Isn't this a YC-invested company? Other than that, I agree with you. I'm not interested in Soylent the product, nor am I interested in Soylent the company. I tell my friends to be wary of using the product.
I think I've heard of past attempts, but they didn't seem to catch on? This Soylent stuff seems to be "proving" itself; or at least not debunked enough to drop it just yet. If it truly does work, I think a lot of 3rd world countries would benefit from it. So at least for me, I'm interested in the developments of Soylent. In general, I'm interested in any tech that TRULY is world-changing even if it's not in the form of a computer. Now do I think it belongs on HN? That's a bit debatable, but if people are upvoting it(and not gaming the system) then it has the right to be here just like anything else. Maybe HN is slowy changing to be more than strictly 0s & 1s news?
But this is what I don't get. We literally already have this. Some cancer patients live on a liquid diet for YEARS already. We have complete liquid nutrition. It's a solved problem.
Now, the application can be debated, but soylent doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table.
It feels like this is just old solution with new marketing.
I'm curious -- are these formulae available for purchase by anyone? I do think that Soylent's research is somewhat redundant (although more research is never a bad thing especially with tricky business like nutrition), but is there another product that's come out of this cancer patient diet that I could buy?
Well, I dunno. I cannot say you're wrong. I'm just interested in stuff like this as long as their are large groups of starving people in the world. Maybe my interests are misdirected and I should be wondering why current solutions aren't being applied.
On a global scale, Soylent is very very expensive. Their current pricing is $65/week. Many nonprofits feed someone for $50-100/year in the third world. The price would have to come down to 2% of the current value to be considered. That's unlikely with such a heavily industrialized product.
Maybe we'll decide to mass-produce and/or subsidize? I don't know, I just think it's cool thing he's doing and want to see the conclusion of it. Maybe it's all a big waste of time, who knows. I just want to be kept informed of the progress.
I'm starting to think this has to be a viral marketing campaign / social experiment.
It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health to unqualified individuals, who lack the resources to employ qualified individuals, simply for an extra hour everyday.
One of the most surprising things about the commentary on Soylent, is the level of vitriol and anger that they are pushing out a meal replacement product without an exceptionally high level of testing and scientific design; and that the entire _concept_ of trying to create a meal replacement product is morally wrong, or totally and completely impossible.
(For examples, just read the comments on this article, or any of the Soylent-related articles).
It seems to be based on a presumption that we all have amazing, carefully designed and scientifically tested diets as is, and Soylent is going to make our diets demonstrably worse, or (apparently) make us really sick, or (even) kill us.
Given that 69.2% of the adult US population is overweight, it would seem that our current amazing diets are perhaps not working.
Of course, the vast majority of us make it up as we go along, influenced by food manufacturers and marketing, and the people around us, as well as our parents.
Sure, food manufacturers have more scrutiny than you or I, but no one is making sure that any particular combination of food in the supermarket is going to lead to a healthy diet - nothing stops me from choosing and carrying out a bad diet - and many many people 'choose' and carry out bad diets as is.
Do you seriously think that, when the supermarket put in an entire aisle of confectionery, that they were doing it as some attempt to give us a good diet?
Or that coke is attempting to help us lose weight when the dump all that sugar - or HFCS - in?
If you think the person buying Taco Bell for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch, and KFC for dinner is following a carefully designed, healthy diet, you are deluded. If you think these people don't exist - you're deluded there too.
To be not evil, Soylent only has to be _not worse_ than the average existing diet.
Now, I agree that a complete meal replacement product should get more scrutiny than the average person's diet - and Soylent is! I certainly haven't had my diet designed by a group of food scientists or dieticians.
> the level of vitriol and anger [...] that the entire _concept_ of trying to create a meal replacement product is morally wrong
You're right there. Some people really do have a strong emotional response against the idea, which makes them put forward nitpicking arguments against it.
Will the initial implementations of Soylent be perfect? Probably not. But there is no reason why it's impossible to make an all-in-one food that is tasty, nutritious, convenient and cheap, so I'm sure that if enough effort is put into doing so, eventually it will happen.
When it happens, it's unlikely that I will solely eat Soylent; I like cooking and I like varienty. But I wouldn't be surprised if I come to use it for 30% of my calorific intake.
> I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.
If you live in a country which adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health then I disagree. You entrust those bodies and the qualified individuals within them because they ensure what you purchase is what it says it is. Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.
> An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.
If Soylent works completely as advertised yes you gain time. Should it lead to any kind of health problems it's more than likely you lose time.
> Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.
Do you actually know that? Presumably if there is US regulation/law around selling and marketing food products, then Soylent will have to be compliant just like everything else?
Though, given I live in Australia, a country which
> adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health
and I can still buy all the Quarter Pounders and chocolate I want, it seems these bodies are more about food safety, than choosing my diet for me.
You either needed to read more or more closely. According to wikipedia linked:
"Like other food substances, dietary supplements are not subject to the safety and efficacy testing requirements imposed on drugs, and unlike drugs they do not require prior approval by the FDA; however, they are subject to the FDA regulations regarding adulteration and misbranding. The FDA can take action against dietary supplements only after they are proven to be unsafe. "
No, you need to read more closely. It says exactly what I said. Soylent is covered under the exact same requirements as all other foods. This is very simple to understand, and I honestly can't imagine how you can possibly be having difficulty with this.
>>I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.
Sorry, but this is straight out wrong. You will lose nothing and it will cause no harm in anyway, and I mean it literally if you experiment with natural foods. Go eat bananas, or apples, or mixture of those. Or say mixture of 20 fruits. It will never cause you any harm. Eat rice, wheat, meat, ragi, vegetables you name it. It will cause you absolutely no harm if you eat what is supposed to be eaten by a normal adult.
This is true, even if you occasionally eat junk food.
But if you go and pull only the essential 'ingredients' of these foods separately, mix them up in water and drink them. You are likely to cause a good enough amount of damage.
There is a very big reason, why our tongues have taste buds,why our stomachs have hydrochloric acid in them,why the stomach has a mucus lining, why we secrete digestive juices/enzymes, why we secrete bile. You see the whole functioning of the body is not designed to receive dosage of macro nutrients back to back in hourly dosage.
On a macro level if you look close, the food chain and the digestive system is perfectly optimized to survive and even thrive in the hands of unqualified individuals like us. If our body needed back to back dosage of macro nutrients in precise quantities to survive, our species would be extinct by now.
So the definition of efficiency when it comes to human digestive system is not, time saved in cooking food, or ability to receive and absorb exact chemical nutrients in precise quantities.
Also note the aim of the human digestive system and the way it measures efficiency is very different than our way.
>>An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.
You could say this about playing a game in the Google doodle, or say reading the news paper.
Its not like your receive 6% of your life in one shot. You receive it an hour at a time. For the kind of job we do an hour is not sufficient to even get started.
"Ensure Complete, one simple choice for 4-in-1 nutrition. Each delicious shake provides balanced nutrition and targeted muscle, heart, immune, and bone health benefits. It’s a simple choice to get the right nutrients in the right amounts to help you stay strong. Take charge of your health and your nutrition with Ensure Complete!"
"For how long can I use Ensure? Ensure products deliver complete and balanced nutrition that is always beneficial. There is no time limit to using Ensure products. In fact, long-term use is encouraged if you’re at a nutritional risk (for example, if you’re an older adult)."
"Can Ensure replace a meal? Yes. Ensure products are complete and balanced, when used in appropriate amounts they can be used to replace meals."
Didn't know about Ensure Complete and it seems that you are right, it looks pretty complete. The problem though is the variance in the DV% of different nutrients. For instance, if I wanted to get 100% of sodium from Ensure then I would have to intake 3500 calories and 260% protein, and I haven't heard too many great things about having too much protein. The DV% of most micros is not listed so there may be a lot of problems like this.
Where does one get the DV% that one needs? And are those % about surviving or thriving? There is literally no definitive place to get such information that is actually backed by science and data.
For instance, that 260% protein you cited is about half the protein I take in a day.
Also, FYI, the danger in taking in too much protein is very much overblown. I doubt you could actually consume enough protein to make it a problem unless you had a medical problem with your kidneys already.
No, they don't disagree at all. They say you can replace A MEAL with ensure. Not all of your food consumption period. There is a big difference. They only ever talk about using ensure as a supplement to your diet, not a replacement for it. If you want to live on ensure you need to drink 5 ensure completes per day, plus consume some extra calories, possibly some extra protein, some salt and a few vitamins. But they explicitly recommend that you do not exceed four servings per day: http://ensure.com/nutrition-faq
They say not to have more than 4 servings of _Ensure High Protein_ because of the protein content. I am not talking about that product.
In the FAQ I pointed to they say that Ensure is safe for long term use, is complete, and they answer a question about how many servings a day are necessary for meet your needs.
Soylent only probably has 100% of what it's testers know they need and who knows how much of what they don't know they need. Ensure is good enough that people live on it, they don't loudly trumpet it as a complete replacement because 1) the market for that is small and it makes you look like a quack 2) people have a variety of nutritional needs based on life style, genetics. Hell ALTITUDE will change your nutritional needs.
Why are people so hypocritical that they claim soylent is not nutritionally complete but ensure is, despite the obvious fact that nutritional labelling laws allow us to see that soylent contains everything ensure does and more?
Here in we see why marketing matters. A product marketed as a supplement to help round out a diet that's affected by age, jaw-being-wired-shut, chrons..., that the company is willing to cop to[1] as "yes it's designed to fully replace food" on their website's faq is positioned very differently than a product marketed as "100% food replacement, oh and maybe we'll save Africa" with heavy notes of fuck-the-establishment and some questionable understandings of how people eat[2].
[1]actually abbot and the like will advertise as being a full meal replacement... for situations where people have medical need and are being monitored by a medical staff, which is to say, in situations where problems might be caught and addressed.
[2]Don't want to eat three multi dish meals a day at 8,12,7? Human bodies have plenty of reserves to deal with out getting 100% of their RDI every single day, just so long as it averages out over a week or two.
But you still want something to keep the stomach from rumbling? Great, the supermarket is chock-a-block full of foods that need no preperation and supply a wide variety of nutrients, either in the form of specialized products (Ensure, Clif bars, various other supplements/diet products) or just no-prep food: pouch of tuna, quart of milk, yogurt, that thing of trail mix that's clearly just muesli with extra peanuts, sack of pre hard-boiled eggs. Whatever.
Perhaps simply watching it all unfold as opposed to just going and buying something.
Personally I am curious as to how it works out; I've never been one to buy gels or sports drinks, preferring to make my own because I know what goes in them and can tweak it for me. I get this vibe from the Soylent project.
Exactly. If you want to live on liquids alone you could just stick to milk. I know a cheap person that lived on nothing but oats and milk for quite a while to save money. Nothing I'd do for a new laptop or other equipment.
People can and have lived on liquid food for quite a long time. This isn't new, this isn't particularly interesting or groundbreaking in anyway.
Why the fascination on HN? Can someone explain it to me?