve world hunger, make us more healthy, save time, make us more creative, save money: it's going to emancipate women! But there's more [5]: "We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated. We need mental strength. We need creativity, patience, discipline, and humility. If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself. Perhaps companies would be more productive if managers had more humility and employees had more discipline." Yes, soylent will result in an increase in humility and all those fat people who lack self-discipline will be thin. Hooray. [1] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 [2] http://www.abbottstore.com/jevity+reg/jevity-15-cal-8-oz-can-case-of-24/invt/57333/ http://www.abbottstore.com/jevity+reg/jevity-15-cal-8-oz-can... [3] http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/jevity-1_5-cal http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/jevity-1_5-cal [4] http://www.soylent.me http://www.soylent.me claims it 'lasts for years' [5] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570