5 ms·

Soylent is definitely suspect. The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of ingredients that are the only things you should eat is nons

by autarch 13y ago

Soylent is definitely suspect. The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of ingredients that are the only things you should eat is nonsense. That said, there's no reason to think this article is any better. Honestly, I didn't finish it, because as soon as it said that you might crave animal protein heavy products because of a protein deficiency I knew that the author was as full of it as what he or she is criticizing. The citations look good until you start digging. One of them cites a naturalnews.com article (not a peer-reviewed journal) that in turn cites the Weston A. Price Foundation site, a towering bastion of pseudoscientific nonsense. I wonder how many of actual scientific articles cited even support the points the author cites them for. In summary, the nutrition science in this article is about as poor as the nutrition science behind Soylent.

jowiar 13y ago
> The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of ingredients that are the only things you should eat is nonsense. It's perfectly sensible that there is a mathematically minimum sufficient diet, or mathematically optimal diet, with the caveat that: 1. There's a high probability that this varies for each definition of "you", and for different times of day / month / year / within a lifetime 2. Soylent is, with almost perfect certainty, not it. But there is a nonzero chance that a purely soylent diet is healthier than the current median human diet. Will we get there someday? Probably. I"d say there's a better than 50% chance it happens within the next century. Whether we want to get there is another story. FWIW, our bodies aren't really a whole lot more complex than feline or canine bodies, and we've managed to come up with a sufficiently nutritious kitty kibble (or at least, we think we have). Remember, deciding what to eat is a decidedly modern problem, as is looking at food as a combination of nutrients. For the vast majority of human existence, nutrition consisted of avoiding starvation. When deciding between options, the proper answer was "all of the above".
- epmatsw 13y ago
  This is my exact outlook on it. You have a very fair chance of Soylent being significantly healthier than your current diet (as an American). At the very least, it provides the nutrients that a hundred years of studying dietary deficiencies have proved necessary and will possibly give some indication of necessary nutrients that we have overlooked.
- DanBC 13y ago
  > Whether we want to get there is another story. NASA could probably have come up with a Soylent-like product by now, but they haven't. I guess that being stuck in a small can in space means that nice food becomes important. So, on the ground, there are two hurdles. i) Portion control, ii) Choice. Some people will not eat two scoops of ice cream. They will eat a pint of ice cream. They won't eat 2 cookies, they'll eat the packet of cookies. Some people will smear the cookies with peanut butter, and crumble them over the pint of ice cream. Will Soylent help these people? What happens if someone eats double the recommended daily amount of Soylent? Or triple? Or quadruple? Some people will walk into a supermarket, walk past all the fruit and vegetables, and into the doughnut aisle. Then they'll walk past the meat and fish and into the crisp / chip aisle. Then they'll go to the weird salt / sugar / fat / slop instant meal aisle and buy bizarre "food". I have no idea how Soylent will help them.
  - jowiar 13y ago
    As far as I can figure out NASA's original solution to space food WAS a Soylent-like product. Astronauts responded by smuggling a corned beef sandwich into space. [1] The point of Soylent is to separate the pleasure from eating. Rather than being a emotional, sensory activity, treat eating with has all the excitement of popping a pill - insert nutrients into body. What do I eat? Soylent. How much? The amount it tells me to. The questions of "Do I eat the broccoli or the ice cream?" or "Do I have seconds?" are taken off the table. I wss in the hospital for the better part of a week a year ago. They had me on the "nothing by mouth" diet for a couple days - simply an IV drip for nutrition, then a liquid diet for two more. When my friends came to visit, the first thing I said was something along the lines of "As soon as I get out of here we're getting the best cheeseburger in this city." Could that desire be trained away? I'm not sure. [1]: http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/zorn/grissom.htm http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/zorn/grissom.htm
rdouble 13y ago
It's pretty cool, actually. If you're entrepreneurial it's good to know that even hackers will fall for anything provided it's being marketed by someone who seems like a hacker, too.
forgot-my-pass 13y ago
"The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of ingredients that are the only things you should eat is nonsense." why?
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Because nothing is simple in life, our bodies are complex, and there's Wikipedia if you have tons of super broad questions like that.
  - forgot-my-pass 13y ago
    I'm not saying whether or not Soylent is the real deal. But I don't understand why you think it's not possible to come up with an optimal combination of input (food) into our bodies that maximizes it's output (longevity?).
    - ekianjo 13y ago
      First, longevity is not the main output of the human body. At least there's no single output. What if Soylent is good for your brain but detrimental to certain organs? Or the opposite? I have a biochemistry background and from what I know the digestive process is extremely complex and still certain parts are not fully understood. So I highly doubt a bunch of whiz kids can find the optimal formula for food without any scientific background, sufficient research and proper studies to support the claims they make. Plus, it's not like there are no variations from one person to another in terms of what you need in terms of nutrition. We know genetic differences exist, in some parts of the world you have deficiencies of certain enzymes to break down some types of food, and so on. By the way, if you want a simple diet, you can probably live on rice and bread alone (mostly). You don't need to stuff your body with some shit people have no experience with. Rice/Bread may not be a very good diet but it satisfies a number of nutritional requirements and we know for a fact people can live (maybe not very well) on such diets (because they did for a fairly long amount of time).
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
lsiebert 13y ago
First of all, trying to find just the right foods reeks of premature optimization. Second we don't know what our requirements actually are. And lab rats aren't going to fix that... one of the arguments why there has been a rise in autoimmune disorders in this century is our obsession with cleanliness... we may not be getting enough dirt, microbes, etc to keep our immune system in check. Third, nutritional science doesn't have unit testing. We don't have integration testing. Nutritional science has bug reports from the field, we have minimal requirements and max quantities. We can compare two systems, but we can't debug them. It's like trying to reverse engineer COBOL from machine code, when you don't know either. Further, we don't know exactly how such things interact with other factors, sleep, genetic and environmental factors, exercise. Nor do we necessarily know all the elements of your health effected by nutrition. Fertility, resilience to disease, mental state. Soylent is an experiment. And if people taking it as their food source keep good records of what goes on with them on it, we may learn from it, by comparing people on other diets in the same environments. You want better nutrition? Log your food, accurately, for years, along with your feeling of health, and environment and any other factors (weight, exercise, amount of sleep, etc.) Publish the data regularly, and maybe someday we'll be able to analyze it and build a nutrition model. However, I think it's premature to decide we know what we need. We are learning. We know some things. But we don't know enough.
jamesfenton 13y ago
Are any other citations suspect? Concerning the overall argument of the paper, that citation was in support of a very minor point concerning whether dietary cholesterol is necessary. Obviously the main point of the paper was to explain our relative ignorance of nutrition as a whole. The sub points appear intended to show that Rhinehart is not even properly informed of the details that have evidence, let alone the massive unknown. In summary, its unfair for you to summarize what you did not entirely read. Read it in its entirety and find more insufficient citations before you debunk everything.

by autarch 13y ago

jowiar 13y ago

> The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of ingredients that are the only things you should eat is nonsense. It's perfectly sensible that there is a mathematically minimum sufficient diet, or mathematically optimal diet, with the caveat that: 1. There's a high probability that this varies for each definition of "you", and for different times of day / month / year / within a lifetime 2. Soylent is, with almost perfect certainty, not it. But there is a nonzero chance that a purely soylent diet is healthier than the current median human diet. Will we get there someday? Probably. I"d say there's a better than 50% chance it happens within the next century. Whether we want to get there is another story. FWIW, our bodies aren't really a whole lot more complex than feline or canine bodies, and we've managed to come up with a sufficiently nutritious kitty kibble (or at least, we think we have). Remember, deciding what to eat is a decidedly modern problem, as is looking at food as a combination of nutrients. For the vast majority of human existence, nutrition consisted of avoiding starvation. When deciding between options, the proper answer was "all of the above".

epmatsw 13y ago
This is my exact outlook on it. You have a very fair chance of Soylent being significantly healthier than your current diet (as an American). At the very least, it provides the nutrients that a hundred years of studying dietary deficiencies have proved necessary and will possibly give some indication of necessary nutrients that we have overlooked.
DanBC 13y ago
> Whether we want to get there is another story. NASA could probably have come up with a Soylent-like product by now, but they haven't. I guess that being stuck in a small can in space means that nice food becomes important. So, on the ground, there are two hurdles. i) Portion control, ii) Choice. Some people will not eat two scoops of ice cream. They will eat a pint of ice cream. They won't eat 2 cookies, they'll eat the packet of cookies. Some people will smear the cookies with peanut butter, and crumble them over the pint of ice cream. Will Soylent help these people? What happens if someone eats double the recommended daily amount of Soylent? Or triple? Or quadruple? Some people will walk into a supermarket, walk past all the fruit and vegetables, and into the doughnut aisle. Then they'll walk past the meat and fish and into the crisp / chip aisle. Then they'll go to the weird salt / sugar / fat / slop instant meal aisle and buy bizarre "food". I have no idea how Soylent will help them.
- jowiar 13y ago
  As far as I can figure out NASA's original solution to space food WAS a Soylent-like product. Astronauts responded by smuggling a corned beef sandwich into space. [1] The point of Soylent is to separate the pleasure from eating. Rather than being a emotional, sensory activity, treat eating with has all the excitement of popping a pill - insert nutrients into body. What do I eat? Soylent. How much? The amount it tells me to. The questions of "Do I eat the broccoli or the ice cream?" or "Do I have seconds?" are taken off the table. I wss in the hospital for the better part of a week a year ago. They had me on the "nothing by mouth" diet for a couple days - simply an IV drip for nutrition, then a liquid diet for two more. When my friends came to visit, the first thing I said was something along the lines of "As soon as I get out of here we're getting the best cheeseburger in this city." Could that desire be trained away? I'm not sure. [1]: http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/zorn/grissom.htm http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/zorn/grissom.htm

rdouble 13y ago

It's pretty cool, actually. If you're entrepreneurial it's good to know that even hackers will fall for anything provided it's being marketed by someone who seems like a hacker, too.

forgot-my-pass 13y ago

"The idea that human nutrition can be boiled down to a minimal list of ingredients that are the only things you should eat is nonsense." why?

ekianjo 13y ago
Because nothing is simple in life, our bodies are complex, and there's Wikipedia if you have tons of super broad questions like that.
- forgot-my-pass 13y ago
  I'm not saying whether or not Soylent is the real deal. But I don't understand why you think it's not possible to come up with an optimal combination of input (food) into our bodies that maximizes it's output (longevity?).
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    First, longevity is not the main output of the human body. At least there's no single output. What if Soylent is good for your brain but detrimental to certain organs? Or the opposite? I have a biochemistry background and from what I know the digestive process is extremely complex and still certain parts are not fully understood. So I highly doubt a bunch of whiz kids can find the optimal formula for food without any scientific background, sufficient research and proper studies to support the claims they make. Plus, it's not like there are no variations from one person to another in terms of what you need in terms of nutrition. We know genetic differences exist, in some parts of the world you have deficiencies of certain enzymes to break down some types of food, and so on. By the way, if you want a simple diet, you can probably live on rice and bread alone (mostly). You don't need to stuff your body with some shit people have no experience with. Rice/Bread may not be a very good diet but it satisfies a number of nutritional requirements and we know for a fact people can live (maybe not very well) on such diets (because they did for a fairly long amount of time).
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago

lsiebert 13y ago

First of all, trying to find just the right foods reeks of premature optimization. Second we don't know what our requirements actually are. And lab rats aren't going to fix that... one of the arguments why there has been a rise in autoimmune disorders in this century is our obsession with cleanliness... we may not be getting enough dirt, microbes, etc to keep our immune system in check. Third, nutritional science doesn't have unit testing. We don't have integration testing. Nutritional science has bug reports from the field, we have minimal requirements and max quantities. We can compare two systems, but we can't debug them. It's like trying to reverse engineer COBOL from machine code, when you don't know either. Further, we don't know exactly how such things interact with other factors, sleep, genetic and environmental factors, exercise. Nor do we necessarily know all the elements of your health effected by nutrition. Fertility, resilience to disease, mental state. Soylent is an experiment. And if people taking it as their food source keep good records of what goes on with them on it, we may learn from it, by comparing people on other diets in the same environments. You want better nutrition? Log your food, accurately, for years, along with your feeling of health, and environment and any other factors (weight, exercise, amount of sleep, etc.) Publish the data regularly, and maybe someday we'll be able to analyze it and build a nutrition model. However, I think it's premature to decide we know what we need. We are learning. We know some things. But we don't know enough.

jamesfenton 13y ago

Are any other citations suspect? Concerning the overall argument of the paper, that citation was in support of a very minor point concerning whether dietary cholesterol is necessary. Obviously the main point of the paper was to explain our relative ignorance of nutrition as a whole. The sub points appear intended to show that Rhinehart is not even properly informed of the details that have evidence, let alone the massive unknown. In summary, its unfair for you to summarize what you did not entirely read. Read it in its entirety and find more insufficient citations before you debunk everything.