Eat Real Food – Not Soylent 2.0

Terrible piece, but this comment, without references, puts the cherry on top. This guy is about as bad as Food Babe.

I'm not making any judgements on Soylent, since I am not a nutritionist. However, anyone who's actually interested in any dietary supplement, including Soylent, should read about the industry's massive lobbying to prevent regulation by the FDA. Indeed, instead of the companies having to prove that their supplements are not harmful (via clinical studies and trials), it instead falls on the 20 something FDA staff to prove that they are harmful -- against the thousands of supplements available for sale in the United States [1].

[1] http://www.marketplace.org/2016/01/19/health-care/vitamins-a...

Really? This doesn't even pretend to be a coherent argument. Is the idea that Soylent is morally wrong because it is similar to livestock feed? Here, I have a better idea: maybe it is similar because the components of a healthy vegetarian diet for many mammals are very similar.

Pigs, which give birth to children, wallow in their own excrement and are shunned by the gods, share 98% of their DNA with humans. When you read the story of a software engineer with a family, who enjoys the outdoors, and has this DNA, there are some definite parallels.

I mean come on.

The food reviewer did not taste the food reviewed. Sigh.

I understand this is (I think?) a quantitative/nutritional food reviewer, but I think it's lazy to not even taste the food you lambaste.

> When evaluating vitamins and minerals, it is important to look at the form that you are taking. For instance, the type of vitamin D used in Soylent 2.0 is ergocalciferol or vitamin D2. Humans need cholecalciferol or vitamin D3 that is used throughout the body. D3 is significantly superior to D2 in human physiology.6 In the same regard, Soylent 2.0 uses vitamin K1 instead of K2. K1 is transported poorly in the intestines and does not convert well to K2.7 In clinical studies, vitamin K2 has shown cardiovascular improvements while K1 had no effect.8 This is because K2 helps transport calcium into teeth and bones rather than forming arterial calcification.9 K2 has also been shown to reduce cancer risk, and K1 has been shown to be ineffective in this area as well. 10

It is hard for me to judge the accuracy of these claims (not knowning the literature), but these are interesting claims if they are true:

> Since the bacteria have, only a restricted diet of the carbohydrate sources in Soylent 2.0 the lack of options will limit the diversity of the population. Bacteria that can process isomaltooligosaccharides and rice starch are going to have a tremendous advantage over those that do not. Over time, the Coprococcus, Collinsella, and Coprobacillus phylotypes will overrun the Bifidobacteria,14 butyric acid levels will drop,15 and endotoxin will leak out into the bloodstream.

1. The idea that we can take something as fantastically complex and as poorly understood as nutrition and successfully boil it down to a formula is really, really unlikely at this point.

2. As incredibly unlikely as it is that someone could create such a formula, even if they had access to and total understanding of all the research that currently exists in the world, it is even more far-fetched that it would be some random software developers who would create it.

3. Even if, despite all that, Soylent is the perfect formula, it still isn't. As is becoming more evident, diet is so individualized that the idea that one formula would be ideal for any significant percentage of the population is very unlikely.

Given all that, it seems really unlikely that Soylent should be the cornerstone of your diet.

So, having spent way too much time studying and experimenting with diet (including SAD,vegetarian, vegan, paleo-variations, etc), the only nutrition advice I feel comfortable with (assuming you are so lucky as to have the choices I do in middle-class America, with practically every food available) is just to start with a variety of whole, unprocessed foods (probably mostly plants) and do your best to identify the ones that you have obvious issues with and avoid those. As there is seemingly no known individual health benefit to gain from processed foods, the safe bet seems to be to avoid them in favor of unprocessed foods when possible. At least until the next over-hyped study comes out showing that vegetables kill!

"Canola oil [aka rapeseed oil, present in many foods] is one of the worst fats one could put in their body because it contains erucic acid that damages the heart."

Not sure about the "worst fats" part, but what about palm oil, lard, etc.? It is true that erucic acid has been shown to be harmful to animal hearts, but at high doses. According to Wikipedia, In Australia, the maximum recommended dose is 500 mg/day/kg, and that's a safety factor of 120 over what is considered safe. Also canola oil has a maximum of 2% erucic acid, so you would need to consume 1/2% * 70 kg (about 150 lbs) * 500 mg/day/kg = 1.75 kg of canola oil per day to get the maximum safe dose. I don't think people eating Soylent are getting anywhere close to 1.75 kg a day -- that's a lot of oil to be in a food.

"Studies have shown that dl-alpha tocopherol (synthetic vitamin E) is linked to increased cancer rates."

The cited study:

There were no significant differences (all P>.15) in any other prespecified cancer end points. There were statistically nonsignificant increased risks of prostate cancer in the vitamin E group (P = .06) and type 2 diabetes mellitus in the selenium group (relative risk, 1.07; 99% CI, 0.94-1.22; P = .16) but not in the selenium + vitamin E group.

Conclusion Selenium or vitamin E, alone or in combination at the doses and formulations used, did not prevent prostate cancer in this population of relatively healthy men.

-- So basically cited study says that synthetic vitamin E did not PREVENT cancer -- quite different than causing it!

Also,

" In the same regard, Soylent 2.0 uses vitamin K1 instead of K2."

Vitamin K1 and K2 have different functions in the human body. K1 (the plant form) helps with blood clotting. K2 is related to cardiavascular health, strong teeth, and healthy skin (not sure about the cancer prevention mentioned in the article). While it's true that K1 doesn't do these things, some does get converted into K2 by the gut. I haven't read that K2 can converted to K1, so using K2 alone would seem to be worse than just K1 (obviously though, it's not binary). That K2 might prevent cancer does seem to have some evidence, though not particularly good:

---

We observed a nonsignificant inverse association between total prostate cancer and total menaquinone [the most studied form of vitamin K2] intake [multivariate relative risk (highest compared with lowest quartile): 0.65; 95% CI: 0.39, 1.06].

-- From http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/4/985.full

Key words being "nonsignificant" and a pretty large confidence interval.

I could probably go on, but basically, it's a bunch of lies and exaggerations wrapped in scientific mumbo-jumbo. I have never had Soylent and have no interest in it, and also have doubts about how wise/healthy it would be to rely on a single food source, but pieces like this just make legitimate critics look bad.

My personal philosophy -- pretty much anything in high doses has been shown to cause cancer, so don't worry about it that much. Eat a lot of different things, and don't eat too much of anything, and especially cut down on the ramen (who knows that the hell they put in those spice packets, find another food to eat when you're poor) and processed sugar.

[0] http://ambronite.com/