Soylent’s Next Chapter
blog.soylent.me
blog.soylent.me
The two biggest competitors in this realm according to these discussions seem to be Ensure, a product from a 127 year old publicly traded company (Abbott) with 90k employees and 40 billion in revenue, and Carnation Instant Breakfast, a product from a Swiss candy company with a laundry list of other products that don't give me a lot of faith that they have my health as their primary interest.
Soylent isn't perfect yet, but neither is our understanding of the human body. I'm glad to see them get infused with more cash that will allow them to add more expertise to their roster and shore up better distribution. I'm more at ease with Soylent and it's backing than I am with the current DIY movement, at least until things settle down.
I'm glad its an option. I'm even more glad that it's fostering the discussion.
It gives users horrific smelling gas, and honestly, I generally felt worse on Soylent than after any other type of food I have ever eaten, including junk food. (I didn't mind the taste though.)
They are already at v 1.3 though. Here's hoping that this capital influx allows them to rapidly improve the recipe.
You're paying for the 100% system, not 98%, not 99%: 100% that is the USP. The price is only a little more expensive than eating out ($3.33/meal roughly).
Plus most off-the-shelf "Ready meals" are extremely unhealthy. Many contain transfats and other foot preservatives which are quite bad for you.
And it looks like it is not confirmed that this is especially healthy from comments on this thread.
As a side note, I now have four boxes of soylent for sale if anyone wants them... :)
I've been thinking of ordering some for when I don't have time for lunch or don't feel like cooking or something, but this would obviously make it a no-go.
That was my thought, but still, think of eating only Soylent for weeks. That is something. But yeah only for lunch, and then an annual checkup... I don't know enough about this to say anything either way, but I wonder.
My next step is to try soylent again and test myself to see the direct effect... every hour or so.
What, haven't you see the ingredient list of SoyLent? It's extremely carb loaded.
I've been saying this for months, we need a Ketoylent version.
o2kewl_at_gmail com
[1] http://www.spacenutrientsstation.com/ [2] http://custombodyfuel.com/
That said, I was really underwhelmed with the taste of Soylent when I finally got mine. I understand that I can improve it by e.g. blending a banana into the shake, but if I need to take out my blender and prepare other food to add to Soylent, I might as well make a smoothie out of available fruits and veggies.
The next time I order Soylent will be when their price comes down to the point where it's cheaper than the food I buy.
It's interesting. HN is supposed to represent some of the world's most dynamic, forward-thinkers. However almost every truly disruptive development is greeted with small-minded negative thinking and parochialism. Bitcoin is scam money for paranoiacs who don't trust banks. Inflation is good for economies. The rich are too rich. We need more and higher taxes and more socialist redistribution of wealth. Soylent tastes bad and destroys traditional food cultures. Uber is too powerful and going to become a monopoly. Google is evil. Without the protection of friendly governments capitalism will exploit the poor. People are too stupid to protect themselves from predatory opportunists (and the government is somehow a perfect vessel to counteract them.) Everything is scary and the way things should be is how a small group of white men who are very good friends with the US government tell us how it should be, which happens to be very similar to today but with more friendly government intervention to fix everything white male programmers are scared of and don't understand.
I guess it'll be entertaining to watch people changing their tune over the coming decades.
Soylent isn't "new". It isn't "disrupting" anything. Meal replacement alternatives have existed for decades and there are numerous brands out there that have a medical proven trackrecord that can be obtained for cheaper than the Soylent we're seeing pushed today.
What we have here is a case of "forward thinkers" believing that some crackpot idea from the startup culture is suddenly revolutionary because they marketed it best to this subculture of life. You're a sucker to believing Soylent offers anything revolutionary yet paying above market to have them feed you that lie.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/tLIC_oIeeORWgna6kbpW1...
The iPhone isn't "new". It isn't "disrupting" anything. Smartphones have existed for years and there are numerous brands out there that have a commercial proven trackrecord that can be obtained for cheaper than the iPhone we're seeing pushed today.
What we have here is a case of "forward thinkers" believing that some crackpot idea from Apple is suddenly revolutionary because they marketed it best to this subculture of life. You're a sucker to believing iPhone offers anything revolutionary yet paying above market to have them feed you that lie.
How did I do?
The main problems with them were that the screens sucked.
But the real disruption was the disruption in the carrier relationship. A lot of smartphones didn't have WiFi, and the carriers would nickel and dime you for every kilobyte. Apple convinced them to do the flat rates and big chunks of data. Apple introduced manufacturer control of the user experience, instead of Verizon disabling every feature that would allow you to avoid the carrier's fees. When the iPhone was announced, the feature I was most impressed by was the visual voicemail. Voicemail was so tedious and inefficient before iPhone.
The Soylent has more protein, a more balanced nutritional profile, less wasteful (and annoying) packaging, and is lactose free too.
Edit: and the Ensure has 0 fiber!
A lot of the time, it's not the specific artifact that is disruptive, but it's the vision behind it. The iPhone is Unix on a phone. Qt had that years before Apple. Apple actually shipped, and added freedom from the carriers' horrible user experience.
Ensure and Shakeology and Slimfast and Garden of Life have been around forever, but Rob is interested in Soylent being a complete replacement for your normal, everyday nutrition. He's not just resting on his laurels, having an obviously desirable product, but he's continuing to work on improving it, and he inspired a community to join him. Soylent is not big enough to disrupt the food industry yet, but if he succeeds, then it will.
Where in the hell did you get that idea?
We should hold companies to higher standards; they don't pay us to be their PR team. But in the case of some of the negativity regarding Soylent, it feels more like jealously than genuine concern.
The interesting thing for me is that 'eating' (and by commutation 'food') is plugged in so deeply into our psyche that it seems people have opinions on it that they developed very early in life. One of the things I noted at Google was the disproportionate backlash when they cut back on the free food available. It was like someone had instituted daily flogging or something, but it was just food. And yet through out our lives and our history food, sharing a meal, etc, is rooted deeply in our tribal culture. Not something you want to mess with lightly. Its not like Christians re-enact the Last Cocktail Party, rather it is the Last Supper.
Given those deep tendrils into our subconscious I wasn't surprised at the harsh response Soylent received. Nor the continuing resistance. And as someone who likes eating too much, I don't think it would be a good product for me but I certainly see how for some it would be ideal.
That the company has made it this far and their problems are "success" problems (can't ship enough, more demand than product) I expect they will grow into something quite a bit bigger than they are. And I too am glad that someone is thinking about this from the perspective of an 'everyday' kind of thing rather than a 'jaw wired shut so you have to' or 'get your kids some protein before school' sort of way.
Oh, or is it easier, instead of using your imagination and a bit of enthusiasm, to point to how it's similar to a crappy product that nobody bothered to market, and imply that it won't be sucessful - because we all know the success and impact of a product has nothing to do with the creativity, perserverance and vision of the creators, right?
By the way: Ensure is available in unflavoured versions to allow users to add it to other food or add other food to it.
SoyDent.
We take out all of your teeth and fit you with a removable and easy-to-clean replacement. No more complex brushing and flossing. No more time-consuming trips to the dentist.
This generally results in me pooping out a product that was subsidized heavily by Big Corn that is not digested, a bunch of preservatives and additives that benefit the storage of, not the digestion of food, and other crap that I'd rather not think about.
Some people just don't think eating is...interesting?
"First and foremost, we will be significantly expanding our manufacturing and shipping capabilities. This process has already begun with two new manufacturers that will ramp up our production to more than fifty times its previous rate allowing us to vigorously tackle our order backlog while working toward imminent real-time shipping fulfillment."
That's roughly 111/k bags per month since launch. For the first nine months of a company, that's operationally extremely impressive.
The delays for new customers (3-6 months, yikes) seem ridiculous, but if you do the math, I'm surprised it isn't more.
I recall reading an interview, or perhaps someone's personal review, stating how it was difficult for them to eat meals and they'd often forget to eat. Soylent solved this problem for them because it gave them an instant meal any time of the day. Upon reading this I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I've read and stupid justification for buying Soylent.
It's funny that this term is used every time Soylent is discussed on HN. Why is that?
I know that for myself, I used to write a lot more code that I wouldn't even dream of starting now, just because I realize how much work is involved for the little return. But sometimes I which I could get temporary amnesia so that I could recapture that youthful enthusiasm.
Do they have any actual smart people working on this, or is it just a bunch of desk-riding "nutritionists" who went to med school 40 years ago when all the books were written by tobacco lobbyists in the 1920's?
Who needs to have a real conversation when you have snark!
Soylent 1.2 was developed under the close guidance of our nutritional advisor, Dr. F. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, M.D., MPH. Pi-Sunyer is professor of medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. At St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center he serves as chief of endocrinology, diabetes, and nutrition, and is director of the New York Obesity Research Center. Dr. Pi-Sunyer is also a senior attending physician at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
I just want to add that this:
> is approved as a food by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Is utterly meaningless. All that means is that everything that goes into the product is "food grade" and that it was prepared in basically sanitary conditions. Nothing more. I highly doubt the FDA has examined their health claims (namely that you could live exclusively off of it). And likely won't unless there is public or political pressure to do so.
As an aside, I wonder if they could get a military or relief effort contract? Seems like the type of product perfect for both, as you "just add water!"
A lack of readily available clean water may be a challenge for use in relief efforts. There are also already products out there e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
(Which might be highly ironic to people in some places of the world.)
(You guys don't know what you are missing).
WFP needs a variety of different foods. Sometimes they just need calories. Sometimes they just need micronutrient. Sometimes they need a specific micronutrient.
http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/re...
http://wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...
Couldn't you just take any smoothie recipe, blend in a multi-vitamin, and claim it's a food replacement? Don't products such as Boost already do this? I don't understand Soylent's edge here, except marketing.
Soylent Recipe: http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0421/5993/t/12/assets/files...
How do you know you're not missing a few micronutrients? We don't know yet all the micronutrients our body needs, so how can you really say that?
"This formula contains what we know we need but not what we might need and don't know how to measure or quantify yet," said Ayoob, at Albert Einstein. "There are hundreds of antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds, for example, that we're still learning about." (1)
The danger with Soylent is that they don't acknowledge these limits of our knowledge. Rather, "You can live on Soylent alone, Mr. Rhinehart claims" (2). Given the nutirition field believes differently and he really has no expertise in the field, a statement like this is mindbogglingly irresponsible. This is my basis for the accusation of hubris. (This also doesn't touch on the obvious monetary incentive he has for believing this/making this claim.)
(1) http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/DietNutrition/46983
(2) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/th...
1) Buy slowcooker 2) Buy a bunch of cans of beans, veges, ground meat, couple spices 3) Drop that slop in slowcooker 4) Turn on and go to sleep for 8 hours 5) Turn off, put in separate containers
Boom, chili meals for a week.
People who believe cooking needs to be expensive and time consuming really haven't put much effort into looking out for alternatives until some marketing scheme makes them believe they've solved a problem that didn't really exist.
I can literally put water in a pot and steam days worth of veges in mere minutes while I pick my nose. Or I take a roast and drop it in a slowcooker, or butter chicken, or any other myriad of choices that involve a highly nutritious set of ingredients. Bulk cooking can be extremely cheap and quick. If your priorities are time/money then put some effort into solving the issue.
That's pretty random. Provided you're not just being facetious, where are you getting that information from? I'm genuinely curious.
Food database: http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/
Daily recommended intakes: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/DRI/DRI_Tables/recommended_inta...
Someone built this webapp that uses all that above data: https://cronometer.com/
I don't eat this exclusively but when I would otherwise be too busy to eat or shop properly, this is an easy solution.
Beware: I'm not a doctor or expert
I share your worries. It's frightening - it sounds like an engineering degree is enough for... everything.
As the subject is nutrition, health and they're proposing a "nutrition revolution", your rant is futile and misplaced. Engineers proposing a "nutrition revolution" because "disrupt" is a problem. Maybe a public health problem, but definitely a mindset one.
And if you think Soylent's raison d'etre is "disrupt" then you're really stupid. Read Rob's blog. He writes a lot about the problems in contemporary food production and how he wants to tackle them with Soylent. If you ignore that in favour of portraying him as a blind hipster then you are not just stupid, but willfully so.
Let's not forget either that Rob and many others have been living healthily off of Soylent for years now.
Because we're not discussing buying a new phone or laptop. If you look at guidelines for nutrition, you'll see that most of them advocate diversity. People are not simple computers, organic systems are way more complex. This is not sofware requirements analysis: you can't grasp all nutritional needs by fulfilling a table of nutrients and daily requirements, and this happens mainly because we don't have the knowledge to do so.
If we can't tell everything we need, nutrition-wise, how can we develop a full nutritional replacement? I'll answer you: by oversimplifying the problem, by simply being ignorant about the complexity at stake.
> ...
Your second paragraph deserves no response or consideration whatsoever.
> Let's not forget either that Rob and many others have been living healthily off of Soylent for years now.
That's anecdotal (at best, because there's surely a bias there). And let me remind you, again, that we're not talking "electronics" or gadgets. The fact that they're functioning for a few years doesn't mean that everything's okay. What if they're not "looking" at the right signs? And how do you know that problems won't be developing on the mid/long-term?
No. He has been living off a diverse diet that includes Soylent. Being a sole source of nutrition is a selling poit of Soylent - it's a claim you've made in this thread - but there's very little evidence to support that use apart from some anecdote and uncontrolled unblinded experiment with a tiny sample size.
Soylent have retreated from the extravagant irresponsible claims they made when they launched the Kickstarter, and that's good. But now Soylent is pretty much the same as all the other products but with less experience and differently targeted ads.
Do you really think that is reasonable for anyone?
From what I've read of this product, it doesn't contain excess anything by design. So it likely isn't problematic, but as a general rule "bad" carbs can be very bad for you and give you things like diabetes if over-consumed.
Yes.
First off, there is absolutely no science showing sugar is bad for you, or that it behaves differently from other carbs when combined with equal amounts of fiber (which is why vegetable carbohydrates tend to be "ok").
Second, even without the fiber, for the vast majority of people a high sugar diet (within reasonable max carbohydrate intake) is not going to adversely affect you directly, the issue usually comes in with behavioral impact, causing you to eat more, causing you to get fat, causing you to have diabetes.
> as a general rule "bad" carbs can be very bad for you and give you things like diabetes if over-consumed
This concept of "bad" carbs is really not useful. Carbs are pretty much carbs. Anything (other carbs, fat and protein) can also be over-consumed but are simply less likely to.
TLDR: assuming equal amounts of carbohydrates, the source doesn't actually seem to have a big impact.
I just stopped reading there. No point going on, that's just jaw droppingly ignorant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar#Health_effects
The fact you're arguing that green veggies and sugar are equally bad for people is just, wow, just wow. That's a new low.
> Some studies involving the health impact of sugars are effectively inconclusive. The WHO and FAO meta studies have shown directly contrasting impacts of sugar in refined and unrefined forms[66] and since most studies do not use a population that do not consume any "free sugars" at all, the baseline is effectively flawed. Hence, there are articles such as Consumer Reports on Health that stated in 2008, "Some of the supposed dietary dangers of sugar have been overblown. Many studies have debunked the idea that it causes hyperactivity, for example.
> Studies on the link between sugars and diabetes are inconclusive, with some suggesting that eating excessive amounts of sugar does not increase the risk of diabetes, although the extra calories from consuming large amounts of sugar can lead to obesity, which may itself increase the risk of developing this metabolic disease.
So there is definitely controversy, and to call me jaw droppingly ignorant is pretty offensive.
The fact that you think I'm arguing green veggies and sugar are equally bad for people means you fundamentally did not understand what I was saying. What do you think the difference between veggies and other sources of sugar is? Hint: it's not the type of sugar, it's the absence of fiber. Here's another quote, from your link:
> Some experts have suggested that refined fructose is more damaging than refined glucose in terms of cardiovascular risk.
The refining process is essentially one that removes the fiber. Let's go back to my quote:
> First off, there is absolutely no science showing sugar is bad for you, or that it behaves differently from other carbs when combined with equal amounts of fiber (which is why vegetable carbohydrates tend to be "ok").
Emphasis added.
Crossing a tomato and a deep sea fish is fundamentally different from crossing two strains of corn and we should expect different risks.
But is there any evidence of gene sharing between biological kingdoms in nature? Why can't an animal and a plant create an offspring that shares both of their genetic information? There's clearly lack of a mechanism for fish-tomato sex but evolution is known to create very elegant mechanisms for things that are beneficial.
Intra-species gene sharing has been selected for as being beneficial, inter-species gene sharing hasn't.
EDIT: I'm not allowed to comment on the response below? So, here it is...
> Given that it is observed in nature, what is your basis for that conclusion?
Clearly I was unaware this happens at all in nature which is why I asked if it happens. Horizontal Gene Transfer is fascinating. However, it's been around since the beginning but sexual reproduction supplanted it as the preferred method of gene sharing as the complexity of organisms increased.
Yes. Horizontal gene transfer can operate between different kingdoms (or, more relevantly to how life is usually divided these days, between the three phylogenetic domains of archaea, bacteria, and eukaryota.)
> Intra-species gene sharing has been selected for as being beneficial, inter-species gene sharing hasn't.
Given that it is observed in nature, what is your basis for that conclusion?
> An early tomato was developed that contained an antifreeze gene (afa3) from the winter flounder with the aim of increasing the tomato's tolerance to frost, which became an icon in the early years of the debate over genetically modified foods, especially in relation to the perceived ethical dilemma of combining genes from different species as the tomato gained the moniker fish tomato.[18] The antifreeze protein was found to inhibit ice recrystallization in the flounder blood, but had no effect when expressed in transgenic tobacco.[19] The resulting tomato was never commercialized, possibly because the transgenic plant did not perform well in its frost-tolerance or other agronomic characteristics
Helpful characteristics approaching commercial reality involve nothing of the kind such as the recent StAs1 and StAs2 Simplot potato or the AquAdvantage salmon opAFP-GHc2 construct.
Apparently fish tomatoes do exist, but have never been on the market.
Its not. Not that its his field or anything, but I suspect Tyson has educated himself somewhat on it before making that statement, and it certainly matches what I've learned from direct contact from people working in the field.
> Crossing a tomato and a deep sea fish is fundamentally different from crossing two strains of corn and we should expect different risks.
We don't cross tomatoes with deep sea fish; we might take genes from deep sea fish (or some other similarly distant species) and insert them into tomatoes, but then, one of the ways that the genetic changes occur that natural and artificial selection both work on is horizontal gene transfer between species (including ones that are very far apart on the tree/web of life), so this is not as fundamentally different from what goes on in traditional breeding as many people seem to think.
If you don't mind me asking, how far apart does this happen in nature? How many genes have made if from fish into plants?
It is bad, and GMO consumers should be aware of that.
Given that I rather not ingest crops modified to resist poison, I just pass on all GMOs.