The founder has been doing this for 4 months and he is healthier than when he started. What makes you think this is a bad idea other than "waaahh they are not food scientists!"?
The founder claims he is healthier than when he started. That's confirmation bias. We have no way of telling because this "experiment" is not at all scientific. When he started and people pointed out just how hopeless the experiment was we were told to shut up and let him get on with it because it was only him being affected and if he wanted to do it let him go ahead. But now we see the problem - that hopeless experiment is being used to sell this product.
I can point you to a range of crack pots who claim their supplement makes them feel much better. One example is all the blue people with colloidal silver. (Do a Google Images search for [colloidal silver] to see.)
You only need common sense to realise that this single product cannot be safe for everyone.
What type of flour does it contain? They say it's hypo-allergenic, so it shouldn't have any gluten in.
God, you are just embarrassing yourself now. Please just stop.
Or, to reach more into our own history, they're the modern snake oil.
You'll need to post some sort of citation in order to convince anyone of that.
Is This the End of Popping Vitamins?, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020464450457665...
“From a practical standpoint, this study does not change the fact that the majority of consumers could benefit from taking an affordable multivitamin,” said Andrew Shao, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs with the council. “It is better to meet these recommendations than not, and consistently taking a multivitamin over the long term could help fill these nutrient gaps and may help consumers lead healthier lives.”
If there's no benefit on average, then there's no reason to recommend on average (disclaimer: I take a chewy multivitamin because I remember being convinced by evidence that manganese is a bad thing to supplement, and most multivitamins have 2mg of it).
The article ended with a conclusion from the study's author:
Dr. Neuhouser said she realizes that many people who are devoted vitamin users will be skeptical of the finding that they are receiving no benefit from a daily multivitamin.
“I don’t want to disparage people who take multivitamins — it’s their choice as a consumer,” Dr. Neuhouser said. “What we’re presenting is the science showing it’s neither beneficial nor harmful. If they want to choose to spend their dollars elsewhere this might be a good place to do so. Perhaps they can buy more fruits and vegetables.”
My take-away from these studies is that unless you have a vitamin deficiency, taking multivitamins does nothing. And if you have a specific vitamin deficiency, then you may be better off just taking supplementation of that vitamin; a general multivitamin will only help because it happens to contain what you are deficient in.
Actually, he's not. He's presenting an argument. You're presenting a personal attack.
What's distressing is that you're being upvoted for it.
Because I'm right, and he's wrong. For fuck's sake, everyone on here needs to educate themselves about the basics of nutrition before commenting on something they don't understand.
What you have here is a bunch of 20-something coders, most of whom don't know jack shit about cooking or biology but wish they didn't have to think about cooking so they could spend more time working on their Rails or iPhone apps, getting excited that one of their own has "disrupted" a new industry.
In reality, it's just another example of the blind leading the blind. But failures in the food industry don't just end with a site shutting down and some commenters on HN complaining about losing their favorite service while some others explain why it didn't survive. They can end with people in the hospital or in the grave.
Why not educate people, rather than call them wrong?
The reasons you're not being convincing are:
- you attack based on age.
- you attack based on lack of credentials.
- you attack based on the idea that someone might get hurt, when you don't have any evidence Soylent is dangerous.
- your entire tone is one of talking down to your audience.
If your arguments had substance, you wouldn't need to resort to any of that.
http://www.businessinsider.com/rob-rhinehart-food-substitute...
> you attack based on the idea that someone might get hurt, when you don't have any evidence Soylent is dangerous
It's like talking to a brick wall. How many times do I have to tell you? The burden of proof is on the people making Soylent. You can't just apologize after the fact, when people are already in the hospital.
A multivitamin doesn't work in the role that this is used marketed for, so...
Think about "junk dna", and the underlying culture that end up creating it as an idea: "this does not appear to do anything, must be junk". The key take away for me is that we simply are underestimating what we do not know about the world, dislike labeling things as unknown, and can financially benefit from applying simplifying assumptions on an industrial scale.
So I'd take these formidable claims with a huge grain of salt.
More importantly, I fail to see what's new with the idea of powder / shake food. This shit has been around.
He is healthier than when he started? By what metric and for how long will that last?