Soylent: Operations Update
blog.soylent.me
blog.soylent.me
One of the aisles is targeted at young people, with marketing themes around bodybuilding or triathlon training. The other aisle is targeted at senior citizens, with marketing themes around osteoporosis or longevity. There might be a third aisle, or a portion of one of the other two, targeting mostly women with themes of weight loss. However, it's pretty much the same stuff in the bottle on any aisle.
Soylent looks to be a online aisle, targeting the exact same stuff to tech-savvy hipsters, with themes of lifehacking and and classic sci-fi cinema.
I'm sure that your particular Brawndo is special because it has electrolytes, or whatever, but I don't understand why the underlying concept of a meal-replacement shake warrants so much coverage. This concept isn't the least bit novel.
Compare the marketing/segmentation of the existing products:
Senior citizens: For old people / a worse replacement for regular meals / medical.
Women losing weight: I'm fat / unhealthy / a worse replacement for regular meals / temporary, once I've lost the weight I'll switch back.
Bodybuilders: DUDE, CHECK OUT MY LATS. I ALWAYS DO 10 x 10 DP SETS AND THEN SLAM DOWN A PROTEIN SHAKE. DUUUUUDE.
Soylent: For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost.
Now which of these is going to attract, and which is going to repel, the stereotypical HN user?
Of course these are stereotypes, but this is marketing, and segmenting often uses stereotypes to push people into making different purchasing decisions: As an average HN user, I'm going to feel weird/wrong buying a women's weight loss shake, or a senior citizens medical food, or a gym expert's protein shake, but I'm going to feel great buying Soylent, because I fit into the marketing.
My point is that none of the existing products on the market market all these points: * An equal replacement for food, instead of a worse substitute on one axis or another (at least nutritionally); * An all the time replacement, not just for a specific purpose; * Market direct to the consumer (this seems to be the issue with some of the replacements used in hospitals).
Now, whether Soylent actually meets these claims, or whether the stereotypes are actually relevant to the contents of the products themselves, is largely irrelevant at this point. This is marketing, and HN users are gullible to it like everyone else. (Personally, I'm rooting for Soylent)
Re the name, which a bunch of people who seriously fail to see why that name: because it is rebellious in exactly the way average HN users are suckers for.
Exactly, and here's another example: What's the difference between Diet Coke and Coke Zero?
Answer: Diet Coke is popular with women, so some men won't drink it. Hence, introduce the more masculine Coke Zero, but basically the same thing. But make some tiny little tweaks to caffeine content and sweetness to create plausible deniability about it being identical.
Reference: http://foodwatch.com.au/mailbag/item/q-what-s-the-difference...
Arguments like "but this product already exists" probably reflect more on the arguer than the product.
That said, I found the arguments urging caution around significant/unproven diet changes to be quite compelling. I'm intrigued by the idea and very interested in following the product, but I don't intend to be an early tester myself.
People can and have lived on liquid food for quite a long time. This isn't new, this isn't particularly interesting or groundbreaking in anyway.
Why the fascination on HN? Can someone explain it to me?
Isn't this a YC-invested company? Other than that, I agree with you. I'm not interested in Soylent the product, nor am I interested in Soylent the company. I tell my friends to be wary of using the product.
It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health to unqualified individuals, who lack the resources to employ qualified individuals, simply for an extra hour everyday.
I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.
> simply for an extra hour everyday
An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.
If you live in a country which adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health then I disagree. You entrust those bodies and the qualified individuals within them because they ensure what you purchase is what it says it is. Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.
> An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.
If Soylent works completely as advertised yes you gain time. Should it lead to any kind of health problems it's more than likely you lose time.
Soylent has to adhere to all those same standards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_food_and_dietary_...
>The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 mandated that the FDA regulate dietary supplements as foods
Soylent has to adhere to the exact same standards as all the other food you buy right now.
"Like other food substances, dietary supplements are not subject to the safety and efficacy testing requirements imposed on drugs, and unlike drugs they do not require prior approval by the FDA; however, they are subject to the FDA regulations regarding adulteration and misbranding. The FDA can take action against dietary supplements only after they are proven to be unsafe. "
Do you actually know that? Presumably if there is US regulation/law around selling and marketing food products, then Soylent will have to be compliant just like everything else?
Though, given I live in Australia, a country which
> adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health
and I can still buy all the Quarter Pounders and chocolate I want, it seems these bodies are more about food safety, than choosing my diet for me.
(For examples, just read the comments on this article, or any of the Soylent-related articles).
It seems to be based on a presumption that we all have amazing, carefully designed and scientifically tested diets as is, and Soylent is going to make our diets demonstrably worse, or (apparently) make us really sick, or (even) kill us.
Given that 69.2% of the adult US population is overweight, it would seem that our current amazing diets are perhaps not working.
Of course, the vast majority of us make it up as we go along, influenced by food manufacturers and marketing, and the people around us, as well as our parents.
Sure, food manufacturers have more scrutiny than you or I, but no one is making sure that any particular combination of food in the supermarket is going to lead to a healthy diet - nothing stops me from choosing and carrying out a bad diet - and many many people 'choose' and carry out bad diets as is.
Do you seriously think that, when the supermarket put in an entire aisle of confectionery, that they were doing it as some attempt to give us a good diet?
Or that coke is attempting to help us lose weight when the dump all that sugar - or HFCS - in?
If you think the person buying Taco Bell for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch, and KFC for dinner is following a carefully designed, healthy diet, you are deluded. If you think these people don't exist - you're deluded there too.
To be not evil, Soylent only has to be _not worse_ than the average existing diet.
Now, I agree that a complete meal replacement product should get more scrutiny than the average person's diet - and Soylent is! I certainly haven't had my diet designed by a group of food scientists or dieticians.
You're right there. Some people really do have a strong emotional response against the idea, which makes them put forward nitpicking arguments against it.
Will the initial implementations of Soylent be perfect? Probably not. But there is no reason why it's impossible to make an all-in-one food that is tasty, nutritious, convenient and cheap, so I'm sure that if enough effort is put into doing so, eventually it will happen.
When it happens, it's unlikely that I will solely eat Soylent; I like cooking and I like varienty. But I wouldn't be surprised if I come to use it for 30% of my calorific intake.
Sorry, but this is straight out wrong. You will lose nothing and it will cause no harm in anyway, and I mean it literally if you experiment with natural foods. Go eat bananas, or apples, or mixture of those. Or say mixture of 20 fruits. It will never cause you any harm. Eat rice, wheat, meat, ragi, vegetables you name it. It will cause you absolutely no harm if you eat what is supposed to be eaten by a normal adult.
This is true, even if you occasionally eat junk food.
But if you go and pull only the essential 'ingredients' of these foods separately, mix them up in water and drink them. You are likely to cause a good enough amount of damage.
There is a very big reason, why our tongues have taste buds,why our stomachs have hydrochloric acid in them,why the stomach has a mucus lining, why we secrete digestive juices/enzymes, why we secrete bile. You see the whole functioning of the body is not designed to receive dosage of macro nutrients back to back in hourly dosage.
On a macro level if you look close, the food chain and the digestive system is perfectly optimized to survive and even thrive in the hands of unqualified individuals like us. If our body needed back to back dosage of macro nutrients in precise quantities to survive, our species would be extinct by now.
So the definition of efficiency when it comes to human digestive system is not, time saved in cooking food, or ability to receive and absorb exact chemical nutrients in precise quantities.
Also note the aim of the human digestive system and the way it measures efficiency is very different than our way.
>>An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.
You could say this about playing a game in the Google doodle, or say reading the news paper.
Its not like your receive 6% of your life in one shot. You receive it an hour at a time. For the kind of job we do an hour is not sufficient to even get started.
Now, the application can be debated, but soylent doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table.
It feels like this is just old solution with new marketing.
Why? Soylent has no rational relationship to any solution to any of the problems that cause people to be starving.
I have this for breakfast every morning. It's designed to be nutritious, convenient and filling to aid weight loss:
http://www.idealshape.com/meal-replacement-shakes/
I have a personal size (two-cup?) blender - I mix one scoop powder, one cup milk, several ice cubes, blend for 30 seconds for a morning milkshake.
Other companies sell formulas designed for weight gain for bodybuilders - you can find those at the local health food/supplements store.
[1]actually abbot and the like will advertise as being a full meal replacement... for situations where people have medical need and are being monitored by a medical staff, which is to say, in situations where problems might be caught and addressed.
[2]Don't want to eat three multi dish meals a day at 8,12,7? Human bodies have plenty of reserves to deal with out getting 100% of their RDI every single day, just so long as it averages out over a week or two.
But you still want something to keep the stomach from rumbling? Great, the supermarket is chock-a-block full of foods that need no preperation and supply a wide variety of nutrients, either in the form of specialized products (Ensure, Clif bars, various other supplements/diet products) or just no-prep food: pouch of tuna, quart of milk, yogurt, that thing of trail mix that's clearly just muesli with extra peanuts, sack of pre hard-boiled eggs. Whatever.
"Ensure Complete, one simple choice for 4-in-1 nutrition. Each delicious shake provides balanced nutrition and targeted muscle, heart, immune, and bone health benefits. It’s a simple choice to get the right nutrients in the right amounts to help you stay strong. Take charge of your health and your nutrition with Ensure Complete!"
From their FAQ: http://ensure.ca/en/faq/
"For how long can I use Ensure? Ensure products deliver complete and balanced nutrition that is always beneficial. There is no time limit to using Ensure products. In fact, long-term use is encouraged if you’re at a nutritional risk (for example, if you’re an older adult)."
"Can Ensure replace a meal? Yes. Ensure products are complete and balanced, when used in appropriate amounts they can be used to replace meals."
For instance, that 260% protein you cited is about half the protein I take in a day.
Also, FYI, the danger in taking in too much protein is very much overblown. I doubt you could actually consume enough protein to make it a problem unless you had a medical problem with your kidneys already.
In the FAQ I pointed to they say that Ensure is safe for long term use, is complete, and they answer a question about how many servings a day are necessary for meet your needs.
Personally I am curious as to how it works out; I've never been one to buy gels or sports drinks, preferring to make my own because I know what goes in them and can tweak it for me. I get this vibe from the Soylent project.
Really? Their site launched with a FAQ on safety that essentially read "well, we haven't died yet..."
If you're eating normal food then some deficiency in one component of one meal may be masked by a surplus in another, and in particular if you eat a varied diet then that deficiency could start and stop within one meal. If instead your sole source of nutrition is suddenly deficient, it's not a stretch to think that you could notice a difference within 10 days.
I'm not trying to defend the product, I just don't think it's inconceivable that 10 days is long enough to notice a big problem with a formulation change.
> Various doctors, dietitians, and food scientists
> have been reviewing our formula and providing
> suggestions as they see fit. We have been listening
> to them and testing these changes in our beta
> program. Each modification requires making a new
> batch of Soylent by hand, shipping them to our
> beta testers, and gathering their feedback, a
> process that takes at least 10 days per revision.
Even if you had a large beta program and ran each revisions for 100 days, the feedback would be garbage unless you had proper controls and measurements in place.
But you are assuming the purpose of the test is to test the merit of the dietary motivator for the change, the testing described here might just be user acceptance tasting. That is, does this this change make it taste bad? Give you gas? etc
If you want to know, if you are allergic, a short test should be sufficient. If you wanna know, if allergies might be initiated from the food, 10 days don't do much good. If you want to know, if some known things (nutrition, et al) are missing from the "food" 10 days won't do you much good and might only be detected in really rigorous blood-tests.
If you want to check for problems with unknown unknowns (and there are a lot of things we yet do not know, regarding food and our bodies) 10 days are nothing more then a nice joke. (Sorry, but living with a biologist make me quite cynical, when it comes to things, that might just endanger us.)
A really scientific method is something else. They might stumble upon some things, but I'd like to know, if every beta-tester gets his blood-work done before and after every test. How does the testing process in the first place look like (blood tests as said? just taste? subjective feeling after n-days of new soylent version? and so on).
> so everyone will get their complete amino acid profile
No everyone will get a one size fits all amino acid profile. And then comes the problem, that humans aren't "one size fits all". They will probably get a solution, that fits one, two or probably max. three sigma of the targeted population.
To be fair, I love food, so soylent would not be for me. I really think, that a cheap food-replacement that does give most people mostly everything they need in terms of nutrition, might really do a lot of good, if distributed in times of disaster or in regions with problematic food distribution (third world). But that is not the targeted audience as I see it.
It seems to be people who do not value food, but have enough money on their hand, to replace it with this product.
"The onset of symptoms of scurvy depends on how long it takes for the person to use up their limited stores of vitamin C. For example, if the diet includes no vitamin C at all, the average onset of symptoms is about four weeks"
http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pag...
I would think twice before committing to a soylent-only diet.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a601166.htm...
for something like twenty years before dying last week at the age of ninety-one. It's basic medical background knowledge that keeps me from being impressed by the Soylent shot in the dark, and it is reflecting that human nutrition is both
a) mostly a hard problem, and
b) mostly a SOLVED problem
that keeps me from making gee-whiz comments about the Soylent project here on HN. The great thing about a free-enterprise economy with minimal regulation is that if you like this kind of thing, you can spend your hard-earned money to buy Soylent. If your eating behavior includes experiential or social outcomes better met by eating a variety of foods you cook and chew, you can join me in eating a little of this and a little of that over the course of a year. The Soylent company is YC-invested, as I recall, so press releases from the company will continue to be posted here, but meanwhile I will pursue a variety of micronutrients and a variety of pleasant experiences by eating a varied diet with my family and friends.
1: http://www.cookingfor20.com/2013/06/18/hacker-school-soylent...
edit: also note, the only synthesised 'chemicals' most recipes include are potassium gluconate and calcium citrate. Everything else is a food or food extract.
Now that's ironic.
Soylent is designed to completely replace food which is a much harder & much more expensive proposition than simply giving you some energy until dinnertime.
Bonus points for a Paleo friendly version.
As it is now, I would never get close to that carbohydrate-based drink.
An aspect of Soylent that I don't get is the assumption that it gets you out of the drudgery of eating, for those people for whom it is such a chore: the idea of chugging multiple cups of gray, sludgy drink daily sounds like an enormous burden that would grow tiring really quickly. It sounds like something that would make you dread the passing of the day, as another cup of slurry draws ever closer.
I speak at least a bit from experience, as one stage in my life had me working out daily, starting each with a big protein drink. Over time I realized that I was dreading, if not even skipping, the workout because of the protein drink that went with it.
1: http://www.cookingfor20.com/2013/06/18/hacker-school-soylent...
In fact, not eating food as often makes you appreciate it more when you have it. Go three months without eating pizza and then have some, how did it taste? Now eat pizza every day for three months and then have some more, how did it taste?
I currently eat once a day and I would gladly replace some of my meals with this drink. That would allow me to eat, say three times a week, enjoying the food that I really crave. As a food lover, this is the perfect product for me.
Why don't you just eat when you want to? As an adult you do what you feel like doing. This is neither here nor there in the discussion regarding Soylent.
In fact, not eating food as often makes you appreciate it more when you have it.
I fully understand and practice the idea of self-deprivation for heightened experiences (I've followed the consumption habits of Ramadan despite being an agnostic, for example). However this product doesn't deprive you of nutrition or liquids, obviously, and while it does deprive you of taste (or at least good taste), the benefit of real food is that the variety is enormous. You mention pizza, for instance, yet again it isn't the choice of pizza every day or Soylent and then the monthly pizza -- many people with good diets already have pizza so infrequently that it is an enormous treat. The same with a grilled burger. Or a steak. Or a lobster. Or a fresh fish. Or sushi. Or Chinese. Some butter chicken. A turkey sandwich on fresh Rye. Or even, dare I say it, the occasional Big Mac. It goes on forever and ever and ever, such that if I ever lose that delight with food, I'm doing something wrong.
I guess some people just don't care about taste as much as they care about superior nutrition that uses less resources to produce and transport, and less time to prepare, consume and clean up.
You've run the numbers on this?
It might be, if you were considering each individual micronutrient individually. The thing about real foods is that they tend to be sources of multiple micronutrients. You get more than calcium from milk.
I love to eat. I love to eat too much. If I make two portions of a meal with the intention of eating the other one later, I'll often just eat both. Where food is concerned, I'm like a labrador dog; I have no willpower. Everyone I know in my family is like this.
I'm mildly overweight, but only just because I play sports, hike and go to the gym a lot. I'd love to have a way of eating ideal my calorific intake with no fuss or special eating time because it would make it much easier to avoid overeating - I could still eat proper food a couple of times a week for the sheer pleasure, but not every mealtime would become a hazardous temptation to eat way, way too much. Soylent looks like a possible way of achieving that.
It's still not a great name because it will always bring the negative connotation for those familiar with the movie. But I see where the inventor was going with it.
Maybe not everybody is going to use it as a straight meal replacement. I for one like to think I would enjoy a glass for breakfast. Or maybe even for a quick working lunch, you know, on those days I'm too busy at work to stop and smell the roses and go out for an 1.5hr lunch break.... I've seen sooo many people get up in arms about completely replacing food. "ZOMG WHY DON'T YOU PEOPLE LIKE FOOD" etc.. Really, I'm fascinated by the nutrition needs of the human body, and I think trying to cram everything into a drink is a curious concept. And yes, on those days I'm on the road, I think it would be better than stopping at say, Mcdonalds or Subway. Likely in both taste and health.
Also, Only Soylent green is people. All the other soylents (red? purple? I don't remember the colors..) were legit food I believe. I do enjoy the irony though...
The whole point of Soylent is that it is a 100% food replacement. If people just want to skip meals...just skip them! Or have a glass of milk.
The human body does not operate on the edge of deprivation, and quite contrary you could go quite a long period of time eating just rice. This notion that every meal must provide a full-spectrum nutritionally complete intake is not nutritionally or practically valid.
on those days I'm too busy at work to stop and smell the roses and go out for an 1.5hr lunch break
It takes literally seconds to throw together a sandwich. Or to microwave some leftovers. Etc. Pitching Soylent compared to infomercial-style broken food habits (you muss! you fuss!) has always seemed very dishonest to me.