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Comment by kbd | Hacker News Reader

> yet if you're on a pure Soylent diet... Soylent's marketing puts... people at serious long-term health risk.

Even Rosa Labs doesn't recommend a pure Soylent diet. I liked Soylentconor's comment on reddit the other day, pointing out that the right way to look at Soylent is that it's "just food"[1]

I'm obviously not arguing Soylent is perfect, but it's almost certainly better than what most people eat most of the time, and humanity got here subsisting on, on average, much worse.

> Eat your fruits and vegetables or, statistically speaking, your cardiovascular system will eventually suffer.

You seem awfully certain given that you can't say what "relatively unknown [but] conclusively beneficial" things Soylent is missing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/4wowtp/why_is_that...

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> You seem awfully certain given that you can't say what "relatively unknown [but] conclusively beneficial" things Soylent is missing.

Some ideas proposed with several sources cited:

* Antioxidants and polyphenols from fruits and vegetables – like Vitamin C, carotenoids, and flavonoids – have been linked to lower cardiovascular disease rates. They’re known to prevent cholesterol and other lipids from oxidizing in the arteries.[14]

* Concentrations of another group of antioxidants, alpha carotene and beta carotene, are also elevated when eating fruits and vegetables[15,16]

* Fruits and vegetables slightly decrease blood pressure[16,17]

* Fruits and vegetables typically contain good doses of magnesium and potassium, both already linked to lower mortality rates[18,19,20]

* Vitamin C, carotenoids, lycopene, and other phytochemicals/phytonutrients (likely some that we haven’t yet discovered) were explained as the success from one mortality study[21]

(https://blog.priceplow.com/vegetables)

Lots of that stuff is not in Soylent. It's not very difficult to be awfully certain in my confidence in eating fruits and vegetables.

Again. Soylent's marketing has been extremely dangerous, and your link reinforces that point. Their haphazard marketing yielded unintended consequences, and they shouldn't be rewarded for it.

Your argument seems to be "vegetables have things your body needs. Soylent is not vegetables, therefore Soylent doesn't have these things". I am far from a nutrition expert, but from some googling it sounds like a lot of what you bring up, carotenoids, flavonoids, etc. are converted by the body to vitamin A, which Soylent includes. It also includes magnesium, potassium, vitamin C, and so on.

> from some googling it sounds like a lot of what you bring up, carotenoids, flavonoids, etc. are converted by the body to vitamin A

Are you willing to bet your life that this is all they do? Are you willing to bet your life that those general hypotheses are the only reasons why fruits and vegetables make nearly everyone live longer?

Do you think these engineers truly understand food, or is it possible that there are things we don't know, just like we didn't understand omegas decades ago?

I don't claim to fully know what's going on when I eat berries. Nobody does. But I see extremely strong statistics showing one thing, and Soylent has been marketed in the complete opposite direction, and that is dangerous.

Honestly I don't care what people do. But I care what is marketed to inexperienced consumers.

>Even Rosa Labs doesn't recommend a pure Soylent diet.

When did they stop marketing it as a full meal replacement?

Since when did meal mean your entire diet?

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