9 ms·

My first thought whenever I see soylent is that we have studies proving that we can't replace breast milk with baby formula. Some of that is due to immune syste

• mrfusion 11y ago
  What should we be feeding dogs?
  • shultays 11y ago
    Other dogs, obviously
  • kondro 11y ago
    Raw meat. Unlike us, they can manufacture all the other vitamins they need.
    • th0waway 11y ago
      raw fresh meat works for us too, no supplements needed.
      • wolf550e 11y ago
        Isn't "rabbit starvation" a problem? Or does raw meat avoid this problem somehow? 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
        • th0waway 11y ago
          http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm - which is quoted in the Wiki. All lean meat leads to 'Rabbit starvation', you need some fatty meats to supply necessary vitamins and minerals.
      • rhaps0dy 11y ago
        Not even some fiber?
        • th0waway 11y ago
          Here's the article I was thinking about: http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm
      • CuriouslyC 11y ago
        First off, in order for this statement to be even HALF true, you need to be consuming organ meats (particularly liver) regularly. Even consuming meat from a variety of different species, and regularly eating organ meat, off the top of my head you would still definitely be deficient in vitamin c and vitamin k. Edit (I was curious about the eskimo paradox): It turns out that whale skin is a fairly good source of vitamin C, and the process of fermenting meat causes it to become rich in vitamin K. So if you are willing to consume whale skin, liver and fermented meat regularly, you too can survive on a diet comprised entirely of animal products! I'm still sure the eskimo diet is far from optimal in terms of health and fitness.
        • feld 11y ago
          Wolves do not eat organ meat. They are "carcassivores" -- they eat meat and bone. That's it. Period. The exception is organs of very small prey that they eat whole, and of course dirt and whatever else that gets on the carcass. The same has been observed of dingoes and this goes for our pet dogs too. Dogs don't need vitamin C. They manufacture their own. Don't know the specifics of K off the top of my head, but dogs are not humans. They may be mammals but they do not have our biology. My dogs eat mostly chicken leg quarters and pork neck and they're thriving. I'm saving incredible amounts of money on food and vet bills. If you want more info look up the research of Dr Tom Lonsdale that has been suppressed by dog food companies for years. His book Raw Meaty Bones has everything you need to know. Did you ever consider how our dogs were fed before kibble existed? Or why we don't feed pet snakes and lizards some meal replacement?
          • CuriouslyC 11y ago
            You did see that the comment I was replying to was basically "raw meat works for us too - no supplements needed" right?
            • feld 11y ago
              > whale skin, liver and fermented meat regularly, Meat. Bone. Very little fat. No organs. We couldn't handle that. Dogs can.
  • spamlord 11y ago
    http://www.orijen.ca/ http://www.orijen.ca/
    • feld 11y ago
      I used to feed orijen. Best of the kibble, nowhere near as good as raw though.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
  • jessejmc 11y ago
    Check out BARF (biologically appropriate raw food, bones and raw food). It's possible to formulate the meals yourself, but it's hard to get the nutrients right. Several companies offer a balanced raw refrigerated/frozen product. We had concerns about bacteria from the raw meat, so we feed a freeze dried raw food (Stella and Chewy's[0], no affiliation, just a happy customer). It can be expensive, costing around $5 per day to maintain a 15 lb dog, but our dog is a picky eater and loves it. Raw food will most likely result in smaller, firmer stools. They're easier to pick up, and they dry out and deteriorate faster. [0] Stella and Chewy had a recent recall due to listeriosis. Fortunately, none of our lots were affected.
• vdaniuk 11y ago
  > it's [not] safe to eat Soylent or another similar product regularly. As opposed to what? Eating organically grown vegetables and fruits, nuts, mushrooms and oceanic fish? Sure. But that is definitely not a diet of most people even in developed, rich countries. And while we can't say confidently it's safe to eat Soylent, we absolutely can claim that most human diets are really, really harmful. I bet Soylent would be much less harmful (if at all) than eating fast food, pizza with red meats fortified by antibiotics and hormones.
• xutopia 11y ago
  I can't trust them. They have 0g of cholesterol yet it's an important part of a healthy diet. This rings of "marketing diet" to me.
  • jobigoud 11y ago
    Cholesterol is produced by your own body just fine. In food, it only comes from animal products, so you are basically saying that any and all vegan diets are unhealthy/marketing. Dietitians (and millions of vegans) beg to differ.
    • megaman22 11y ago
      I would argue that most vegan diets are unhealthy. You have to work damned hard to get the same nutrients that are readily available in animal products.
      • enlightenedfool 11y ago
        You could just argue, but the country I come from has millions of vegetarians who are as healthy as animal eating and live as long.
        • adwn 11y ago
          > [...] millions of vegetarians who are as healthy as animal eating [...] Note that megaman22 said "vegan", not "vegetarian".
      • PretzelPirate 11y ago
        Eating vegan is no more difficult than eating non-vegan. The only extra step is taking a B12 supplement if you don't eat one of the many B12 fortified products.
  • tdaltonc 11y ago
    https://diy.soylent.com/wiki/other-nutrients https://diy.soylent.com/wiki/other-nutrients
• Amezarak 11y ago
  > but we haven't yet mastered the nutritional content of real food to the point where we can confidently say it's safe to eat Soylent or another similar product regularly. I'm not aware of any ill effects from consuming meal-replacement shakes like Ensure regularly, and they've been around for quite some time. In some instances people have been sustained on them for fairly long periods. Would I want to consume them exclusively for a long period of time? No, like you, I would start becoming concerned about nutrition. But drinking them regularly for long periods of time or even exclusively for short periods of time seems like it would be fine. People eat lots of less nutritious foods just as regularly. The real question for me is what is Soylent supposed to offer over older equivalents.
  • cynic_ 11y ago
    Ensure has a much higher glycemic index. And its lower fat and dietary fiber doesn't give much satiety(I think as intended). Most diet shakes are still in the "fat is bad" mindset, and almost all the calories come from simple carbohydrates.
• normloman 11y ago
  I'm also skeptical that one can live well on soylent alone. There's nothing bad in soylent AFAIK, but there's no way of knowing whether soylent is missing anything vital. With this in mind, I wouldn't be worried if someone replaced one or two meals a day with soylent. But I'd hesitate to replace all meals. I think it's irresponsible that the makers of soylent keep pushing the idea that one nutrient drink can replace all your meals, though I have nothing against the product itself.
  • FLUX-YOU 11y ago
    Soylent is a step up if you currently have an unhealthy diet though, and I'd wager you could make the same argument about an unhealthy diet missing something vital.
    • normloman 11y ago
      True. And I didn't make that argument because it should be obvious to everyone. A key difference is that frito-lay doesn't imply you can subsist solely on cheetos.
  • LoSboccacc 11y ago
    same here. if they were to start sales in Europe, I'd buy in to replace the low quality lunches I'm having, but I'd keep a varied diet at evenings. I'm sure soylent has many nutrients I'm not getting enough, but might also miss rare unknown nutrients that body needs in minimal quantity - not to be confused with homeopathy principles, I'm talking about quantifiable quantities of chemicals - I think the first iteration had a similar issue, lacking sulfur or something. because even stuff bad in quantity might be of use to the body and we don't yet know 100% but since we do know that we get by nicely with incomplete diets, I see no drawbacks to a mixed soylent diet.
  • mcdougle 11y ago
    Even though the founder does that, he has explained many times that he doesn't expect most people to replace their entire diet with Soylent. They expect you to do just as you said -- replace one or two meals, specifically the ones where you're in a rush or in the middle of something (work, etc.) and you would've otherwise grabbed a reheatable lunch or some kind of unhealthy fast food.
• jcfrei 11y ago
  What worries me is that soylent is 20% based on soy. Some studies indicate that eating a heavily soy based diet leads to increased estrogen levels. Which can have negative side effects regardless of your gender. [0]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074428/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074428/ [1]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303720711007374 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303720711...
  • DarkTree 11y ago
    yeah thanks for citing this. It was a deal breaker for me.
    • pbreit 11y ago
      Why is that?
      • DarkTree 11y ago
        What do you mean? Did you read the parent comment?
  • anon3_ 11y ago
    Exactly, you don't want protein. You want whey. These guys don't quite know what they're talking about. Or there smart and playing the sheep like a fiddle. My fear is that these guys are laughing their way to the bank suckering people into this stuff.
    • DarkTree 11y ago
      whey is protein. It's the protein derived from dairy products. Also, I think the founder, Rob Rhinehart, is genuinely trying to make a good product that benefits consumers. Whether the results show these benefits or not, does not mean he is "laughing himself to the bank".
      • anon3_ 11y ago
• codingdave 11y ago
  Agreed, it is good to try it, and even better that they care about the impact of the production on food and the environment. But this should not be a startup looking for fast growth. This should be a slower process, evaluating the longer-term health of people who truly use it to replace their food. I don't know that I would go so far as to say it needs the whole clinical trial process, but it definitely needs more than "A bunch of us made some stuff in the lab, and on paper it sounds healthy, so lets sell it to the world."
  • 222www 11y ago
    Lol You obviously have no idea of the food business
    • dang 11y ago
      Please comment civilly and substantively when posting to Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• hiou 11y ago
  There are plenty of very healthly adults raised on formula. There is not strong evidence either way and your comment is a great example of how fringe and trend chasing nutrition can be. The same can be said for soylent and probably every other diet fad out there. Will it kill you? No. Is it the secret to eternal health and well being? Also no. So tired of diet fads on HN.
  • feld 11y ago
    The only child in my family that was breast fed did not end up with terrible allergies. I've heard other similar anecdotes. It should be taken with a grain of salt until further research on this type of thing is done.
    • brandonmenc 11y ago
      > The only child in my family that was breast fed did not end up with terrible allergies. Here's an anecdote to cancel yours out: My sister and I were both breast fed but she had terrible allergies as a child.
      • feld 11y ago
        yup, so the question is which was nature which was nurture?
• DickingAround 11y ago
  If anything, I don't understand the worries people have about replacing 95% of their entire diet with a well-engineered food. In the past people lived on a single or very small number of crops. In our current time we know people who live entirely on fast food or delivery pizza. The human body is more resilient than we give it credit for and having soilent is likely better than what we'd be giving it otherwise.
  • pizza234 11y ago
    Conceptually it wouldn't be different than satisfying 95% of sexual needs with well-engineered sex dolls; then also satisfying 95% of the fitness needs with well-engineered electrical muscle stimulators; then also satifying 95% of the romantic needs with a well-engineered dating app. And so on. I wouldn't define myself "worried" of this, but I find utterly banal (infinitely misable, to be honest) that the existential end of all this optimization is (metaphorically) to have more time to produce and consume the next iPhone. Talking on the strictly nutritional perspective, we can't compare the past. Infant mortality, in those times, was much higher. And the body may be resilient, yes, but don't forget that a very large percentage of people in USA is clinically obese, that is, sick.
    • darkmighty 11y ago
      I like this implication; it's hard to define meaningful and consistent goals to ourselves when we are relieved of our usual constraints to get pleasure/satisfaction (our means are basically eat food, socialize, have sex, practice sport, consume culture) -- how do we distinguish fundamentally means to ends? To illustrate, extend Soylent to a more general Hapiness drink. If you took it, you'd be instantly and lastingly satisfied, allowing you to do work and stay very productive without the need to "waste time" socializing, practicing sports or w/e -- and suppose this satisfaction is indeed indistinguishable or better from activity-borne satisfaction. Would we choose to consume it, and why not, fundamentally?
• pbreit 11y ago
  Can't confidently say it's not safe to eat either. So why be a stick in the mud?
• Bartweiss 11y ago
  I'm curious - is there convincing evidence that baby formula is (absorbed-)nutritionally incomplete compared to breast milk? I know it produces worse health outcomes, but I haven't found decent claims on whether that's a failure of nutrition, or only a lack of side-channel influences like immune-system boosting. As a more general principle, I certainly agree that Soylent might miss the mark on dose and accessibility of some nutrients. The early development history shows that they definitely have in the past. It's definitely good to see someone trying. My only real concern is that they might miss a low-effect or slow-acting component. If they forget potassium, testing will happily reveal it in a month. If their calcium bio-availability is a bit low, maybe we don't see it until Rhinehart gets osteoporosis in 20 years.
  • csarva 11y ago
    re: "worse health outcomes" for formula/bottle-fed babies - there was a recent study which refutes that common idea -- http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/27/breast_feeding_study_benefits_of_breast_over_bottle_have_been_exaggerated.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/27/breast_feedi...
• peteretep 11y ago
  > My first thought whenever I see soylent is that we have > studies proving that we can't replace breast milk with > baby formula I was under the impression that there are many women who - for various reasons - can't breast feed. Are there any credible studies showing their infants have worse health outcomes?
  • csarva 11y ago
    It's still a commonly held belief but a recent study concluded there may be no difference at all: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/27/breast_feeding_study_benefits_of_breast_over_bottle_have_been_exaggerated.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/27/breast_feedi...
  • ArtDev 11y ago
    A ton of research has been put into this. No matter how much formula companies try to spin it, the results are very clear: infact formula is very suboptimal: impact on future health http://jn.nutrition.org/content/138/9/1782S.full http://jn.nutrition.org/content/138/9/1782S.full impact on allergies http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12839115 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12839115 Now, what does this have to do with Soylent and adult nutrition? Not much.