3 ms·

Of course - but the food and beverage industry can't serve you amphetamine-salts in your coke (well not anymore) just because it's profitable. I don't know wha

by hurin 12y ago

Of course - but the food and beverage industry can't serve you amphetamine-salts in your coke (well not anymore) just because it's profitable. I don't know what soylent is (beyond just searching it in google). Wikipedia says: Soylent is a nutritional drink, intended to cover all human nutritional requirements for an adult so that it may serve as main or sole food There should be a very obvious test for this right? I think a large-scale controlled study would likely show negative effects compared to a randomly sampled population consuming the nutritional equivalent in natural products. This is actually part of the problem - you'll never read about such a study. Why? Because there is no profit incentive for anyone to finance a large-scale study that proves soylent or hypothetical product X to be useless or harmful. If soylent (or company X) finances a study of their product and the results are contrary to their expectations (assuming the researches are honest and do not engage in fraud) - they can simply shelve that material - and if eventually study i++ is successful they can publish that (without ever referencing any number of past unpublished studies). The FDA is wasting my money and yours (if you are a US citizen), in a way that normally should address this imbalance of selective interest in research. That it does not - hardly surprises me.

zaroth 12y ago
Soylent is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. FDA be damned, people are actually allowed, with great level of discretion, to choose what they eat. There are controls on what they can put it in, it must have an accurate ingredient list, a nutritional label, etc., but medicine it is not.
- kirsebaer 12y ago
  Soylent is intended to prevent malnutrition. It is advertized as fullfilling _all_ of your nutritional needs. (Why would they call it Soylent? The name comes from a sci-fi movie where Soylent is a food made from human corpses. Using that name is an indication that there is a lack of judgement in the Soylent team.)
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    Prevention of malnutrition is not the same as treatment of nutritive deficiency diseases. Prevention of malnutrition is more simply termed "eating food". Products like Soylent or Plumpynut are foods, not drugs. Replacing one's entire diet with Soylent is logically equivalent to choosing to eat a banana rather than an apple with your lunch today. If you have kwashiorkor or beriberi or scurvy or pellagra, it is unlikely that you could be effectively treated with Soylent, because it is formulated to satisfy daily needs, rather than to correct a deficiency that may have taken many months to manifest symptoms. It is designed to be a complete food, using a recipe. And if you watched the movie (it doesn't hurt all that much), you would know that only Soylent Green was made from people, rather than algae, as was claimed. The Soylent company sold other types of food products, and everyone ate mostly Soylent-brand foods, because they could not afford anything better. In the film, all the extras got most of their nutrition from Soylent Orange or Soylent Blue, or whatever those grubby-looking flakes were in the bins. Soylent Green always sold out early, and was in short supply. Still... not the best naming decision. Most people haven't seen any more of the movie than the scene where Heston cries "You've gotta tell 'em. Soylent Green is people!"
ekianjo 12y ago
> There should be a very obvious test for this right? Yes, definitely, but I'm pretty sure it won't happen, and such a solution should not be allowed to make such claims ("intended to cover all human nutritional requirements for an adult") without any data supporting it, or at least a clear indication of the risks people take on it. In any case, some data is needed before you sell this kind of stuff to the public.
philh 12y ago
> compared to a randomly sampled population consuming the nutritional equivalent in natural products. Define "nutritional equivalent" and "natural products"? Do you just want the same levels of carbs/fat/protein as Soylent has, or do you want to also get the same levels of iron, sodium, vitamins, etc.? The more demanding you make that condition, the closer you get to just replicating Soylent. ("We could replace this artificial ingredient with that natural one, but the natural one has less salt, so to make up for that we have to...") And it hardly seems fair to compare Soylent against a natural equivalent of Soylent, which doesn't currently exist to my knowledge, instead of against people's actual real-life diets.
- hurin 12y ago
  I don't think I ever mentioned 'replicating soylent' - By nutritional equivalent in natural products I presumed a diet.

by hurin 12y ago

zaroth 12y ago

Soylent is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. FDA be damned, people are actually allowed, with great level of discretion, to choose what they eat. There are controls on what they can put it in, it must have an accurate ingredient list, a nutritional label, etc., but medicine it is not.

kirsebaer 12y ago
Soylent is intended to prevent malnutrition. It is advertized as fullfilling _all_ of your nutritional needs. (Why would they call it Soylent? The name comes from a sci-fi movie where Soylent is a food made from human corpses. Using that name is an indication that there is a lack of judgement in the Soylent team.)
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Prevention of malnutrition is not the same as treatment of nutritive deficiency diseases. Prevention of malnutrition is more simply termed "eating food". Products like Soylent or Plumpynut are foods, not drugs. Replacing one's entire diet with Soylent is logically equivalent to choosing to eat a banana rather than an apple with your lunch today. If you have kwashiorkor or beriberi or scurvy or pellagra, it is unlikely that you could be effectively treated with Soylent, because it is formulated to satisfy daily needs, rather than to correct a deficiency that may have taken many months to manifest symptoms. It is designed to be a complete food, using a recipe. And if you watched the movie (it doesn't hurt all that much), you would know that only Soylent Green was made from people, rather than algae, as was claimed. The Soylent company sold other types of food products, and everyone ate mostly Soylent-brand foods, because they could not afford anything better. In the film, all the extras got most of their nutrition from Soylent Orange or Soylent Blue, or whatever those grubby-looking flakes were in the bins. Soylent Green always sold out early, and was in short supply. Still... not the best naming decision. Most people haven't seen any more of the movie than the scene where Heston cries "You've gotta tell 'em. Soylent Green is people!"

ekianjo 12y ago

> There should be a very obvious test for this right? Yes, definitely, but I'm pretty sure it won't happen, and such a solution should not be allowed to make such claims ("intended to cover all human nutritional requirements for an adult") without any data supporting it, or at least a clear indication of the risks people take on it. In any case, some data is needed before you sell this kind of stuff to the public.

philh 12y ago

> compared to a randomly sampled population consuming the nutritional equivalent in natural products. Define "nutritional equivalent" and "natural products"? Do you just want the same levels of carbs/fat/protein as Soylent has, or do you want to also get the same levels of iron, sodium, vitamins, etc.? The more demanding you make that condition, the closer you get to just replicating Soylent. ("We could replace this artificial ingredient with that natural one, but the natural one has less salt, so to make up for that we have to...") And it hardly seems fair to compare Soylent against a natural equivalent of Soylent, which doesn't currently exist to my knowledge, instead of against people's actual real-life diets.

hurin 12y ago
I don't think I ever mentioned 'replicating soylent' - By nutritional equivalent in natural products I presumed a diet.