Interview with Rob Rhinehart about Soylent
vice.com
vice.com
On the other hand, I can't shake the feeling that it's not going to. Even reading this article, my suspicions flared up a few times (I thought invoking McDonalds was strange, and most of his points about nutrition and consumption seemed off-base.) Maybe it's years and years of pseudoscience taking its toll on me, I dunno.
At the very least, I'm interested to see where things are headed.
Something mailed to your door monthly and quickly mixed together vs going to the grocery store for beans and firing up the rice steamer for 15min.
One way that's possible is if the processing is done close to the point of production and reduces the size (and increases shelf life) enough that the savings in transportation, packaging, and reduced losses on the shelf compared to less-processed basic foods is greater than the processing cost.
a) People who are starving. If the price is right and it has the right properties as far as shelf life and nutrition, sure, it would make an excellent ration for feeding populations in food emergencies or natural disasters.
b) People for whom eating and food preparation is an undesirable chore. A good example would be combat soldiers who need to eat something and don't care what it is as long as it satisfies hunger and provides nutrition.
For many (most?) other people food is intimately tied in with culture and epicurean tradition. This product won't go over well in places like Italy and France, for example.
From this experience, I've always been interested to see how soylent turns out. Even back here in the rear nutrition is a chore. I eat to stay alive, not for the experience. Heck, I go to Costco and pay $3.77 for a slice of pizza, hotdog, and a drink whenever I can.
My major question about soylent is its nutritional value. I work out 2x a day, 5-6 days a week. I have a Syntha-6 protein shake after each workout with some fruit and orange juice. I'm curious if soylent will provide the same level of nutrition I currently get.
If it does, it'd be excellent under demanding physical conditions like combat operations and high performance athletes. I'd eventually like to see different mixes, i.e.: weight loss, weight-gain, distance athlete, etc. Hell, I'd pay a premium for it. My wife pays around $200/wk. for Bistro M.D. meals because she doesn't have time to cook. I'd pay something similar if I could get a high performance meal replacement that I could eat every day, for every meal (maybe different flavors to mix it up), and didn't taste like shit.
So how long until we see the ultra-lean startup that forgoes the in-house gourmet chef for a soylent dispenser?
The color is a bit problematic in that respect. He should just put in a little coloring. I suggest green.
One of the most interesting thing about this whole campaign is seeing who is afraid of it. Now that provides some interesting insights.
The green suggestion was in reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green, a joke.
Instinctively, we're not really attracted to blue food because no natural food is blue.
There is a few counter examples like the blue Gatorade, but it's 100% liquid, I can't think of any soup-texture food that is blue.
(Blueberry puree is not blue : http://www.adventuresinshaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/b... )
Blue smoothies are pretty visually attractive.
Well let me qualify that. I wouldn't trust my health to eating primarily an engineered food solution as he is doing. In the grand scheme of things it's a lot less scary than the majority of "food" that you see for sale everywhere in the developed world. At least he is trying to create a healthy food rather than something that addicts people and maximizes margins. So I think it's better than the status quo, far less scary than Coca Cola for instance.
But the part that scares me is the idea that a healthy diet can be engineered. As far as I've seen, our understanding of diet and human metabolism is in the dark ages. I wouldn't trust a nutritionist to engineer a diet any more than I would trust a medieval "doctor" to cure me by bloodletting.
So what insight does that provide about me?
When I eat a burger at McDonalds, I know what I'm getting and it surely isn't for the health benefits.
Beyond that, the distracted 16 year old is not suggesting that you consume McDonalds as your sole source of nutrition (in fact, he doesn't care at all what you eat); pretty much everyone agrees that eating only McDonalds is a terrible idea, how that gets twisted into a defense of Soylent is just baffling.
If Soylent becomes cheaper than the previous products [1], it would definitely help more people.
For people living in the US, I agree with you and I don't think it's a solution :
If we take 2 different people, whose optimal intake is 2500 kcal, I'm pretty sure that among these 2500 kcal, one person would need x% of protein and y% of carbs, whereas the other person would need x2% and y2%, so how can Soylent fix this ?
If we can figure out what the x,y,x2,y2 exact values are, then people could get their personalized Soylent, but we're far from it.
[1] http://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
Soldiers mostly live off an engineered diet; last I checked they tend to be healthy. Hospitals serve engineered meals. Just because they're using whole foods doesn't really change the fact that they are deliberately building a diet made to supply every nutriment needed by a human being.
And the alternative, the status quo for the majority of the population, is even worse. We're just prodding at random without even thinking about what nutriments we're eating, hoping that somehow we won't forget to eat enough of one crucial nutriment.
What is important for Soylent is that it is clear for everyone who decides to use it extensively to listen to their body. People who die due to bad diets don't go from healthy to dead in 5 seconds. People die when they believe that feeling bad or weak is a normal effect of their diet. They ignore their body when it tells them that there's something wrong. As long as everyone on it knows to stop or see a doctor if they feel in any way worse after starting Soylent, the danger is minimal.
This isn't a particularly deep insight, lots of people are, but one of the interesting things about Soylent is that if you eat a 'normal' diet (which is to say one recommended as a 'healthy diet' by the FDA) you ingest all of the same chemicals in much the same ratios.
If you were pathologically afraid of the unknown (and some folks are) then you would first sterilize some soil, then put it into a garden with an isolation layer and drainage system, then populate it with a soil biome that you had previously done DNA analysis on to insure you understood which bacteria and fungi were present, and then you would water only with distilled water, plants that you had also sequenced which allowed you to ascertain the lack of tampering with their genome, and fertilizer from fish or chicken for which you controlled all of their consumption.
You wouldn't really do that, because you've grown up and seen people all around you eating stuff. And long before you could reason about these things you got hungry, ate, and got full, and it hasn't hurt you to do so and you continued on your path.
The current things you "trust your health" to have, especially if you buy any packaged food, been engineered in ways that are way more extreme than what has happened to Soylent in order to make you buy more of them. The book "In Defense of Food" [1] by Michael Pollan goes into great detail about the things folks do which make Rob sound pretty mild.
You state "As far as I've seen, our understanding of diet and human metabolism is in the dark ages." Which is an understandable bit of hyperbole but the reality is that you trust in the defensive mechanisms of your body which have evolved over millennia to get as much as they can out of what ever you put into your digestive system, whether it be Beluga caviare or rice beetles.
If you look at the situation non-emotionally (and that is very hard to do), then you see that based on your belief that we're in the dark ages of nutrition science, and the chemicals in choice A and choice B are the same. The predicted outcome of consuming all of A or B as your primary food source is "no difference." However, as most people I know who have gone through this emotional journey, what does change is you start actually being aware of what you are eating and making choices based on that and it does have an outcome since you change behavior when you identify a correlation between eating X and outcome Y.
Daily chewing is applying pressure to teeth and keeping them 'set' in the position you're familiar with.
While researching some wisdom tooth extraction possible long-term side effects, I was surprised to find out how much can teeth migrate, start receding etc. if one is not able to chew on both sides for example.
I don't remember the source(s), but I saw real pictures of people with this problem. There were multiple causes too, not just as a consequence of extractions gone wrong.
A lot of people are focusing on the issue of meeting nutritional requirements, but I'm curious on seeing a real dentist's opinion on the possible long-term effects of such a diet as well.
I was a bit surprised when I tracked down the price - $65-$75 for a weeks supply means $10+ per day. Although I cannot imagine replacing my entire diet with this I could see supplementing or replacing the occasional individual meal. IMO, the price would have to come down from $10 for that to be reasonable.
Even if you want to avoid the joy of eating, isn't Ensure Complete Vanilla already a sufficient meal-replacement-that-looks-like-seminal-fluid drink?
Truly the food of the future. (controlled by machines.)
As others in this thread have alluded to, we're far from having a correct model that we can believe in with high confidence when it comes to nutrition.
No soy.