Innovation only really works if you're solving a problem. I don't really see much of a problem with our food/nutrition system as is. Yes, there are parts of the world where people are starving, so maybe there is an application for this there, but if the aim is to test this product out in the Bay Area, I don't really see it going anywhere. I could be wrong, but that's my 2 cents.
I'm withholding judgement on this Soylent thing because there seems to be quite a bit of controversy, but I can't say I agree that it isn't solving a problem.
2. There are companies that will prepare and deliver meals for you. Usually lower in sodium than dining out / take-away.
3. Soylent is surrounded with controversy because of the deliberate avoidance of expert input leading to trivial but potentially life-threatening errors:
http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1jvsie/the_man_w...
I'm not disregarding what Herman says, he seems knowledgeable. But if you act like a dick, it's less likely that most people will really warm to your advice.
But his general point is still correct: a mix of foods trumps a formula, especially given population variations in requirement and uptake.
I do agree though that a mix of foods does seem to trump a formula, at least at our current level of understanding. And I can’t say I’d really be willing to make myself a guinea pig in this experiment at this juncture, but I’m still glad people are thinking about this issue and trying new things.
There are meal replacement shakes on the market already. There is fast food (cheap!) there are hot dog stands...
So then, the correct question is "Is a diet of only Soylent healthy?" Even here we run into some pretty significant trouble: nutrition is not a developed enough science to really answer that question yet. We don't have a good metric of healthiness, even for an entire diet. What we can do, though, is make comparisons. We can ask if a diet of only Soylent is healthier than a diet of only rocks. That one's a pretty easy yes. More meaningfully, we can ask if a diet of only Soylent is healthier than a diet of only fast food. I'm confident that it is, but this is where the disagreement begins. Unfortunately, this stuff is hard to test. Forcing someone to eat nothing but fast food for an experiment would be completely unethical, and observing people who already only eat fast food would be subject to some really significant sampling bias.
This has all been a long-winded way of saying that there's no way to know, yet. I would strongly argue that adult consumers should be free to experiment with their diet as long as they do it responsibly. There are definitely some moral and legal gray areas here ('experimenting with your diet' by downing a bottle of pills is still attempted suicide).
I think it's highly likely that a diet of only Soylent is quite a bit healthier than the diet I'm currently eating (way more fast food and take out than I should, for a variety of reasons). That being the case, I'm very happy to give it a try.
Bag of flaxmeal, Bananas ,Oats ,Yogurt
Mixed Nuts, Raisins, Power bar
Blend & drink the first four, munch on the nuts & raisins during the day, have the occasional power bar, take a multivitamin and toss in a nice diverse meal once a week to catch anything else and... profit?
(I only ever ate MREs in transit, and at most for ~10 meals in a row. My preferred strategy was to eat the main antree "cold" (I only got them in 90F+ weather, so they were plenty warm), maybe the candy (if it was the carmels, or I think M&Ms), pocket the little bottle of tabasco for future bloody mary use, and give away or trash the rest. Otherwise, far too much hassle. Given the choice, the tuna pouches from the PX were 10x superior, even if I had to pay for them, especially if I had some packets of mustard and relish and salt and pepper).
I'm not sure how you cannot see a problem. Obesity alone affects 36% of the US adult population!
I am looking forward to the energy boost and increased alertness (and could stand to lose a few pounds). As well as saving 5 or 10 hours a week on food preparation.
Keto works great for weight loss, and moderation is usually sufficient for a healthy maintenance diet. Loaded with carbohydrates as it is, Soylent is particularly uninteresting for anyone trying to reduce body fat.
Like my electric razor, I have my safety razor too, but it's so much faster to use my electric.
A coworker has a beard so he can save 5 minutes in the morning, is it lazy to want time to do other things?
Don't know what the distribution is, but that varies.
Other than not dying, I just don't get what all the fuss is about.
Some meals I eat for the enjoyment of the food. Those are meals I wouldn't replace with Soylent. Some meals I eat for the utility that the food provides; I'd happily replace some of those with Soylent.
Imagine not having to eat most of the time, but always having two hours set aside every Wednesday night to cook a feast.
And it goes on. Perhaps you really enjoy Caesar salad. I know I do. When I am trialling a new place I will often order the Caesar salad as a reasonably reliable proxy for the quality of the kitchen, because it is a finicky thing to put together and requires the ingredients to be fresh and properly balanced.
Over-oily croutons? Bzzt. Stale cos leaves? Bzzt. Swimming in commercial dressing? Bzzt.
So if you have a particular favourite dish, you can enjoy the excitement of discovering the different ways different chefs can approach it. Consider the humble BBQ rib. There are a few schools of thought on the simple question of how to apply heat. And then you get into dry rub and wet rub, what herbs, what spices, what order they're applied ... the variety and possibilities are endless. Truly endless.
It's like wandering into the library and saying "well, I guess I could walk around the stacks and try the different books that catch my eye. Or I could stare at the 'this page intentionally left blank' in that dot matrix printer manual most days for the rest of my life."
Those things were invented to avoid displeasure. Most people find eating pleasurable, it's something they actively seek to do.
It's like saying "guys, I've invented a way to have children without that boring orgasm nonsense".
For some small segment of the population, that is the best news ever. But I don't seeing it being a break-out hit with the general public.
This is where you lose me.
Extending my analogy, you're replacing sex thrice daily with anorgasmic sex, thrice daily.
I'm not seeing the upside.
Companies with actual dietitians and biologists and millions of dollars and labs and decades of lead time haven't been able to create a total replacement for food. There are too many variations in what different people need, too many as-yet unknown conditionally-essential nutrients. That's why all the existing replacement formulae are marketed as being for temporary use only.
Haven't they? I've seen this claim repeatedly in debates about Soylent, but I've never seen it substantiated other than by pointing to marketing claims on related meal replacement products, which may be motivated very much in part by there not being any real benefits to claiming it is a full food replacement, coupled with a lot of potential downsides such as the risk of lawsuits, increased scrutiny by the FDA, etc.
Maybe they haven't been able to. Or maybe they haven't tried (as opposed to try to make something "close enough" for suitability for medical use or occasional meal replacement). Or maybe they have been able to, but there's simply not enough additional revenue potential compared to the potential costs and risks of making the claim.
The only reason there isn't any such product in the consumer market is because there's little incentive for it: too commoditized, lots of liability.
at one level you're right. Millions of dogs live off a handful of composite foodstuffs.
However, when you have millions of test subjects, you quickly discover what's missing and people won't sue you for wrongful death. You also have the advantage that if a peculiar deficiency emerges in a small part of the population, a vet will probably remedy it -- or the dog will get sick and die and nobody will be the wiser.
Finally, note that most dog foods are not really composed chemicals in the sense that Soylent proposes to be. They are usually processed food -- usually made of offcuts and mechanically recovered meat considered unsuitable for human consumption -- dried, ground, emulsified and then fortified with additives.
It's not really food replacement. It's food.
Yes, there may be some of those chemicals that we haven't yet recognized as being important to a healthy diet. However, since quite a few people (not just Rob, there's an entire community built around this doing DIY Soylent for the past few months) have been fine on Soylent for a significant amount of time, there's not much reason to think that we're missing anything life-or-death important. We certainly know that there isn't anything in your typical fast-food meal that is both important for health and missing from Soylent.
It seems like you have two main objections. First, judging from your posts, you really fucking love food. That's cool, and I'm happy that you can get that much enjoyment from eating, but a lot of us don't. Second, you seem to think that there's a fundamental difference between food and not-food (Soylent). If you look at the chemistry though, there really isn't. In fact, Soylent has significantly more healthful nutrients than the average American's diet.
That all said, nobody is trying to convince you to convert to Soylent. I couldn't care less where you get your nutrition. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for the same courtesy in the other direction.
Is it the concept of literally replacing all of your meals? To me it seems that there are dozens of existing MRPs that beat Soylent on price, flavor, and quality. But I have rarely seen any manufacturer claim that you can replace every meal with their product, and when they do its been controversial, and only suggested for limited times while convalescing or cutting.
What's the appeal?
That said, I don't intend to replace all of my meals. Eating is often more for social reasons than it is for nutritive ones, and in some cases I'll still be happy to eat conventional food for that reason. I expect to replace most of my meals, but I don't plan to swear off conventional food entirely. Maybe once or twice a week I'll have lunch or dinner with friends.
There's no difference. The point is that those are expensive because getting a concoction of nutrients that doesn't damage you in the long term is hard.
For some reason this subject hits a nerve with some people really, really hard (Aside: it's actually really fascinating to think about why that is. Health concerns are definitely not enough to explain the level of vitriol.). Those people then tend to use some really disingenuous arguments against Soylent. For example, I can't say how many times I've seen people dismissing Rob as "having spent a couple weekends reading Wikipedia". Well, no, he spent quite a significant amount of time reading textbooks and journals, getting a pretty reasonable grounding in the science. It's also not like it's his first time studying science, seeing as he is an engineer, yet somehow people are actually describing him and Soylent as "anti-intellectual". Obviously he didn't go through a traditional degree program in nutrition, but I've seen what comes out of a lot of those traditional degree programs, and that's really not much of an argument against him.
It's especially fascinating to see this backlash in a community like HN, where most of us work in a field that has done a lot to cast off the traditional model. A lot of our role models didn't go through those traditional degree programs either, yet something about nutrition makes people completely freak out. Yes, I get it, nutrition is complex and we know relatively little about it. Yes, I get it, if you screw up on nutrition people's lives are at risk. And yet, as Rob often points out, nobody was up in arms yelling at him when he was eating a terrible diet of pizza rolls and fast food. I find it really hard to believe that Soylent could be worse for you than that.
Sorry for going off on a bit of a rant, obviously I've thought about this all for a while.
>Obviously he didn't go through a traditional degree program in nutrition, but I've seen what comes out of a lot of those traditional degree programs, and that's really not much of an argument against him.
That's another false equivalency. Nutritional programs do not produce scientists, but not being in a nutritional program doesn't suddenly make you a scientist.
>Well, no, he spent quite a significant amount of time reading textbooks and journals, getting a pretty reasonable grounding in the science. It's also not like it's his first time studying science, seeing as he is an engineer
Engineers do not practice the type of science required to develop new food/drugs. Where are the long term studies across various demographics with double-blind tests? The lack of those is what makes this "anti-intellectual".
They may not be advertised as a full-time meal replacement, but they are certainly used as such by a non-negligible number of people. Nobody is up in arms about that fact.
> not being in a nutritional program doesn't suddenly make you a scientist.
Nowhere did I claim any such thing.
> Engineers do not practice the type of science required to develop new food/drugs.
I wasn't claiming that they do, I was simply claiming that it's not his first time hearing what the scientific method is. He's not a complete foreigner to the field, though many people have cast him as such.
> Where are the long term studies across various demographics with double-blind tests?
How do you propose to accomplish this? This is exactly why nutrition is such an undeveloped science. You can't reasonably test hypotheses in the field, predominantly for ethical reasons (forcing someone to eat nothing but fast-food is clearly unethical). Double-blind is also pretty much impossible in most scenarios, e.g. Soylent vs. McDonalds.
The lack of rigorous double-blind studies isn't because of anti-intellectualism, it's because those studies are completely impractical. The best we can do is have volunteers try it out and provide anecdotal evidence. It isn't rigorous and it isn't scientific, but so far the results are all positive.
I don't advocate for soylent, but I'm not against it either, and that's only because I honestly don't know what to make of any meal replacement. Right now, making claims like potentially curing world hunger are much too premature when factoring in how little we know (i.e. we literally wouldn't know when we had such a cure if it slapped us in the face); thus I wouldn't be surprised if much of HN is backlashing based on those marketing claims. If instead it was billed less like a product, and more like a long-term research project into the intricacies of nutrition, then I know I would've backed it (and it would've made it a lot clearer that you're investing for a chance to be a guinea pig, rather than paying to be a consumer of a life-altering product). Because despite the fact that MRPs have been in constant research by other companies, a fresh open engineering perspective would still be welcome. They still have a chance to pivot that way, but some stuff like what's in this reddit thread, is a bit concerning: http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1jvsie/the_man_w... I don't particularly like the attitude of the comment, but it does make some good points.
What exactly is Soylent's target market? 20-30 something men?
As much as I love the idea of a meal replacement, the idea of a one-formula-for-all Soylent marketed as a near-entire meal replacement is kind of disturbing. I really hope the Soylent team figure things out soon by coming out with multiple formulas, or at least make it really clear who they're targeting first.
You don't have to even reach for a patient with special dietary requirements to realize the problem. For years I had to ensure I either took an iron supplement or got enough iron through my diet due to iron deficiency anemia from menstruation - a problem discovered only after I passed out in the middle of the street one morning. Given that I love iron-rich foods and that I chalked up the rest of the symptoms to stress, imagine my surprise. My postmenopausal mother consumes an absurd amount of calcium daily because that's one thing the female body needs after menopause. My father is getting old and his eye doctor tells him to consume eye vitamins now to reduce his risk of AMD (age related macular degeneration - one of the largest causes of vision loss). These three examples from my immediate family. Half the world's population will menstruate at some point, or will stop doing so. Even more will eventually get old. You can see where I'm trying to go with this.
I would probably be a lot more relaxed about this and put Soylent on the same level as my Carnation Breakfast Essentials if it's only supposed to replace a small part of what you eat, but while people are wholeheartedly advertising this as a complete meal replacement and while all the (so far public) test subjects seem to be 20-30 something men... I'll be nervous about it and I'll hold it to a higher standard. (And no, none of my disapproval of Soylent means I approve of crappy diets of fast food and sugary foods. Maybe some people will end up eating healthier with Soylent compared to their old diet, which would be great, but just don't market it like it's for everyone to replace nearly all their meals with IMO.)
I don't think anyone is expecting to replace all 21 meals per week with Soylent (including the creator, who specifically said that his regular meals have become more delightful).
For me, the aspects that resonate are: 1) weight management, 2) ease and time savings, 3) cost savings & 4) increased alertness & energy.
If you have any suggestions on what I should consider until Soylent is ready, I'm all ears.
Afraid I don't know of any in the US, though (assuming location based on time). Medifast seems the closest but they advocate meals alongside the replacement.
There is nothing like a food shortage in the world. There is problem with food distribution, often because its expensive to send food from point A to B and no one is ready to pay for it.
The solution is to find those people jobs so that they can buy food.
It has more to do with economic policy.
also, doesn't it have to be blended?