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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

On a side note, I was one of the early recipients of Soylent 2.0, and I was incredibly impressed with the product. As many have noted, the taste is similar to milk left in a bowl of cereal. It errs on the enjoyable side of neutral, unlike powdered Soylent 1.5, which fell on the unenjoyable side of neutral. The texture is also completely smooth -- the powdered versions were always grainy to me no matter how much I tried shaking.

I have a personal rule of never drinking Soylent more than once in a day and never two days in a row. But I consider it a worthwhile, affordable, and extremely convenient addition to my diet.

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Can I ask - Why do you have a personal rule of never drinking Soylent more than once in a day, and never two days in a row?

A few reasons:

(1) I figure that at best Soylent has the nutrients that we know we need, but not the ones that we don't know we need. Over-reliance on Soylent might mean missing out on these nutrients, even if the health effects of doing so are very delayed.

(2) I've read reports on how the simple act of chewing food has an effect on digestion and other processes.

(3) Pure Soylent may not cultivate gut flora in the same way as normal solid diets do.

(4) I enjoy cooking and don't want those skills to atrophy because it's so much easier to just grab a bottle of Soylent.

(5) The rule also encourages me to go out with friends or invite people over more.

It's not a hard and fast rule -- it's just something I generally try to abide by, both as a risk-minimizing mechanism and as a general effort to force me to enrich my life more.

> I figure that at best Soylent has the nutrients that we know we need, but not the ones that we don't know we need. Over-reliance on Soylent might mean missing out on these nutrients, even if the health effects of doing so are very delayed.

Why is it any more likely that your traditional diet provides the nutrients that we don't know we need?

Because the traditional diet is closer to what we have eaten as a species for tens of thousands of years.

We haven't known much about nutrition for most of the last ten thousand years, and I don't think we know all that much even now. Malnutrition used to be (and still is, in many places) the norm.

What "traditional diet"? The diet that supported hunter-gatherers was very different from that of early agriculturalists, which was different again from urban populations pre-refrigeration and pre-transport (refrigeration + railroads + ships changed _everything_ about food availability), then post-WWII eating has been steadily changing every decade in an ongoing revolution of food packaging and branding, and in the steady globalization of cuisines. There is no "traditional diet". And to say, without evidence, that there has to be something "better" about the typical person's random food choices than a manufactured product like Soylent is a blatant example of the Naturalistic fallacy.

Note: I'm not the parent but like them I like, and consume Soylent and I agree that once a day is probably a good rule of thumb. I'll try and explain the parent's perspective in my words.

Soylent is deterministic. In-fact Soylent's goal is to be deterministic and as such will only become more deterministic as time progresses. Any two Soylent's will be the same.

Traditional food on the other hand, especially through variety, is by its nature non-deterministic. Example: You happen to be a patron of an icecream parlor. Today you buy/eat mango icecream, unknown to the parlor the mangoes happened to be from the east coast of Mexico. Tomorrow you buy/eat "the same" mango icecream, but these mangoes happened to be sourced from the west coast of Mexico. Was it the same? This example, doesn't even account for the variety involved with "traditional food", which only increases the stochastic nature of its nutritional properties.

Having defined that (hopefully we agree on the axioms), we can continue on to discuss the nature of problems where "we don't know [what] we need". Until we know what we need, the optimal strategy to satisfy an unknown goal is through non-determinism (again, hopefully we agree).

Based on the above:

I'll try to make a more succinct argument:

Given that Soylent contains everything we know we need.

And we know we don't know everything we need.

Then only consuming Soylent guarantees we do not satisfy all of our needs.

We must then consume things we do not know, to increase the probability of satisfying all our needs.

P.S. I am all for scientific experiments to better determine the unknowns and turn them into knowns. However, as long as there are any unknowns, the above points still hold.

I don't see why the larger variation in traditional diets guarantees a higher chance of providing some nutrients that we need but that we don't know we need.

Sorry, I guess I'm not able to explain it all that well.

I'll try one last time with an analogy.

Lets play a game: I will think of two numbers (range: 1..10) and you're going to guess which numbers they are.

I'm going to do you a big favor and guarantee you: I'm going to always pick 7. I will also guarantee you, the other number will never be 7.

To reiterate the givens: My numbers will be in the domains: [7] AND [1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9]

You get to pick two numbers. Would you pick 7 AND 7?

I hope not. 7 AND 7 by definition will always lose (probability of winning: 0%). Introducing variety for the second number will clearly increase your probability of winning to 1/8 = 12.5%.

Granted, the probability of winning is still low, and 12.5% assumes a random distribution, but its higher than 0%.

Now, similarly, lets a play a game: I am going to think of all of the nutrition that you need and you're allowed to guess two meals that will encompass all of that nutrition.

I will do you a favor and guarantee you: Soylent will get all of the food that we know we need (if you pick Soylent as one of the meals you will only need a tiny set of additional nutrition to win). I will also then guarantee you, we need things that we don't know, therefore since Soylent only has the things we know, we need at least one nutritional "thing" not in Soylent.

To reiterate the givens: Meals will be in the domains: [Soylent] AND [...everything except Soylent]

You get to chose two meals. Would you pick Soylent AND Soylent?

I hope not. Soylent AND Soylent by definition (in this game) will always lose (probability of winning: 0%). Introducing variety for the second meal will clearly increase your probability of winning. The increase in probability is not calculable, however it is non-zero.

Granted, the probability of winning is still very low, however, variety provides a non-zero probability while only-Soylent provides 0%. Clearly then, variety is the better option over only-Soylent.

Does that at all help? Am I just being trolled?

Either way, this was fun. glhf, and thanks for reading.

The problem with your analogy is that a traditional diet might be missing nutrients we know that we need (most people don't track very closely) and might also contain things that are actively harmful which Soylent does not contain. Lots of people eat traditional diets and have lots of nutrition problems.

To make the issue with your analogy clearer, note that you could invent any somewhat edible product and make the claim that adding it to your diet makes your diet safer, because of the possibility that it contains nutrients we need but which we don't know we need.

It's a simple matter of inability to prove a negative.

You're being downvoted, but I don't entirely disagree with you.

I could instead offer the following weaker form of what I wrote previously. We know that Soylent does not offer any nutrients that we don't know we need, whereas we do not know that traditional foods do not provide any nutrients that we don't know that we need. It does not follow that they do, but this at least recognizes the possibility.

I find it unlikely that nutritional science has reached its end state, so I don't want to bet too much on Soylent being perfect. At the same time, malnutrition was the norm for most humans for most of our existence, so we can't defer to much to traditional diets.

My question is why you chose Soylent over more tried and trued meal replacements like Ensure?

I thought was an interesting question, so I Googled, and there are actually some pretty convincing replies on Soylent's forums - http://discourse.soylent.com/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing...

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Compare the Ensure[0] nutrition facts with Soylent 2.0[1]. Note specifically that 1 Ensure is 220 calories vs Soylent's 400, so you'll need to basically double everything on the Ensure's nutrition facts page.

I don't take either Ensure or Soylent (and I'm not sure that USDA recommendations for a 2k calorie diet are that good). It appears that Ensure tries to match a 100% USDA recommendation for caloric profile (at 9 servings per day fat/carbohydrates almost add up to 100%), while providing way over the recommendations on vitamin/minerals (~225% for most, close to 500% for a couple). On the flip side, Soylent appears to try to hit the vitamins/minerals 100%, while having a high fat, low carbohydrate profile (175% fat, 60% carbohydrates).

On the whole, it looks like they are not really replacements for each other, other than in the broad category of "meal replacements" since the caloric profile, and serving sizes are so far away from each other.

Personally, I'd go with the high fat, low carbohydrate version since I've found that those types of meals (in general, not specifically for "meal replacements") tend to keep me more satiated for longer periods of time.

[0] - https://ensure.com/nutrition-products/ensure-original#vanill...

[1] - http://files.soylent.com/pdf/soylent-nutrition-facts-2-0-en....

Soylent actually has all the nutrients required for an adult human, while Ensure does not. Ensure assumes you eat SOME other food to make up for nutritional deficiencies, while Soylent aims to provide a 100% replacement for all of your meals if you desire it.

How could you possibly know this? Where is this comprehensive prescient list of "all the nutrients required for an adult human"?

It's not black magic, NASA for example has specified exactly what someone eats over long periods so they needed to study this. Historically, Military's have also been interested in this and have developed satisfactory minimum standards ex: http://www.apd.army.mil/pdffiles/r40_25.pdf

That does not mean such things are Ideal just that they work acceptably well for young healthy people.

Well, how could anyone possibly know that the diet of traditional food they eat is any better?

It's called research. There are good well researched standards of diet for use by prisons, the military and space exploration that have enough real world use to have some level of verification.

I used to drink Ensure before I switched to soylent. I couldn't stand how sweet Ensure tasted, it's kind of disgusting.

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