Serious question: Do they have any actual nutritionists working on the product yet or just a bunch of hybristic 20-somethings who think they can "hack" the nutrition space without any real education, cause, you know, "disrupt!".
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
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!
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.
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.
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.