> What's distressing is that you're being upvoted for it.
Because I'm right, and he's wrong. For fuck's sake, everyone on here needs to educate themselves about the basics of nutrition before commenting on something they don't understand.
What you have here is a bunch of 20-something coders, most of whom don't know jack shit about cooking or biology but wish they didn't have to think about cooking so they could spend more time working on their Rails or iPhone apps, getting excited that one of their own has "disrupted" a new industry.
In reality, it's just another example of the blind leading the blind. But failures in the food industry don't just end with a site shutting down and some commenters on HN complaining about losing their favorite service while some others explain why it didn't survive. They can end with people in the hospital or in the grave.
Because I'm right, and he's wrong. For fuck's sake, everyone on here needs to educate themselves about the basics of nutrition before commenting on something they don't understand.
Why not educate people, rather than call them wrong?
The reasons you're not being convincing are:
- you attack based on age.
- you attack based on lack of credentials.
- you attack based on the idea that someone might get hurt, when you don't have any evidence Soylent is dangerous.
- your entire tone is one of talking down to your audience.
If your arguments had substance, you wouldn't need to resort to any of that.
> you attack based on the idea that someone might get hurt, when you don't have any evidence Soylent is dangerous
It's like talking to a brick wall. How many times do I have to tell you? The burden of proof is on the people making Soylent. You can't just apologize after the fact, when people are already in the hospital.
Just to be clear, you're embarrassing yourself because multivitamins are the modern equivalent of magical totems of other civilizations that we patronizingly mock.
Or, to reach more into our own history, they're the modern snake oil.
“From a practical standpoint, this study does not change the fact that the majority of consumers could benefit from taking an affordable multivitamin,” said Andrew Shao, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs with the council. “It is better to meet these recommendations than not, and consistently taking a multivitamin over the long term could help fill these nutrient gaps and may help consumers lead healthier lives.”
Yes, I saw that. But that was from the vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Council of for Responsible Nutrition, which is a vitamin industry trade group.
The article ended with a conclusion from the study's author:
Dr. Neuhouser said she realizes that many people who are devoted vitamin users will be skeptical of the finding that they are receiving no benefit from a daily multivitamin.
“I don’t want to disparage people who take multivitamins — it’s their choice as a consumer,” Dr. Neuhouser said. “What we’re presenting is the science showing it’s neither beneficial nor harmful. If they want to choose to spend their dollars elsewhere this might be a good place to do so. Perhaps they can buy more fruits and vegetables.”
My take-away from these studies is that unless you have a vitamin deficiency, taking multivitamins does nothing. And if you have a specific vitamin deficiency, then you may be better off just taking supplementation of that vitamin; a general multivitamin will only help because it happens to contain what you are deficient in.
You'll often find such mealy-mouthed conclusions in write-ups of studies where the evidence doesn't confirm the author's hypothesis, and especially in anticipation of controversy. (in this case, your quote doesn't come from a study author, I guess)
If there's no benefit on average, then there's no reason to recommend on average (disclaimer: I take a chewy multivitamin because I remember being convinced by evidence that manganese is a bad thing to supplement, and most multivitamins have 2mg of it).
Let's not forget that our understanding of the world, and of our own biology, is full of holes. When science says "glucids exist", that does not suggest that other molecules don't, but we (scientists and the general public) have a tendency to assume it does.
Think about "junk dna", and the underlying culture that end up creating it as an idea: "this does not appear to do anything, must be junk". The key take away for me is that we simply are underestimating what we do not know about the world, dislike labeling things as unknown, and can financially benefit from applying simplifying assumptions on an industrial scale.
So I'd take these formidable claims with a huge grain of salt.
More importantly, I fail to see what's new with the idea of powder / shake food. This shit has been around.
