Soylent isn’t Healthy (2017)

https://www.nateliason.com/blog/soylent

by ecliptik • 6 years ago

84 81 6 years ago

This article states that minimizing grains is ideal but never defends that point. Does anyone have data defending that?

pricci• 6 years ago

I thought the same while reading the article. My understanding is that carbohydrates are not really bad, especially unrefined ones.

Examine.com has this to say: https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/#summary...

At the end of the day, no one knows I guess.

andor2• 6 years ago

The author is confusing highly-processed white bread and sugary cereals with the grains themselves. Whole grains are some of the healthiest foods one can eat.

https://nutritionfacts.org has a lot of information on evidence-based nutrition, sadly it's mostly videos.

dkdk8283• 6 years ago

Soy is bad for you - high amounts of estrogen.

unwoundmouse2• 6 years ago

False actually. This study states that the isoflavones in soy don’t affect serum T levels.

https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/full...

JohnGB• 6 years ago

That's not quite accurate. Soy contains phytoestrogen, which is a plant estrogen, not a human estrogen. It's similar in many ways and does have (in a much weaker form) some of the effects of human estrogen. However, just calling it "estrogen" implies that it's the same as human estrogen. It isn't.

1273• 6 years ago

From anecdotal evidence it seems for some people the phytoestrogen still activates estrogen pathways. Probably has genetic variation on the effects.

waynecochran• 6 years ago

As soon as I heard "man boobs" and "soy protein" I was out. This may be completely false, but truth is hard to come by these days. No need to risk it here when there are plenty of other good sources of protein.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18558591/

MFogleman• 6 years ago

I dont have citations on hand, but my understanding is that this claim is largely attributed to a single/small amount of studies of dubious validity funded by US Beef industry, and that when you look at populations that have much higher soy intake, their estrogen levels are not elevated/are lower than similar US populations.

Grain of salt and all that, just offering a lead for those curious of the counter argument

ThrowawayR26• 6 years ago

If that were true, we'd have seen significant effects in the peoples of Asia by now, where soy consumption is high.

andor2• 6 years ago

Did you know that cow milk contains actual estrogen and other hormones?

staplers• 6 years ago

As a product designer, it's easy to see through the trend of repackaging old products with new "minimal" branding. Soylent is PediaLyte or Ensure for millenials.

You see it in every industry now not just tech.

jefftk• 6 years ago

PediaLyte and Ensure had far more sugar pre-Soylent

DaiPlusPlus• 6 years ago

I think it misrepresents Soylent to claim it’s essentially a repackaged Pedialyte/Ensure - it had a very, very different product development process and it ostensibly has different goals.

ctrl-j• 6 years ago

Uhhh.. PediaLyte and Ensure are vastly different products. Ensure is a weight gain meal replacement drink and PediaLyte is fancy gatorade.

Soylent is somewhere between Slimfast and Ensure. I'm not positive there's a quality calorically balanced meal replacement drink out there? Maybe there is, but whatever that is, Soylent is the branded version of that. Not PediaLyte or Ensure.

jeff-davis4• 6 years ago

It doesn't need to be perfectly healthy to serve its purpose to me. It helps me avoid time-and-money-wasting bad meals.

If you are out somewhere busy, sometimes you just want to keep going but you are hungry. But all the food options might be overpriced junk food that you have to wait for. Drink a soylent and skip that meal. When you get home eat real food that you actually want to eat.

Soylent kills food cravings and keeps your mood even for hours.

ceejayoz• 6 years ago

But all the food options might be overpriced junk food...

Isn't the point of the article that Soylent is overpriced junk food?

saluki• 6 years ago

Try carrying a couple of granola bars, dried fruit and nuts when you're out.

jeff-davis4• 6 years ago

It has protein and it's not greasy/salty. Like a protein bar except easier to consume and doesn't require a separate drink (bars are usually super dry for me).

A soylent is a couple dollars, whereas bad restaurant food at a crowded event is easily $15 plus 20 minutes of waiting.

I guess I don't see a big problem here? What's an alternative that's better?

itsoktocry• 6 years ago

Soylent kills food cravings and keeps your mood even for hours.

Why not eat an apple, a handful of almonds or a can of sardines? There are a multiple of convenient, healthy foods.

seangrogg• 6 years ago

Because taking a drink from a bottle is perhaps a bit more crowd-friendly than opening a can of sardines when you're at a grocery store, hospital, gym, etc.

thatswrong0• 6 years ago

Because none of those on their own has the same balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs)?

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

An apple is 50 calories and mostly sugar. Almonds are pretty good. Most people don't find eating sardines plain to be convenient or tasty.

Soylent is fairly well balanced, plenty of people seem to think it tastes good enough (I think it's a bit chalky, but, ymmv) and it's reasonably enough priced and convenient.

If you aren't cooking most of your meals, and if you struggle with tracking macros and your needs are statistically average, then Soylent is probably not a bad solution. I got a case for my sister when she was having trouble keeping weight on her and it helped her back on track nutritionally - anecdotal obviously.

jasonpeacock• 6 years ago

Fasting is also a viable alternative, you don't need every meal.

ThrowawayR26• 6 years ago

While I admittedly would benefit from skipping a few meals, I get very surly when hungry; not a good thing either at the workplace or at home. Dunno how people overcome that.

abeppu2• 6 years ago

Fasting can be a valuable practice, but I think it should be applied intentionally, based on your goals for your health and body, not haphazardly when you find yourself in a context where good food is inconvenient.

It can also be a good idea to not look at screens sometimes, but it's disruptive if that time away from screens is at a time not of your choosing but forced on you by external conditions.

ThrowawayR26• 6 years ago

Title: "No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why."

Heading of the conclusion: "The Core Problem: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know"

Most sections could be summarized as "We don't know that Soylent is doing things right therefore it might be unhealthy." It's just a FUD piece.

cultus2• 6 years ago

The human body is incredibly complicated and we really don't know what we don't know. It's really not necessarily true that drinking a nutrient rich slurry like Soylent is a good substitute for a conventional healthy diet. It literally is an unknown. There's good prior reason to believe it is not significantly better. It probably isn't a whole lot worse either, certainly better than many people's diets.

Thus, unknown benefit or harm which probably isn't huge either way. It's like taking an untested drug that probably isn't dangerous but probably doesn't have a huge effect either. The precautionary principle is the usual rule with such things.

To really know, we'd need multi-decade longitudinal studies of large numbers of people. Soylent obviously doesn't have that kind of evidence.

isoskeles2• 6 years ago

I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy."

Maybe we're going too far into a discussion on epistemology here, but I don't think it is FUD to call out that we cannot clearly say the same thing about Soylent that we say about a serving of cruciferous vegetables. One is healthy and the other is unknown and ambiguous.

However, if we still want to call this FUD, I'd argue that maybe FUD is necessary when thinking about what we put into our bodies. I'd also practice FUD when thinking through whether I should approach a mountain lion, and I'd encourage everyone else to do the same.

m0zg2• 6 years ago

I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy."

There's a difference between _knowing_ and _believing_. You _believe_ this, it's not an absolute truth.

It's the same as most people believe they must drink 2L of water a day, where in reality there's zero scientific basis for the assertion.

It could be that there is scientific basis that ground up plant material of which Soylent is comprised is not nutritionally similar to "leafy green vegetables", but you don't _know_ that. You merely _believe_ it. I'm not even a soylent fan (although I did try it), but I am a fan of critical thinking.

BlueTemplar2• 6 years ago

No, most sections could be summarized as "We don't know that Soylent is doing things right therefore it shouldn't be called "healthy"."

ThrowawayR26• 6 years ago

By that logic, we don't know that any dietary plan is doing things right so nothing should be called healthy. That's what makes it FUD.

Haven't tried the stuff in near a decade personally but IMO Soylent is reasonably well researched and a good faith effort to try to create a healthy food, whether it ultimately is or not. "We don't know" doesn't cut it as a counterargument.

ncmncm• 6 years ago

"Soylent: because some of us really like people."

macksd2• 6 years ago

As others have commented, this article is a little bit FUD-ish and doesn't back up all it's claims that much better than Soylent. But personally what I was attracted to in Soylent, I found in better in Huel. Real nutritionists, who share great content about their choices, etc. Very interesting to follow, and I'm a big fan of their powder for breakfast and their "Hot & Savory" for lunches.

My diet is now almost entirely plant-based, there are noticeable health improvements, and it's as cheap and efficient as Soylent.

marliechiller• 6 years ago

I would second huel. its made my shift to veganism much, much more pleasant and practical and has allowed me to hit my macros for hypertrophy in a more manageable way

tmikaeld• 6 years ago

My fiancé and me have been on it for ~2 years, replacing the meal at work with it. In the evening we eat home-made food.

It's been amazing, we both feel more energized and the stool have been better (probably due to the large amount of fibers in huel).

macksd2• 6 years ago

The stool is better, ONCE YOUR BODY IS USED TO IT! One of the main reasons I'm able to be so disciplined about keeping it in my diet heavily is I don't want to subject my wife to the first few weeks back on a mostly-Huel diet :) The poor dear...

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

This whole article has a much too assured tone about itself than is actually warranted. The one thing I can agree with when it comes to nutrition science are:

1. There are a huge amount of unknowns in nutrition science.

2. We have multiple examples where highly processed foods (e.g. trans fats, refined sugars, low fiber) have been proven bad for you, so eating whole foods is generally a safer bet, but regardless it tastes better, too.

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

My car is product of evolution of a couple hundred years, evolving to lubricate with refined petroleum oil in its engine.

Today I,m making oil change, too busy to get petroleum 10-30 oil, figure some canola should be just as good, it,s just oil, guys.

ryeights• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil

lucb1e• 6 years ago

in the Silicon Valley world where everyone ought to spend 16 hours a day coding, food was a waste of time

Any more straw men you want to knock down before talking about the content people clicked for? I don't have to agree with the lifestyle of working >8 hours a day or not taking breaks to find it a convenient food without having to worry about, y'know, the 'snack' being healthy.

this is pretty much entirely nonsense and caused significant harm to an entire generation of Americans, likely leading to much of the modern obesity epidemic

Everyone adhering to the food pyramid is why Americans got obese? Really?

But okay whatever, I'm not here for this discussion, I'm here for Soylent. Let me read on.

the sugar-industry-funded food pyramid

[citation needed]. This kind of advice is given all around the world and doesn't seem to vary by the amount the sugar industry has control over each country's particular food agencies. But feel free to tell me of a country where it's significantly different, I will readily admit not to having checked every single one, but then I'm also not writing an article about how bad this pyramid (or disc, as it is in the Netherlands and probably other countries) is.

To be clear, I know the sugar industry shifted blame to fats. Yes, that is a thing. But not all of this can be solely blamed on the sugar industry and it's not all 100% lies by the government either.

But we're coming up on the first actual content, let me not waste more time.

"[Soylent has no] excess amounts of sugars, saturated fats, or cholesterol." [...] There’s no good evidence suggesting that saturated fats are bad for you, only that they aren’t quite as good for you as monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. [...] eating cholesterol does not raise your cholesterol in the simple ways we used to believe, and that eating some cholesterol is important for your brain and for sexual health

So Soylent says their food doesn't contain much of these two things, and it's debatable to what degree those two things are undesirable... but does that mean they should have included more of something suspected to be bad? They just don't include, as you cited, excess amounts.

This is a problem for Soylent.

No, this is a problem for you. You're taking issue with their wording, not their actual contents so far. I haven't seen a single ingredient being mentioned that is in excess or too little.

you could be at higher risk for neurodegenerative disease, memory loss, decreased sexual function, and other problems.

That's a huge leap. Yeah, yeah, weasel word "could be" is in there, author's grace is saved... it's unhelpful at best.

The next point being made is about sugar in a specific product I hadn't even heard about, Coffeist. The variant of Soylent I buy also has added flavoring and sugars, I think it's obvious to everyone buying this that it's not as good as the real, original thing. The core is the part we're trusting to be free of unhealthy things.

Odds are good that we don’t know everything about what we get from food, just what we know so far. This imperfect information about vitamins and minerals is problematic, because while a lime probably has some other [unknown good stuff, dubbed Vitamin X], Soylent doesn’t.

Wait, leap: we don't know -> thus soylent has to be incomplete. You literally just said you don't know that.

If don't know which foods have Vitamin X, you can call into question literally every diet. The only solution would be to eat a little of everything, including unhealthy things, because perhaps there is a helpful mystery ingredient we don't know about.

If an argument applies equally to the food you're trying to determine the healthiness of as well as the control group, it's not an argument against the food in question.

when you stop eating vegetables and start drinking magical silicon valley food powder…

Yeah, this pretty much speaks for itself. Nobody ever said the former.

It may have all of the vitamins and minerals you need, but do you absorb them the same way? The only way you would know is to consume only Soylent and nothing else and get your levels tested after a few months, maybe longer

Woa smartypants, guess what people did? I didn't research this topic, this is just regular news. You don't have to look far to find this. Top hit for my first guess at a search query, "blood test soylent", is "Blood test results. 100% Soylent 2.0 for 1 year". The results "were all within the normal ranges except for sodium and chlorine. Doctor asked about water intake and it was determined I drank way too much water". What's the top reply in that thread? "I am also on a 80%+ Soylent diet for 24 months and my blood tests came back as normal too! Except for a vitamin D deficiency."

People did this. And I'm still waiting for the first unhealthy or missing/deficit ingredient. You did literally zero research for this opinion piece.

as an animal that evolved to eat other animals

We didn't evolve specifically to survive in space either, so let's not go there using artificial means? What an argument.

If you're saying there are non-vegetarian (let alone vegan) ingredients that we absolutely cannot miss, then please do say which ones because there are a lot of vegans and vegetarians trying to live healthy lives that would love to hear your well-founded research.

Soylent 2.0 has a glycemic index of 49, which is about the same as orange juice, Snickers bars, and spaghetti. That’s not so bad on its own, but if it’s all you’re consuming, then every meal is hitting your blood sugar the same way as a sweet drink or plate full of pasta would. That’s not good.

Okay so here is something I can't comment on. I'm no nutritionist (neither does the author claim to be), so far everything was just common sense and plain logic. I don't know if sugar spikes cause diabetes or something. Let's read on!

...

but no, that is the end of that topic. Nothing further about what issue(s) this might cause. So a "not good" glycemic index is the sole argument of the entire post that is relevant to most Soylent eaters.

The other argument is "we don't know what we don't know". As if we're unaware of that. People get blood tests because of that. They're actively developing the formula because of that.

So, is it objectively not healthy, as you claim in the headline? Should I not have this as a snack or single meal replacement, or are you really just warning against "don't eat this 100% of the time for 30 years because it might give you a higher chance of cancer; we don't know, and I definitely can't tell you"?

jyu• 6 years ago

Soylent is not healthy. Does anyone remember how Rob Rhinehart gave himself heart palpitations? How he hired a bunch of marketers, branders, engineers before any nutritionists and medical advisors?

https://soylent.com/pages/careers

He is still making the same mistake by not prominently showing nutritional consultants, medical experts and hiding behind the claim that this is a nutritional supplement.

Please correct me if Soylent has changed their MO of "move fast and break things" with people's nutrition. I would love to be wrong.

edit: The idea of a fast, easy, nutritious paste is great. Nutrition, however, does not often fit into a piecemeal ready to eat box for all your meals. I ended up taking personal nutrition seriously when I realized my dietary choices were undermining my health. You only get one run at this life. Please take the gravity of your health and who you abdicate your health decisions with the respect those consequences deserve.

dsizzle• 6 years ago

I read this and assumed he got heart palpitations from Soylent. The closest I could find was this article https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-w... that mentions that he had heart arrhythmia -- but while developing Soylent early on and _deviating_ from the USDA recommendations (specifically with the amount of potassium). From that he concluded that Soylent should adhere to the USDA recommended values, which it does.

petargyurov• 6 years ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but I have an issue with "liquid" food.

My concern with products like Soylent and Huel is whether the nutruients they claim to provide are actually absorbed by your body.

Solid food that has been liquidised is not the same as solid food: nutrient absorbption is affected by rate of digestion - more solid food, especially if it is fibrous, gives our bodies more time to absorb nutrients.

It's the same way a fruit smoothie is actually worse for you than just eating the solid contents (disregarding the insane sugar content you would consume).

cwkoss• 6 years ago

I think solid food takes longer to digest because it takes our bodies longer to absorb the ingredients. Liquid foods are much more bioavailable, so I would expect them to be better absorbed than solid foods.

If the liquid food has bad stuff in it (ex. bunch of sugar in a smoothie) that could be a negative thing, but for good stuff that would be a good thing.

abeppu2• 6 years ago

I don't use soylent, but use a similar product in the same space. I hope very few people are using these to replace _all_ of their diet. But as a tool, I find meal replacement mixes to be useful in multiple contexts:

- when traveling somewhere and I expect the options which meet my dietary requirements to be limited

- when trying to fit extra calories to gain weight

- when the other low-effort option would be snacks I won't feel good about (this used to mean the office)

Especially if you have a dietary restriction and a metabolism that requires a lot of calories to avoid unintended weight loss, arranging to always have nutritious _real_ food can require a lot of effort and planning, and I can't always be bothered. If the other options are eating too few calories, eating crappy snacks, or picking something at a geographically convenient restaurant, a meal replacement shake can quickly become best easy option.

closetohome• 6 years ago

Criticism of Soylent does often seem to imply that the alternative is a home-cooked meal of leafy greens.

artagnon• 6 years ago

I've experimented with Soylent for almost 1.5 years, and here are my main takeaways:

1. It's far from perfect, but can serve as a substitute for junk food. After six months of switching to Soylent, the cholesterol in my blood had dropped significantly, as verified by blood tests.

2. It's much easier to moderate food intake with Soylent. If you eat out, especially in the US, the portions tend to be huge, and there's often a post-meal slump. Soylent makes it possible to continuously consume little amounts of food.

3. Your body loses the ability to process solid food if you have too much Soylent. It's possible to get addicted to Soylent, and develop an aversion for regular food, and this is unhealthy, to say the least.

4. Cooking and eating home-cooked meals is an essential part of overall well-being. For snacking on-the-go, smoothies are a good substitute. With yoghurt, seeds, and protein powder blended it, it's arguably healthier than Soylent.

Conclusion: Soylent is like one of those fruit juices you might pick up at the supermarket, when you fancy it. Getting cartons of it shipped home every month is harmful to overall well-being.

knrz• 6 years ago

I’ve started using Coffiest as a substitute for Soy Milk and protein powder.

Coffiest Frozen Bananas Ice Frozen Cauliflower & Avocado Chia Seeds Hemp Hearts Cocoa Cacao Assorted nuts (Cashews, Pistachios, Walnuts, Almonds)

post_below• 6 years ago

I've read a lot of comments about unsourced claims and the like. I expected that after reading the article, the tone is more matter of fact than it has a right to be based on it's citations.

Or at least it didn't present a credible argument for a crowd like HN. Despite that, from my perspective, having long followed the research in fields that relate to health, almost all of the points are the most likely explanation based on what we know (which isn't enough). Backing that up is of course a big ask, big enough that you'd have to decide between spending a few hours on a post or spending weeks compiling sources, then writing a brief history of health policy and practice.

I can understand going with option one.

All of that aside, I think this point is important:

The default for evaluating some food that isn’t found in nature shouldn’t be that it’s “healthy until proven bad,” rather, bad until proven healthy.

We've co-evolved with our environment for 25 million years (if you count from the earliest evidence of hominoids). It's hard to argue that it doesn't make sense to approach anything that falls outside of that evolutionary relationship with healthy skepticism.

cwhiz2• 6 years ago

We know that synthetic supplements are not absorbed the same way as when we get them in real food, so even though Soylent has everything, we’re likely not using all of it the same way since it’s not in its original form. In that case, “100%” may be more like 20%, since we can only use some of it.

Anecdotally, I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels from deficient to 57 ng/mL. Blood tested three times to confirm stability at or around that level. I've heard numerous times that vitamin supplements don't work, or aren't absorbed the way same, but the blood tests don't lie.

PhantomGremlin• 6 years ago

I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels

That's just one vitamin. I'd venture that the micronutrients you need all have different absorption profiles.

For example, someone I know had an iron deficiency. It turns out there are lots of different ways to attack that, with quite different effectiveness.

cwhiz2• 6 years ago

I'm sure. I just think the blanket statement is obviously not true. There was a linked study or article, but because the article is so old, the link is dead.

y2bd• 6 years ago

I wish it wasn't bulked with maltodextrin.

jdofaz• 6 years ago

I tried Soylent for a while a few years ago, I always felt a little off after drinking it. Nothing extreme but I decided it wasn't for me.

tbran• 6 years ago

If you're into it, there are many user-submitted DIY Soylent recipes at completefoods.co [1].

There are recipes for Keto Chow (costs $7.15/day) [2], a super low-cost Soylent (costs $1.51/day) [3], AgroVittles solid bars (costs $14.15/day) [4], and Eldar Bread, also solid (costs $1.79/day) [5].

I'm not really interested in replacing all my meals with a drink (and I doubt many people really do that long term), but I think some of these options are a good way to get things I probably lack.

[1] https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes

[2] https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/keto-chow-150-maste...

[3] https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/brets-soylent-corn-...

[4] https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/agrovittles-electri...

[5] https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/eldar-flour

bigbossman• 6 years ago

These kinds of posts always make me think of Jay-Z - "What you eat don't make me shit"

t0mbstone• 6 years ago

Soylent is full of sugar (which will cause your insulin levels to spike) and has crappy fat in it from stuff like canola oil. It's objectively a terribly unhealthy beverage.

A much better alternative is Orgain, which uses monkfruit for sweetener (which won't affect your insulin if you are diabetic), and has a bunch of vegetables in it, plus protein from peas.

m463• 6 years ago

I had a subscription for soylent for years.

I remember someone asking me if I could go 100%. I said NO WAY. maybe 10% of your diet, more is not great.

I treated it as a snack replacement because -- hey, it's better than reaching for something really bad, right?

In the end I think it IS a snack. It was better than eating donuts, or hotdogs all day, but is only by a matter of degree. It is a highly processed food, which is not great.

I see it a little like the emergency room - it will prevent you from dying today. But it will not help you with a healthy and thriving lifestyle.

dwrodri• 6 years ago

I am a graduate student with ADHD-PI who lives alone. Keeping my apartment in acceptable condition and taking care of myself can be quite difficult at times. It can take hours for me to fold laundry, do the dishes, or cook meals because I struggle following through with tasks. I am not bound from ever feeling like a functional human, I have my good days and my bad days, same as everyone else.

Prior to soylent, I was ordering food multiple times a week and keeping lots of junk food in the house, in case I hyperfocused through the time that I should be cooking dinner, which was quite often.

I'm not here to defend the contents of Soylent, and I'm only loyal to the brand to the extent that I find it tasting not bad. But the concept of an instant meal replacement which I can prepare in a matter of seconds has had a huge positive benefit to my life.

If anyone else has any tips for how they managed to deal with this (besides Soylent), I'm all ears. For what it's worth, I try to keep Soylent to one a day and always have a "real" meal otherwise

Soylent isn’t Healthy (2017)

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