Not: "we're a large company with deeply-interested professionals who've made this their life's work, our own multi-million dollar labs and decades of accumulated experience in the development, testing, validation and manufacture of temporary food substitutes". Because that's boooorrrrinnnng.
Basically it's getting buzz because of novelty (to people who didn't know there were existing products) and homophily (Rhinehart is "one of us").
The actual product is at this point nearly completely tangential to the marketing.
It's a bit like a dietitian bursting in and saying "I've invented a new thing, I call it 'computertalk'. What you do is you 'type' your 'instructions' into your computer. It's going to change everything, you won't need programmers any more!"
you don't need to know about dietary supplements or supply chain management to understand the rhetorical distinctions.
Why do those ads use "school teachers"? Because it is relatable to the target audience and sufficiently anti-authoritarian that they don't question the credentials.
I'm not for or against Soylent, and I usually find this kind of advertising annoying, but it's also entirely possible that people further down the chain of command in any system discover things that people higher-up won't or can't.
That's part of the entire premise of why startups work, no?
Here we're talking about people who aren't even in the same system!
Einstein was someone who went up the academic course for physics, but had a brief detour during a jobless interval. I imagine many of us here can relate to that. He's not some sort of quintessential outsider.
(He's not a quintessential insider either; while the rumors about his poor grades are overstated, he did have a rough relationship with any academic subject he didn't really care about. He certainly wasn't the valedictorian type or a groomed, perfect academic from tip to toe. But neither was he an outsider. He's just an average everyday genius who combined tons of hard work with immense native talent.)
I want to be able to take a good fuel for my body and indulge in great food whenever I want.
I want to be able to back-pack for a week with only a 4-pound food supply.
Then eat some meat and some vegetables.
> I want to be able to back-pack for a week with only a 4-pound food supply.
Then take trail mix.
P.S.: I am currently eating Chicken I made with a side of snap-peas from my garden. I do what you say already -- I just also want an alternative which has incredible shelf-life, portability, cost-benefit, etc. etc. etc.
By the way -- there are such alternatives already available. Have you bought any before?
https://www.google.com/search?q=meal+replacement+shakes
Almost all of them are marketed to the diet crowd. There are a bunch of 'atkins' branded bars, too, if you are going the low-carb route. Slim-fast, I know, can be had in giant tubs for relatively little money per serving; I remember as a kid, looking through my grandparent's pantry and finding a giant tub of slim-fast.
This is a huge industry. I mean, sure, marketing it to hackers is a new thing, and something I, personally, would have never considered, and the guy is doing a hell of a job of it, but yeah; the product itself is nothing new, even if he's selling to a group that has not yet been targeted.
I actually kinda like the McDonald's salads. I mean, as far as you can like fast food at all. If you go easy on the dressing, (the dressing comes in a package that looks like a giant-size katsup packet, so you get to decide how much you eat.) I think it's probably pretty healthy, I mean, at least when you compare to shakes.
I have used meal-replacement shakes in the past as supplemental breakfast; I like to load up on calories in the morning, but eating can be... hard before my system wakes up, so the meal-replacement shakes (with as much breakfast as I can choke down) is a reasonable way to consume as many calories as I can in the morning.
Of course, for me? meal-replacement shakes have never quelled hunger like real food, so I'm no longer using them just because I'm trying to reduce the number of calories I consume. If I eat something, it had better make me feel not hungry for a good long time. I'm having the best luck with meat and vegetables... the carbohydrates tend to make me hungry shortly afterwards. On the other hand, I have not lost significant weight. (I vary from 200 to 195#, and that has been true for some time now. As far as I can tell, most of that 5# is either water gain or loss, or inaccuracy of my cheap bathroom scale.) so "you shall know him by his fruits" - don't take my advice on losing weight, as I've not managed to do so myself.
Also, a big, sarcastic thanks. after that 'meal replacement shake' query on google, now just about every webpage I load is trying to sell me some sort of 'optimized nutrition' (Google seems to get that I'm male-identified and thus is trying to sell me the shakes targeted at 'building lean muscle' - you know, the stuff with the rippling abs on the can. Google does not seem to be smart enough to notice that I quite often google things I don't intend to buy. Really, books on what I'm searching for are usually more appropriate than products I'm searching for. Not that I often buy books through ads... but it's more likely than me buying nutrition shakes targeted at bodybuilders.)
About the targeting, either use incognito mode or opt out of targeted advertising (it's in your Google account preferences).
Fibre and protein can increase the satiety of a drink, though.
I've also started doing slow-cooker pork. I pan fry it when I'm done, and it comes out kind of somewhere between pulled pork and carnitas. I slow-cooked a bunch of boneless beef short ribs last night, I haven't tried them yet. more expensive per pound, but short ribs are so good.
Especially if I cook something in sauce (like chili) I put it in little ziplock baggies and freeze it.
Or do we all just think that because of the original blog post?
Personally? I dismiss those claims as marketing fluff. I am not competent to evaluate those claims; I'm not saying that the guy is lying or anything, soylent may in fact be perfect. I don't know. but the claims sound so out there that I don't think they are worth evaluating. I am treating them as marketing fluff until/unless credible people do a credible study.
I suspect that none of the other meal replacement drinks make such claims due to fear of legal liability. "A delicious shake for breakfast, lunch, and a sensible dinner" is the standard formula, which is reasonable; I'm sure Soylent would work just fine on a similar plan. (hell, for most of us, water would work just fine.)
I bet that as Soylent accumulates money (and lawyers) they will move towards a model where they emphasize 'And a sensible dinner'
And really, if you think that the RDA is good enough, just take your vitamin pills.
Really, it's textbook. He's using his ties and understanding of a subculture demographic to market to it specifically.
Sure, but the execution (to me) looks good. He is doing a way better job, for example, than I've done at marketing VPSs - a product that is much more natural to this market. Better, I think, than I did even back when I had a compelling price advantage over the competition.
That's doable already. 4-pounds of dehydrated food will last you a week, and has the advantage that you get to eat something different for every meal.
The number of bad habits I engage in over my days is one thing, I am not about to jump from fad to fad in hopes of out smarting the medical community.
I think it's not because it sounds boring but because it sounds like a marketing bullshit. Guy in a suit tells you "trust us, we have a whole basement of experts and years of experience" but when you check them out, the company was funded few months ago and only one employee doesn't have some sort of "manager" or "director" in his job title.
I guess openness of soylent and creator's low experience in bullshitting is what makes it attractive. Those of us who eat to live don't expect much from industry after McDonalds and sugar everywhere but we still desperately hope for something better. That hopes fuels enthusiasm for soylent.
But this is an aspect of the large nutrition companies that can be checked out. Unless you're talking about the other companies.
They do have a lot of people with respected qualifications working for them; they do produce all these different products.
The bullshit with these companies is that they push multivitamins as useful for everyone, when really there's a limited market. They push a bunch of other stuff as useful for all kinds of conditions, when really the evidence is weak at best.
> Those of us who eat to live don't expect much from industry after McDonalds and sugar everywhere but we still desperately hope for something better. That hopes fuels enthusiasm for soylent.
That's fair enough. It's your body, and you can make your own choices. You know that as well as Soylent there are a bunch of these liquid feeding products, so if you wanted to experiment now you can?
Sometimes a fresh set of eyes are valuable, because the industry culture has developed some pathologies. Sugar in the food industry is a prime example.
And sometimes, it's just a cover for charlatans.
Would you care to link to where people can purchase these existing products? It seems that every time someone makes that claim they are either referring to medical products not available to the public, or to crap like MET-Rx that doesn't provide a complete, balanced micro nutrient profile.
Very few of these products are prescription only or even pharmacy only products. It is possible to persuade companies to sell to individuals. To answer your question - Ensure brand includes complete meal replacement products; the Fortisip range also includes suitable products. There are a bunch of others but these are easiest to obtain.
Most companies are very careful about selling these products. Some people think that's a good thing.
Enshure: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes click buy online from the product page.
Fortisip: http://www.fortisipdrink.co.uk/. Again, click the buy online link from there homepage. (Though I think this is a UK brand.)
PS: You can find a wide product range at http://abbottstore.com/
No, that's almost exactly what these products are designed for.
EX: Similac, Complete nutrition for your baby's first year.
It should be noted that most of these are balanced nutritionally but not calorie wise because it's easy to backfill empty calories with soda etc and people generally drink quite a few extra calories. But, you really can live off of ensure complete and empty calories or just ensure if you don't mind spending more money.
How is 13% of one micronutrient and 65% of another balanced? In order to get complete micronutrient coverage from ensure, you have to drink 5 a day, putting you at risk of overexposure to manganese assuming you drink water still.
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/DRI/DRI_Vitamin_A/394-419_150.p...
The Manganease recommendation is based on observed western diets not actual need. From existing studies it looks like there is a fairly wide tolerable range for Manganease with some people needing quite a bit to maintain Manganease levels. Anyway, 5x ensure is well within the 'Tolerable Upper Limit' and thus Not an issue.
Edit: If it's really bothering you. Ambient manganese concentrations in seawater have been reported to range from 0.4 to 10 μg/l (ATSDR, 2000), with an average of about 2 μg/l (Barceloux, 1999). Levels in fresh water typically range from 1 to 200 μg/l (Barceloux, 1999). ATSDR (2000) reported that a river water survey in the USA found dissolved manganese levels ranging from <11 to >51 μg/l. The United States Geological Survey’s National Water Quality Assessment Program has gathered limited data since 1991 on representative study basins around the USA. These data indicate a median manganese level of 16 μg/l in surface waters, with 99th-percentile concentrations of 400–800 μg/l (Leahy & Thompson, 1994; USGS, 2001). Higher levels in aerobic waters are usually associated with industrial pollution.. (http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/man...)
So, again there may be people that need to be consurned to it's less than 1% of the population and they can get buy by drinking bottled water if nothing else.
You keep making this claim and it is just not true.
And no, this is not an "every opinion deserves equal airtime" claim. The vast majority of nutrition and health experts draw on a mix of science, pseudo science and superstition, and assume it is all science.
(Quick check: Think salt intake causes hypertension? That dietary cholesterol (and cholesterol in general) is bad for you? That you can only get B-12 from meat, or that cows make it? If you answered "yes", your answers are not based on science)
Could you link to a few relevant medical studies?
Have a look at the relationship between potassium/nacl and Blood pressure.
TLDR: Focus on unprocessed foods and foods you like that are rich in potassium. Lower your bodyfat percentage and exercise in same fashion regularly.
Analogy: peanut allergy is not caused by peanuts. But if you have it, you should avoid peanuts. It is possible that your hypertension is related to salt intake, in which the advice to cut back on salt is a good advice. But that's not generally true - not any more than general the advice to avoid peanuts is good.
The causal relationship between salt and blood pressure appears to have historically been under debate. I don't however think it should be so readily dismissed as not backed by "Science". In fact the evidence appears to suggest that there is now little to debate.
A study called INTERSALT [1] in the late 1980s appears to have muddied the waters, and is often brought up. It supported the causal link - but was subsequently seen to be the victim of poor statistical analysis.
This seems to have been the theme of those arguing pro-salt, finding flaws in studies. Fair game - but it doesn't disprove the link. More recently though the general consensus seems to be that a long term reduction sodium has a measurable and beneficial impact on BP[2]. A key study in demonstrating the link was the DASH-Sodium study, a randomized controlled trial [3].
The Harvard School of Public Health has some great articles[4][5] discussing the "Salt Debate" and points to a number of papers.
Personally, having taken time to read (and understand what I can), I think the evidence supporting is pretty compelling so have reduced the levels of sodium in my diet.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersalt_study [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23558162 [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11136953?dopt=Citation [4] http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2010/07/10/its-t... [5] http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-and-heart-d...
However, iirc (can't review now), the data supports the following:
A) on average, if hypertension, reducing salt reduces blood pressure. But so does adding potassium.
B) despite that, there is a population with hypertension for which salt reduction does not reduce blood pressure.
C) In healthy individuals, increase of salt intake increases blood pressure slightly, but does not get to the hypertension realm.
But the often repeated meme "salt causes hypertension" is not supported by data. Furthermore, sodium deficiency is a serious condition, which was practically unheard of before the low sodium craze.
When someone who isn't trained at all in a field claims to have made a revolutionary advance in that field, the rational response for a non-subject-matter-expert member of the public is deep skepticism. The discovery might indeed be revolutionary, but the way we find out is by running proper scientific tests on it, not by pioneering the revolution.
The rational objective news angle on this is as a human interest story. Until a proper, falsifiable scientific test is at least planned, this project is genuinely interesting, but has no scientific merit.
(FWIW, health advice condensed into headline "do" and "don't" edicts is bad science reporting as well)
Most of the criticism directed at soylent is of "this doesn't seem right" variety, rather than the "this detail is wrong" variety. The latter is what I read the discussions for. The former is a waste of bits.
And the response in question is not deep skepticism, but equally non-scientific and inaccurate nonsense. "Soylent will kill you because you need the magic spirits of whole foods!" is not skepticism, it is bullshit.
Human nutritional science is HORRIBLE from a "meta-science" perspective. Gary Taubes, who admittedly is a bit of a one trick pony, has written extensively on the failings of the nutritional scientific community to adequately fund real, controlled studies that test out poorly performing hypothesies that have been taken as gospel.
Eggs are good for you now, but a few years ago every doctor was saying they were bad for you, along with butter. Why is that? Because nutritional science SUCKS. The general public thinks that eating a serving of bacon is worse for their body than eating a serving of raisin bran. The actual data shows that the opposite is true. The fault for this lies 100% with the nutritional science community in the United States.
As a person who fell victim to their bullshit for years until I tried the Atkins diet (tons of green vegetables, meat, minimal carbs/sugar) and subsequently lost weight, improved my blood profile (HDL went up, triglycerides went down, LDL decreased slightly) and all the while going against the conventional wisdom on diet. I tried low fat, I tried vegetarian/vegan, none of it worked. It was scientifically unproven bullshit due to a flawed scientific community embedded in the study of human nutrition.
I'm not saying reject the scientific credentials of individuals in the community. I'm saying reject the establishment. They have repeatedly failed the public, so fuck em.
What most people don't realize is that their gut is probably the single thing with the biggest influence on nutrition, and it is practically its own goddamn biome. Also, what we know of human metabolism would fill an entire wall with an intricate nightmare spaghetti chart, and that would be the abridged version.
At this point, the only viable way to proceed is to continue research and empirical data on large populations. This is why traditional diets and whole foods win, because we already have a lot of data.
Well, maybe "meat sources (dairy products under the umbrella) are the only significant source of B-12 without supplementation" is more accurate.
Cereals are "fortified" so I count that as supplementation.
Sure, many yeasts contains B-12 too, some quite a bit. I'd even agree that it is significant, but it doesn't occur in foods people normally eat (maybe a guess here, but if that were true, vegans wouldn't need to supplement with yeast, etc), so it's taken as a supplemnt.
After the discovery of antibiotics, many people in the western world became B12 deficient - especially vegetarians. However cows and other animals are just as incapable of making it - and in the last 30 years or so, just as deficient as humans, as they've also been getting lots of antibiotics.
So we give them supplements. Thus they have enough B12, and meat eaters do too. According to some estimates, 80% of the world's B12 production goes to animals these days. So, likely, your B12 coming from meat is still from supplement, albeit one given to your hamburger while it was still alive.
I have no dietary sources of B12, and yet have good levels, way above population average. You might call me a liar, more then one MD did. But they usually apologize if they actually research this (Wikipedia B12 has enough info)
Anyway, my guess is you are in your early to mid twenties, and probably have only been a vegan for a handful of years, am I right? Give it 20, 30 years and lets see if your B12 levels are still good.
I've never heard of a study claiming B12 in animals in vivo is not synthesized by bacteria (or archaea). Care to give a reference?
> sorry, It's a fallacy, but I don't like getting my "facts" from programmers and Wikipedia
Programmers, ok. Wikipedia - why? and "dieticians and health professionals" - sorry, most of them have no idea what they are talking about - they are just parroting what they learned. You admit yourself it is a fallacy. What's the point then?
> Anyway, my guess is you are in your early to mid twenties, and probably have only been a vegan for a handful of years, am I right? Give it 20, 30 years and lets see if your B12 levels are still good.
Your guess is very wrong. Been vegetarian for over 35 years (only a few years of those vegan, but not having a B12 source in almost any). And my B12 levels are very good, although they weren't in the past.
That's not what I was referring to. I'm referring to the (implied) claim that the B12 synthisized in our gut by bacteria is available to us.
Wikipedia doesn't support that claim, and Wikipedia is editable by anybody, so while it's mostly trustworthy, if a heavy portion of the editors have a bias, it's going to show in an article that is heavyily political/quasi-relisious like veganism. Or vice versa if Wikipedia editors are heavily carnivorous (e.g Atkins) and hate vegans or something like that.
"Been vegetarian for over 35 years (only a few years of those vegan, but not having a B12 source in almost any)."
Well, I don't know you, and can only assume you aren't lying or bending the truth, so I'll say that it is possible you are an outlier. In a cursory search yesterday (a couple hours only) I found references on both sides of the fence claiming that we can use B12 synthisized in our gut, and about the same number of sources saying we couldn't.
Who to believe in such a hot, political topic. A guy with an axe to grind (vegan trying to defend/promote his lifestyle) or the fact that there seems to be no concensious in the sciencific community?
If you can actually link to them, I would be grateful. I can only find yahoo-answers style discussions that claim people cannot.
> A guy with an axe to grind (vegan trying to defend/promote his lifestyle) or the fact that there seems to be no concensious in the sciencific community?
You are making an awful lot of assumptions about me. I'm not a vegan (I was for a few short years; I've been vegetarian for 35 though). And I more often in these discussions advocate against veganism and vegetarianism because even though they can be very healthy, most people do them wrong - and if you can't stand your ground with science in these discussions, you shouldn't be vegan.
And about consensus in the scientific community - I believe I have science backing me here, but let's put it aside - I gave two other examples in which the (so-called) scientific consensus is provably wrong (and others mentioned egg consumption). Personally, I'm not ignoring scientific consensus on everything and try to look at the details. Follow the common/average belief, and you get common/average results. If you like mediocrity, all power to you.
Maybe "no human" is over stating it.... I could easily just slot "the vast majority of intelligent adult humans" into the sentence and it should still be mind blowing.
People have used their brains to explain nuclear physics, create a network of computers which spans the globe and landed a man on the moon. Yet no one can clearly tell me what I should be fueling my brain and body with?
One of the worst parts is watching how ill equipped most of society is to detect something is off-kilter. This pretty much applies to anything requiring technical understanding beyond that required to visit a mall.