"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally."
This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck.
We've seen his posts before and discussed it to great lengths, but the bottom line is if he's created something that is truly capable of sustaining health for the lifetime of a person he should be rewarded, but without scientific proof of longterm health this will never, and should never, be taken unquestionably.
So the way I look at this critique is that most people in the US are running a parallel experiment with their bodies, only instead of the input being Soylent, it's garbage like fast food. It's true, we don't understand how the human body operates - whether you're eating McDonald's, or organic, or Soylent. So given that the baseline seems to be an equally untested and probably more detrimental food choice, this completely voluntary experiment doesn't seem so bad, it's not like the govt is teaching us to eat a certain way (which they have been known to do incorrectly). In other words, Soylent vs theoretically ideal diet (which we don't even know) - sure, bad choice. But the reality is for the target audience (such as myself) its Soylent vs pizza and burgers, which doesn't seem that bad.
I think for this parallel to be valid he'd have to be eating McDonalds or what-have-you every day. The point is variety (mostly) ensures we get everything we need from somewhere. I think it's almost assured that in the long run 100% (or so) soylent will turn out to be more detrimental than even the 'average diets' out there. BTW, I'm kinduva healthy eating nut myself, but this just isn't 'healthy eating'.
Right, thats precisely my point: I think you underestimate how many people eat McDonalds or what-have-you every day. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that I think it takes place all over the spectrum: the poor do it as well as the rich. Perhaps you do not see this as much because you are a self-described health nut (and thus this diet probably isn't for you, the same way an Alienware computer isn't for someone who knows how to build a PC), but in my developer circle I see eating trash food every day for all meals quite often. And what I've found is often the problem is that you forget about food and then are starving and make a bad decision so you can keep working, not necessarily because you love pizza or whatever. If Soylent can deliver on immediateness, then it has a chance of competing with this lifestyle. And, if the end result is people thinking more about what they eat, it may be a win either way.
haha, I really hope you are right about the problem space. I'm currently building a company that hopes to solve exactly the "forget about food and then are starving and make a bad decision" problem. Not ready to say more yet, but again, sure hope you're right :-)
Anyway, if it's that thing to have on stand-by, I'm sure its ok, but so is an Ensure, a Balance Bar, a Slim-Fast, etc, so again, no real innovation here.
Note that your argument began with "It's too radical, it won't work!" and ended with "It's boring, there's nothing new here." When I see this particular pattern of cognitive dissonance, I take it as a sign that the phenomenon being dismissed has real merit. Not to single you out, either--this pattern describes perhaps the majority of arguments I've heard against Soylent.
to eat one thing 100% of the time "is too radical it won't work". yep. To eat one thing as your 'go-to' filler is fine. but neither new nor radical. One addressed one argument, the other addressed a different one.
I recently started using a meal replacement shake as my primary food source and this is exactly how I respond to the nay sayers.
The same thing happened when I became a vegetarian (how will you get your protein??). When you do something abnormal like this people tend to have ill thought out emotional reactions.
The biggest valid criticism is the QA process. But it's an issue with all meal replacement shakes.
Thanks. May I ask what are some of the results? I don't mean weight loss necessarily but more health effects. Do you feel like you're lacking anything, are there any negative side effects?
I'm not doing controlled research which is part of the reason for buying a premise solution. I hadn't noticed anything negative that I can attribute to the stuff. I've only been doing it for a few weeks.
If proper studies were done on this, we could actually know if it is better or worse than burgers and pizza. From what I know of how the human body works (serious amateur interest), I'm exceedingly doubtful.
I really believe the combination of long-term liquid diet and an extreme uniformity of diet will be the cause of significant health problems. I also think we will find a bunch of "nanonutrients" that are critical to long-term health that we have no idea are important today.
There is no easy answer today for nutrition. If there was, the thousands of food technicians working everywhere from universities to food companies to NASA and the military would have already come up with it. They all have compelling reasons to try.
> There is no easy answer today for nutrition. If there was, the thousands of food technicians working everywhere from universities to food companies to NASA and the military would have already come up with it. They all have compelling reasons to try.
I would say a century of study of this specific topic is "starting somewhere". Now, while I believe Zombie Feynman would go far, far more hungry in a group of nutritionists than he would in a group of string theorists, it doesn't mean that there isn't a lot more knowledge than what is contained in a single, undergrad text book (witness the lack of sulfur) that espouses thinking to has begun to be significantly altered by new science in the last decade. To completely ignore that isn't "starting somewhere", it's blindfolding yourself, spinning a few times, and stumbling off.
I'm all for experiments with n=1 in nutrition (I do it all the time), but call it what it is. Don't pretend that, even if it works for six months or a year on you, that you really have any info that is relevant to the rest of the world. Increasing his n with others is a good start, but it will still take 50 years or more to know if this stuff is poison or panacea.
Indeed. To sum up some of the basic issues with his research so far:
Sample size is 1.
He's still eating, just much less often. Some nutrients are only required in very small amounts, which he may still be getting from his occasional meal.
Three months is a very short time frame on which to evaluate a diet. Even something as simple and well-understood as scurvy can take three months to develop. In other words, he could have forgotten something as basic as Vitamin C and still lived this long.
He has something to gain (even if just recognition) from this diet working. He also wants it to work. The effects he reports could be psychosomatic.
I haven't followed very closely because I don't really have interest in it (I like food, cooking, etc.) but I have to ask, if he's pushing this as a product after such low levels of reliability does he garner any liability should it prove to be damaging long term?
Everything has been pivoting into a kickstarter campaign. He is trying to turn this into a business.
Which is all very weird. There are a number of "nutritionally complete" meal supplements on the market. I do not understand why this particular one, with rather quackish supporting claims, gets attention here.
I think if you thought about it for a moment you would realize that he is appealing to the concept of hacking. In this case, hacking diet, something everyone on this site can relate to. This is why it gets attention.
I'm on the fence as to whether I'll to wait and see how this turns out, with his volenteer base or to even hit up the Kickstarter to try it myself, as I personally am at a pivot point where I could change my diet significantly and benefit. If Soylent proves the easy route, so be it.
I think if you thought about it for a moment you would realize that he is appealing to the concept of hacking
Absolutely. Timothy Ferriss has made good bank doing something similar, hacking various aspects of his life.
What earns criticism, though (this is a discussion board, and we aren't here to blanket applaud everything), is the pseudo-science: The "I ate a normal meal and my cognitive process degraded, etc". There is zero scientific validity to those claims, and they give it the rank stench of snake oil (again, exactly like energy bracelets, good aura, or the tactics of the anti-immunization crowd). It may be entirely well-meaning, but such are a million quack remedies and claims.
Well, since he hasn't actually made the kickstarter page we can't tell his true intentions, however the statements he has made previously are that the purpose of the kickstarter campaign is to fund a larger study than the limited local volunteer population he's currently using. The goal is of course to eventually make a commercial product ASSUMING that the research doesn't uncover some kind of insurmountable problem. So yes, this is still research, but the hope is that given some more time it might eventually lead to a product. I know I'm certainly hoping for it, and I'd probably contribute to the kickstarter in the hopes that it bears fruit, and I believe it will based on the results he's achieved so far.
At the end of the day, this is all still experimental, caveat emptor and all that, but everything I've seen so far suggests to me soylent can't possibly be any worse than the garbage served at any number of fast-food restaurants every day.
As for the "nutritionally complete" meal supplements, I think that you can find your answer in the last word of that, "supplement". None of the various "food shakes" that are available commercially are designed to be truly nutritionally complete, rather they're designed to include some of the vitamins and minerals that tend to be lacking in the average diet. Further they tend to be a "one size fits all" affair which out of necessity will be less than optimal for nearly everyone in an attempt to be marginally useful to everyone.
It's probably more like he's trying to turn it into something that can sustain himself while he works on something he's passionate about, which happens to take the form of a business because there aren't many other choices at the moment.
Could be a sham. He's (as far as anyone can tell) dogfooding though, which is, in this case, behavior you'd expect from either a very dedicated sham, or someone who wants to make sure something that they think is a potentially very good idea isn't going to make people terribly sick in three months time.
If you read the article you'd see he did miss something important, sulfur, which he has corrected. He's tweaking the formula as he goes, carefully monitoring his health and vital statistics (at a level I might add that seems way more involved than just about any "health nut" I've ever heard of), and doing research on various health and nutritional studies that are ongoing. Give him another year and a reasonable selection of volunteers to help test a wider audience with and I'm convinced he'll have something that will blow every other "diet" or nutrition shake out of the water.
> This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients.
It really doesn't. Whatever knowledge we do have can be applied, with whatever degree of certainty we have, and that is likely to be better than what we do currently, because what we do currently is basically nothing. Most people, most of the time, eat what they feel like, combined with some vague ideas about calories and fat, and whatever they read in a magazine last week if they're particularly conscientious. In other words, guesswork. Except this is guesswork that's almost totally uninformed. No, we can't be certain about this stuff yet, but what you call "guesswork" i.e. Our best hypothesis given all the information we have about the functioning of the human digestive system, is almost certainly going to be better than the current state of affairs, which is pretty much stab-in-the-dark randomness. It's really not hard to beat.
> any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck.
If you manage to find an optimal diet by choosing foods you think of as 'healthy' and trying to avoid cookies, well that's a stroke of luck. Deliberate scientific optimisation by adjustment, experimentation and measurement? That's not luck.
We invented vaccination more than half a century before we had even accepted the Germ Theory of disease, and the history of science is full of such things. You don't need full understanding with no uncertainty in order to figure out what works. Science is neat like that.
What's it called when a person has an irrational preference for the current state of affairs? Look it up, because you have it.
>This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients [but] this is still a huge mystery to science
If "no uncertainty" was the golden standard, we'd never do anything new (except perhaps mathematics). Yes, there is uncertainty in what he's doing, as there is always when trying something truly novel. But I'm sure glad someone is making the attempt. Nutrients are not a huge mystery to science - there are entire college courses on biochemistry and such.
It is really easy to figure things out at the cellular level because you can easily build experiments containing controls and the turn-around time on iterations is fast.
The human body has trillions of cells and even more symbiotic bacteria. We are clueless how the system functions as a whole. We know some simple things (iron and calcium compete for absorption in the intestine), but only the "big" stuff.
Maybe if you eat 20% of your RDA of Vitamin E at every meal, it makes your intestines toxic to a particular strand of gut biota that regulates half your body[1]. The space we know nothing about is huge, and jumping in with a product for the masses with so little respect for that is, IMO, very dangerous.
1. There is evidence that people suffering metabolic syndrome have significantly different gut biota than those who aren't and when "normal" biota is reintroduced, their health improves. My hypothetical is not an impossibility.
If you set yourself on fire, your flesh will burn and you will eventually die horribly. It is less clear what happens if you expose yourself to repeated small amounts of radiation. See the problem with your logic?
Er, no? People repeatedly expose themselves to small amounts of radiation all the time. X-rays, sunlight, airplanes, astronauts, living anywhere with large quantities of granite rock . . .
Really, that seems to be totally irrelevant to whether or not this guy is on to something. (Personally, I think he's probably running a long con. But making stupid arguments against con men is just a way to send them more victims. Ask for some evidence instead - arguments screen off authority.)
> if he's created something that is truly capable of sustaining health for the lifetime of a person he should be rewarded
Why? The world isn't short of food. Food is just poorly distributed, or contaminated, or with insufficient micronutrients. None of those problems are solved by this type of feed.
Sometimes there's a need for crisis feeding of a population - during a famine or feeding lots of people in a evacuee camp or somesuch. Again, this feed is of minor use there.
I guess he's having fun doing this stuff, but it's of no use to wider society. Especially because complete liquid feed of high quality already exists, made by different companies and subject to very high levels of quality assurance.
"Reward" was the best term I could conjure up while writing. I'm not much of a word-smith. My thoughts are more of the idea that if he does this, and it is a great food replacement then he deserves any praise, fame or riches that come his way. He's taking a huge risk making himself the guinea pig for this experiment and if it pays off that's cool!
If I recall correctly though is motivation is that he's simply not a "food person". He has no interests in the finer parts of dining and sparking the palette of the human taste. I'm not one to judge him because I'm quite the opposite. But for people like him who's to say such a goal is wrong? Something simple, quick, and effective marketed well would be a huge success. I just don't want to see innocent people swept up in the moment and getting hurt.
> This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients.
It seems mostly to assume that health follows rules that you can discover and which aren't particularly unstable.
To believe that you have a decent chance of hitting on it assumes that we have a broad understanding of what's in what we normally eat I suppose.
But, you know, this is why people mess around with this sort of stuff. If it goes great then fantastic, and if it doesn't then we only lose a couple of people here and there. The risk-reward is almost certainly going to work out in its favour. It probably sucks for him if he gets it wrong but, well, that's his look out isn't it? It's not like anyone's taking advantage of him.
I suppose to be strictly ethical you'd go and feed it to starving kids and feed the others your best natural diet, so everyone seems likely to get a bit of a win out of it even if eventually it turns out to give them cancer or something. But that seems a bit beyond DIY studies.
This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck.
We've seen his posts before and discussed it to great lengths, but the bottom line is if he's created something that is truly capable of sustaining health for the lifetime of a person he should be rewarded, but without scientific proof of longterm health this will never, and should never, be taken unquestionably.