Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marknutter | Hacker News Reader

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It seems I'm late to the thread but I want everyone to realize that you don't need to drink Soylent or any other meal replacement solution for every meal. Attacking the idea of meal replacement on that assumption is attacking the straw man. The founder of Soylent only replaced every single meal of his to test out the product, not as a recommendation for how it should be used.

If you enjoy preparing every meal you eat, or eating social for every meal, Soylent isn't for you so save the specious criticisms. If you do, however, get annoyed by having to prepare certain meals and wish you could just get the food into your belly immediately without the work on occasion, then Soylent or some other meal replacement drink is a great solution.

It's not going to kill you, or mess up your health, or do any of the many terrible things people have been warning about in every thread having to do with Soylent. It's going to perhaps save you some time and give you a few essential nutrients you may not have been getting otherwise. That's it.

> It's not going to kill you, or mess up your health

How do you know?

Give me a break. People have gone on crazier diets for a lot longer than this guy has and not died. Steve Jobs famously went on an all fruit diet for years and did not die as a result. There are people out there who literally eat nothing but McDonalds for breakfast lunch and dinner and it takes decades for them to die. We are more resilient than you're giving us credit for.

Is it really so ridiculous to question the claims being made here, though? Also "there are crazier things than this" is an incredibly bad argument when defending a product that has, in early stages, claimed it "automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition"[1] prior to any published tests. Admittedly they have dialed back the rhetoric, but is that enough to dismiss someone asking for some demonstration of proof?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5745707

So you don't know? Yet you're happy for them to sell it as safe for everyone, as providing optimal nutrition, as bring people to perfect health, as being tested, when we don't know if any of that is true? (And we know the tested part is a lie).

This is ridiculous reasoning. Do you think every new food product that hits the market is tested for years beforehand to make sure it doesn't kill anybody? Soylent is just food, not some new medicine.

Soylent is being sold as a complete food. We've seen a couple of mistakes during the testing process. The ingredients list is not easy to find, and the sources of those ingredients are not available, so we cannot check if it is a complete food or not.

Soylent is being sold as something that you can eat for every meal. You can argue that most people aren't going to do that, but that's how Soylent are selling it.

Soylent claim, unambiguously, that it is safe for everyone. People with Crohn's disease sometimes need to eat a liquid feed. Is Soylent safe for them? Because Soylent claim that it is safe for them, and that it'll provide them with optimum nutrition and bring them to good health.

> Soylent is being sold as something that you can eat for every meal. You can argue that most people aren't going to do that, but that's how Soylent are selling it.

I agree with you that they should not be selling it in that way.

I apologise if I've been too harsh on Soylent. I have, previously, been strongly against Soylent. I'm against some of the techniques they're using to sell it now.

But I'm trying to be more a "critical friend" rather than just "negative". I realise that I don't yet have the right balance.

No worries, you do make some valid points.

Isn't Jobs fruitarianism considered to be a potential cause/contributor to his pancreas problems, which ultimately killed him?

The first two sentences made me think of Atkins, who I've heard (yes hearsay again) was hastened to his death by the high fat content of his low-/no-carb regime?

FWIW I'm not saying Soylent is worse than any other diet, I don't know. Just that your opposition to the parents scepticism seems a little too strong.

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