Freedom from Food | Hacker News Reader

Freedom from Food

aeon.co

51 pointsbenbreen49 comments

With products like this, the concern is always that we "don't know what we don't know" about human nutrition. Our mechanical understanding of how nutrients do what they do is in its infancy, and human metabolism is mind-bogglingly complicated. This is the thinking behind the (pretty good, in my opinion) advice to "eat real food."

I've been toying with the idea of developing a "real food soylent" -- an easy-to-prepare-in-bulk stew or chili, with a base of real-food ingredient options that can be interchanged based on season, availability, and taste. The idea would be to develop a real food framework that could (in theory) constitute once's entire diet. I think of this idea as Soylent minus the hubris.

I've had the same thought -- the history of the last 100 years of processed foods definitely supports the "don't know what we don't know" suspicion.

One hidden assumption behind Soylent immediately jumps out at me: the assumption that it is healthy to ingest the same level of every nutrient constantly over time. In reality it's possible that our bodies are actually adapted to -- and benefit from -- variation in nutrient intake. We are not engineered industrial artifacts designed to run on constant engineered inputs. We are the product of a varied, highly textured environment and an evolutionary design process whose "reasoning" is quite alien from our own.

>I've been toying with the idea of developing a "real food soylent" -- an easy-to-prepare-in-bulk stew or chili, with a base of real-food ingredient options that can be interchanged based on season, availability, and taste. The idea would be to develop a real food framework that could (in theory) constitute once's entire diet. I think of this idea as Soylent minus the hubris.

This is not only sensible, strength trainers already do this. My favorite is a cabbage+(beef/venison/lamb) curried stew. You could probably just sell this as microwaveable packets, but then it doesn't have the mystique of Soylent :)

Very interesting, and sounds delicious.

Look at the diet of bodybuilders (that includes the population beyond the diet of the largest, most steroid abusing population).

Meat, rice/potatoes/oatmeal, veggies.

Over and over again.

It's how I eat. It's how my son eats. We don't get bored of it, we're both healthy.

Obsessing about making food "interesting" and "varied" all the time is the sign of something else.

Eating plain, simple, home-cooked food isn't as complicated, time-consuming and mundane as people think it is. Guests at my house marvel at how good our food is.

Foodie-ness and shit eating can very easily be countered by simple foods, cooked quickly, at home.

Everything else is just.. fodder for blog posts and journalism.

Why are you so reductive? I don’t really get that …

What’s wrong with enjoying to cook and eat really complicated stuff?

After years of [poor diet], I am a firm food supporter of 'small changes, very carefully and very slowly'.

I don't have judgment or opinion of how other people choose to organize or live their lives, but I do wonder whether people are aware of what they are replacing, as they choose to replace it.

But, that's not to say that those who remain conservative aren't missing out on opportunity that otherwise might not be afforded to them, given the choice. Maybe you want to create a soylent/ individual dietary analytics startup with your biology PhD and CS buddies.

My idea behind eating real food is, I like to. A lot. It looks pretty, it smells pretty, and it tastes awesome, and it's about the only time I blab to whoever I am surrounded with in real life. Food can be more than food.

I agree. I think anyone who lives on an all (or nearly all) Soylent diet is very likely setting themselves up for some sort of long-term health problems.

That said, I can see a strong argument for replacing one meal a day with Soylent. It's unlikely to be worse than what most people eat, and as part of an overall varied diet I'd be much less concerned about the unknown missing ingredients.

If someone only wants to eat Soylent they should. They should also be documenting as many health data points as possible, how much they are eating, and when they deviate from the diet. Twenty five to thirty years out we should have a good idea what the side effects are.

Negative side effects showing up within the next couple of years will kill Soylent. Why? Because their marketing says you don't need to eat anything else. That is a very steep claim, not much different than claiming your magical sugar pill prevents cancer.

If they made diminished claims I would speak less negatively. Certainly, as a nutritional supplement it would have strong and immediately measurable benefits in poor areas such as sub-Saharan Africa. Put a healthy 21 year old exclusively on it until they are 35? Ouch.

> some sort of long-term health problems.

The leading cause of cancer is life. Everything causes long-term health problems, eventually. People are too risk-averse, How can you enjoy anything if you are perpetually concerned about long-term health risks?

One end of the spectrum is being too careful, the other end is not taking any kind of precautions. Both are probably a bad way to live. (ie: if everything is equally dangerous, why not let children smoke a pack a day while working in a coal mine? They'll all die eventually anyway).

In response to your request for a "real food soylent",

There is another company called mealsquares that is planning on doing just that. I was going to sign up for the beta test but it currently isn't available in Canada.

http://www.mealsquares.com/

Great idea. Garanimals for food. I do this informally. Common base of ground meat, onions, tomato, spices, and broth with a varying selection of additives like beans, bell pepper, carrots, peas, corn, root veggies of all kinds, green leafy veggies, squash. It comes out different every time but always tasty, easy to freeze and reheat, and a decent balance of protein, fat, carbs, fiber, and micro-nutrients. Not great for breakfast, but it's fine for a good chunk of the remaining 14 meals per week.

Had to Google "Garanimals", but yeah. I'd imagined getting a little geekier about the details, along the lines of "Take 2 lbs from food list A, 1 lb from food list B, 1.5 lb from food list C..." but I may be falling prey to the very thing I'm criticizing.

I disagree on one point: this sounds delicious for breakfast.

Right - for example, we didn't even know about phtyo-nutrients until recently.

Still, if it only replaces the mexican tortilla chips I eat regularly, I'll probably still come out ahead.

Probably, and to take it a step further, people who are already on diets of mostly processed foods could even see improvements from switching to 100% soylent, which I suspect underlies a lot of the "I went soylent and my blood work improved and I've never felt better!" reports.

I've received my shipment of Soylent. I read many negative and positive reviews. I've been on it for three weeks now and am loving it so far. In fact, I find myself craving it sometimes. It hasn't replace my meals completely, but as someone who has been skipping breakfast for most of my life I now get the nutrition I need in the mornings and my life has considerably improved as a consequence.

The concept of Soylent is wonderful. No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, but it should be able to do so, otherwise it wouldn't work as a single meal either. The joy of cooking still exists, you choose whether you want a quick meal or a longer one. I would still never turn down a well cooked meal for Soylent, but I'm happy to know I have some in my cupboard for when I need it.

"No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, but it should be able to do so, otherwise it wouldn't work as a single meal either."

I don't think that follows; we don't expect any other single meal we eat to necessarily be able to a complete diet on its own. I can well imagine it to be far easier to make a 1-meal-a-day replacement than an all-food replacement.

Nothing else we regularly eat is an any-meal replacement. They're all imbalanced. So if Soylent wants to be able to replace any meal it should be balanced enough to replace them all. That's what I meant.

> The concept of Soylent is wonderful. No one is saying it should completely replace all meals,

That's exactly the claim they made when they were raising funds. Along with the dubious health claims.

> "What if you never had to worry about food again?"

> "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you."

> "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health,"

> "By taking years to spoil"

>"there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet."

This is fraudulent horseshit and it's kind of surprising they got away with it.

The new website avoids making medical claims, but still says that you can live off it entirely.

In none of those statements do I read them saying you should replace all food with Soylent. The first quote is simply setting the tone for a future where that could be a possibility. I don't doubt this would help people with acid reflux and other similar symptoms. Soylent has freed me from shopping trips and expensive lunches. Soylent does take years to spoil.

I really don't know what you're getting at. This is much better than beer commercials promoting that your best times involved beer.

>>"there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet."

>This is fraudulent horseshit and it's kind of surprising they got away with it.

Considering that more people are overweight in the USA than not, it's not fraudulent at all. The average American diet is atrocious.

They had no evidence at all when they wrote that statement.

I just had my first soylent 'meal'. I am planning to use it as my breakfast meal too.

I'm surprised so many people engage in a Soylent vs cooking debate as if there are two sides and you have to choose one. Recently I was cooking an elaborate dinner, starting early in the afternoon, and I found myself wishing my Soylent shipment had arrived so I could have lunch without interrupting my dinner preparation.

Yeah, I see no problem with this being a more complete version of a granola bar. Hungry? Got no time? Here's a complete meal you can fit in a glass. Keeps you alert and powered up for now, though no one in their right mind would want to live solely on clif bars.

I sometimes wonder if the inventor of the shower was shouted down by people explaining how they enjoyed their baths.

As someone who also loves food and preparing it, I am also a consumer of Soylent.

While it takes away the joy of a well prepared meal it gives that back in time and convenience. I can't help but spend too much time in the kitchen when I'm making something. I go overboard and over do it to a fault.

With a food like Soylent I can get in and out in minutes. Eating Soylent does not mean you can't spend time making a great meal when you have the opportunity too. After several weeks on this new food I appreciate my home cooked meal much more than I had in the past. Win-Win as far as I'm concerned.

What do you do with your extra time?

DIVx0 (yes, that is his/her natural name) is my neighbor and I wondered the same thing so I began a period of systematic surveillance. Basically I just tapped into the NSA's feed so I can't really take any credit for that.

DIVx0 spends a lot of time reading about Soylent, posting on /r/Soylent, Facebooking and Twitting his experiences, and otherwise communicating and mentoring other Soylent users or prospects. The conclusion he and all his Soylent colleagues have come to is that they really do save a lot of time. Occasionally DIVx0 stays up till 1:00am or later writing poetry and odes to Soylent.

I thought all of this was really ironic until I checked the NSA's archives and found that in fact DIVx0 used to spend about twice that amount of time preparing, eating, and discussing salsa dip.

To each their own - there may be people who convert to Soylent but I love spending time in the kitchen or at the dinner table and I suspect I'm not the only one. If I think about what I would do with extra spare time it would include a lot of cooking and baking.

1) Something always glossed over in the PR is we've been feeding "sick" people nutritionally complete liquids out of a can for decades with no real problem. Baby formula, and old people and cancer patients drinking Ensure and the like. Its really old stuff and heavily studied. What is new, is marketing it to people who are more or less healthy (as healthy as you can be on the standard American diet of junk food, anyway). I've tried left over cans of ensure. Personally not my cup of tea. Like a melted mcdonalds shake, kind of. Also tried baby formula, not impressed, like super heavy cream, sorta. This previous experimentation does not encourage me to try soylent.

2) Like it or not, admit it or not, we're mammals just like livestock or pets. It seems that feeding housepets scientifically designed food, every day, for decades, really does boost their lifespan compared to a diet of mice and bugs in the wilderness. This gets the anti-evolutionary people all found up, the mere suggestion that us people are animals too or that their god didn't create us separately from the animals ... Also if you talk to a livestock rearing farmer about what he feeds his hogs / cows / whatevers to fatten them up for slaughter, and then compare what he fattens his livestock with, to the ingredients on the food aisles at walmart, and then look at how round the shoppers are, I'm just saying you won't be too surprised. You can dislike it all you want, but we are mammals.

As someone who truly enjoys eating (and lovingly assembling each bite and taking my time, the social aspects, etc), I don't think I could fully move over to something like Soylent.

But during the weekday, I find thinking about lunch (packing it or deciding which restaurant to go to, etc) to be a real waste of time. In other words, are you guys exploring a formula that would work well for just "Monday to Friday lunches" combined with a regular diet for dinners and weekends?

I entirely expect to have both breakfast and lunch as soylent (like) meals and then enjoy suppers. I end up eating less healthy because I don't have time to make a good lunch every day, it's just not possible. Breakfast is usually skipped. I don't even care if it's disgusting, as long as I'm getting enough nutrients to sustain me.

Same here - It's also a cost thing. Because I'm often too tired/lazy to pack lunch for the next day, I end up eating out. At $10 a meal or more, these add up quickly.

I'd be curious to see how that use case pans out health-wise with Soylent.

I was so excited to finally get my Soylent and give it a go. I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately by the second day I found it aversively unpalatable, almost sickening to drink. Along with intense gastrointestinal distress (think food poisoning-level liquefaction) I gave up and now its sitting in the box under my desk collecting dust. I wouldn't even put it in a bomb shelter, I think it would decrease my chances of survival.

I'm a big fan of this as a product category, but less so of Soylent itself. Recently, I've mostly eaten MealSquares, which have the same premise, but (imo) better execution. They're nutritionally better; they're solid, so people don't look at them strangely; they shipped at reasonable speed, unlike Soylent which keeps falling behind; and, because they're dry instead of liquid, they're more portable.

Those look really interesting. How do they taste?

How about feeling of fullness? (Most breads or other carb-based foods leave me feeling hungry again shortly thereafter, which sucks.)

I eat a couple a week. The taste is hard to characterize -- it's sort of like some pretty rich slightly fruity bread -- but they have dark chocolate which dominates the flavor when you bite into a chocolatey bit (I suggest microwaving a little before eating to melt it.)

Interesting. Might give it a try. Thanks!

"Another study (also in Japan, which seems to lead this obscure field of research) in 2007 found that eating hard-to-chew foods results in a smaller waist size, but not a lower body-mass index overall."

Doesn't this contradict the commonly held belief that its not possible to redistribute the fat around your body (ie, you can't gain abs by just doing core workouts and ignoring nutrition) ? Is that belief just broscience garbage?

With the rats in the same study, the body weight difference was only 6%, while the different amount of white fat tissue in the belly was 22%. So it is pretty clear the body is changing composition (more muscular, less fatty).

BMI is worthless in such a case because it penalizes muscle, which is heavier than fat. I know countless very fit friends who have bad BMIs just because they have a lot of heavy muscle. BMI only allows you to be a certain weight at a certain height, it doesn't allow you to carry muscle instead of fat.

If they're slightly more muscular, that would make up the difference in mass and since muscle has a somewhat different distribution than fat, would explain the slimmer waist.

People are different when it comes to how their fat is distributed. Men tend to get a potbelly, as opposed to women who tend to become fat in a more distributed way.

Considering that, I guess a person could change when it comes to how their fat reserves are stored. Maybe a hormonal change? But this is just a guess.

(The other explanations given also seem reasonable.)

I think the biggest immediate benefit of a product like Soylent is that people can pick it up in order to try _eliminating_ other foods. There are numerous symptoms that correlate to a food intolerance, but aren't immediately life threatening and don't manifest with the typical "swell up and get inflamed" allergic reaction.

These are the secret enemies of our diet, as they tend to also involve everyday foods that are integral to the food culture of the household, and their removal can't be so easily justified when the symptoms aren't obvious. Individuals attempting an elimination by changing cooking strategy face conflict, misunderstanding, and to a large extent, their own self-defeating habits. A product like Soylent reduces the cost of experimentation, which is a really big deal.

Interesting idea. I often find eating sort of a task that is required rather than enjoyed. With that said, my wife has helped me really enjoy the process of sitting down with others and enjoying their company whilst eating. In addition, I've been learning how to cook as well and it's helped me really enjoy the entire process of sitting down and having a meal.

Every Soylent article will have a bunch of comments from people who actually like to spend time on preparing and consuming food. Good for you, I guess? There are still a lot of people who would gladly skip some meals and use the time for something more important. What could be more important? It's not really your problem.

I guess for some people it works, however, for myself the more I devote to enjoying life the better I feel (and perform, though I no longer have the spreadsheets to prove it).

There's a solid version called MealSquares:

http://www.mealsquares.com/

Unfortunately all these foods just remind me of NutraLoaf:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf

Which is used as a form of punishment for inmates.

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