63 ms·

Soylent Micronutrient Breakdown

52 points by ph0rque 13y ago

ChristianBundy 13y ago
I wish that they would show how these compare to the recommended dietary intake of the micronutrients.
- garblegarble 13y ago
  I did a random sampling of 3 and it seems to be 100% of the US recommended intake, although I recall them mentioning that even if you only consumed 1/3rd (or 2/3rds?) of the Soylent packet for a day you'd reach your recommended levels, which seems at odds with these figures.
- jonah 13y ago
  Though, generally the US RDA is around the minimal needed level.
  - garblegarble 13y ago
    As a european this is what I wonder about most, I'm toying with the idea of ordering Soylent but I'd prefer to get the UK RDA... but it seems that mixing vitamin supplements with Soylent runs the risk of an excess of a number of vitamins (and I'm too lazy to mix my own... maybe I should stick to cooking!)
applecore 13y ago
Macronutrient breakdown: http://blog.soylent.me/post/68180382810/soylent-1-0-macronutrient-overview http://blog.soylent.me/post/68180382810/soylent-1-0-macronut...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jlas 13y ago
And here's a compact version: http://pastebin.com/WNZnF1N7 http://pastebin.com/WNZnF1N7 Extracted via command line, of course: curl http://blog.soylent.me/post/69835344439/soylent-micronutrient-breakdown | grep -o ".*" | sed "s/$.*$<\/strong>/\1/"
seiji 13y ago
Still not sure how this varies from a basic bulk vitamin and mineral powder (besides the übernerd ego "this one weird nutritional trick" loyalty marketing): http://www.gnc.com/graphics/product_images/pGNC1-9331188_gnclabel_pdf.pdf http://www.gnc.com/graphics/product_images/pGNC1-9331188_gnc...
- garblegarble 13y ago
  To be honest, neither am I - although part of it seems to be the idea of this as a complete diet replacement rather than a supplement (although I suspect the existing products are marketed as a supplement for legal reasons more than anything else and Soylent may have to use the same language)
  - yaddayadda 13y ago
    The FDA considers Soylent a food. "According to Arthur Whitmore, a press officer with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Soylent would fall into the category of what the FDA considers food. Unlike a medication, Soylent will not require FDA approval, unless it contains some new type of food additive, which Rhinehart would need to disclose. It’s important to Rhinehart that Soylent be considered a food, as opposed to a medicine or supplement, so that food-stamp recipients can buy it using EBT cards." http://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-is-powdered-soylent-the-food-of-the-future-062613 http://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-is-powdered-soyle... http://discourse.soylent.me/t/fda-press-officer-comment/3783 http://discourse.soylent.me/t/fda-press-officer-comment/3783
    - saalweachter 13y ago
      One month of Soylent is currently $255; the maximum SNAP benefit for a single person is $189. If he makes his $5/day target, maybe, but the SNAP benefit for the Nth person in an N person household decreases to $142.
      - yaddayadda 13y ago
        This has already been acknowledged within the Soylent community: - http://discourse.soylent.me/t/soylent-and-food-stamps-ebt/3315 http://discourse.soylent.me/t/soylent-and-food-stamps-ebt/33... - http://discourse.soylent.me/t/food-stamp-friendly-soylent/4424/4 http://discourse.soylent.me/t/food-stamp-friendly-soylent/44... Within the Soylent community, there are two acknowledged classes of soylent. The two are distinguished by using "Soylent" when referring to the "official" recipe, and "soylent" when referring to DIY versions. Rob has stated several times that he isn't going to patent the Soylent recipe. The reason is because the only product on the market that comes even close to Soylent for complete nutrition (without lots of harmful other components) is Plumpy'nut [1]. Plumpy'nut's recipe is patented, so even if someone could produce it cheaper, they can't legally produce it. Rob is keeping the Soylent formula open in large part so that other people can produce exact and comparable versions. In addition, Rob has not only allowed others to develop comparable version, but outright encouraged it. So much so that when NickP developed a tool to develop recipes based on a list of ingredients and individual goals, Rob promoted the tool and gave it a home on the official soylent.me domain - http://diy.soylent.me/ http://diy.soylent.me/ In otherwords, people are being actively encouraged by the founder of Soylent to develop versions of soylent that meet needs that are not met by Soylent. And people are rising to the challenge - http://diy.soylent.me/recipes?sort=dailyCost&pctComplete=0.9 http://diy.soylent.me/recipes?sort=dailyCost&pctComplete=0.9 There's even a 100% complete recipe that can be made for $2.45 per day; this works out to about $74.73 a month - http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/low-entry-barrier-soylent http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/low-entry-barrier-soylent tl;dr - Your concern has been already been acknowledged by the community; there are alternative recipes, including one that works out to $74.73 a month, which is well under the $225 SNAP allowance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
itafroma 13y ago
The amount of potassium in Soylent is interesting. I noticed a while ago that I wasn't getting enough potassium in my diet, went searching for a supplement, and found that you can't buy an OTC supplement that contains more than 100mg. It turns out the FDA severely restricts the amount of potassium you can get in OTC supplements to prevent certain health risks.[1] I wonder how they get around that restriction. [1]: http://www.berkeleywellness.com/supplements/minerals/article/potassium-pills http://www.berkeleywellness.com/supplements/minerals/article...
- rlwolfcastle 13y ago
  Is that 100 mg total or 100 mg per serve?
  - itafroma 13y ago
    Per serving/dose/pill. The pills I've seen usually contain about 400-500mg of inactive ingredients (about the same ratio Soylent uses), so the pills are ~500-600mg, which is fairly large. To equal just one serving of Soylent, you'd need to ingest 35 of them.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Ensure has lots: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes (I accidentally clicked the one with the most though)
  - itafroma 13y ago
    Interesting: so it's not just Soylent. I wonder why liquid supplements aren't affected by the 100mg limit.
    - caublestone 13y ago
      The FDA has different restrictions and requirements depending on if a product is labeled a food or a nutritional supplement. A nutritional supplement is limited to 100mg of potassium while something that is a food is free to have up to 1500mg. Soylent is a food and is thus able to have 3500mg of potassium.
Pitarou 13y ago
Can anyone explain why there is any interest in this story? I'm not snarking: I genuinely want to know. Why are you following this story? Why are you voting it up? Do you actually want to buy and eat this nutritionally balanced gruel? Why?
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  Soylent is a leading application of an analytical/techie approach to the "question" of food (i.e. what do we eat?), which is even bigger than online advertising, electric cars, or video games.
  - manicbovine 13y ago
    No, you're describing a number of well-established scientific fields along with basic human instinct and intelligence. Eat food. It has worked quite well for a very long time. There is nothing better to eat than food. No data analysis is required to eat food. Interestingly, any biological creature is capable of eating food. There are a variety of foods that you are capable of digesting, and it's likely that you were introduced to these foods as a young child. You will enjoy eating these foods and they'll manage to help you live out your natural lifespan. Maybe you'd also like to take a vitamin, but it's probably unnecessary and possibly harmful depending on your health status. Food is fairly simple unless you pretend that it's not.
    - dack 13y ago
      So food is "simple", yet obviously depending on the type and quantity of food eaten, we consume a different assortment and balance of nutrients. I don't think anyone can argue that there isn't a huge percentage of the population that does a bad job of managing that balance. If that's the case, then Soylent could help those people - more power to them. If, on the other hand, the body is resilient, and we don't have to be that precise about what we eat (as in, just eat "reasonably healthy" foods and you'll be fine), then soylent should be a reasonable substitute, even if it isn't without flaws. Either way, they should keep going with their plan - I wish them well.
- 13y ago
pushedx 13y ago
Whenever food preferences come up as a topic of conversation at work, I have a co-worker who says, "As soon as they come out with Soylent, I'm in. That's it, that's all I'm going to eat for life." I want to see him do it.
- droopyEyelids 13y ago
  If he's really that excited about it, we've already been able to buy complete liquid nutrition for decades. http://www.nestlenutritionstore.com/departments/therapeutic-nutrition/general-tube-feeding-nutrition/general-tube-feeding-nutrition http://www.nestlenutritionstore.com/departments/therapeutic-... For the truly hardcore, you can also buy complete sources of intravenous nutrition. Expect to pay hundreds of thousands a year for this extreme productivity boosting option. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition
  - yaddayadda 13y ago
    From the creator of Soylent > Soylent is not the first drink with calories in it, nor was Google the first search engine. There are many liquid diets. You'd probably be surprised how long you can survive on just cow's milk. No one says 'solid diets exist already' when someone makes a new food. I don't see how the viscosity makes up an entire category. I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal. > The goal of soylent is to make something ideal, not just a quick shot that will get rid of hunger for a few hours. I need something that allows me to run and lift and think, not just survive, and something considerably cheaper than normal food. A big part of soylent is its personalization as well. There is no 2000 calorie human. If you want an ideal diet you have to personalize it. http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-nutritional-products/431/7?u=biab http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-...
- rlwolfcastle 13y ago
  You should remind him that biology is not computing.
codex 13y ago
Soylent is going to have a very, very hard time with new customer acquisition. Right now it's riding a wave of novelty, but as it solves a problem very few people have, and solves it in a way that leaves people craving the innate satisfaction of eating, it's not going to go far. But there are founders with more ambition than sense. In fact I suspect that's most of them.
- epenn 13y ago
  That wave of novelty could just as easily gain them a critical mass of customers as well. Ultimately it will depend on their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the product.
  - manicbovine 13y ago
    What lunatic would bet their money on whether people will stop eating? It is a fundamental biological need and evolutionary drive. That's a tough sell for Soylent, and it has nothing to do with "critical mass". And of course it will depend on the satisfaction - that's entirely vapid. Soylent is not even disguised as food, like most of our industrial food-like products. It tastes like oats according to that blog. Nobody is going to replace all of their food with fortified liquid oatmeal.
    - dack 13y ago
      Even _they_ don't claim that you'd replace every single meal with Soylent. It's supposed to act as the "default", when you're either too lazy, low on time, or just would rather not deal with preparing or going out to buy a meal. It's a basic meal that can't replace the satisfaction of normal food, but sometimes you just don't care about that. You could consume it as often or as little as you want, and know that you're getting something balanced and healthy at the same time.
- arbitrarilyHigh 13y ago
  It's riding a wave of novelty, but it's hard to argue that it's actually solving the problem that it claims to (busy/lazy, want healthy food-substitute). The post doesn't actually tell you much about the nutrition without evidence about levels of actual nutrient absorption, but a quick google scholar search finds that calcium inhibits iron and copper absorption, especially in the presence of phytates [0,1] (which Soylent contains from the oat flour) and that zinc, manganese, and iron have similar uptake pathways and limit each others absorption by competing for use of those pathways [1,2]. No idea if there's any other interactions, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to rely on this stuff much for nutrition. Aside from that, he vetted the formula by an uncontrolled, unblinded study with a sample size of n=1 (i.e. trying it himself for a few months), and he says on his blog that he "started having joint pain and found [he] fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as [he] consume[s] almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day." [3] In that same post, he says that "After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did", and makes major revisions to his formula, apparently assuming that he's figured it all out this time. He puts a significant amount of fiber in the formula for the first time, going from 1.2 grams to 40 grams, in line with the 38 grams recommended for men under 50 [4], which was probably a good idea considering how much low fiber intake increases the risk of heart attack [5]. A month later, he responds to criticism by saying that "there have been no deficiency symptoms, and if this becomes a problem the amounts can be changed to compensate" [6]. His dismissal of concern ignores the fact that many known nutrient deficiencies can take much longer to manifest, and have severe irreversible harm (like B12 deficiency leading to nerve damage, or developing heart disease after years of insufficient fiber intake, or calcium deficiencies and osteoporosis). He also says that "The initial sample size was small and the timeframe short, but the results are easily reproducible, as shown by the community site discourse.soylent.me", as if having a greater amount of data overcomes the fact that the sample was extremely biased, still short-running, and with nothing even resembling a credible study design or consistent data collection. Maybe it's not a bad thing that Soylent's probably not going to take off? [0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1600930 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1600930 [1] http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBJN%2FBJN85_S2%2FS000711450100109Xa.pdf&code=4b47255651139890417e3dfa463249ff http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBJN%2FBJN... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2058577 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2058577 [3] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570 [4] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fiber/NU00033 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fiber/NU00033 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8941095 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8941095 [6] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507
manicbovine 13y ago
Soylent really belongs on a late night infomercial for pseudo-scientific products.
kolev 13y ago
Calcium carbonate, really? Basically, it has some basic nutrients, but most of them are pretty low quality. I'm not sure about you, but I personally get stomach sick even just with 5g of Potassium Gluconate - I can't imagine the (pukey) effect of 15g!
moeedm 13y ago
Can this please just go away? What a load of horse shit.
olva22 13y ago
It's a shame they used the cheap, synthetic (and less bioavailable) forms for quite a few of the ingredients. For instance: Cyanocobalamin vs Methylcobalamin D2 vs D3 (ergocalciferol is D2) Folic Acid vs MethylFolate or at the least Folinic Acid Sodium Selenite vs Yeast based Selenium or Selenomethionine Why not just eat a bowl of total cereal? Or, eat a bowl of oatmeal and pop a centrum?
xahrepap 13y ago
I'm interested to see how Soylent works out in the long run. I've read the articles and blog posts about people going on it for a month at a time and doctors telling them they're perfectly healthy. But how does their health look after 6 months? A year? Several years? That's what I'm interested in hearing about. So for a couple years I'll still have my suspicions. I hope it works out, though.
Shorel 13y ago
I still think this stuff is very conservative with the macronutrients ratios. I would pay for a keto-friendly version, but as it is, it seems too full of carbohydrates to fit my current needs.

52 points by ph0rque 13y ago

ChristianBundy 13y ago

I wish that they would show how these compare to the recommended dietary intake of the micronutrients.

garblegarble 13y ago
I did a random sampling of 3 and it seems to be 100% of the US recommended intake, although I recall them mentioning that even if you only consumed 1/3rd (or 2/3rds?) of the Soylent packet for a day you'd reach your recommended levels, which seems at odds with these figures.
jonah 13y ago
Though, generally the US RDA is around the minimal needed level.
- garblegarble 13y ago
  As a european this is what I wonder about most, I'm toying with the idea of ordering Soylent but I'd prefer to get the UK RDA... but it seems that mixing vitamin supplements with Soylent runs the risk of an excess of a number of vitamins (and I'm too lazy to mix my own... maybe I should stick to cooking!)

applecore 13y ago

Macronutrient breakdown: http://blog.soylent.me/post/68180382810/soylent-1-0-macronutrient-overview http://blog.soylent.me/post/68180382810/soylent-1-0-macronut...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

jlas 13y ago

And here's a compact version: http://pastebin.com/WNZnF1N7 http://pastebin.com/WNZnF1N7 Extracted via command line, of course: curl http://blog.soylent.me/post/69835344439/soylent-micronutrient-breakdown | grep -o ".*" | sed "s/$.*$<\/strong>/\1/"

seiji 13y ago

Still not sure how this varies from a basic bulk vitamin and mineral powder (besides the übernerd ego "this one weird nutritional trick" loyalty marketing): http://www.gnc.com/graphics/product_images/pGNC1-9331188_gnclabel_pdf.pdf http://www.gnc.com/graphics/product_images/pGNC1-9331188_gnc...

garblegarble 13y ago
To be honest, neither am I - although part of it seems to be the idea of this as a complete diet replacement rather than a supplement (although I suspect the existing products are marketed as a supplement for legal reasons more than anything else and Soylent may have to use the same language)
- yaddayadda 13y ago
  The FDA considers Soylent a food. "According to Arthur Whitmore, a press officer with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Soylent would fall into the category of what the FDA considers food. Unlike a medication, Soylent will not require FDA approval, unless it contains some new type of food additive, which Rhinehart would need to disclose. It’s important to Rhinehart that Soylent be considered a food, as opposed to a medicine or supplement, so that food-stamp recipients can buy it using EBT cards." http://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-is-powdered-soylent-the-food-of-the-future-062613 http://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-is-powdered-soyle... http://discourse.soylent.me/t/fda-press-officer-comment/3783 http://discourse.soylent.me/t/fda-press-officer-comment/3783
  - saalweachter 13y ago
    One month of Soylent is currently $255; the maximum SNAP benefit for a single person is $189. If he makes his $5/day target, maybe, but the SNAP benefit for the Nth person in an N person household decreases to $142.
    - yaddayadda 13y ago
      This has already been acknowledged within the Soylent community: - http://discourse.soylent.me/t/soylent-and-food-stamps-ebt/3315 http://discourse.soylent.me/t/soylent-and-food-stamps-ebt/33... - http://discourse.soylent.me/t/food-stamp-friendly-soylent/4424/4 http://discourse.soylent.me/t/food-stamp-friendly-soylent/44... Within the Soylent community, there are two acknowledged classes of soylent. The two are distinguished by using "Soylent" when referring to the "official" recipe, and "soylent" when referring to DIY versions. Rob has stated several times that he isn't going to patent the Soylent recipe. The reason is because the only product on the market that comes even close to Soylent for complete nutrition (without lots of harmful other components) is Plumpy'nut [1]. Plumpy'nut's recipe is patented, so even if someone could produce it cheaper, they can't legally produce it. Rob is keeping the Soylent formula open in large part so that other people can produce exact and comparable versions. In addition, Rob has not only allowed others to develop comparable version, but outright encouraged it. So much so that when NickP developed a tool to develop recipes based on a list of ingredients and individual goals, Rob promoted the tool and gave it a home on the official soylent.me domain - http://diy.soylent.me/ http://diy.soylent.me/ In otherwords, people are being actively encouraged by the founder of Soylent to develop versions of soylent that meet needs that are not met by Soylent. And people are rising to the challenge - http://diy.soylent.me/recipes?sort=dailyCost&pctComplete=0.9 http://diy.soylent.me/recipes?sort=dailyCost&pctComplete=0.9 There's even a 100% complete recipe that can be made for $2.45 per day; this works out to about $74.73 a month - http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/low-entry-barrier-soylent http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/low-entry-barrier-soylent tl;dr - Your concern has been already been acknowledged by the community; there are alternative recipes, including one that works out to $74.73 a month, which is well under the $225 SNAP allowance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut

itafroma 13y ago

The amount of potassium in Soylent is interesting. I noticed a while ago that I wasn't getting enough potassium in my diet, went searching for a supplement, and found that you can't buy an OTC supplement that contains more than 100mg. It turns out the FDA severely restricts the amount of potassium you can get in OTC supplements to prevent certain health risks.[1] I wonder how they get around that restriction. [1]: http://www.berkeleywellness.com/supplements/minerals/article/potassium-pills http://www.berkeleywellness.com/supplements/minerals/article...

rlwolfcastle 13y ago
Is that 100 mg total or 100 mg per serve?
- itafroma 13y ago
  Per serving/dose/pill. The pills I've seen usually contain about 400-500mg of inactive ingredients (about the same ratio Soylent uses), so the pills are ~500-600mg, which is fairly large. To equal just one serving of Soylent, you'd need to ingest 35 of them.
maxerickson 13y ago
Ensure has lots: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes (I accidentally clicked the one with the most though)
- itafroma 13y ago
  Interesting: so it's not just Soylent. I wonder why liquid supplements aren't affected by the 100mg limit.
  - caublestone 13y ago
    The FDA has different restrictions and requirements depending on if a product is labeled a food or a nutritional supplement. A nutritional supplement is limited to 100mg of potassium while something that is a food is free to have up to 1500mg. Soylent is a food and is thus able to have 3500mg of potassium.

Pitarou 13y ago

Can anyone explain why there is any interest in this story? I'm not snarking: I genuinely want to know. Why are you following this story? Why are you voting it up? Do you actually want to buy and eat this nutritionally balanced gruel? Why?

auctiontheory 13y ago
Soylent is a leading application of an analytical/techie approach to the "question" of food (i.e. what do we eat?), which is even bigger than online advertising, electric cars, or video games.
- manicbovine 13y ago
  No, you're describing a number of well-established scientific fields along with basic human instinct and intelligence. Eat food. It has worked quite well for a very long time. There is nothing better to eat than food. No data analysis is required to eat food. Interestingly, any biological creature is capable of eating food. There are a variety of foods that you are capable of digesting, and it's likely that you were introduced to these foods as a young child. You will enjoy eating these foods and they'll manage to help you live out your natural lifespan. Maybe you'd also like to take a vitamin, but it's probably unnecessary and possibly harmful depending on your health status. Food is fairly simple unless you pretend that it's not.
  - dack 13y ago
    So food is "simple", yet obviously depending on the type and quantity of food eaten, we consume a different assortment and balance of nutrients. I don't think anyone can argue that there isn't a huge percentage of the population that does a bad job of managing that balance. If that's the case, then Soylent could help those people - more power to them. If, on the other hand, the body is resilient, and we don't have to be that precise about what we eat (as in, just eat "reasonably healthy" foods and you'll be fine), then soylent should be a reasonable substitute, even if it isn't without flaws. Either way, they should keep going with their plan - I wish them well.
13y ago

pushedx 13y ago

Whenever food preferences come up as a topic of conversation at work, I have a co-worker who says, "As soon as they come out with Soylent, I'm in. That's it, that's all I'm going to eat for life." I want to see him do it.

droopyEyelids 13y ago
If he's really that excited about it, we've already been able to buy complete liquid nutrition for decades. http://www.nestlenutritionstore.com/departments/therapeutic-nutrition/general-tube-feeding-nutrition/general-tube-feeding-nutrition http://www.nestlenutritionstore.com/departments/therapeutic-... For the truly hardcore, you can also buy complete sources of intravenous nutrition. Expect to pay hundreds of thousands a year for this extreme productivity boosting option. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition
- yaddayadda 13y ago
  From the creator of Soylent > Soylent is not the first drink with calories in it, nor was Google the first search engine. There are many liquid diets. You'd probably be surprised how long you can survive on just cow's milk. No one says 'solid diets exist already' when someone makes a new food. I don't see how the viscosity makes up an entire category. I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal. > The goal of soylent is to make something ideal, not just a quick shot that will get rid of hunger for a few hours. I need something that allows me to run and lift and think, not just survive, and something considerably cheaper than normal food. A big part of soylent is its personalization as well. There is no 2000 calorie human. If you want an ideal diet you have to personalize it. http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-nutritional-products/431/7?u=biab http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-...
rlwolfcastle 13y ago
You should remind him that biology is not computing.

codex 13y ago

Soylent is going to have a very, very hard time with new customer acquisition. Right now it's riding a wave of novelty, but as it solves a problem very few people have, and solves it in a way that leaves people craving the innate satisfaction of eating, it's not going to go far. But there are founders with more ambition than sense. In fact I suspect that's most of them.

epenn 13y ago
That wave of novelty could just as easily gain them a critical mass of customers as well. Ultimately it will depend on their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the product.
- manicbovine 13y ago
  What lunatic would bet their money on whether people will stop eating? It is a fundamental biological need and evolutionary drive. That's a tough sell for Soylent, and it has nothing to do with "critical mass". And of course it will depend on the satisfaction - that's entirely vapid. Soylent is not even disguised as food, like most of our industrial food-like products. It tastes like oats according to that blog. Nobody is going to replace all of their food with fortified liquid oatmeal.
  - dack 13y ago
    Even _they_ don't claim that you'd replace every single meal with Soylent. It's supposed to act as the "default", when you're either too lazy, low on time, or just would rather not deal with preparing or going out to buy a meal. It's a basic meal that can't replace the satisfaction of normal food, but sometimes you just don't care about that. You could consume it as often or as little as you want, and know that you're getting something balanced and healthy at the same time.
arbitrarilyHigh 13y ago
It's riding a wave of novelty, but it's hard to argue that it's actually solving the problem that it claims to (busy/lazy, want healthy food-substitute). The post doesn't actually tell you much about the nutrition without evidence about levels of actual nutrient absorption, but a quick google scholar search finds that calcium inhibits iron and copper absorption, especially in the presence of phytates [0,1] (which Soylent contains from the oat flour) and that zinc, manganese, and iron have similar uptake pathways and limit each others absorption by competing for use of those pathways [1,2]. No idea if there's any other interactions, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to rely on this stuff much for nutrition. Aside from that, he vetted the formula by an uncontrolled, unblinded study with a sample size of n=1 (i.e. trying it himself for a few months), and he says on his blog that he "started having joint pain and found [he] fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as [he] consume[s] almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day." [3] In that same post, he says that "After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did", and makes major revisions to his formula, apparently assuming that he's figured it all out this time. He puts a significant amount of fiber in the formula for the first time, going from 1.2 grams to 40 grams, in line with the 38 grams recommended for men under 50 [4], which was probably a good idea considering how much low fiber intake increases the risk of heart attack [5]. A month later, he responds to criticism by saying that "there have been no deficiency symptoms, and if this becomes a problem the amounts can be changed to compensate" [6]. His dismissal of concern ignores the fact that many known nutrient deficiencies can take much longer to manifest, and have severe irreversible harm (like B12 deficiency leading to nerve damage, or developing heart disease after years of insufficient fiber intake, or calcium deficiencies and osteoporosis). He also says that "The initial sample size was small and the timeframe short, but the results are easily reproducible, as shown by the community site discourse.soylent.me", as if having a greater amount of data overcomes the fact that the sample was extremely biased, still short-running, and with nothing even resembling a credible study design or consistent data collection. Maybe it's not a bad thing that Soylent's probably not going to take off? [0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1600930 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1600930 [1] http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBJN%2FBJN85_S2%2FS000711450100109Xa.pdf&code=4b47255651139890417e3dfa463249ff http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBJN%2FBJN... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2058577 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2058577 [3] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570 [4] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fiber/NU00033 http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fiber/NU00033 [5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8941095 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8941095 [6] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507

manicbovine 13y ago

Soylent really belongs on a late night infomercial for pseudo-scientific products.

kolev 13y ago

Calcium carbonate, really? Basically, it has some basic nutrients, but most of them are pretty low quality. I'm not sure about you, but I personally get stomach sick even just with 5g of Potassium Gluconate - I can't imagine the (pukey) effect of 15g!

moeedm 13y ago

Can this please just go away? What a load of horse shit.

olva22 13y ago

It's a shame they used the cheap, synthetic (and less bioavailable) forms for quite a few of the ingredients. For instance: Cyanocobalamin vs Methylcobalamin D2 vs D3 (ergocalciferol is D2) Folic Acid vs MethylFolate or at the least Folinic Acid Sodium Selenite vs Yeast based Selenium or Selenomethionine Why not just eat a bowl of total cereal? Or, eat a bowl of oatmeal and pop a centrum?

xahrepap 13y ago

I'm interested to see how Soylent works out in the long run. I've read the articles and blog posts about people going on it for a month at a time and doctors telling them they're perfectly healthy. But how does their health look after 6 months? A year? Several years? That's what I'm interested in hearing about. So for a couple years I'll still have my suspicions. I hope it works out, though.

Shorel 13y ago

I still think this stuff is very conservative with the macronutrients ratios. I would pay for a keto-friendly version, but as it is, it seems too full of carbohydrates to fit my current needs.