7 ms·

Nice job missing the forest but spotting a few trees. I see some promising initial signs given the short duration of the trial. Imagine if there was a new dru

by marze 13y ago

Nice job missing the forest but spotting a few trees. I see some promising initial signs given the short duration of the trial. Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. The guy doesn't claim to be a medical expert, he just did his best to report the results of a bunch of miscellaneous tests that were suggested to him. With a drug for which if you took 40x the daily dose you might die, or a drug that might cause significant harmful side effects at normal dose, you need careful studies to prove a benefit and quantify risks. With a dietary change, the risks are orders of magnitude lower. I'd be surprised if the average American wouldn't improve their nutritional status doing this for a while, with an existing diet likely low in magnesium, copper, zinc, vitamin c and d and probably more. The need for careful studies is greatly reduced for a food product like this one. People can try it, report how they feel. If other think is worth trying, they can see exactly how it works for them by giving it a try. That is the power of self experimentation.

alphaoverlord 13y ago
Again, my first paragraph is: > I'm all for people having the freedom to eat whatever they want and I really like the quantified self aspect of seeing how diet affects how they feel and metrics of health, but I have to say the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data. I'm not going to comment on the drink, but rather on his misunderstanding of medicine. I'm not trying to refute what he says about how he feels, whether that saves him money, or his mental ability - those aren't my areas of expertise. I do know a little about medical tests, and I think it's valid to point out that he clearly does not and how the results he reports are either incorrect or irrelevant. I'm just suggesting you shouldn't consider his medical tests in deciding how good this product is. I have no horse in this race, but I'll tell you if this racetrack is not standard regulation. Self experimentation might be useful, but only if you understand the metrics you measure and whether it's stochastic noise or meaningful results.
- marze 13y ago
  "Self experimentation might be useful, but only if you understand the metrics you measure and whether its stochastic noise or meaningful results." I feel you miss the whole point of self experimentation. If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know. A low-risk food product (such as this) can simply be trialed in a n=1 trial. If the results are positive, great. If not, go back to what you were doing before. All the studies in the world only suggest how something might work for you. It is only the n=1 test that matters.
  - nonchalance 13y ago
    > If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know. Perception is different from reality, as exemplified by an Apple anecdote: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: - Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. - The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding. This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
    - marze 13y ago
      No doubt people can misjudge things. With health changes, I think it is often easier to see changes in the negative direction, like the author when he stopped the soylent trial. If the changes are great enough in magnitude to be obvious, then you know you're on to something. Also, measures like weight and computer mental agility tests can be quite reliable if you are consistent in your testing, and they aren't subject to misinterpretation or wishful thinking. Edit: Below, skore is skeptical that a person can notice a significant change to their own health. I respectfully disagree. Check out the blog of Seth Roberts. He is a professor who is involved in the quantified self movement. He records many subjective measures qualitatively, and feels he has made some significant discoveries doing so. I won't try to summarize anything here, but anyone interested can read for themselves on his blog. Roberts studies rats, and he is the ultimate human rat.
carbocation 13y ago
Imagine that there was a drug that reduced your renal function by 25% in two weeks.[1] People will see in this what they want to see. This is why case reports are evidence of the lowest grade. This is more a curio than it is evidence, and there is nothing wrong with writing a blog post about a curio. 1 = I think the creatinine bump is quite likely due to stochastic fluctuation, but if for discussion's sake we attribute all positive changes to Soylent, we should do the same for the negative ones.
- vidarh 13y ago
  As my doctor pointed out to me when I warned her to expect significantly elevated creatinine because of my protein supplementation: Raised creatinine in itself is not a "negative". Substantially raised creatinine may be a symptom of reduced renal function, but it is also a symptom of any number of other things - such as, indeed, increased protein intake. It could be just fluctuating in his case, or it could very well be, given his past diet (how could he survive on that), that he was finally getting decent amounts of protein.
  - carbocation 13y ago
    I think you might be thinking of BUN. For creatinine, there is peer-reviewed data demonstrating that in people without renal disease, increasing the protein in your diet tends to improve your eGFR, not decrease it (which is what happened here). So for him, it either fluctuated or was a marker of true kidney disease, but in any case this is not just a marker of adequate protein intake.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Neither. I'm talking of creatinine levels in the blood, and my doctor was also very clear on that, and that it wasn't normally a concern at the levels she would expect to see from protein supplementation, but if it was too high, she'd need to establish filtration rate to rule out renal problems. Also, while you may very well be right that GFR would improve, the little bits of reading I've had time to do indicates that unless they did eGFR by measuring his urine over 24 hours, then they likely estimated it from his creatinine levels, and so anything increasing creatinine levels would presumably cause the eGFR value to drop whether or not the increased creatinine levels are due to renal function or anything else.
obstacle1 13y ago
>Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. I found this drug that makes me feel way relaxed and totally content with the world. I don't do anything while on the drug, 'cause life's great just sitting here on the couch. As a consequence of sitting on my couch enjoying my great life, I don't spend any money, so I'm totally saving compared to before I took this drug. Pass the joint, man. I'm legitimately not sure if your argument in this thread is serious. You are basically recommending we throw out any pretensions of objectivity or science or knowledge in favor of "do what you feel".
- marze 13y ago
  "recommending we throw out any pretensions of objectivity or science or knowledge in favor of "do what you feel"." Not so. Mental agility, weight, blood pressure are all easy and inexpensive to track. A person's perception of how well they slept, overall feeling of well being, etc., can also be tracked if they are careful to quantify and record them. I think you underestimate the power of carefully recorded data, which is at the core of the quantified self movement.
  - obstacle1 13y ago
    Here is what you said earlier: >If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know. The above directly contradicts your most recent reply, since it obviously precludes the possibility of any meaningful quantification. "Screw the tests, you'll know" is precisely the opposite of objective analysis. We'll know what? Nothing objective, that's for sure. Since you appear to be arguing both for and against quantified self-style living in this thread, I can't help but wonder what your angle is. Are you actually just arguing for Soylent? Your position makes no sense, but you're enthusiastically defending the product, and you've done it in prior threads about Soylent, too.
    - marze 13y ago
      I'm not arguing for Soylent, but arguing that people should personally test out low-risk dietary changes and see for themselves if they help. Many argue against Soylent by arguing that we need some careful studies before anyone should try it. I think that is overkill for a food product like Soylent. As for how to tell if Soylent or anything else is helping you, big changes should be obvious, smaller changes would require careful quantified-self style tracking to detect. Sorry if I wasn't more clear, but by obscure test I'm referring to blood work and other harder to interpret tests. Easy to interpret tests are reaction time, weight, fast arithmetic tests for mental agility, as well as recording qualitative feelings of health quantitatively, in a consistent and rigorous manner. Edit: As for this article on the Soylent trial, my take was it had "some promising initial signs given the short duration of the trial". Hardly blind enthusiasm.
stephenbez 13y ago
From this NYTimes article (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/07/business/the-ever-fatter-business-of-thinness.html?pagewanted=1 http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/07/business/the-ever-fatter-b...): "The Government forced all liquid protein products off the market after they were implicated in 59 deaths." The article doesn't give many details, but it looks like changes in diet can be dangerous.
- vidarh 13y ago
  No, it looks like people can be scared by correlation. Of course changes in diet can be dangerous (you just try switching to an all cyanide diet). But "liquid protein products"? Like milk? Or protein shakes? There are certainly plenty of "liquid protein products" on the market, and heavily used, and tons more protein products sold as powders to be mixed with water, milk or juice by consumers. Somehow we don't have weightlifters dropping like flies.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Milk cannot not be liquid protein product by almost any sane definition. It has more fat and more carbohydrates per gram than protein.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      Most protein products have substantial amounts of carbs and fat. The point is not - unless you are buying pure protein products or "diet" protein shakes for cutting - to avoid carbs and fat, but to get more protein. It is far easier to stomach large amounts of protein (due to taste and consistency) when mixed with a lot of carbs than alone, and unless you're cutting you generally need a lot of carbs too when training hard, so there's little incentive for most general protein supplements to keep carbs down. In fact, there are a large number of protein supplements on the market where the majority of calories comes from carbs and fat, and many will have more carbs alone by weight than protein (many often also are specifically advertised for weight gain / bulking). They are still commonly referred to as protein products because the main basis for calling something a protein supplement amongst suppliers and people using them is generally large amounts of protein, not low amounts of carbs and fats. (And yes, that means some of them - intentionally - have massive amounts of calories) You also probably talk about "pure" milk, but there's also a number of milk products on the market that are milk + extra casein extracted from milk, for very high protein concentrations - my favourite has about 40g of protein per 300ml; you are free to not accept that as "milk", but it tastes like milk and is generally marketed as "protein milk" or similar. But milk alone is also frequently used by weight lifters for the decent protein content and good ration of protein, carbs and fat (a well known "supplemental diet" for bulking for lifters is called GOMAD: Gallon Of Milk A Day) The main point being that large amounts of protein is being ingested in liquid form every day all around the world, and has been for decades, and we're not seeing mass deaths. Barring actual evidence to the contrary, there's very little reason to believe that the deaths referenced in the article had anything to do with getting "liquid protein", and very good reasons to believe it was hysteria.
ekianjo 13y ago
> Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. Benefits are not self-assessed for drugs.
IanCal 13y ago
> Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. Sell people a green pill and tell them it'll make them want fast food less. Done. Make it more dramatic and you'll get a better effect. Expensive helps, requiring it to be injected would help even more.
gwern 13y ago
> Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. He used > Finally, I took some tests on Quantified-Mind.com to measure my mental alertness while I was eating my typical diet of burritos and Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. In this way, I could try to reproduce Rhinehart’s claim that Soylent improves mental acuity. Those tests tend to exhibit substantial practice effects until you've done them a lot. And then there's the obvious placebo effect. I present to you a training regime which due essentially to an expectancy effect by subjects can increase your IQ by 9 points... or 2 points: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis Quite a difference.

by marze 13y ago

alphaoverlord 13y ago

Again, my first paragraph is: > I'm all for people having the freedom to eat whatever they want and I really like the quantified self aspect of seeing how diet affects how they feel and metrics of health, but I have to say the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data. I'm not going to comment on the drink, but rather on his misunderstanding of medicine. I'm not trying to refute what he says about how he feels, whether that saves him money, or his mental ability - those aren't my areas of expertise. I do know a little about medical tests, and I think it's valid to point out that he clearly does not and how the results he reports are either incorrect or irrelevant. I'm just suggesting you shouldn't consider his medical tests in deciding how good this product is. I have no horse in this race, but I'll tell you if this racetrack is not standard regulation. Self experimentation might be useful, but only if you understand the metrics you measure and whether it's stochastic noise or meaningful results.

marze 13y ago
"Self experimentation might be useful, but only if you understand the metrics you measure and whether its stochastic noise or meaningful results." I feel you miss the whole point of self experimentation. If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know. A low-risk food product (such as this) can simply be trialed in a n=1 trial. If the results are positive, great. If not, go back to what you were doing before. All the studies in the world only suggest how something might work for you. It is only the n=1 test that matters.
- nonchalance 13y ago
  > If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know. Perception is different from reality, as exemplified by an Apple anecdote: http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: - Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. - The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding. This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.
  - marze 13y ago
    No doubt people can misjudge things. With health changes, I think it is often easier to see changes in the negative direction, like the author when he stopped the soylent trial. If the changes are great enough in magnitude to be obvious, then you know you're on to something. Also, measures like weight and computer mental agility tests can be quite reliable if you are consistent in your testing, and they aren't subject to misinterpretation or wishful thinking. Edit: Below, skore is skeptical that a person can notice a significant change to their own health. I respectfully disagree. Check out the blog of Seth Roberts. He is a professor who is involved in the quantified self movement. He records many subjective measures qualitatively, and feels he has made some significant discoveries doing so. I won't try to summarize anything here, but anyone interested can read for themselves on his blog. Roberts studies rats, and he is the ultimate human rat.

carbocation 13y ago

Imagine that there was a drug that reduced your renal function by 25% in two weeks.[1] People will see in this what they want to see. This is why case reports are evidence of the lowest grade. This is more a curio than it is evidence, and there is nothing wrong with writing a blog post about a curio. 1 = I think the creatinine bump is quite likely due to stochastic fluctuation, but if for discussion's sake we attribute all positive changes to Soylent, we should do the same for the negative ones.

vidarh 13y ago
As my doctor pointed out to me when I warned her to expect significantly elevated creatinine because of my protein supplementation: Raised creatinine in itself is not a "negative". Substantially raised creatinine may be a symptom of reduced renal function, but it is also a symptom of any number of other things - such as, indeed, increased protein intake. It could be just fluctuating in his case, or it could very well be, given his past diet (how could he survive on that), that he was finally getting decent amounts of protein.
- carbocation 13y ago
  I think you might be thinking of BUN. For creatinine, there is peer-reviewed data demonstrating that in people without renal disease, increasing the protein in your diet tends to improve your eGFR, not decrease it (which is what happened here). So for him, it either fluctuated or was a marker of true kidney disease, but in any case this is not just a marker of adequate protein intake.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Neither. I'm talking of creatinine levels in the blood, and my doctor was also very clear on that, and that it wasn't normally a concern at the levels she would expect to see from protein supplementation, but if it was too high, she'd need to establish filtration rate to rule out renal problems. Also, while you may very well be right that GFR would improve, the little bits of reading I've had time to do indicates that unless they did eGFR by measuring his urine over 24 hours, then they likely estimated it from his creatinine levels, and so anything increasing creatinine levels would presumably cause the eGFR value to drop whether or not the increased creatinine levels are due to renal function or anything else.

obstacle1 13y ago

>Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. I found this drug that makes me feel way relaxed and totally content with the world. I don't do anything while on the drug, 'cause life's great just sitting here on the couch. As a consequence of sitting on my couch enjoying my great life, I don't spend any money, so I'm totally saving compared to before I took this drug. Pass the joint, man. I'm legitimately not sure if your argument in this thread is serious. You are basically recommending we throw out any pretensions of objectivity or science or knowledge in favor of "do what you feel".

marze 13y ago
"recommending we throw out any pretensions of objectivity or science or knowledge in favor of "do what you feel"." Not so. Mental agility, weight, blood pressure are all easy and inexpensive to track. A person's perception of how well they slept, overall feeling of well being, etc., can also be tracked if they are careful to quantify and record them. I think you underestimate the power of carefully recorded data, which is at the core of the quantified self movement.
- obstacle1 13y ago
  Here is what you said earlier: >If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know. The above directly contradicts your most recent reply, since it obviously precludes the possibility of any meaningful quantification. "Screw the tests, you'll know" is precisely the opposite of objective analysis. We'll know what? Nothing objective, that's for sure. Since you appear to be arguing both for and against quantified self-style living in this thread, I can't help but wonder what your angle is. Are you actually just arguing for Soylent? Your position makes no sense, but you're enthusiastically defending the product, and you've done it in prior threads about Soylent, too.
  - marze 13y ago
    I'm not arguing for Soylent, but arguing that people should personally test out low-risk dietary changes and see for themselves if they help. Many argue against Soylent by arguing that we need some careful studies before anyone should try it. I think that is overkill for a food product like Soylent. As for how to tell if Soylent or anything else is helping you, big changes should be obvious, smaller changes would require careful quantified-self style tracking to detect. Sorry if I wasn't more clear, but by obscure test I'm referring to blood work and other harder to interpret tests. Easy to interpret tests are reaction time, weight, fast arithmetic tests for mental agility, as well as recording qualitative feelings of health quantitatively, in a consistent and rigorous manner. Edit: As for this article on the Soylent trial, my take was it had "some promising initial signs given the short duration of the trial". Hardly blind enthusiasm.

stephenbez 13y ago

From this NYTimes article (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/07/business/the-ever-fatter-business-of-thinness.html?pagewanted=1 http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/07/business/the-ever-fatter-b...): "The Government forced all liquid protein products off the market after they were implicated in 59 deaths." The article doesn't give many details, but it looks like changes in diet can be dangerous.

vidarh 13y ago
No, it looks like people can be scared by correlation. Of course changes in diet can be dangerous (you just try switching to an all cyanide diet). But "liquid protein products"? Like milk? Or protein shakes? There are certainly plenty of "liquid protein products" on the market, and heavily used, and tons more protein products sold as powders to be mixed with water, milk or juice by consumers. Somehow we don't have weightlifters dropping like flies.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Milk cannot not be liquid protein product by almost any sane definition. It has more fat and more carbohydrates per gram than protein.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    Most protein products have substantial amounts of carbs and fat. The point is not - unless you are buying pure protein products or "diet" protein shakes for cutting - to avoid carbs and fat, but to get more protein. It is far easier to stomach large amounts of protein (due to taste and consistency) when mixed with a lot of carbs than alone, and unless you're cutting you generally need a lot of carbs too when training hard, so there's little incentive for most general protein supplements to keep carbs down. In fact, there are a large number of protein supplements on the market where the majority of calories comes from carbs and fat, and many will have more carbs alone by weight than protein (many often also are specifically advertised for weight gain / bulking). They are still commonly referred to as protein products because the main basis for calling something a protein supplement amongst suppliers and people using them is generally large amounts of protein, not low amounts of carbs and fats. (And yes, that means some of them - intentionally - have massive amounts of calories) You also probably talk about "pure" milk, but there's also a number of milk products on the market that are milk + extra casein extracted from milk, for very high protein concentrations - my favourite has about 40g of protein per 300ml; you are free to not accept that as "milk", but it tastes like milk and is generally marketed as "protein milk" or similar. But milk alone is also frequently used by weight lifters for the decent protein content and good ration of protein, carbs and fat (a well known "supplemental diet" for bulking for lifters is called GOMAD: Gallon Of Milk A Day) The main point being that large amounts of protein is being ingested in liquid form every day all around the world, and has been for decades, and we're not seeing mass deaths. Barring actual evidence to the contrary, there's very little reason to believe that the deaths referenced in the article had anything to do with getting "liquid protein", and very good reasons to believe it was hysteria.

ekianjo 13y ago

> Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. Benefits are not self-assessed for drugs.

IanCal 13y ago

> Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. Sell people a green pill and tell them it'll make them want fast food less. Done. Make it more dramatic and you'll get a better effect. Expensive helps, requiring it to be injected would help even more.

gwern 13y ago

> Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news. He used > Finally, I took some tests on Quantified-Mind.com to measure my mental alertness while I was eating my typical diet of burritos and Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. In this way, I could try to reproduce Rhinehart’s claim that Soylent improves mental acuity. Those tests tend to exhibit substantial practice effects until you've done them a lot. And then there's the obvious placebo effect. I present to you a training regime which due essentially to an expectancy effect by subjects can increase your IQ by 9 points... or 2 points: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis Quite a difference.