Yes. I'm being serious about adding a coloring. Most synthetic foods don't have very nice colorings without dyes to help. Blue would be good, a lightish brown like chocolate milkshake would be good too.
Well let me qualify that. I wouldn't trust my health to eating primarily an engineered food solution as he is doing. In the grand scheme of things it's a lot less scary than the majority of "food" that you see for sale everywhere in the developed world. At least he is trying to create a healthy food rather than something that addicts people and maximizes margins. So I think it's better than the status quo, far less scary than Coca Cola for instance.
But the part that scares me is the idea that a healthy diet can be engineered. As far as I've seen, our understanding of diet and human metabolism is in the dark ages. I wouldn't trust a nutritionist to engineer a diet any more than I would trust a medieval "doctor" to cure me by bloodletting.
This line of reasoning drives me crazy. Who cares if it's maybe healthier than just about the shittiest food available for consumption? Honestly, can you think of anything that wouldn't pass the test of "healthier than McDonalds"?
Beyond that, the distracted 16 year old is not suggesting that you consume McDonalds as your sole source of nutrition (in fact, he doesn't care at all what you eat); pretty much everyone agrees that eating only McDonalds is a terrible idea, how that gets twisted into a defense of Soylent is just baffling.
I agree with you, but with a mass produced product we can expect low costs, so this would be really helpful in poor countries where starvation is common.
If Soylent becomes cheaper than the previous products [1], it would definitely help more people.
For people living in the US, I agree with you and I don't think it's a solution :
If we take 2 different people, whose optimal intake is 2500 kcal, I'm pretty sure that among these 2500 kcal, one person would need x% of protein and y% of carbs, whereas the other person would need x2% and y2%, so how can Soylent fix this ?
If we can figure out what the x,y,x2,y2 exact values are, then people could get their personalized Soylent, but we're far from it.
Yet our pets can live long, active lives eating the same dry food every single day, I don't see how it's especially difficult to imagine a similar solution for humans. Might be a bit more complicated, but not impossibly so.
Soldiers mostly live off an engineered diet; last I checked they tend to be healthy. Hospitals serve engineered meals. Just because they're using whole foods doesn't really change the fact that they are deliberately building a diet made to supply every nutriment needed by a human being.
And the alternative, the status quo for the majority of the population, is even worse. We're just prodding at random without even thinking about what nutriments we're eating, hoping that somehow we won't forget to eat enough of one crucial nutriment.
What is important for Soylent is that it is clear for everyone who decides to use it extensively to listen to their body. People who die due to bad diets don't go from healthy to dead in 5 seconds. People die when they believe that feeling bad or weak is a normal effect of their diet. They ignore their body when it tells them that there's something wrong. As long as everyone on it knows to stop or see a doctor if they feel in any way worse after starting Soylent, the danger is minimal.
The insight is that you are afraid of the something which is vital to you, is also incomprehensible.
This isn't a particularly deep insight, lots of people are, but one of the interesting things about Soylent is that if you eat a 'normal' diet (which is to say one recommended as a 'healthy diet' by the FDA) you ingest all of the same chemicals in much the same ratios.
If you were pathologically afraid of the unknown (and some folks are) then you would first sterilize some soil, then put it into a garden with an isolation layer and drainage system, then populate it with a soil biome that you had previously done DNA analysis on to insure you understood which bacteria and fungi were present, and then you would water only with distilled water, plants that you had also sequenced which allowed you to ascertain the lack of tampering with their genome, and fertilizer from fish or chicken for which you controlled all of their consumption.
You wouldn't really do that, because you've grown up and seen people all around you eating stuff. And long before you could reason about these things you got hungry, ate, and got full, and it hasn't hurt you to do so and you continued on your path.
The current things you "trust your health" to have, especially if you buy any packaged food, been engineered in ways that are way more extreme than what has happened to Soylent in order to make you buy more of them. The book "In Defense of Food" [1] by Michael Pollan goes into great detail about the things folks do which make Rob sound pretty mild.
You state "As far as I've seen, our understanding of diet and human metabolism is in the dark ages." Which is an understandable bit of hyperbole but the reality is that you trust in the defensive mechanisms of your body which have evolved over millennia to get as much as they can out of what ever you put into your digestive system, whether it be Beluga caviare or rice beetles.
If you look at the situation non-emotionally (and that is very hard to do), then you see that based on your belief that we're in the dark ages of nutrition science, and the chemicals in choice A and choice B are the same. The predicted outcome of consuming all of A or B as your primary food source is "no difference." However, as most people I know who have gone through this emotional journey, what does change is you start actually being aware of what you are eating and making choices based on that and it does have an outcome since you change behavior when you identify a correlation between eating X and outcome Y.
True, one does not imply the other. But if you've read Rob's blog and other material you see that his process was identify "the ingredients your body requires" and then "find those ingredients in safe to eat form." So in this case the list of ingredients is a dependent variable on what your body requires.
I'm not sure if you are serious, or trying to make a joke... But last I heard, consuming the Phytoestrogens in soy were found to have no measurable effect on a human male's estrogen/testosterone levels, or otherwise make them appear/act more feminine.
Sure, but I'm pretty sure the reason xenoestrogens are "bad" is because they affect the same cellular receptors as naturally occurring hormones, not because they affect estrogen/testosterone levels. Just because we've measured that something isn't the case, doesn't necessarily mean something (else) isn't happening. It could be doing something we just can't measure yet. Who knows what the long-term effects of greater phytoestrogen intake is for an individual? Or for their future offspring?
As others in this thread have alluded to, we're far from having a correct model that we can believe in with high confidence when it comes to nutrition.
I think the digestive track adapts to what you eat. If you eat only this for a while you may have issues digesting other things down the road. At least this is my anecdotal experience with eating the same damn thing as a student.
On one hand, I really really want Soylent to be successful; it would solve so many problems if we had a ubiquitous, cheap, and above all else effective meal replacement option.
On the other hand, I can't shake the feeling that it's not going to. Even reading this article, my suspicions flared up a few times (I thought invoking McDonalds was strange, and most of his points about nutrition and consumption seemed off-base.) Maybe it's years and years of pseudoscience taking its toll on me, I dunno.
At the very least, I'm interested to see where things are headed.
> How can it become cheaper than harvesting and packaging something that needs very little additional processing?
One way that's possible is if the processing is done close to the point of production and reduces the size (and increases shelf life) enough that the savings in transportation, packaging, and reduced losses on the shelf compared to less-processed basic foods is greater than the processing cost.
My one month supply is going to cost me approx. $2.50 a meal. That's pretty damn cheap for the amount of nutrients packed in. Compare going to McDonalds and getting some $1 cheeseburgers and diabeetus.
I think it is an interesting product idea if the market is either:
a) People who are starving. If the price is right and it has the right properties as far as shelf life and nutrition, sure, it would make an excellent ration for feeding populations in food emergencies or natural disasters.
b) People for whom eating and food preparation is an undesirable chore. A good example would be combat soldiers who need to eat something and don't care what it is as long as it satisfies hunger and provides nutrition.
For many (most?) other people food is intimately tied in with culture and epicurean tradition. This product won't go over well in places like Italy and France, for example.
b) Is me and a lot of people I know, probably most people I'd think, every meal isn't an important part of culture, no one is proposing eating/drinking exclusively soylent.
I'd add another market category - people who are interested in a diet that has the correct ratios of fats/proteins/carbs (and the other nutrients) that will optimize one's energy. I've always been intrigued by the zone diet's claims that following the appropriate results in feeling much healthier and having more energy, but have found that cooking meals following that ratio is too tedious / time consuming.
b) is interesting. In 2008/2009 I spent a year in Iraq on a small military advisor team. We went out in teams of 6-9 and lived with the Iraqis. Most of our MREs were expired (they expire quickly in 100+ degree heat) so we ate a lot of Iraqi food. I also brought tubs of True-Mass to mix with water. It worked pretty well, even over 1-2 weeks ops.
From this experience, I've always been interested to see how soylent turns out. Even back here in the rear nutrition is a chore. I eat to stay alive, not for the experience. Heck, I go to Costco and pay $3.77 for a slice of pizza, hotdog, and a drink whenever I can.
My major question about soylent is its nutritional value. I work out 2x a day, 5-6 days a week. I have a Syntha-6 protein shake after each workout with some fruit and orange juice. I'm curious if soylent will provide the same level of nutrition I currently get.
If it does, it'd be excellent under demanding physical conditions like combat operations and high performance athletes. I'd eventually like to see different mixes, i.e.: weight loss, weight-gain, distance athlete, etc. Hell, I'd pay a premium for it. My wife pays around $200/wk. for Bistro M.D. meals because she doesn't have time to cook. I'd pay something similar if I could get a high performance meal replacement that I could eat every day, for every meal (maybe different flavors to mix it up), and didn't taste like shit.
So how long until we see the ultra-lean startup that forgoes the in-house gourmet chef for a soylent dispenser?
It's interesting to see an industry traditionally dominated by marketing/advertising being taken on from the perspective of engineering. I have a strong suspicion that the management team isn't right for the long term and if they really hope to compete in the food industry or supplement industry they will have to get bought out.
I was a bit surprised when I tracked down the price - $65-$75 for a weeks supply means $10+ per day. Although I cannot imagine replacing my entire diet with this I could see supplementing or replacing the occasional individual meal. IMO, the price would have to come down from $10 for that to be reasonable.
Doesn't someone already own the trademark for Soylent? Here is Rob's trademark application dated February 21, 2013: http://www.markhound.com/trademark/search/sBxK5WeM7 It seems (to me) incredibly unlikely that someone hasn't already at least tried to trademark it for use in protein shakes or other foodstuffs. And whoever owns the rights to the movie Soylent Green might want to have a word with him if his food supplement ever becomes popular.
I don't get the appeal to those of us w/ easy access to a wide variety of inexpensive, high-quality foods stuffs. Eating a varied diet is one of life's great joys, not a problem that needs to be solved.
Even if you want to avoid the joy of eating, isn't Ensure Complete Vanilla already a sufficient meal-replacement-that-looks-like-seminal-fluid drink?
An overlooked consequence of long-term replacement of solids with liquids for nutrition is the fact that dentition is going to most likely change, I'm referring especially to teeth position.
Daily chewing is applying pressure to teeth and keeping them 'set' in the position you're familiar with.
While researching some wisdom tooth extraction possible long-term side effects, I was surprised to find out how much can teeth migrate, start receding etc. if one is not able to chew on both sides for example.
I don't remember the source(s), but I saw real pictures of people with this problem. There were multiple causes too, not just as a consequence of extractions gone wrong.
A lot of people are focusing on the issue of meeting nutritional requirements, but I'm curious on seeing a real dentist's opinion on the possible long-term effects of such a diet as well.
The color is a bit problematic in that respect. He should just put in a little coloring. I suggest green.
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