Nutritionist Criticizes Soylent as Dangerous and Unhealthy

All true, but not actual refutations. Most people's diets are not monitored by a doctor, after all, and most foodstuffs have not been put through clinical trials despite being cocktails of unknown thousands of compounds and are believed to be safe merely because they don't seem to be too poisonous.

> His self-experiment is ludicrous

Absurdity heuristic, check.

> and most likely dangerously unhealthy.

'most likely'? I'm guessing this is a guess, and not any sort of informed comment based on a meta-analysis etc.

> While the diet is essentially trying to be like the medical food that is injected into a patient's stomach when they have a feeding tube, Jay Mirtallo of Ohio State told the Washington Post that these are "very complex products, in terms of making sure you get them in a form that’s palatable but that stays in a form that’s bioavailable to the body." He continued, "some of the products are very difficult to get into a liquid form and may lose their potency when they do that, or could interact with other substances that keep them from being absorbed completely."

His Soylent is also pretty complex looking, last I saw one of his posts, and also prepared shortly before eating.

> however, I see a red flag for a potential eating disorder."

Insinuation of mental issues, check.

> Stella Metsovas's response: It's no surprise that a fasting state produces endorphins. The fact of hemoglobin being brought up so casually alerts me to how novice the experimenter must be.

My god! He's using biological terms! What a novice.

> SMR: Are you sure the author is using real olive oil (insert satire)?

Click the link; it's merely reporting that some olive oils are sold as higher quality than they are, others are not as excellent as they could be. Moronic reply.

> SMR: Definitely caught my attention here and wondered if I should review the rest of the post. Is he suggesting the cocktail will provide him with the appropriate nutrients for endurance running?

Er, should an improvement in diet not have some sort of effect? Suppose Rhinehart saw his distance go down; would SMR be ignoring the effect - or triumphantly implying the diet was unhealthy and that was proof?

> SMR: Note: Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin Concentration (MCHC) was on the lower end of range, dated 1/7/13, prior to this experiment.

Implying...?

> SMR: Should we have a roundtable discussion about this? What a stupid, ridiculous statement.

Right, because there are no studies showing differences in metabolic rates, or demonstrating differences in response to exercise...? What a stupid, ridiculous statement (by SMR).

> SMR: As an avid cook, I can tell you the author wasn't spending 2 hours a day on food preparation and cleanup.

As an avid reader, I can tell you that SMR has apparently never actually timed total time devoted to food prep, never read historical novels or economists' estimates of time devoted to food, or had an informed thought in this whole page.

> FYI: cultures that have lived healthiest and longest without disease, base their life on foraging, cooking and consuming quality foods.

Great! I'll keep that in mind the moment I become a hunter-gatherer! Thanks for the advice!

> SMR: Living on fast-food isn't cheap.

Price out 2000 calories of fast food and get back to us.

> SMR: The authors interpretation of calorie restriction (CR) is hugely inaccurate. [It's true, the latest studies about caloric restriction indicate that it doesn't seem to work in primates, even after a 25-year study]

Quibbling. It may not 'reverse', but it does slow aging in many rat studies (and all sorts of other animal studies). The primate studies are interesting, but all the ones I've read are still in progress... And the in-progress human studies show benefits on some dimensions, as would make sense since Americans are lardy-lardballs and all the nutritionist advice in the world has yet to make a dent in our belts.

> SMR: The author has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to protein digestion and assimilation. Even with a reasonable amount of intake, variability in protein consumption can result in measurable health consequences in specific conditions. This said, dietary protein delivers more than energy and building blocks to the human body: The pools of body, tissue, and cell proteins, peptides, and amino acids are under complex metabolic control, resulting in a highly dynamic protein turnover, that is, the interplay between synthesis and degradation. Proteins also contain peptide sequences that can be interpreted as bioactive precursors which can be liberated upon digestion to exert biological functions locally (e.g., in the gut) or systemically (i.e., via the bloodstream).

This would be fascinating, if the Rhinehart quote had had anything to do with it.

Amusingly, my own reaction is exactly that of the single comment:

> I started the article wholly on the nutritionist's side and ended up dismayed by her reliance on snark over reasoning. If this green frothy diet is nutritionally flawed, it ought to be downright easy for a professional nutritionist to explain why, so Metsovas' reliance on insults and vague generalities ends up trivializing her position and setting up Rhinehart to be the misunderstood genius. Nonetheless, I'm going home to COOK dinner that I will actually CHEW. But I don't feel right now that I'm in particularly good company, if Metsovas is on my side.

Indeed. With friends like these, who needs enemies? I still prefer to let Rhinehart treat himself as a guinea pig, but it's hard to remember this when I see such sneering idiotic contempt & rhetoric passing for informed commentary.

> SMR: As an avid cook, I can tell you the author wasn't spending 2 hours a day on food preparation and cleanup.

As a reader, I can tell you that the author said 'on food', which includes time to eat, not the '2 hours a day on food preparation and cleanup' that the nutritionist mis-states.

> Nutritionist Explains Why The 'Stop Eating Food' Diet Is Dangerous And Unhealthy

> RRB: olive oil for fatty acids

> SMR: Are you sure the author is using real olive oil (insert satire)?

> RRB: Some people can eat all they want and never gain weight, others can't shed pounds no matter how hard they try. The trick is in the genome, though both extremes are uncommon. 23andme is awesome!

> SMR: Should we have a roundtable discussion about this? What a stupid, ridiculous statement.

this nutritionist seems to provide more mockery than explanation, for a large serving of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

Anyone can call themselves a "Nutritionist". I bet she'd never be qualified to be a Dietitian, now would she enjoy being hampered by ethics and knowledge.

Honestly, he could have accepted that he doesn't know anything about Soylent because nobody really does.

After doing keto, all nutritionists seem untrustworthy Monsanto slaves to me now.

I love the attitude he has about Soylent, the whole disrupt food industry type thing is like hacker culture invading health science. However, it should be done in a controlled scientific approach. Kickstarter is probably going crazy trying to figure out if they should approve his application.