As a fellow hacker who has spent a significant amount of time trying to understand how diet, exercise, and nutrition work - especially within my own body - I can confirm the Soylent campaign's "know it all" attitude is off-putting.
But then again, it seems like these days being pretentious helps to sell.
I'm curious what people think of diet-hackers.. this forum is probably more sympathetic than most.
It seems like there's a bi-modal distribution where either you don't care about diet, or you ascribe metaphysical properties to food and how it was obtained and prepared. The later seems like ho-hum, nutrition is much more complicated than the FDA labels, but I have to believe it's possible to synthesize boring goop that gives you everything you need. I really don't care that much about eating.. as in, if I could flip a switch and never eat again, I would unhesitatingly do so.
I tried Soylent for a while, which I liked well enough, but they are optimizing for things I don't particularly care about like vegan ingredients and sedentary nutrition profile. Lately I've been using 100%FOOD which I like quite a bit in the triple protein profile, and is helpful for my activity level.
I think if you thought about it for a moment you would realize that he is appealing to the concept of hacking. In this case, hacking diet, something everyone on this site can relate to. This is why it gets attention.
I'm on the fence as to whether I'll to wait and see how this turns out, with his volenteer base or to even hit up the Kickstarter to try it myself, as I personally am at a pivot point where I could change my diet significantly and benefit. If Soylent proves the easy route, so be it.
I don't know what it is about diet research but it seems to really bring out strong opinions on hackernews. Given that we're the target market for Soylent I guess it makes sense.
The thing that bothers me about Soylent is the arrogance that the incredibly complex interplay of how the food we eat interacts with our body can be distilled down to a simple formula - X g protein/kg bodyweight, etc.
We still don't directly understand how certain vitamins may interact with each other, how much the ratios of Omega-3s to Omega-6s affect overall health, whether there might be other chemicals that affect overall longevity and health, and so on.
I understand convenience, but why should we think we've "cracked the code" of the totality of nutrition?
And as previously mentioned by many people here on HN, it's amazing that none of the people involved with Soylent seem to have an education or work experience related to diets or nutrition (see the "Team" section on https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body).
I'm not sure I'd want to be doing experiments with my body based on advice from IT engineers.
Youre bias is substantially more harmful and ignorant than anything in soylent. This may be snake oil with protein, but the idea that someone is challenging a very deeply ingrained accepted truth (humans need food) creates a process that leads scientific progress and promotes at least an opportunity for innovation.
Not to be harsh, but your diatribe is exactly the opposite of what HackerNews stands for. Your armchair quarterback position offers nothing
That said I am passing on this until there is way more information.
> Third, it is one of the foremost examples of hacking diet.
> Fourth, the HN audience is a key audience of early adopting efficiency seekers.
There is nothing new about Soylent, apart from the unethical crowd-funding[1] and easy access to the public.
Liquid total meal replacements are common and have existed for a log time and are available from Amazon. They don't always push the total replacement aspect because lawyers and I guess because they never expected anyone to want to do so, but people live off existing products and have done so for years.
[1] "puts you in perfect health" and other unethical claims which seem to have been quietly dropped.
I agree with you man. For a site that's geared towards technology blogs there's a huge amount of health articles on here. Not only that, but like you said it attracts a lot of fervent personality types who portray a lot of the cult-like attitudes towards a certain diet or program (Keto is especially bad). Way too much speculation from programmers who think they're outsmarting an entire industry of health professionals.
I have a particular hatred for Soylent but thankfully its quick rise to popularity has drawn upon it a lot of scrutiny and with that has alleviated a lot of the bad that it was originally representing. I still think there are superior alternatives on the market that have pre-dated Soylent but the fact that its been iterated and improved by health professionals and not a Software Engineer says a lot for it.
My "criticism" of Soylent is that it's essentially protein powder / vitamins / mass-gainer-type stuff with some other non-perishables, except marketed to geeks who have never stepped into a gym and thus have no idea that all this stuff already existed for the most part.
We understand so little about nutrition. Yet the same people that code for a living also run around saying "don't roll your own crypto" are the people replacing their diets with things like Soylent. It's madness.
No it is not a serious attempt at proving everything a body needs, not in the slightest.
If it was a serious attempt the soylent team would be composed of scientists with expertise in nutrition. Instead their website lists a lot of people with absolutely irrelevant skills. I can't think of anything associated with y-combinator which is quite as embarrassing as this.
Sadly one part of hopes this takes off, so that in 10 years time we have an idea of the long term results of a diet of this kind of nonsense. It will have been tested on the kind of people who have the arrogance to believe that because they understand business / computing the can 'solve' the worlds nutrition problem.
Lately growth hackers and marketers for some reason consider themself tech companies and disruptors while what they do is just repackage old things that were out there for decades into attractive offering for millennials.
Soylent is a mere marketing company having not real innovation on the product side, not to mention questionable ingredients quality.
I have the same reaction to this as I did to Soylent: I'd be a lot more inclined to try it if there was somebody involved with it who had some demonstrable background or expertise in nutrition, health or medicine.
The human body is a complicated thing, but while it's hard to improve, it's very easy to screw up. And screwing up someone's health can have consequences for them that last for years or decades. It can literally ruin their life. If that happens it won't be much comfort for them that their sad story has led you to pivot to a more promising approach.
For all the intellectual firepower of people in the tech community, there is a curious strain of anti-intellectualism that comes forth in projects like this; an eagerness to discount the expertise of people who have studied a subject for their entire lives, just because they weren't CS majors. It's like trying to send a man to the moon without working with any aerospace engineers. I honestly do not understand it.
No, my argument is I don't understand all the excitement here at HN for Soylent. It doesn't seem novel or exciting, but a lot of people act like its the best thing ever invented. I then attempted to guess at the reason, which is that it's marketed towards techies and hackers in the startup scene, which ensure isn't.
Other replies have given me additional information which I'm going to go over. Your's was setting up a straw man argument.
Considering many people on this HN are, well, hackers, and can spend a ton of time coding, optimizing, etc... often even evangelizing coding for everyday people, I feel like this is the lazy answer.
Which is fine; there's nothing inherently wrong with being lazy or ignorant about cooking. But evangelism about Soylent freeing up ones time is silly, all things considered. It's not for everyone, it's not for families, it's not even formulated for women, the elderly, children, or generally for people with nutritional needs that deviate from those of a 30 year old male. It's for the lazy dude who doesn't want to cook.
Wow, thanks for the judgement, and for quoting selectively to imply actual malice on my part.
So I'm "conservative" and have "a mindset diametrically opposed to that of a hacker" because I think someone is more likely than not to get shit wrong in trying to replace the human diet, evolved over aeons, with something he makes in his blender?
I'm all for challenging convention, disruption, experimentation, growth, and such. More than a little revolution, more than merely now and then, is more than just a good thing, in my book. Frankly, I think there are more human institutions that are moribund at best — and more likely actively harmful to the human condition — and desperately in need of replacement than not.
IMO, diet — or at least a healthy diet, where one eats actual food — is not among those things. It seems pretty clear to me that eating plants, and to a lesser extent, things that eat plants, or things that eat things that eat plants... is what our bodies have evolved to do, and correlates very strongly with health and longevity. It's equally clear that eating processed things correlates incredibly highly with all kinds of malady and morbidity.
Now, along comes someone who thinks he knows better than that. I wish him luck. I really, honestly do. I just don't have high hopes for his experiment. And, yes, while I probably will have some schadenfreudey, "Well, you probably should have seen that coming" if he gets it wrong badly enough to suffer some harm, I most certainly don't actually wish that upon him.
We see on practically a weekly basis some new and exciting way in which our understanding of human nutrition has been wrong all along. "Soylent Dude" is basing his recipe on that understanding, which has been demonstrated over and over and over again to be incomplete, misguided, based on faulty information — and even deliberate misinformation — and just plain wrong.
Given all that, please tell me how he's not likely to be missing something, getting something wrong, and potentially doing serious harm to himself, because I just don't see it.
> Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it.
Really? It seems to me like it's Ensure for computer programmers.
This soylent discussion that I constantly see on HN is what happens when computer nerds who know nothing about nutrition (and a couple who do) talk about health.
This guy is going to make a ton of money but I think that people should be thinking, "Do I really want to live a life where I don't have time for food or I don't enjoy preparing and eating it".
Personally I think it is kind of sad and hope in the future that 'Eating' doesn't become what 'face-to-face communication' or 'playing outside' has become today.....
But then again, it seems like these days being pretentious helps to sell.
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