Comment by sowhatquestion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sowhatquestion | Hacker News Reader

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-- Soylent is not a diet. It's not low-calorie, low-carb or anything like that. The simplest way to describe its nutritional content is that a Soylent "meal" has 33% FDA daily value of everything (including fats, carbs, protein, vitamins, minerals). Also, unlike a diet, you don't have to eat it all the time (or according to any sort of regimen) to benefit from it. It is designed to be nutritious enough to replace one's whole diet if necessary, but this decision is up to the user.

-- True, there aren't double-blind, peer-reviewed studies (give it time, though...). But the product was developed over the course of a year, with the help of ~100 volunteers who beta tested it and offered feedback [1].

-- The article you linked correctly identifies the importance of low-glycemic carbs, but it loses me when it argues that all "processed" foods are high-glycemic. Not only does "processed" strike me as a weasel word here, the person they're citing as an authority on this issue is Dr. Dean Ornish, whom many regard as a quack [2]. Soylent's carbs are designed to be low-glycemic. They use a form of maltodextrin ("low DE") that is designed to be low-glycemic, as well as whole-grain oat flour. These ingredients are indeed "processed." But (forgive me) the proof of the Soylent is in the eating: all the beta testers took regular blood tests, and these were checked for any abnormalities, including blood sugar levels. Rob Rhinehart actually had a glucose monitor implanted in his chest to test Soylent's glycemic index directly. The result: "Soylent has a pretty low GI" [3].

[1] http://blog.soylent.me/post/69009837729/last-month-five-boxe... [2] http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/03/05/dr-dean-ornish-... [3] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qpjh4/im_rob_rhinehar...

>with the help of ~100 volunteers who beta tested it and offered feedback [1].

Random testing with no controls, oversight or monitoring is useless.

I'll add to that by saying: a year isn't really a long time and I'd argue not nearly long enough to understand what the long term effects this stuff has on ones health, both positive and negative.

They might have had controls, for all we know. The team shared many but not all details of the process, as is their prerogative.

Rhinehart is an engineer by background, and his blog posts ( http://www.robrhinehart.com ) evince a serious respect for the scientific method. Now that version 1.0 has been finalized and is shipping, I think we will definitely see a lot more testing of Soylent from both inside and outside the organization.

It doesn't matter if their blog does lip-service to the scientific method. No pun intended, but the proof is in eating the pudding, that is, in doing science.

"Random testing with no controls, oversight or monitoring is" how we arrived at the current human diet.

controls = natural selection, survival of the fittest

oversight, monitoring = culture, language, history

Science has the potential to speed up the process of knowledge acquisition. Our current human diet is the result of thousands of years of trial and error. A scientist attempts to follow cause and effect, minimizing confounding variables that obscure cause and effect.

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_...

How much does the current diet have in common with two or even one generation ago?

Some cultures have retained traditional diets, some cultures have not retained traditional diets.d

But on many orders of magnitude larger than 100 people.

Unfortunately, anecdotes are enough for most people; they have no concept of sound science.

It is a food, and is designed to be part of a diet.

Given how poor our knowledge is of nutrition, and how it is still very much an area of active research, I'm very skeptical of any new "foods" that are produced chemically instead of biologically.

Our knowledge of biological systems is extremely limited, we don't have the knowledge to create food at this point, and I think any skepticism about long-term effects is well-warranted given the history of the processed food industry.

Personally, I try to avoid all "foods" that were not around at least a hundred years ago. For something to qualify as food for me, it needs to be composed of ingredients that have evidence of promoting health in the long-term, and I measure the "long-term" by centuries, not years or even decades.

> we don't have the knowledge to create food

Better stop eating then, since any plants or animals you might ingest have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Knowledge of our nutritional needs--this knowledge that we allegedly "don't have"--has completely transformed them.

> any skepticism about long-term effects is well-warranted given the history of the processed food industry

The whole point of Soylent (the creators have basically stated as much) is to take the tools of "processed food" and use them for good, not evil. Seriously, Soylent is not McDonald's. The Atlantic explored this idea in a recent article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-junk...

Soylent is certainly different from McDonalds and the rest of the modern profit-driven food industry, but your first sentence is an insufferable straw man:

> Better stop eating then, since any plants or animals you might ingest have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Knowledge of our nutritional needs--this knowledge that we allegedly "don't have"--has completely transformed them.

Breeding food over the course of many generations is completely different from inventing industrial processes that completely restructure food in a way that no organism has ever been exposed to. It gets worse when science is used to reformulate flavor profiles to make food appealing in a way that fools our bodies about its nutritional content. Pretending like the food system today is the same as early agriculture with selective breeding is intellectually dishonest.

The fact is our knowledge of how the human organism metabolizes food is still extremely rudimentary. The thing that bothers me about Soylent is the founder's utter dismissal of any complexity to the issue at all. He seems to unquestioningly believe this reductionist pseudo-scientific hand waving that a certain subset of geeks subscribes to wherein gaining weight is a simple thermodynamic equation of calories in > calories spent, and nutrition is a question of all the correct molecules passing through one's mouth.

This is an incredibly naive way of thinking, and will not allow Soylent to ever find a healthy formula. Of course, if they do start to take it seriously it will still take many decades to perfect as the necessary scientific knowledge does yet exist. A lot of people are invested in the idea of convenience foods because they make life easier, but the uncomfortable truth is that choosing any convenience food, even one with such good intentions as Soylent, is not a smart bet if you want to be as healthy as possible, and demanding scientific proof otherwise is based more on wishful thinking than solid rationality.

I kind of see @zenbowman's point, though I might reword some things. The biggest difficulty I have with accepting isolated mixes of nutrients and supplements is that when we consume and metabolize food, or anything, we don't do it in isolation. There are hosts of synergistic effects throughout biology that are difficult to understand and accurately replicate.

No I'm not a nutritionist or a biologist, so what I'm saying is admittedly highly qualitative. But I did work for several years on a project to curb improper disposal of pharmaceutical waste (into toilets where it gets into the water system), because I read hundreds of papers and articles about how scientists simply don't understand yet how different pharmacological compounds might mix in water and have synergistic consequences for wildlife, especially as it bioaccumulates up the food chain. (Side note, this will be hard to understand since so much of our studies are focused on isolating on variable and looking for effects ceteris paribus, but this isn't how systems work in reality.)

The difference to me when we breed food is that at least we're still consuming something in an evolutionary context, bred over several generations. Certainly it still could be bad for us, but I think that the plant/ animal itself is surviving is better evidence than just taking its component parts and ingesting them. Isn't it general best practice that the whole gestalt is greater than the sum of its parts?

Most of the plants and animals that I eat have been created through selective breeding (a biological process), not synthesis (a chemical process).

Create a hypothesis, do experiments, examine the evidence, revise the hypothesis. Then, restrict your claims to the hypothesis and evidence. 'Knowing anything' is irrelevant and the assertion that 'we know so little about nutrition', etc. in this context is facetious and disingenuous.

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