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Comment by feld | Hacker News Reader

My first thought whenever I see soylent is that we have studies proving that we can't replace breast milk with baby formula. Some of that is due to immune system being passed on to the infant, but we haven't yet mastered the nutritional content of real food to the point where we can confidently say it's safe to eat Soylent or another similar product regularly.

It takes me back to the whole issue with processed dog foods -- kibble, while even the most expensive brands claim to be "nutritionally complete", miss the fact that dogs cannot process/absorb the many nutrients within (and why their waste is... more than a nuisance). Eg, calcium added to dog food is nearly worthless, while calcium from eating raw bones is readily absorbed by their bodies. Same with many other vitamins and minerals.

We have a lot of work ahead of us in this sector. It's good that someone is trying, though.

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What worries me is that soylent is 20% based on soy. Some studies indicate that eating a heavily soy based diet leads to increased estrogen levels. Which can have negative side effects regardless of your gender. [0]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074428/ [1]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303720711...

yeah thanks for citing this. It was a deal breaker for me.

Why is that?

Exactly, you don't want protein. You want whey.

These guys don't quite know what they're talking about. Or there smart and playing the sheep like a fiddle.

My fear is that these guys are laughing their way to the bank suckering people into this stuff.

whey is protein. It's the protein derived from dairy products. Also, I think the founder, Rob Rhinehart, is genuinely trying to make a good product that benefits consumers. Whether the results show these benefits or not, does not mean he is "laughing himself to the bank".

I can't edit it, but I meant you don't want soy.

This sentence gave me pause:

"The protein source is soy, which contains an ideal ratio of amino acids for excellent nutrition ..."

You can argue the merits of one protein source over another, but I think to declare any non-animal protein source as "ideal" in any way would require some evidence to be presented. Unfortunately, it shows that they are glossing over the hard decisions that have to be made in creating a product like this with so much empty marketing-speak.

I thought it was pretty common knowledge. Whole civilizations depend on soy protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_protein#Nutrition "Based on this method, soy protein is considered to have a similar equivalent in protein quality to animal proteins. Egg white has a score of 1.00, soy concentrate 0.99, beef 0.92, and isolated soy protein 0.92."

There's a lot of misinformation about soy and estrogen levels. This[0] is required reading for soy

[0] http://examine.com/faq/is-soy-good-or-bad-for-me/

Ps thanks sol (the owner of examine)

I read your link. I didn't see what you were implying is "misinformation" if anything the link only supports that there is legitimate concerns about soy and that the only group to benefit are women with low estrogen levels (postmenopausal).

Also the article says things like: "[lowers] LDL and Total Cholesterol" but doesn't dive into the fact that lowering your total cholesterol is bad for your health. Since there is good and bad cholesterols, if you lower everything you're damaging your health (see the 1980s obsession with lowering all cholesterols for example). But, yes, lowering LDL alone is good as far as we know.

I don't think day to day people need to be actively avoiding soy, or heck even not having the occasional soy based meal. But we're talking about a meal replacement diet based almost entirely on soy, that's a big deal, and the health implications cannot just be glossed over.

If anything your link has made more more concerned about the impact of a purely Soylent diet on all groups except postmenopausal women who may benefit.

>What worries me is that soylent is 20% based on soy. Some studies indicate that eating a heavily soy based diet leads to increased estrogen levels

Here's what they have to say about this [1]:

>There are some public concerns about high consumption of soy, but Rhinehart is quick to dismiss them. "Because we’re not using whole soy, we’re just using the protein isolate…the isoflavone levels are much lower than what they would be in soy flour or tofu. There are some levels, but they’re well below any that have shown to have an effect," he explained. "There was somewhat specious research in the past on what impact soy can have on testosterone levels and those have been widely debunked. We’ve certainly done our research here and we’ll be posting our analysis on the Web as well."

[1]http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/soylent-2-0-is-coming...

It's like people think that they know some nutritional secret that soylent hasn't thought of. I take them on their word that they're taking this seriously and every time I read a comment about "Soylent is so clueless! How could they have thought of 'X'?!" then I google "soylent X" and find an extremely detained post explaining how they're taken 'X' in to account.

Dunning-kruger in effect. We are all at least layman when it comes to nutrition and health, so you get people who dont know what they dont know commenting on something to reassure their views. They dont do the research, because they already "know" the right answer.

We should be skeptical of any food stuff the purports to be nutritionally near perfect, but Soylent looks like its on track.

> Dunning-kruger in effect

Are you talking about Soylent or people criticising Soylent?

Because, for a company that's supposed to have done all tue research, they've made a couple of errors.

That might not sound like much but liquid feeds are not new; there are plenty of people that have experience in liquid feeds; so there's not much excuse to make the mistakes Soylent made.

So they are not perfect demi gods?

Burn them!

Really? I saw Soylent claim to "put you in perfect health", and claim to be suitable for anybody.

Both of those are dangerous, scumbag, claims. Soylent has not retracted those claims. They did quietly drop them though.

That's what iterative improvement looks like. You make mistakes, then you stop making them.

That's not what I want from people making medical products. Or food.

Yet the medical community and food industries still have iterative processes. It's a miracle you still live.

I love Soylent, but because they use Soy protein, I have stopped using it. I would drink it every day, all day if they used an animal protein source. I haven't read latest research, but even if there is a slim chance it increases estrogen levels, I don't want to risk it.

Ok...

> but we haven't yet mastered the nutritional content of real food to the point where we can confidently say it's safe to eat Soylent or another similar product regularly.

I'm not aware of any ill effects from consuming meal-replacement shakes like Ensure regularly, and they've been around for quite some time. In some instances people have been sustained on them for fairly long periods.

Would I want to consume them exclusively for a long period of time? No, like you, I would start becoming concerned about nutrition. But drinking them regularly for long periods of time or even exclusively for short periods of time seems like it would be fine. People eat lots of less nutritious foods just as regularly.

The real question for me is what is Soylent supposed to offer over older equivalents.

Ensure has a much higher glycemic index. And its lower fat and dietary fiber doesn't give much satiety(I think as intended). Most diet shakes are still in the "fat is bad" mindset, and almost all the calories come from simple carbohydrates.

If anything, I don't understand the worries people have about replacing 95% of their entire diet with a well-engineered food. In the past people lived on a single or very small number of crops. In our current time we know people who live entirely on fast food or delivery pizza. The human body is more resilient than we give it credit for and having soilent is likely better than what we'd be giving it otherwise.

Conceptually it wouldn't be different than satisfying 95% of sexual needs with well-engineered sex dolls; then also satisfying 95% of the fitness needs with well-engineered electrical muscle stimulators; then also satifying 95% of the romantic needs with a well-engineered dating app. And so on.

I wouldn't define myself "worried" of this, but I find utterly banal (infinitely misable, to be honest) that the existential end of all this optimization is (metaphorically) to have more time to produce and consume the next iPhone.

Talking on the strictly nutritional perspective, we can't compare the past. Infant mortality, in those times, was much higher. And the body may be resilient, yes, but don't forget that a very large percentage of people in USA is clinically obese, that is, sick.

I like this implication; it's hard to define meaningful and consistent goals to ourselves when we are relieved of our usual constraints to get pleasure/satisfaction (our means are basically eat food, socialize, have sex, practice sport, consume culture) -- how do we distinguish fundamentally means to ends?

To illustrate, extend Soylent to a more general Hapiness drink. If you took it, you'd be instantly and lastingly satisfied, allowing you to do work and stay very productive without the need to "waste time" socializing, practicing sports or w/e -- and suppose this satisfaction is indeed indistinguishable or better from activity-borne satisfaction. Would we choose to consume it, and why not, fundamentally?

I'm also skeptical that one can live well on soylent alone. There's nothing bad in soylent AFAIK, but there's no way of knowing whether soylent is missing anything vital. With this in mind, I wouldn't be worried if someone replaced one or two meals a day with soylent. But I'd hesitate to replace all meals. I think it's irresponsible that the makers of soylent keep pushing the idea that one nutrient drink can replace all your meals, though I have nothing against the product itself.

Soylent is a step up if you currently have an unhealthy diet though, and I'd wager you could make the same argument about an unhealthy diet missing something vital.

True. And I didn't make that argument because it should be obvious to everyone. A key difference is that frito-lay doesn't imply you can subsist solely on cheetos.

same here. if they were to start sales in Europe, I'd buy in to replace the low quality lunches I'm having, but I'd keep a varied diet at evenings.

I'm sure soylent has many nutrients I'm not getting enough, but might also miss rare unknown nutrients that body needs in minimal quantity - not to be confused with homeopathy principles, I'm talking about quantifiable quantities of chemicals - I think the first iteration had a similar issue, lacking sulfur or something. because even stuff bad in quantity might be of use to the body and we don't yet know 100%

but since we do know that we get by nicely with incomplete diets, I see no drawbacks to a mixed soylent diet.

Even though the founder does that, he has explained many times that he doesn't expect most people to replace their entire diet with Soylent.

They expect you to do just as you said -- replace one or two meals, specifically the ones where you're in a rush or in the middle of something (work, etc.) and you would've otherwise grabbed a reheatable lunch or some kind of unhealthy fast food.

There are plenty of very healthly adults raised on formula. There is not strong evidence either way and your comment is a great example of how fringe and trend chasing nutrition can be. The same can be said for soylent and probably every other diet fad out there. Will it kill you? No. Is it the secret to eternal health and well being? Also no. So tired of diet fads on HN.

The only child in my family that was breast fed did not end up with terrible allergies. I've heard other similar anecdotes. It should be taken with a grain of salt until further research on this type of thing is done.

> The only child in my family that was breast fed did not end up with terrible allergies.

Here's an anecdote to cancel yours out:

My sister and I were both breast fed but she had terrible allergies as a child.

yup, so the question is which was nature which was nurture?

I'm curious - is there convincing evidence that baby formula is (absorbed-)nutritionally incomplete compared to breast milk? I know it produces worse health outcomes, but I haven't found decent claims on whether that's a failure of nutrition, or only a lack of side-channel influences like immune-system boosting.

As a more general principle, I certainly agree that Soylent might miss the mark on dose and accessibility of some nutrients. The early development history shows that they definitely have in the past.

It's definitely good to see someone trying. My only real concern is that they might miss a low-effect or slow-acting component. If they forget potassium, testing will happily reveal it in a month. If their calcium bio-availability is a bit low, maybe we don't see it until Rhinehart gets osteoporosis in 20 years.

re: "worse health outcomes" for formula/bottle-fed babies - there was a recent study which refutes that common idea --

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/27/breast_feedi...

> it's [not] safe to eat Soylent or another similar product regularly.

As opposed to what? Eating organically grown vegetables and fruits, nuts, mushrooms and oceanic fish? Sure.

But that is definitely not a diet of most people even in developed, rich countries. And while we can't say confidently it's safe to eat Soylent, we absolutely can claim that most human diets are really, really harmful.

I bet Soylent would be much less harmful (if at all) than eating fast food, pizza with red meats fortified by antibiotics and hormones.

I can't trust them. They have 0g of cholesterol yet it's an important part of a healthy diet. This rings of "marketing diet" to me.

Cholesterol is produced by your own body just fine.

In food, it only comes from animal products, so you are basically saying that any and all vegan diets are unhealthy/marketing. Dietitians (and millions of vegans) beg to differ.

I would argue that most vegan diets are unhealthy. You have to work damned hard to get the same nutrients that are readily available in animal products.

You could just argue, but the country I come from has millions of vegetarians who are as healthy as animal eating and live as long.

> [...] millions of vegetarians who are as healthy as animal eating [...]

Note that megaman22 said "vegan", not "vegetarian".

Eating vegan is no more difficult than eating non-vegan. The only extra step is taking a B12 supplement if you don't eat one of the many B12 fortified products.

https://diy.soylent.com/wiki/other-nutrients

It has been found that most cholesterol in food just passes straight through you, most of the cholesterol outside your digestive tract is produced (by your liver IIRC) as a product of working on other things like large fat molecules.

People used to think that cholesterol directly in food was the big bad here because the sorts of foods with high cholesterol also tend to be high in the stuff the body uses to make its own meaning there was a significant correlation.

Silly high cholesterol in your diet is probably still bad, but very low is likely fine (as long as you have the right balance of everything else, of course).

This does mean that I have trouble trusting something like Soylent though: as we are still finding surprises like this because we don't fully understand how our bodies process nutrients, we can't be sure that a food replacement product like this is as healthy as intended and not potentially causing new problems. It is an interesting experiment to watch as an outsider though. I wonder if any independent researchers are yet doing well run long term comparative analysis on people using this stuff compared to other replacements and more "normal" diets? People are willingly taking it, so you don't have the ethics comity problem of convincing people to let you feed the stuff to humans as they are already feeing it to themselves and you are just watching the results.

Agreed, it is good to try it, and even better that they care about the impact of the production on food and the environment.

But this should not be a startup looking for fast growth. This should be a slower process, evaluating the longer-term health of people who truly use it to replace their food. I don't know that I would go so far as to say it needs the whole clinical trial process, but it definitely needs more than "A bunch of us made some stuff in the lab, and on paper it sounds healthy, so lets sell it to the world."

Lol

You obviously have no idea of the food business

Please comment civilly and substantively when posting to Hacker News.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    > My first thought whenever I see soylent is that we have
    > studies proving that we can't replace breast milk with
    > baby formula

I was under the impression that there are many women who - for various reasons - can't breast feed. Are there any credible studies showing their infants have worse health outcomes?

It's still a commonly held belief but a recent study concluded there may be no difference at all:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/02/27/breast_feedi...

A ton of research has been put into this. No matter how much formula companies try to spin it, the results are very clear: infact formula is very suboptimal:

impact on future health http://jn.nutrition.org/content/138/9/1782S.full

impact on allergies http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12839115

Now, what does this have to do with Soylent and adult nutrition? Not much.

What should we be feeding dogs?

Other dogs, obviously

Raw meat. Unlike us, they can manufacture all the other vitamins they need.

raw fresh meat works for us too, no supplements needed.

Isn't "rabbit starvation" a problem? Or does raw meat avoid this problem somehow?

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation

http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm - which is quoted in the Wiki. All lean meat leads to 'Rabbit starvation', you need some fatty meats to supply necessary vitamins and minerals.

Not even some fiber?

Here's the article I was thinking about:

http://www.mendosa.com/stefansson1.htm

First off, in order for this statement to be even HALF true, you need to be consuming organ meats (particularly liver) regularly.

Even consuming meat from a variety of different species, and regularly eating organ meat, off the top of my head you would still definitely be deficient in vitamin c and vitamin k.

Edit (I was curious about the eskimo paradox): It turns out that whale skin is a fairly good source of vitamin C, and the process of fermenting meat causes it to become rich in vitamin K. So if you are willing to consume whale skin, liver and fermented meat regularly, you too can survive on a diet comprised entirely of animal products! I'm still sure the eskimo diet is far from optimal in terms of health and fitness.

Wolves do not eat organ meat. They are "carcassivores" -- they eat meat and bone. That's it. Period. The exception is organs of very small prey that they eat whole, and of course dirt and whatever else that gets on the carcass. The same has been observed of dingoes and this goes for our pet dogs too.

Dogs don't need vitamin C. They manufacture their own. Don't know the specifics of K off the top of my head, but dogs are not humans. They may be mammals but they do not have our biology.

My dogs eat mostly chicken leg quarters and pork neck and they're thriving. I'm saving incredible amounts of money on food and vet bills.

If you want more info look up the research of Dr Tom Lonsdale that has been suppressed by dog food companies for years. His book Raw Meaty Bones has everything you need to know.

Did you ever consider how our dogs were fed before kibble existed? Or why we don't feed pet snakes and lizards some meal replacement?

You did see that the comment I was replying to was basically "raw meat works for us too - no supplements needed" right?

> whale skin, liver and fermented meat regularly,

Meat. Bone. Very little fat. No organs.

We couldn't handle that. Dogs can.

http://www.orijen.ca/

I used to feed orijen. Best of the kibble, nowhere near as good as raw though.

Check out BARF (biologically appropriate raw food, bones and raw food). It's possible to formulate the meals yourself, but it's hard to get the nutrients right. Several companies offer a balanced raw refrigerated/frozen product.

We had concerns about bacteria from the raw meat, so we feed a freeze dried raw food (Stella and Chewy's[0], no affiliation, just a happy customer). It can be expensive, costing around $5 per day to maintain a 15 lb dog, but our dog is a picky eater and loves it.

Raw food will most likely result in smaller, firmer stools. They're easier to pick up, and they dry out and deteriorate faster.

[0] Stella and Chewy had a recent recall due to listeriosis. Fortunately, none of our lots were affected.

Can't confidently say it's not safe to eat either. So why be a stick in the mud?

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