Soylent Campaign

https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body

by nkh • 13 years ago

352 473 13 years ago

campaign.soylent.me

Afforess16• 13 years ago

Looking forward to this. There has been a lot of FUD, and I think some of it is valid, so I'm choosing the 1 week supply option to give it a try. I'd like to replace 1 of my meals each day with this, I hate having to deal with cooking and cleaning up in small temporary apartments.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

I hope you enjoy it! It'd be interesting to hear how you get on.

If you decide you don't like soylent there are a bunch of other products from other more mainstream manufacturers.

Fortisip and Ensure are the two brands I'm most familiar with, but there are others. Fortisip do wide range of different style products (shake, juice, yoghurt, and 'savory'.) But it's an acquired taste.

I'm not sure why they have two trailing slashes. (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)

(http://ensure.com/)

rosser• 13 years ago

You might want to avoid Ensure. In a test where it was used in place of the standard glucose solution for an oral glucose tolerance test, it caused 2 hour blood glucose levels over 180 mg/dl in some subjects.

Sure, it's marketed as having a low glycemic index — but the GI of chocolate cake and ice cream is even lower...

obviouslygreen• 13 years ago

Be very, very careful. Ideally, if you can afford it, have a doctor evaluate your health (particularly blood chemistry) before and then after a few weeks. Not only would it be useful to you, it'd be informative to everyone considering this.

justincormack4• 13 years ago

But for the soylent product there is no need as it is perfect for all people. Yeah right. And why the dystopic branding?

mscottmcbee• 13 years ago

I've been following this for a while, and I'm excited to see it start to come together. I hope a lot of people aren't turned off by this pseudo Kickstarter, and wonder why Kickstarter turned them down in the first place.

drharris• 13 years ago

I imagine Kickstarter turned them down because of potential liability if something goes wrong. Replacing food with chemicals makes sense to scientists and engineers, but I imagine this has the potential to be lawsuit-heavy for the average people out there (my back aches, must be the Soylent).

Edit: specifically, these two guidelines:

- Projects cannot offer financial, medical, or health advice.

- No tobacco, drugs, and drug paraphernalia; energy food and drinks; or nutritional supplements.

jonathanjaeger3• 13 years ago

Kickstarter is for creative projects with a finite ending point. For example, you can't launch a website and raise funds on Kickstarter so you can pay engineers -- it needs to be a concrete project, not "I want to start a company." The same is true for Soylent, it isn't framed as a project.

machinshin_• 13 years ago

The campaign's powered on the open-source Crowdhoster platform, which is a Crowdtilt project. They recently wrote a blog post about updates to the platform: http://blog.crowdtilt.com/post/50939274192/updating-crowdhos...

russelluresti• 13 years ago

I've been following the Soylent articles since they were posted and have been pretty interested in it. Definitely going to have to give thought to backing this.

Fuzzwah• 13 years ago

www.soylent.me doesn't work.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.soylent.me

johncoogan• 13 years ago

Sorry about that. DNS record pointing to http://campaign.soylent.me is caching. Should be live now.

gcb03• 13 years ago

Still doesn't answer how this is much different than just another kind of diet shake.

mc-lovin• 13 years ago

It's a diet shake where the seller goes "you know what, fuck it, I don't recommend that you eat a balanced diet, and I do recommend you replace all your meals with this shake"

smacktoward3• 13 years ago

and "of course it's safe, I've been eating it for, like, months now"

Afforess16• 13 years ago

Really? He said he has replaced most meals, but I haven't seen where he recommends that strategy to others.

batgaijin• 13 years ago

Most diet shakes aren't marketed as being fully nutritious. This has all the vitamins your body craves; as in I think you could eat this forever with no side effects, but that (to my knowledge) has never been tested with diet drinks (because they can claim that it's your responsibility to get the right nutrients).

gcb03• 13 years ago

So, it's a diet shake where the company is liable?

Man, i'm dying to be able to live on shakes (I already do, protein shakes and soluble fiber when i'm out of time) but claiming you can go on and on on just one food source for long periods of time without extensive testing is just irresponsible.

enoch_r• 13 years ago

It probably isn't much different--but after reading about Soylent, I bought a few six-packs of Ensure just to try out the "don't feel like cooking/eating and would ordinarily eat something bad for you? drink a meal!" concept. I ended up crashing--hard--a few hours after my "breakfast." It was absurdly sugary. Basically it felt like marketing had demanded a product that "tasted good," so the ingredients list got a giant extra helping of sugar. If Soylent were just a version of Ensure that is focused on a sane balance of calories between carbs, fat, and protein, I'd personally be very happy with it.

gcb03• 13 years ago

Anyone ever heard of the kickstarter clone they are using? http://www.crowdhoster.com/

it seems to just be a implementation of Selfstarter with a backend to process payments, but at the same time they boast "Free to use"... how can a payment processing be free?

gergles• 13 years ago

It uses Crowdtilt to process payments, which takes 2.5%. Although the wording of the statement isn't crystal clear; they may charge the people wishing to contribute an extra 2.5%? Regardless, 2.5% gets skimmed off for payment processing.

https://www.crowdtilt.com/learn/fees

sp3324• 13 years ago

I got curious about this statement: 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. This is just wrong enough to be misleading, since that figure actually includes heating, not just cooking. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs292/en/ So soylent wouldn't help in the cases where indoor pollution is caused by heating.

volandovengo3• 13 years ago

Really?? From all the comments about this idea/execution/etc, this is what you chose to focus your attention on?!

marknutter7• 13 years ago

Welcome to Hacker News!

sp3324• 13 years ago

Yes, a claim that 0.2% of the world population dies every year from their own stoves caught my attention. The WHO report is striking to me, because that's a lot of people dying from causes they don't understand and don't see coming.

trebor• 13 years ago

It's a pretty important fact. If the creator is trying to justify the adoption of Soylent as a meal replacement by using this fact (obviously not by itself) then they need to be careful to use facts clearly. The phrasing in the pitch blames 2 million deaths upon indoor cooking, which is inaccurate.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

Soylent got a fact wrong.

Either they deliberately misreported something; in which case they're lying while trying to raise money.

Or they made a mistake. And if they get something this simple wrong why should I trust them when they're making something that I'm supposed to be able to live on?

jere3• 13 years ago

>Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.

Citation needed. I'm a big fan of n=1, but making these kinds of claims supported by anecdote and then asking for money based on those claims is ridiculous.

jckt11• 13 years ago

Also, the quotations from the early adopters...they could at least say who said those things, never mind whether or not they actually said them.

ceejayoz8• 13 years ago

It's a pity no one on the team has any experience in a relevant field, and the "Is it safe?" answer is absurd. You could say the same thing to deem cigarettes safe.

gojomo3• 13 years ago

Indeed, the hand-waving and un-attributed testimonials are of the same class of support usually provided for ideas like Breatharianism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breatharianism

volandovengo3• 13 years ago

Very true. They need a nuticionist on the team

ceejayoz8• 13 years ago

More than a nutritionist, they probably need a ten year double-blind study. "We tried it on ourselves for a few months" isn't long enough for some deficiencies to present themselves, lacks a control, and both the investigators and the test subjects are aware of what they're taking in.

breadbox2• 13 years ago

YM dietitian. A dietitian is someone with the relevant educational background, at least in the US. (The title of "nutritionist", in contrast, has no legal requirements, so they are perfectly free to call themselves nutritionists if they want to.)

Steko• 13 years ago

Zero food scientists on staff but hey they have a COO, VP of Business Development/Sales and a CTO who does the website.

Duhck2• 13 years ago

By "does the website" you mean cloned https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter and modified the copy?

gojomo3• 13 years ago

I'm glad such eccentric projects are pursued – they're how progress happens – but it's still the case that...

(a) Both the 1973 Charlton Heston movie and mixed, some-negative health connotations of the word 'soy' make the chosen name for the product problematic.

(b) The argument for its safety – "We have been testing Soylent on ourselves for several months and the data shows it to have a positive nutritional benefit" – creates little confidence compared to thousands of years of alternate practice, and strong evidence the human system needs some variety/chaos for optimal health/resilience.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

Some people said that it was only a matter of time before this person started charging money for this crank product, and I guess this proves them right.

He's making a number of health claims on that page. I'm curious about the legality of doing so; it's not legal in the UK unless he meets some pretty strict criteria.

> If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive.

Waste food is a serious problem and something needs to be done. I'm not sure there's a connection between food waste and world hunger.

> 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone

This could be an interesting problem. Why do people use really inefficient dirty open fires to cook? Why aren't they using better stoves? It's not as if a stove requires huge amounts of resources.

jckt11• 13 years ago

They actually noted that

"Unfortunately due to regulatory constraints, our initial runs of Soylent will be available within the United States only. We are diligently working to provide it worldwide as soon as possible."

So indeed the UK won't be seeing this sold (legally) anytime soon.

That said, I don't think it's really a case of whether or not Soylent is safe. Even if they have FDA approval, and produce Soylent under the strictest conditions of food safety, the real problem is their idea behind Soylent's use -- that it can replace a balanced diet. I'm sure it's safe to have it occasionally, if even a few portions of it everyday. But to virtually replace your diet? That's a bold claim, and with dangerous consequences at that.

mongol5• 13 years ago

Are the people that die from smoke inhalation going to buy and feed themselves on Solyent in the future? That is an interesting logistical problem, and if so, what would that logistical footprint mean for the environment? I think these arguments are ridiculous, no matter how good it is, unless it is opened, locally produced food will always be the best choice, environment-wise.

smacktoward3• 13 years ago

Yeah really. If that figure is incorrect, building a better cook stove would be an excellent place to apply some engineering know-how. Reinventing food is less so.

postfuturist2• 13 years ago

People are working on this very problem: http://ecozoomstove.com/

Afforess16• 13 years ago

Rob Rhinehart said he would be doing a kickstarter a long time ago. This isn't news, it's a followup to what he promised. Why is this horrible/end-of-the-world? I don't have the time or knowledge to safely track down and mix the materials myself, I will happily pay a premium for someone else to do so.

NickM2• 13 years ago

Why do people use really inefficient dirty open fires to cook? Why aren't they using better stoves? It's not as if a stove requires huge amounts of resources.

Or better still, why not just let them eat cake? Then they won't need stoves or fires at all! Those poor people out in third-world countries sure are silly....

Sarcasm aside, if someone can't afford a better stove they're not going to be able to afford Soylent, so it's a pretty ridiculous benefit to cite in the first place.

justincormack4• 13 years ago

The reason for the stoves and kerosene lighting is that there is little other energy available. And its not cheap. There are startups working on funding solar panels which can provide electricity cleanly by funding the capital costs.

Rather more worthwhile than some bullshit diet for Americans who can't cook.

papsosouid18• 13 years ago

>Some people said that it was only a matter of time before this person started charging money for this crank product

Like he explicitly said he was going to do from the start? Man, those people must be clairvoyant.

mrleinad• 13 years ago

Is crowdhoster trustworthy?

xefer• 13 years ago

The logo seems to be a benzene ring. When I see that I think "poison" not "health"

Udo• 13 years ago

It could also be any other C6 ring. To me, it simply looks "organic" ;)

christianrahn• 13 years ago

I'm extremely interested in this...concept.

But for someone trying to hack nutrition this way, you would think they would open the ingredients, or at least offer research sources.

Knowing the contents of Soylent isn't going to stop anyone from buying it (convenience), but it would allow people to understand some of these bold claims.

Afforess16• 13 years ago

They have. Soylent Formula: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

Xanza2• 13 years ago

I'm actually really pissed off at this product -- as with many, I've had both high hopes and reservations since the start of this whole ordeal.

With me being a college student with a VERY limited budget I get very little nutrition that's needed for my body to operate normally. I was so turned on to this product because it was initially advertised to cost the creator between $50 and $100 per month. Now, all of a sudden it's going to cost me $230 just to get started.

It's starting to sound more and more like a scam; I'm pretty livid.

dpcx• 13 years ago

It's a $230 "backer", and you happen to get a months worth of the stuff as a prize. Same with all the Kickstarter stuff.

angkec3• 13 years ago

Yeah I remembered he claimed to be able to control the monthly cost for around $103 and I got pretty excited over that. Now I'm disappointed to see the price rose to $230. I guess it is time to really find out where my own mix went wrong: I feel the irresistible urge to eat a ton a few days after I'm on my own mix.

samatman• 13 years ago

Don't forget the null hypothesis: you're feeling the urge to eat because we evolved to eat solids and you're not.

jgj2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure that the cost of a month's supply on this campaign is necessarily what it will ultimately cost in full production. The prices listed here, I assume, are what they think they need to charge to reach their 100k goal to enter mass production (based on how many people they expect will support the campaign). Ultimately they have a lot more costs than just the price of the ingredients, and their first run is likely to be more expensive than subsequent runs.

gwern2• 13 years ago

Exactly. If it really cost $65/week or whatever the Kickstarter is charging, why would they bother doing it? The whole point is apparently to raise funds to cover all the startup costs - of course you are paying more than the marginal cost of Soylent.

infinitone• 13 years ago

Precisely this.

I remember when I first read the creator's blog post and how little it costs to make. Now I come and see it costs about the same amount it costs me to purchase food for a week.

Afforess16• 13 years ago

...compared to eating out. His comparison was eating out almost every meal. $230 is cheaper than grocery shopping for a month for a lot of people too.

angersock• 13 years ago

Spent one summer living off of ramen, eggs, carrots, and celery. It's like tenbux for a week of food, and can be filling--poaching an egg into the ramen with a sliced up carrot and celery stalk is where it's at.

imperialWicket2• 13 years ago

It was always pretty clear that the early costs represented ingredients only, and the ingredients themselves have changed over time. There's also processing, containers, shipping, etc. when you're interested in someone making it for you.

The ingredients list is published and available, there's even a spreadsheet up with online locations where you can buy everything.

I can understand being dissatisfied about cost - but it was never claimed that you could receive this delivered to your door for $100/mo.

beefman4• 13 years ago

Where is the ingredients list and/or spreadsheet?

tunesmith• 13 years ago

Re-read his first post. It initially cost him a little over $150/month.

nazgulnarsil3• 13 years ago

Poor Uni student here, I spend ~$2.75/day on Soylent Orange. Blood work after 8 months is peachy. Of course I still buy food, but my overall food bill is way lower than anyone I know.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...

troebr• 13 years ago

I don't think it's really cheaper than making your own food. If you buy it for a month and you eat it three times a day, it ends up being about $2.5 per meal, or $7.5 a day. My breakfast costs me $.5 to $1, so that leave $3.5 per meal. It's probably what I average already, if not less. I think I spend about $100 maximum on groceries per week for my girlfriend and me, and that includes extras like an occasional bottle of wine.

I think I remember him saying that the recipe was "open source", maybe you could just make it yourself to save.

I can see his saving time argument though. Although there are days I gladly spent an hour or more in my kitchen, some days when I'm busy or lazy I would consider it.

Sidenote - calling this "corporation", I don't know if it's a joke or just poor marketing.

mongol5• 13 years ago

I don't understand how it ever can be cheaper than making food from raw ingredients. This powder they are selling are a mixture of processed ingredients, that must have originally been extracted from something from something harvested, right? It is a more complicated process to make it, compared with letting things grow in the sun mostly by themselves, and then harvesting.

deathcakes• 13 years ago

I can't help but feel that this is such an 'engineers' solution to something that isn't really a problem - whilst I agree that a cheap, reliable and efficient way to feed a lot of people is something that the world is sorely in need of, I can't understand why someone would opt for this through choice and not necessity.

Which is nothing more than a failure of my imagination, of course, and I'm not seriously suggesting that anyone who does is defective in any way, but I feel like most of life's greatest pleasures come directly from the preparation and consumption of food. To want to get rid of these pleasures in the name of efficiency is a strange argument to my mind.

I'm 100% behind the vat grown meat brigade on this one.

marknutter7• 13 years ago

For me one of life's greatest annoyances is the preparation and consumption of food, like 90% of the time I have to eat. To each their own, I guess.

jgj2• 13 years ago

Agreed. I'm a pretty good cook, but I can't stand doing it upwards of 99% of the time. I appreciate the shit out of a good meal, but I appreciate a mediocre meal that took me 0 effort to acquire much, much more than even the best meal that took me so much as 1 effort to acquire. Pour water into container and shake is about as low effort as I can imagine for a nutritionally complete meal, and if I die from liver failure after a month then I just wasn't meant to be.

mjt0229• 13 years ago

Although some of the lofty stated goals of this project seem commendable, this is one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time. I can't tell if it's a joke, but I hope that it is.

jonathanjaeger3• 13 years ago

Would be nice if you put nutrition facts on the campaign page. I wouldn't buy without seeing those. Here is what I found ("What's In Soylent?"): http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

The macronutrient breakdown based on calories per gram is 50% carbs, 13% protein, 37% fat, if I'm not mistaken. I'd rather have a bit more protein and a bit less fat, personally.

beefman4• 13 years ago

I still don't see an ingredients list. I believe one will be required to sell this in the U.S.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/GuidanceRegulation/UCM2654...

atdrummond6• 13 years ago

They'll also want to get their production facility cGMP certified, which is going to substantially raise short term prices in addition to those associated with FDA labeling procedures.

Ghostp4nts• 13 years ago

You might "rather" have more protein and less fat but you have no clue if that is what you need. If they market the product as a dietary supplement, then they will not have to list nutrition facts and will be able to say this is a "Proprietary Blend". This is a very common practice among supplement companies and can be witnessed by going to your local GNC.

jonathanjaeger3• 13 years ago

Protein shakes and meal replacements almost always show the amount of protein/fat/carbs. Usually they reserve these "secretive" proprietary blends for creatine, NO3, caffeine, and similar muscle-building or preworkout supplements. I see what you're getting at it, and I agree they might not have to list it, I just think it would be nice to know and perhaps would increase trust.

I'm in the same camp as the author, saying that people overestimate the harm of fat. I don't think I need 56 grams of fat in a serving of soylent, though. Let's assume I want to maintain my bodyweight and need about 2500-3000 calories to do so given the amount I exercise. Two servings of soylent will give me 1600 calories from carbs, 400 calories from protein, and 1008 calories from fat. Maybe that's fine, but maybe it's not ideal. I guess I'd like to know. I think it's a stretch to say I have no clue what I need. Maybe I don't know what I need to survive, in terms of a bare minimum, but I know what I need to maintain my weight in terms of calories.

devonbarrett• 13 years ago

Although I love the concept, backing a team that does not even have a single chemist or nutritionist in it is worrying.

btbuildem2• 13 years ago

Yes, because a handful of smiley tech nerd kids know nutrition better than professional researchers with decades of experience, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Afforess16• 13 years ago

Why not? Handfuls of smiley tech nerd kids think they know the web better than professional corporations with decades of experience, and are proven right all of the time.

btbuildem2• 13 years ago

Web, yes, nutrition -- hell no.

jimmar4• 13 years ago

I'd put more stock in nutrition researchers if their advice was remotely consistent from decade to decade.

jongraehl2• 13 years ago

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Do you understand "research" at all?

They study, they tell us what they find, they study more, and tell us new information, and keep going, getting better and more refined as they progress. More researchers test the claims, and prove it one way or another. If this isn't good enough for you, then at what point would information ever be good enough for you? Do you expect a time when knowledge is complete and set?

You prefer the ideas of non researchers, people with no foundation in the subject or scientific methods? You prefer their advice? You might as well take your scientific facts from a bloke in a bar.

allenu• 13 years ago

Hey, no need for scientific rigor here when you're crowdfunded and are operating a startup. Move fast and break things, right?

In all seriousness, kudos to these kids and their ambitions. However, the software model of iterating fast doesn't always translate to the physical world, especially when it comes to items ingested by human beings.

It's one thing to "pivot" on your Instagram clone, but taking some experimental goop that hasn't been rigorously tested with good unbiased science (not to mention with a sample size larger than one 24-year old) and deciding to market it is another thing--especially when none of your "team" are nutritionists by trade. There's a reason we have the FDA. I get that this is the "startup culture", but let's take a moment to realize the physical world doesn't allow us to recompile and try again very easily.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

I'm surprised this is even legal.

ceejayoz8• 13 years ago

Who says it is?

brown9-22• 13 years ago

Is it me or is the nutritional breakdown of the drink not listed anywhere?

Afforess16• 13 years ago

It is. Soylent Formula: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

revelation2• 13 years ago

Do they really expect to market this without even listing whats in that thing? And why does not a single person in their team have any credentials in the area whatsoever?

obibring• 13 years ago

Assuming this product is made from Soy (ingredients aren't listed), I would caution any male from inducing it in large quantities.

fowkswe• 13 years ago

The name has nothing to do with Soy, its a reference to a movie titled Soylent Green (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green)

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

Limited market appeal (folks who eat to live vs live to eat) and it lacks the credibility of a clinical study done under the supervision of folks who have the experience to evaluate the results.

So in that way it is simply another "look, eating this probably won't kill you, at least not quickly." product. There are many of these introduced and produced every year.

That said, to the extent that this guy can get traction for his effectively artificial food, the big food companies will watch it and talk about it. If there is something to it they might add their own toe in the water, or not. Most recently they have been hammered pretty publicly about how their manufactured food products aren't really much food (see "In Defense of Food" as an example of the narrative)

marknutter7• 13 years ago

In the end though, it's just food. I could launch a kickstarter campaign that sold veggie shakes and claim it makes people feel healthier when they drink them and it would be no more harmful than this campaign.

gamegoblin• 13 years ago

I think that the difference is that Soylent aims to replace (or come close to replacing) one's entire diet.

jckt11• 13 years ago

This is not a veggie shake though. I'm pretty sure most people who eat this would eat this in conjunction with other foods, but the few that really do try to eat Soylent alone, and for long periods of time, which is exactly the idea they're pushing, that may be harmful.

Afforess16• 13 years ago

The same could be said for a McDonalds.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

True, and perhaps one of the classic examples of a product like this is "Instant Breakfast" which claims to be the equivalent of breakfast but something you can prepare and eat quickly.

There are markets for this kind of stuff though, like military foodstocks (MREs) or disaster supplies if there is a decent shelf life. But those products have some interesting (at least to me) testing cycles they have gone through.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

> So in that way it is simply another "look, eating this probably won't kill you, at least not quickly." product.

If that's how it was marketed most people would have much less problem with it.

But when it's claiming to regulate cholesterol and etc, well, that's just sleazy.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Limited market appeal (folks who eat to live vs live to eat)

Are we that rare?

papa_bear• 13 years ago

This is kind of what I wanted to accomplish by building Eat This Much[1], ideally making eating and staying healthy at the same time less of a chore.

I'm really on board with the idea, but what got me interested was the notion that it would be easy to adjust the formula to my needs, e.g. choose a different ratio of various powders if I want to gain weight, lose weight, or compensate for some genetic difference.

[1] http://www.eatthismuch.com

toomuchtodo3• 13 years ago

Eat This Much subscriber here. Thanks for the awesome product/service.

petercooper• 13 years ago

I hope they eventually state all of the potential allergens that are in this. As I've gotten older I've become very sensitive to various foods (especially anything with lactose in it) and this sort of thing appeals to me, but if it had lactose in it, say, it could be.. interesting ;-) Ditto for people with peanut allergies and the like.

atdrummond6• 13 years ago

I wouldn't count on them providing an exhaustive list. They already claim Soylent is allergen free, despite using whey protein. Yet beta-lactoglobulin is a well known allergen present in whey protein.

angkec3• 13 years ago

It's interesting to see everything went from supportive on soylent to very negative after they published this campaign. I wonder what has changed?

DanBC18• 13 years ago

What?? Some people have been negative about soylent from the very first posts.

mongol5• 13 years ago

It changed from one guy experimenting with his own body and blogging about it to making a sales pitch with ridiculous claims that have no backing.

wch• 13 years ago

Experimenting on yourself with replacing food with shakes is one thing. I find that an interesting project, and I'm sure many others did as well.

On the other hand, selling this stuff with claims like, "Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition," is another thing completely. It sounds like a total scam, especially since they don't even say what's in it.

dragonwriter7• 13 years ago

> It's interesting to see everything went from supportive on soylent to very negative after they published this campaign. I wonder what has changed?

There's a pretty big difference between "I'm trying this new nutritional approach out for myself" and "without any serious testing, I am trying to get investors to sell this nutritional approach to the public".

I suspect the difference you observe in responses is tied to the that difference.

chourobin• 13 years ago

If the founder came out and said, "look ive been trying this for months and its great.. now you can try it with me...", that would be fine. But I agree that some of these claims are too much for something that is so unproven.

typicalrunt• 13 years ago

Is soylent vegan available yet?

Not yet. This first run will be the regular vegetarian soylent, but it is lactose free, kosher, halal, and absent of all known allergens

I believe soy is an allergy to some people. What does "absent of all known allergens" mean then?

crististm• 13 years ago

Then it must be the green flavor.

smacktoward3• 13 years ago

It means "we haven't really looked into that too hard."

Judson2• 13 years ago

They use a whey protein - I don't believe the formula contains soy.

steveklabnik4• 13 years ago

Doesn't whey protein contain lactose?

dragonwriter7• 13 years ago

Whey allergies are a thing, so a product cannot both "use a whey protein" and be "free of all known allergens".

nemof• 13 years ago

If any of you are foolhardy enough to try this stuff, please please please get your physician to do a full workup before, and do regular repeat checkups.

chasing3• 13 years ago

"Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition."

Bull-fucking-shit.

This is a product made by four twenty-somethings, none of whom appears to have a background in nutrition or any kind of health studies. To trust your health to these people would be fucking stupid. Jesus.

Also: They've got to be violating some kind of FDA rules. So that'll be fun. When they get sued. Or accidentally harm someone.

Please. Do not back these people.

-----

Edit: What FDA rule do I think they're violating? I don't know, exactly. But I doubt you can say things like "it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition" without having some actual data backing you up.

Afforess16• 13 years ago

Wow, it's like the "Hacker News Is Depressing" Article didn't happen. I trust the Soylent folks more than I trust myself purchasing frozen meals in a grocery store. It's hard to be worse than that benchmark.

jckt11• 13 years ago

Are we not allowed to criticise anymore? Chasing makes a good point. They simply stated several claims, and didn't even attempt to substantiate them at all.

evv• 13 years ago

Its not like one article would change the behavior of everyone on here.

HN has pessimism in its culture, and most of the best comments are the critical ones.

revelation2• 13 years ago

I'm fine with being positive on the next fun cat photo sharing service, no evil has ever come from that, but they are advertising this as a complete replacement for all your meals without even telling as much as whats in it.

That, frankly, should be illegal, and it probably is.

w1ntermute6• 13 years ago

> trust the Soylent folks more than I trust myself purchasing frozen meals in a grocery store.

That's a strawman. You're ignoring the fact that those frozen meals are made by companies who have more experience in the food industry than these 4 clowns combined a million times over. I am MUCH more afraid of the Soylent guys' sheer ignorance than I am of any profit-motivated negligence on the part of large frozen meal companies.

Edit: also read this thorough breakdown of Rob Rhinehart's claims regarding Soylent by a health expert and nutritionist: http://www.businessinsider.com/rob-rhinehart-food-substitute...

brown9-22• 13 years ago

Would you mind saying how they won your trust? Have you tried the product?

gus_massa• 13 years ago

I didn't like the insults and the tone of the comment. I think that it could have been written in a more polite way.

Anyway, I agree that it's advertised as a too good to be true product, and it was created by people without the needed background. In the last update they added sulfur!!! ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5609546 ). It's one of most common elements in the human body, not a very strange unexpected thing.

Most of the vitamins were discovered because some people aet a very restrictive diet. Usually because more diverse food were not available (in the middle of the sea), or because they didn't have money to buy more diverse food (semi slavery). A diverse diet of complex food protect you form not eating the thing that you don't know you should eat. Eat only this at your own risk.

blazespin• 13 years ago

In fact, most doctors would say that you should trust yourself more. Our bodies are generally pretty good at self regulating and telling us what we should or shouldn't be eating.

If you look at something and find yourself salivating / very hungry, it's probably your bodies way of telling you it has some nutrient you're missing.

xtracto• 13 years ago

It is funny that I agree with both you and GP's post:

On one side, it is very sad that the majority of posts in this thread are very negative. But on the other side, I would give more credit to their enterprise if there was a nutriologist, chemist, or at leas tan MD in their team.

The fact that no one in the team is slightly related to food/nutrition or human well-being rings bells.

peterwwillis2• 13 years ago

They've got to be violating some kind of FDA rules.

Like what?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Drug_Administration#Fo...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_food_and_dietary_...

"The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 mandated that the FDA regulate dietary supplements as foods, rather than as drugs. Therefore, dietary supplements are not subject to safety and efficacy testing and there are no approval requirements. The FDA can take action against dietary supplements only after they are proven to be unsafe. Manufacturers of dietary supplements are permitted to make specific claims of health benefits, referred to as "structure or function claims" on the labels of these products."

3825• 13 years ago

You can't make blanket statements like "Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition." because people might think they can eat Soylent and nothing else. I won't say they are breaking the law. All I am saying is they need a lot of clinical trial to cover their butts in court.

nkohari• 13 years ago

IANAL, but at a minimum, it's likely they should include the standard supplement disclaimer of "This product is not intended to cure, prevent, or treat any disease" [1]. This protects them from liability depending on how the FDA decides to classify the product.

Regardless of legality, they are making some very bold claims that would benefit from some scientific study. Preferably, expert, peer-reviewed, published scientific study.

[1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRs...

joering2• 13 years ago

Why would Y-combinator alumni have to comply with any government imposed rules? I hate to sound like a broken record but check my comments or history of PG companies he founded. AirBnB co-founders were or still are on FBI top spammer list that used tax money to spam people to high heaven.

As of the product, I join vast majority that says stay away. My personal thing is that after reading one of their interview where they were inviting people to clinical study, I send them long detailed email covering my willingness to participate and even pay all the cost from my own pocket. My email got ignored and I never got response. For that reason alone, I would stay away from something you have to pay for, because their customer support sucks from the get go.

angkec3• 13 years ago

Trust yourself on the food industry is stupid too. Please. Stop eat junk food.

But you still eat them right?

ceejayoz8• 13 years ago

Replace 'soylent' with 'junk food' in their marketing copy.

"Junk food is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition."

Ever see anyone say that about junk food?

ancarda3• 13 years ago

Several people have tried the recipe and can vouch for it.

If you don't like it, don't buy it.

chasing3• 13 years ago

The study you cite confirming their claims sounds bulletproof.

cal2• 13 years ago

It appears as if only one of the founding individuals has a degree in anything remotely pertaining to nutrition (David Renteln, degree in "Human Evolutionary Biology").

Speaking as a biochemist who works in the biotech industry, this looks to be like a gigantic train wreck just waiting to happen.

At first glance, I would be convinced these individuals know very little about the science behind their product. They all have a bunch of fancy business acronyms next to their name, yet the majority of this group appears to have little scientific background.

Website annoyances:

- Why is a benzene ring in the background of their logo? Sure, the benzene moiety is prolific and crucial throughout biological systems, but plain benzene is a toxic carcinogen.

- Why is their favicon cyclohexane instead of benzene, if that was why they're going for?

w1ntermute6• 13 years ago

As someone else in biotech, I agree with your sentiment. I would advise the guys behind this to go back to making social networking and photo sharing apps and leave biotech to those who know what they're doing. You can't just say "oops" and apologize when you put someone in the hospital, or worse. It's not like if someone hacks your Instagram account.

pogden• 13 years ago

I don't have a scientific background but I still manage to do okay choosing my own food at the grocery store. Soylent doesn't have to be the pinnacle of human nutrition, it just has to be better than burritos and ramen and freezer pizza.

marknutter7• 13 years ago

Have you ever bought a red bull? Read the can. It says "vitalizes body and mind." I'm sure a lot of people read than and believe it's true. Heck, it may even be true. But it's not breaking any FDA rules, and it's not a harmful claim any more than the claims the Soylent folks are making. Do we not hold any responsibility for what we put into our bodies?

DanBC18• 13 years ago

"vitalizes body and mind" is carefully constructed meaningless nonsense.

"For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." is not carefully constructed. It has clear and specific meaning, but it is untested and not yet proved.

Have Soylent really thought about that sentence? What happens when someone with a digestive disorder eats Soylent, thinking they're getting the nutrition they need and then they get even more ill?

> Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition.

How can they say this? They have no idea what my body and lifestyle is! I could be a 78 year old bed-ridden patient riddled with cancer or a 17 year old who goes out clubbing 5 nights a week.

> By taking years to spoil,

They're claiming their nutrients are stable for years. I seriously doubt that.

antihero3• 13 years ago

Well that's the thing about food. We can drink about a litre of that shit and a bottle of vodka and feel great for the night, and shitty in the morning.

tutu• 13 years ago

Have you even read up on the background of this? He makes a pretty solid argument for what's in Soylent in one of his earliest blog posts: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

Obviously the guy has a background in chemistry or biology. As we all know, you don't have to go to school in a subject to become an "expert" in it.

Ecio78• 13 years ago

Of course not, but when you need surgery where do you go, to the hospital or to "the guy at the corner of the street that seems to know a lot about how stuff in your body works"?

vhost-• 13 years ago

I would really like an ingredients list.

frankacter• 13 years ago

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

fc2• 13 years ago

"They don't have a background in nutrition therefore they can't possibly know anything about nutrition"

Never heard of books and the internet?

jerrytsai• 13 years ago

I am skeptical of Soylent, but I also think that interesting ideas-- backed by at least some science-- are worth examining.

That being said, health claims such as the ones you cite-- "it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition"-- fall into the realm of regulated speech. You shouldn't be making claims like these without well-controlled clinical trials to back them up. The sellers of Soylent will need to hire legal counsel before long...

dragonwriter7• 13 years ago

> Also: They've got to be violating some kind of FDA rules.

Its pretty hard to violate FDA rules when soliciting investment, they'd most likely only run that risk when they start actually marketing product. And even then, the incredibly lax FDA rules around supplements have enabled some of the biggest (and most dangerous) health related scams ever to operate within the rules, so they can probably be okay even then. Usually, this seems to involve placing a disclaimer that the product is not intended to prevent or treat any disease or condition on advertising touting its health benefits (often including explicit claims that the product prevents or treats various diagnosable diseases and/or conditions.)

> But I doubt you can say things like "it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition" without having some actual data backing you up.

You'd probably be surprised.

rglover• 13 years ago

The FDA has an entire document on allowable amounts of rat feces and insect parts that manufacturers can have in their food: http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocuments....

I'll listen to what the kid has to say.

cmccabe3• 13 years ago

So what. Did you think that food was carefully grown in a sterile lab and delivered to you in a vacuum-packed container? It's grown in the dirt, harvested by day laborers, and stored and transported in big heaps out in the open.

Word of advice to you, sir. If you care about avoiding rat feces, spoiled food, and contamination in general, buy whole foods. For example, buy apples rather than applesauce. Buy steak rather than soylent. When you can visually inspect the thing, you see a lot of defects that are hidden when you grind or mash it all up.

NickM2• 13 years ago

This would possibly interest me, but including nootropics without listing them seems incredibly scary. It's one thing to include all the normal vitamins and minerals your body needs, but to take it a step further and include mind-altering substances seems absurd and questionably legal.

Maybe by "nootropics" they just mean everyday vitamins that have been shown to benefit your brain, but that's certainly not what I think of when I hear that term. Then again, maybe there's somewhere online where they actually list what they're using, but I couldn't find any details on the campaign page.

beefman4• 13 years ago

Nope, one of the blog posts mentioned actual nootropics. They're playing pretty fast and loose with the ingredients. If they're still experimenting (as it seems they are), they should say so.

jeffasinger• 13 years ago

This is a blog post by the creator that has a little detail on it: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

jckt11• 13 years ago

This is an interesting parallel to another article on the front-page right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5743419

crusso• 13 years ago

This went from "interesting self-hacking experiment worth watching" to " train wreck of a health and liability hazard" in a fairly short time.

Not good.

TheCoelacanth• 13 years ago

I get that the name "Soylent" was originally coined in a book that did not involve cannibalism in any way, but it still seems like a very bad choice of name. "Soylent green is people" is much more well known than any allusion to Make Room! Make Room! can possibly be.

iandanforth• 13 years ago

I really enjoy this campaign because it gave me an excuse to compare it with snake oil labels. (https://www.google.com/search?q=snake+oil+label&tbm=isch...)

The characteristic of this kind of marketing that I enjoy the most is the presence of what I call 'linguistic asymptotes.'

These are words that imply a product has unparalleled or infinite properties.

On the soylent page we have "ubiquitous", "perfectly", "optimized", "automatically", and "optimal" all in the first paragraph.

On a sample of snake oil labels we have 'instantaneously', 'cures all aches and pains', 'always', 'strongest', and 'immediate.'

It's very difficult for a claim that contains a linguistic asymptote to be true, but it's cognitively very easy to understand and process. You don't have to consider your personal medical history, or cost, or anything else really, because the product is 'always' right for you!

Fun stuff.

vecinu5• 13 years ago

That's a very good point and very observant.

I too am highly skeptical of ALL of these claims.

My main gripe with Soylent (ever since I first saw it here on HN a month ago) is that they are making cooking seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.

Shopping is convenient because I go whenever I have time and only buy exactly what I need. At the same time, I also ensure I only buy the best ingredients I can at the moment (Assuming labeling is correct).

A lot of people I know and myself included, LOVE to cook. I love cutting a bell pepper and catching a whiff of its fresh smell in my nostrils. I love sometimes adding different sauces, spices or ingredients in my meals to give them a distinct and unique taste.

And cleaning up is also fun because I recognize I am a responsible adult, able to revert something back to the state I received it in. Just like my bed, or a rental car or my home.

katbyte• 13 years ago

As much as i love cooking, there are times where i would love something that is quick and healthy. not to say soylent is that, just that it would be nice.

garry• 13 years ago

Most people would regard riding a horse as a pleasant thing to do in leisure time, but most today would also balk at the idea of having to care, feed, and maintain a horse to get to work every single day.

I realize this is anathema (I love food as much as anyone else) but there are moments in my life where I'd like to code or create things rather than worry too much about my next meal.

lholden3• 13 years ago

> I love cutting a bell pepper and catching a whiff of its fresh smell in my nostrils. I love sometimes adding different sauces, spices or ingredients in my meals to give them a distinct and unique taste.

Can I come over for dinner? :D

> My main gripe with Soylent (ever since I first saw it here on HN a month ago) is that they are making cooking seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.

Some people really do hate cooking. Either they don't enjoy the act of it, or do not have a lot of time for it. I know... one could say that you could make time for it. The fast food industry works not because the food is good (It generally isn't...) but because it's so easy. I think people are a lot better off eating Soylent then MCD :)

_pius• 13 years ago

My main gripe with Soylent (ever since I first saw it here on HN a month ago) is that they are making cooking seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.

To me, the more worrisome thing is that they are making eating seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.

SoftwareMaven2• 13 years ago

My concern is that they are billing this as healthy with zero evidence that it actually is. The last few years of nutrition research has begun to show us that we know nothing about it. Pretending you can come up with an optimal solution when nobbody knows what healthy is, is just that, pretending.

I fear for the people who see this as a great "life hack" who wind up doing long-lasting damage to themselves. There are cases of people having liver failure when they go on a long-term liquid diet. I have no idea if that applies, because we don't really know why that happens.

I appreciate the hacker instinct, but, in this case, I fear it is a dangerous one.

nazgulnarsil3• 13 years ago

I've been using my own version of Soylent (Soylent Orange see elsewhere in this thread) for 8 months now and I find it enhances cooking. When I only have to worry about one meal each day i can actually enjoy the process. With 3 not so much.

baddox2• 13 years ago

> My main gripe with Soylent (ever since I first saw it here on HN a month ago) is that they are making cooking seem like a horrible chore that nobody wants to do.

On the contrary. I think they're doing something reasonable, which is purposefully marketing the product to people to whom cooking is a horrible chore they don't want to do. I'm one of those people, and I suspect there are others.

I despise all the time I have to spend on food preparation. I'm annoyed that even if I eat out regularly, I have to spend time planning my nutrition and budget or risk being unhealthy or broke. Other people (or machines) can prepare food better than me, so I think it's ridiculous that it's still expected that each adult (or household) should learn to cook personally. Sure, it's not terribly difficult, but neither is making clothes, fixing many home plumbing issues, cutting hair, performing an oil or tire change, and many other things that are well-accepted as outsourceable.

papsosouid18• 13 years ago

You aren't required to buy it or use it. Cooking and shopping is a horrible chore for lots of people. Those are the people this is marketed for. "I am not the target market for this product" is not a problem with the product.

ajryan• 13 years ago

So you coined a new word for hyperbole? Cromulent!

pippy• 13 years ago

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

niico• 13 years ago

"We have been testing Soylent on ourselves for several months and the data shows it to have a positive nutritional benefit."

No shit. Seriously, who is going to try this powder made by this twenty-somethings guys with no background in any kind of health nor nutrition studies.

It reminds me to the Power Balance scam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Balance

josscrowcroft• 13 years ago

Apparently 1,016 backers, with $130,000 kicking about, at last count.

nemo1618• 13 years ago

I think HN's hatred of Soylent has been increasing exponentially as we get closer to a mass-market release. What's with all the negativity? If you don't like it, don't buy it -- easy as that.

It may not be the perfect product, but at least it's pushing some boundaries. I, for one, am excited to get my hands on a batch and let the results speak for themselves.

mongol5• 13 years ago

Hacker News would be very quiet if no-one commented and everybody made their purchasing decisions in quiet. This is a controversial diet, it is not clear if it is viable food replacement and it can affect your health, especially what are the effects long-term? Their page pitches environmental concerns, and I find that ridiculous. Are they serious that they aim for Soylent to be a large part of what people eat globally in the future?

WiseWeasel• 13 years ago

Maybe the fact their branding and marketing copy is a paragon of hyperbole and ambiguity could have something to do with a hostile reception on a site with a relatively marketing- and logic-savvy readership. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with more dystopian PR than this, to the point where you have to wonder if it's satire.

I wouldn't even consider ingesting this mystery powder, even if they paid me.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

What boundaries is it pushing?

Liquid feed is not new.

dgabriel2• 13 years ago

Right? Medifast. Optifast. Slimfast. There are literally thousands of options.

mongol5• 13 years ago

Is Soylent better for me than carrot juice, oatmeal and eggs? Now I just chose three random foodstuffs, but at least I know what they are and what they contain.

jimmar4• 13 years ago

Part of the appeal of Soylent is that you don't have to juice the carrots, cook the oatmeal, or scramble the eggs.

eof• 13 years ago

Without going on with the almost certainly absurd claim you can be perfectly healthy, indefinitely, eating one shake.. There does seem to be a lot of interest, I think mostly from people interested in the saving of time and still getting good nutrition.

To those people, I highly recommend green protein smoothies.

They aren't cheap, really, but they are fast and done right they taste good and will take an otherwise mediocre diet to better than 99% of people without much other change (I am not a doctor, just an observer).

Some fruit, some leafy greens, some nuts, optionally some protein powder (my favorite had been pea protein, but my nutritionist recommended alternating protein sources every few weeks of doing it regularly).

Adding in some thing like vitamineral green and you are really doing alright. Spending about 3-400 USD on a good blender and you can have an über healthy, delicious meal replacement in minutes with about 30 seconds of clean up.

A mediocre blender still make the experience less enjoyable when using nuts and tough greens like kale.

Expect an 800 calorie shake to cost maybe 3-5 bucks to put together depending on your tastes, whether you go organic, and access to produce.

scottjad• 13 years ago

My favorite green smoothie (lacks protein, I'll have to try the pea protein):

2 large handfuls of fresh spinach or kale, 1 apple or 6 strawberries, 1 banana, 1 tbsp ground flaxseed, 1 large handful of ice, 1-2 cups of water, 1/4 cup unsweetened almond milk

I prefer to drink it with a straw.

zeroexzeroone3• 13 years ago

Damn that sounds good - completely natural - save for possibly the emulsifiers in the almond milk.

antihero3• 13 years ago

What would you suggest as an alternative to nuts, for those of us who cannot eat nuts?

tocomment2• 13 years ago

Ever since I heard about this project I've been trying to make my own version.

I've found it's surprisingly hard to make something healthy that doesn't make me gag. So far I tried egg protein powder mixed with chia seeds, olive oil, plain yogurt and a banana.

I'm now thinking I'd be better off with something solid that I could eat on the go. I haven't seen a good recipe though.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

Why don't you try the existing liquid feeds?

tocomment2• 13 years ago

I like the idea of gettin more olive oil in my diet. Also the existing ones have too many carbs and aren't filling.

jstalin• 13 years ago

Is it just me, or can you barely hear the guys on the video? They need a microphone.

pron• 13 years ago

Guys, please don't do this. We've met at YC, and I think you are great guys, but some things in the video are false.

Soylent is definitely not "perfectly tailored to your body" and it probably isn't "everything the body needs", for the simple reason that nobody has any idea what the body needs, let alone how to tailor a perfect diet. Nutrition research is extremely complex and fraught with false findings. When John Ioannidis said that most medical research findings are false he singled out nutrition and genetics as the most problematic fields.

False advertising this particular product can be dangerous because a lot of people get obsessed about diet and health, and tend to cling to whatever subset of findings they happen to have heard, and then treat the whole thing religiously.

Some nutritional deficiencies become apparent only after years and then possibly only in people with a certain genetic makeup.

You are targeting a population that adopts health fads like they were the ten commandments, and are trying to sell a product that has properties you can't possibly know. Please stop because you may inadvertently hurt people.

wldlyinaccurate2• 13 years ago

I'll admit that I'm very interested in Soylent, and I'd like to try it myself. But I completely agree with you on this.

Soylent is the sort of thing that could seriously damage your health. I know that several people have trialled it over the course of a few months, but nutritional deficiencies can take much longer to develop. For example I don't recall ever reading that oral health was being monitored during the trials - when you're not chewing anything, your teeth will fall out.

I'm sorry but I truly do believe that selling Soylent would be dangerous and irresponsible. Please, don't sell Soylent to anybody until you've done some proper clinical trials.

shurcooL• 13 years ago

I really hope they're able to ship to Canada soon. :( I just donated $50 to the cause until then.

I believe in the general cause so much, that even if there's only 1% something good will come out of this particular project, I'll happily take that chance.

caublestone• 13 years ago

Thank You So Much! We will work to get it across the border asap.

iagomr• 13 years ago

You guys are f* crazy. This has a place in the world because many people don't know how to eat or don't even know what is good food. Free piece of advice: Move to a southern country and spend less money in health treatments

ericcumbee• 13 years ago

is it people?

mattip• 13 years ago

My thought exactly the choice of name is suspicious, and lack of ingredients even more so. Is this all a joke?

Duhck2• 13 years ago

I truly hope this is successful, not in the sense that these guys monetize it and become millionaires, but that the world in general does need a way to supplement our diets in a more sustainable way.

What irks me though, is the lack of a true clinical trial.

This fundraising effort is for the supplement itself when it really should be for clinical trials to prove the stuff is safe and works.

Perhaps they are scared of the results, or perhaps they really believe in their product, either way this is in the wrong direction and people COULD get hurt.

mdisraeli• 13 years ago

I believe that Soylent uses Whey protein, because of common allergies to Soy protein... which is amusing, since an intolerance to milk protein runs in my family, and appears to be quite common too.

In fact, an extremely common request of clinical nutritionists is for a non-diary product, especially for ones aimed at children.

I strongly urge Soylent to try and gain the help of someone with experience within the established industry and get their assistance. Whilst us hackers might be happy to take the risk at this stage, someone with industry experience and knowledge of product development and production would bring invaluable skill. Plus, they'd be best placed to answer any questions about FDA issues, etc

Disclaimer: I have a family member who works in this field

tghw• 13 years ago

Oh good, it has antioxidants! Which have been shown to actually increase mortality slightly when given to healthy people[1].

I really like the idea, but until they apply some real science to it, I'll pass.

[1] http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD007176/antioxidant-supplemen...

jere3• 13 years ago

Yea, it's rather silly to claim that Soylent contains no toxins. It's been suggested that the positive effects of antioxidants may arise through hormesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antioxidant#Pro-oxidant_activit...

steveklabnik4• 13 years ago

> vegan

I don't even really believe soylent is legit, but it's interesting enough to plunk down money for. However, this is kinda a deal-breaker.

How exactly is Soylent currently not vegan?

EDIT: Re-reading http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424 , it's implied that this uses whey protein. I've used hemp protein rather than whey before.

Also, it'd be green then. ;)

adnam• 13 years ago

'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.'

If only this genius and effort behind 'soylent' were put to good use.

supes• 13 years ago

Feels like they are jumping the gun in terms of saying this could help with malnutrition in developing countries. Starving and malnutrished people can't just drink a meal replacement shake and be fine, especially kids. There are many other factors that must be taken into consideration. For example see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut . I saw this on 60 minutes a few years back.

"Plumpy'nut is a peanut-based paste in a plastic wrapper for treatment of severe acute malnutrition... They are also relatively high in calories, which means that a patient receives a lot of nutrition from small amounts, important because malnutrition shrinks the stomach."

gojomo3• 13 years ago

Per "Poe's Law", I would not rule out the idea that this is an extended prank/art-project.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

d233• 13 years ago

There is no doubt this is. The "irrational" improvements to 3.14 (read: pi), the ridiculous name, the complete lack of evidence -- all point to obvious parody.

cpeterso2• 13 years ago

Like "Hufu", the healthy human flesh alternative for cannibals who want to quit:

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

create_account• 13 years ago

While their high level goals (eliminate hunger, reduce stress on agricultural and environmental resources) are laudable, this project suffers from the same arrogance of doctors in the 1960s who said mother's milk was primitive and could be replaced by artificial formula.

Now, in hindsight, we know what a mistake that was, as natural breast milk contained compounds which decreased various cancer and health risks.

I cannot help but think they are going down the same road.

jongraehl2• 13 years ago

I for one will be sticking to breast milk.

minimize_me• 13 years ago

Those doctors were probably on the Nestle payroll, after the money from Camel dried up.

hapkins• 13 years ago

Out of curiosity, if Soylent really does provide every nutrient the body requires, would that mean a user would no longer have to defecate?

My reasoning is if every nutrient is absorbed and used, there is no physical waste left, and all toxins and byproducts would be expelled through urine.

atdrummond6• 13 years ago

Having done pure liquid diets (with significantly reduced caloric loads) on numerous occasions (not by choice, unlike these fellows) this is mostly true. One will typically see bowel movement frequency drop dramatically, although not entirely to zero in my case.

That said, I am missing a significant length of digestive tract, so my experience may be atypical. I would also note that that as calories increase, to or above your metabolic needs, that this effect would likely diminish.

superkamiguru• 13 years ago

I had a feeling this wouldn't hit Kickstarter.

jimmar4• 13 years ago

They tried to get on Kickstarter. Kickstarter didn't want them because Soylent is not a "creative" product.

mindstab2• 13 years ago

Personally as a 20 something first worlder earning decent money in tech I am interested in this. So part of me wishes they'd kept the advertising focused on that. Because claiming to be able to tackle world hunger with this "long shelf life, easy to prepare, and efficient no waste" product is disingenuous unless they plan on lowering prices > 10x the listed kickstarter rewards. I'm sorry white kids of America but world hunger is a little more complicated than just waiting for you to come along with a powder. Your product will not end subsistence farming. You want to know why? Take a look outside and around for a change, travel, or read for a MINUTE: as pointed out elsewhere "Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day"[1] ($17.50 / week). Your $65/week product... not going to even register for them. So good luck, I mean it, I'm interested in this product because I kind of eat out too much and not well, and this can be a good product, but maybe reign in the marketing kids because it's sounding nearly offensively naive when you start talking about ending world hunger with this rich kids product for food.

[1] http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

nawitus2• 13 years ago

The linked article states that the price will go down as production scales. Besides, ingredients tend to be cheaper (in dollars) in poorer countries.

vecinu5• 13 years ago

So it's going to be manufactured in every single country it's sold? What other products do this?

raddoc• 13 years ago

As a physician with a degree in biochemistry, I am no expert but will throw in a few thoughts.

1) All foods are broken down into their respective molecular constituents (free fatty acids, glucose, amino acids, etc) through a series of enzymatic reactions. These nutrients are ultimately absorbed through the wall of the bowel or what remains passes as feces. This is true whether you are eating lettuce, ribs, a slice of bread, or this soylent product.

2) Frankly, I see no difference in this product from any other meal replacement powder available in bulk at any nutrition store. If we ever see a nutrition label, I suspect it will look strikingly similar to Slim Fast.

tzs• 13 years ago

If you want to see why this is a terrible idea if you care about your health, with plenty of cites to peer-reviewed science, read "In Defense of Food" by Michael Pollan.

taude• 13 years ago

May as well put a Michael Pollan quote in here with some simple, sane ideas for eating: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

papsosouid18• 13 years ago

That's a good book, but it doesn't give any reason to believe this is a "terrible idea" at all. Perhaps you should read it again.

mindstab2• 13 years ago

Why was this flagged? 123pts at 2 hours should not place 39th?

Eliezer2• 13 years ago

I'm in for $65, because I've run out of patience with everyone wisely nodding caution and not trying to solve the problem themselves. Like a lot of metabolically disadvantaged people, I feel betrayed and tossed off a cliff by a society that doesn't understand and doesn't care. You want to know how desperate we are? Read this:

http://www.shaman-australis.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=35...

That's the next alternative if Soylent doesn't work. Now either offer a design for a better food replacement, or shut up and get out of the way.

aarondf• 13 years ago

Same, in for $65.

As a type one diabetic if 80% of meals were the exact same, my long term health prospects would be brighter.

Here's to hoping!

jckt11• 13 years ago

Do you mind explaining why Soylent is the solution for metabolically disadvantaged people as opposed to a "traditionally balanced diet"?

tinco4• 13 years ago

Because the idea of being being metabolically disadvantaged is that you can't eat a traditionally balanced diet.

Soylent has none of the complex/unnecessary/unhealthy chemical substances tradional diets (milk,bread,nuts,fish) have that are the frequent object of intolerances.

Eliezer2• 13 years ago

Because we tried your traditionally balanced diet, the high-protein diet, the high-fat diet, the paleo diet, the improved paleo diet, the four-hour diet, and yes, exercise, and nothing worked. (Shangri-La resulted in 20 pounds of very easy weight loss then stopped working and never worked again.) Maybe Soylent won't work either, but the concept behind Soylent seems dissimilar to all of those diets along dimensions in which they are similar to each other, so I'm going to try it.

DanielStraight• 13 years ago

I appreciate what you're saying, but to be fair to those criticizing, this isn't the problem Solyent is advertised as solving. The stated problem that Soylent is advertised as solving is "food is a hassle", and it is also alleged to provide benefits for health and the environment. It's also being advertised as "perfectly balanced", "automatically [putting] you at an optimal weight", and "[improving] your focus and cognition". These are the claims that people are criticizing, not it's suitability as a last resort. If Soylent's message was "here's a better option for those who are desperate", I'm confident the responses would be less critical.

Paul_D_Santana• 13 years ago

I'm more interested in seeing Soylent succeed as a benefit to people around the globe who literally cannot afford (or don't have access to) a proper healthy diet.

GuiA• 13 years ago

I'm confused by what you're trying to protest/demand.

What's "metabolically disadvantaged"? Are you suffering from a medical condition for which no satisfactory diet (in the proper sense of the term) has been developed?

I'm not sure I have all the background information necessary to properly understand all the intricacies of what the OP in the link you posted is describing; but it sounds like what he's going through is complex enough that it probably won't solved by something as straightforward as Soylent (which is basically "let's take everything current science says your body needs, and mash it all together in one solution").

Any light you can shed on this for the non-initiated would be appreciated :)

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

>>What's "metabolically disadvantaged"? Are you suffering from a medical condition for which no satisfactory diet (in the proper sense of the term) has been developed?

In the vast majority of cases, "metabolically disadvantaged" means "lazy and sedentary" without actually taking the responsibility for it. It's similar to blaming one's obesity on "genetics" or "body shape" or being "big-boned." (The last one is especially funny. Guess why your bones are big. It's because they have to carry all your fat!)

abstractbill2• 13 years ago

Hear hear.

I resent having to frequently stop what I'm doing - what I'm really excited about - to spend time attending to the endless whining of my body. And I resent even more the things my body does if I don't give in and feed it perfectly every damn time (so far, gastric ulcers and frequent heartburn). Food currently sucks. It could be so much better. It could "just work".

I'm also in for $65.

nazgulnarsil3• 13 years ago

Low satiety liquid calories will not help people control their weight. It's been tried a million times in various permutations (slim fast is a thing, so are medical nutrient replacements). I'd stake my life savings on it.

I did try to solve the same problem the Soylent guy is solving, it's on LW under "I hate preparing food". I think I did a better job.

legierski• 13 years ago

It's a real bummer that they don't send it anywhere outside US

DanBC18• 13 years ago

Why?

Liquid feeds are already available, and are made by regulated suppliers to a high quality.

seivan• 13 years ago

LCHF. http://www.kostdoktorn.se or http://www.dietdoctor.com

Eat till you are full. Normalise your weight.

frozenport2• 13 years ago

This is poorly motivated:

1. I can make a Hot Pocket in about 3 minutes. While the microwave is running I can browse my email on my cellphone etc...

2. Some instant food is unhealthy, perhaps healthy instant food is market for disruption?

3. Are we living in a society where people can't stop for 3 minutes to grab a bite to eat!?

Afforess16• 13 years ago

1. If I eat a Hot Pocket every day I will shorten my lifespan considerably.

2. Healthy instant food tastes bland or like garbage.

3. Yes. I don't like it, but most of us don't have choices.

frozenport2• 13 years ago

You can't wait 3 minutes for the microwave!? Even if you can overlap microwaving with doing other things like reading HN on the ipod.(common threading paradigm). You don't have a choice for 3 minutes!

loupeabody• 13 years ago

I'm going to put $65 up for this as I've been eager to try Soylent since it first popped up on HN.

Clearly this is a very controversial topic, but the general attitude for most of the supporters (myself included) appears to be that if no serious negative effects have been exposed from consuming Soylent in three months, it must be safe to try.

Is there any possibility that consuming Soylent for a while (say, a week to a month) and then stopping cold-turkey could be significantly harmful to one's digestion? Maybe? I guess we'll find out when the first round of supplies is consumed.

Another thing, props on the campaign and having already been funded, but let's hope the next promo video does less to seem like a run-of-the-mill infomercial... :\

alex_c2• 13 years ago

I read this initially assuming it to be a clever spoof on the whole startup / crowdsourcing scene, because of the name: pick something that is obviously a joke product ("Soylent Green is people!") and run with it - start piling on impressive claims, include startup-y backgrounds for the founders, and be really vague about what the product actually is. Given my initial interpretation, I thought the "Is soylent vegan available yet" FAQ was particularly hilarious.

Then I started reading the HN comments, and initially assumed them to be tongue-in-cheek replies running with the joke: the typical "this is why it won't work", the usual "this is why it's a bad idea", the inevitable "it's actually amazing, stop being so negative". But that gradually stopped making sense the further I read, with people appearing to take it way too seriously for a simple spoof.

So thanks HN, you've managed to confuse me completely. This might be a sign I've been spending too much time here lately.

ellyagg• 13 years ago

Yep, I thought it was a joke at first, too.

Since the term soylent is widely understood to mean human remains masquerading as food, the name suggests pretense.

He wrote:

    Before I rarely had enough energy to go to
    the gym, but this day I had plenty so I 
    decided to put the diet to the test. I'd been
    running off and on for several months, never 
    able to do more than a mile straight, but
    this day I ran 3.14 miles non-stop. This is an
    irrational improvement.

!! Indeed, it does sound irrational, doesn't it? In fact, whether this is a hint or he's just being cute, I literally don't believe that Soylent caused this uptick in performance. Want to bet on the results of a double blind study?

Elsewhere, he said he only needs 1/3 the calories on Soylent, which was explained away by an apologist in the comments as a figure of speech, or perhaps art of rhetoric, but that explanation is contradicted by his precise descriptions elsewhere and worrisome in this context regardless.

There were more jokes like that, conveniently allowing its author to laugh at people no matter whether he's being truthful or not. Parts of the campaign are patronizing and condescending and they've shown no desire to fix that aspect, making me more leery due to the immaturity. Should I trust my health to such a cavalier attitude?

I lean toward it being legit, but they've got a long ways to go to catch up with the cutting edge of understanding in nutrition science and it's not clear what advantage they'll be able to offer over established meal replacement drinks like Ensure, which most people don't want to drink today. Improved taste? You can get rats to overfeed to fatness on chocolate Ensure. Expertise? No. For personal use, Soylent Orange is more convenient, available today, and safer, IMO:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/h2h/i_hate_preparing_food_my_solutio...

princess30002• 13 years ago

Also notable is that he ran exactly pi miles.

e: AND called that an "irrational improvement." That must be a joke or something...

gwern2• 13 years ago

> Want to bet on the results of a double blind study?

Unfortunately, I don't think such a study is runnable. How do you blind 'oil-sludge' against 'real food'?

That said, randomizable is perfectly doable: Rhinehart could flip a coin each week to decide whether to eat real food or Soylent. I suggested as much on his blog a while ago, but he never responded.

papsosouid18• 13 years ago

>what advantage they'll be able to offer over established meal replacement drinks like Ensure

Ensure isn't remotely close to nutritionally complete. We're not talking about your mythical unknown magic plant powers here, we're talking known vitamins and essential minerals, with established RDIs, that Ensure and similar products do not come anywhere close to providing enough of. If you can show me a product that is actually nutritionally complete (provides 100% of the RDI of all vitamins and minerals with an RDI) then you have an argument.

namwen• 13 years ago

Yeah, I'm dumbfounded in more ways than one. Here we have a group of young guys supposedly selling a mysterious powder with no ingredients under the name Soylent of all things. Then I come to the comments and virtually no one has questioned this product as even being real and is instead arguing over whether it's a viable business / safe.

wiggins37• 13 years ago

I had the same thought, I was cracking up reading the website, especially the "testimonials" and the brief FAQ answers. Then I read the comments and had to search for "green" before I found your comment that even suggested it was a joke. I think is all one elaborate joke.

rspeer• 13 years ago

I have scrolled through hundreds of apparently dead serious comments to get here. Thank you.

I'm just dumbfounded. I can't comprehend what is going on in this comment section. It seems quite clear to me that the HN community is being parodied, and yet either everyone here is so gullible they have never been on the Internet before, or they are dutifully playing their part in the parody.

morgante• 13 years ago

Seriously, this has to be a joke. A very elaborate one, which half of HN is apparently playing along with...

I mean, in Soylent Green it's all about "freeing your body" as well.

tripzilch3• 13 years ago

question, has anyone actually seen the stuff?

if this turns out to have been an incredibly elaborate hoax, I'm gonna laugh, tip my hat and buy the guy a beer if I ever meet him

peteysd• 13 years ago

The launch of this campaign is about a month and a half late. It would have been much more appropriate to launch on April 1st.

chollida1• 13 years ago

I think the biggest issue I see here is that they are selling a dietary supplement and they don't have a licensed or even a trained nutritionist or doctor on their startup team.

That's pretty scary to me. Who is the person who is certifying this as safe for meal replacement?

Where is the clinical study that was done before this was released to people?

bksenior• 13 years ago

The founder needs a public speaking class. He talks like Dexter.

nsxwolf3• 13 years ago

STILL sticking with that absolutely horrific name, I see? You should seriously give out DVDs of the film as rewards.

How about a sleeping pill named Quietus[1]?

[1] Children of Men reference, film version

Afforess16• 13 years ago

Horrible? Try genius. Instant recognizability, causes tons of comments. Any press is good press.

nsxwolf3• 13 years ago

Well what may doom them is that their concoction looks like human snot, or even semen.

zeroexzeroone3• 13 years ago

Most people have already screwed themselves with the traditional "American" diet. I can see why this would be enticing. I, for one, prefer raw food - vegetables and animals I can hunt myself (when I can). I wouldn't call it Paleo - I would call it NORMAL EATING. I also run every day and do some moderate lifting every other day with yoga every night. I feel great, actually, and don't need something that looks like raw cocaine to put in my body. I don't trust food bought from the internet, no matter how it looks or what the reviews are. Farmer's markets are where its at - buy local and buy raw, everything else is a waste of time.

ratherbefuddled• 13 years ago

I'm amazed the key question hasn't been asked or answered yet:

Does it taste good?

zeroexzeroone3• 13 years ago

Looks to me like it tastes like chicken.

antihero3• 13 years ago

According to the guy who made it it tastes fantastic, so empirically yes, of course.

Afforess16• 13 years ago

Yes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTkuvppi334

gnoway• 13 years ago

Aside from the possible health issues, I'm kind of disappointed with the price. It's pretty expensive!

gph• 13 years ago

That's how I felt. I wonder how much it costs to produce per "meal" for them. Because they are charging ~3.10 per "meal" at the weekly rate. Maybe there will be a better price after they officially launch. But it kind of feels like they are taking a heavy profit at that rate. Perhaps making a quick buck upfront in case this doesn't pan out in the long run?

Either way that and the snake-oil type sales pitch has really turned me off. Through all the hoopla this generated on HN I mostly sat on the fence. Now I feel distinctly like I don't trust them. But they've got backers, so we'll see the results eventually.

georgebonnr• 13 years ago

Ok, so just to be clear... this is real? And not an elaborate Charlton Heston joke? Well color me surprised that... they used the name Soylent.

tinco4• 13 years ago

It's crazy how strongly people react to the idea of this drink. It contains only ingredients that are found in other nutrients. That means the FDA will probably give it a stamp of approval without even giving it a second thought.

There's this idea that because we have such stringent laws governing our medicine, we probably have such laws governing food too. But the reality of it is that if you take a bunch of ingredients that have already been established in the market and you throw them together you're allowed to call it food and sell it in the supermarkets.

In a macabre way, if this drink _does_ seriously harm someone, and they sue these guys that would actually be a good thing, because these guys are doing nothing different from what the preprocessed food industry is doing. Except that the preprocessed food industry optimizes for minimal ingredient costs and maximal consumability, where Rob is optimizing Soylent for maximal ingredient coverage and minimal consumation need, the exact opposite! We might actually get some sane laws (like the rejected one that said food marketed for children should consist of at least 50% nutrients)

Before you question the integrity of this project, please consider that Rob himself has already been living almost exclusively for 4 months. No that does not mean this product is by all means safe or that you should replicate him without doubt, but it does mean he already put his life on the line for the idea of this product.

That being said, I do find it a bit disconcerting to see that all the cautionary language of his blog is gone in this marketing site. It wasn't a good idea to hire a sales person for this kind of project, he already has more initial backing than he should need in my opinion.

jbarham2• 13 years ago

Startup idea: Soylent Restaurant.

Only one item on the menu. No need for a kitchen or trained chefs. I'll be rich!

jbarham2• 13 years ago

I'm calling it: Soylent is the Pets.com of this investment cycle. Ironically dog food is probably more nutritionally balanced than Soylent, which is almost beyond parody.

yadamo• 13 years ago

Let's stop and think. This is a good thing. The truth is, none of us know whether or not it's snake oil. Just because we don't have enough information to prove it isn't a farce (besides the founders' insistence on their good health), does not mean we have enough information to prove that it is. Is it dangerous? Highly unlikely. The vast majority of early adopters will probably be people at least somewhat characteristic of this community, meaning smart enough to know that if something makes you feel awful, you should probably stop eating it. If you bought a month's supply, maybe you get burned a few hundred bucks and it wasn't the best decision. If you bought a week's supply, you tried it for a few days and felt terrible, just make the intelligent decision and stop eating it (or drinking or whatever the process of consumption should be called). Whether or not the people behind this are looking out for everyone else, we don't know. But let's be honest, neither is McDonald's or even the businesses stocking microwave dinners in grocery stores. They're in it to make a profit, not to fill you with the proper nutrition. Frankly, the goal of many of the businesses in the food industry is to cause customers to crave the product, often at the expense of nutrition (i.e. by loading with sugar, conditioning the brain to crave more). To say that they know better than these 20-somethings who have been collecting some actual data besides "hm, tastes good" is exceptionally naive. Your average gym rat eats far healthier than a microwave dinner diet. This could be bad. But none of us have the data to prove it. Until then, I'm hopeful. Innovation in this industry is long overdue. To say that these 'kids' are too young or inexperienced to make a real innovation and prove us all wrong, is a shame, especially in this community. Is it perfect for everyone? Doubtful. Is it better, on average, than the diet many of us are consuming? Well, that just might be true. Who are we to say it isn't?

mecha• 13 years ago

What, it's only at version 0.6!? I'll usually wait until my food at least matures to version 1.0.

collypops• 13 years ago

Rob has been testing (and modifying) Soylent for mere months. He has a bunch of human Guinea Pigs that have been testing various mixes for mere weeks. How is a Kickstarter-esque campaign the logical next step?

It sounds like the guys behind this are impatient, overconfident and reckless. Worse than that, they're preying on those caught up in how fashionable crowd-funding is these days. I doubt very much that a website like Kickstarter would actually get behind a project like this, which is why they've had to roll their own website.

If these guys had a background in Bromatology and did their due diligence before launching this campaign, I'd be skeptical. Just imagine how confident I am, given the reality.

blhack3• 13 years ago

Wow there is a lot of hate in this thread...

A lot of the arguments here seem to boil down to "Much smarter people are working on this and they haven't solved it, who the hell does this KID think he is?!?"

That's pretty depressing for a website that, at least originally, was to help startups talk to one another. Shame on you, hacker news. You're smarter than this. By this logic, never ever trust your data to anybody other than IBM because those dumb hacker kids don't know what they're doing!

Second: "He's violating ALL KINDS of FDA regulations! [none of which I can name]"

Oh is he? Because if you actually look at what he's doing, it appears that he is taking things are already approved from human consumption, and mixing them together. This would be akin to a baker taking eggs and flour and mixing them.

What he's selling (although selling is a bit of an incorrect word here) is effectively a big power bar, except his comes in powerdered form. There are some hippies that sell power bars at my local coffee shop. They are terrible. What sort of advanced degrees do you suppose the hippies have? None? Possibly some experience in "baking"?

Finally: this is being presented within the context of "an experiment". If you start eating soylent, and you get sick, STOP EATING IT!

I'd imagine that I might have similar results if I ate nothing but the hippie vegan power bars at the coffee shop.

Personally, I'll be in for whatever the $65 level is.

1) Because I think this is neat

2) I want to encourage people to experiment with the world around them.

3) I'm not an idiot, and if I start feeling sick as a result of not eating any "real" food, I'll stop eating soylent.

Geesh.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

> it appears that he is taking things are already approved from human consumption, and mixing them together.

...and then saying that the nutrients are stable for years.

> A lot of the arguments here seem to boil down to "Much smarter people are working on this and they haven't solved it, who the hell does this KID think he is?!?"

Mavericks can solve big problems. They show their working; they provide a demonstration; they give a proof. Other people then pick at the work to see if there are any problems. That's how science works. We check the sample sizes, we check the stats, we check the confounding factors, we proceed cautiously.

This guy has gone from self-experimentation (and caution about letting other people try it) to a full blown sales pitch full of errors and over-blown claims.

The actual product might not be the TimeCube of nutrition, but the documentation so far is hopeless.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

> This guy has gone from self-experimentation (and caution about letting other people try it) to a full blown sales pitch full of errors and over-blown claims.

So it's exactly like any other campaign for supplements. But he is one of us, so apparently we cannot let him get away with it.

Afforess16• 13 years ago

The irony of this HN discussion literally hours after the "Hacker News Is Depressing" article is so thick I could cut it with a knife.

intended2• 13 years ago

The language on this product and the pitch deserve quite a bit of criticism and dollops of caution.

Being fair in your assessments means that some days you will rightly give out negative assessments.

jckt11• 13 years ago

"Finally: this is being presented within the context of "an experiment". If you start eating soylent, and you get sick, STOP EATING IT!"

If you ate a McDonald's said their food was nutritionally complete, and you ate it everyday for a week, and then got sick, who is to be blamed? Of course, given McD's reputation I'd say you're to be blamed. But in this case Soylent is untested, and so far doesn't even substantiate its claims very well. And even McD's doesn't go so far as saying that their food can replace your meals (or maybe they have? I do not get that vibe though), while Soylent here is supposed to do that (the vibe I got from his blogs, at least -- this is supposedly revolutionary, no?).

Although I love cooking to bits I do find Soylent interesting as a concept, but the way they've gone about doing things isn't what I'd approve of myself.

And as I see it, a majority of the arguments here do not boil down to "Much smarter people are working on this and they haven't solved it, who the hell does this KID think he is?!?" or "He's violating ALL KINDS of FDA regulations! [none of which I can name]". For the former, Soylent is simply making unsubstantiated claims, to which much smarter people have not even come up yet. If Soylent is indeed that smart, then they better have good claims to back it up. For the latter, I only saw one commenter talk about breaking FDA rules, and he was only speculating about them, and to be honest it's very likely that there's something about false advertising that they broke.

But then again the FDA probably didn't expect some company claiming that they'd come up with a food to end all foods...

wavefunction• 13 years ago

I doubt that even McDonalds would advocate that you only consume McDonalds as a healthy diet

atdrummond6• 13 years ago

Even if they're already approved for human consumption, the end production process needs to occur in a cGMP approved facility to cover themselves legally.

This isn't a cheap or quick process.

blhack3• 13 years ago

What you're talking about is commonly referred to as a "certified kitchen".

Not only is this process simple, but there are community available certified kitchens in most major cities that people like the aforementioned hippies use to make their granola bars.

Here is the first link for "certified kitchen Phoenix": https://www.chefssharedkitchen.com/default.aspx

ozim• 13 years ago

Do you really think that they will start some approval process? I think they will licence this stuff to some company that already has such approval. Other way they can probably order ready mix based on their recipe in some company. I don't think they will mix it by hand in kitchen.

cscurmudgeon2• 13 years ago

Except that those hippies don't raise $100k+ on the web.

"Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition"

The techniques and the wording seem snake oilish.

Also, if anything those dumb hacker kids build breaks (email, web app, game) etc, they won't hurt you physically.

The body is a weird mechanism: it can put up with lots of abuse and experimentation. It is also fragile at the same time.

Also, where are the ingredients listed? The FAQ is hilarious. I can't believe that people are so gullible. There are mountains of research on nutrition in modern science and thousands of years of accumulated evidence from traditional practices (Indian, Chinese) etc.

"But, hey, there is this magic potion which I can buy. Don't care about the ingredients. Can't be bothered to read up on the manuals for the greatest mechanism I will ever own. "

Whatever happened to extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? In this case, there is a huge chance that a bunch of guys will get rich and some person will get hurt badly.

baddox2• 13 years ago

All of those seem like valid reasons for you to not back the project.

goostavos2• 13 years ago

>The techniques and the wording seem snake oilish.

You know, every time this guy's story has popped up on here I've defended him. I like that he's trying to do something big, I like that he wants to solve a very real world problem, and I like that in his blog posts and updates he phrased all of his results as personal findings needing further study.

However, this:

>>"Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition"

and

>>puts you in excellent health,

...This I do not like. At all. It's a massive, massive leap to go from "this is something under test," to "this is something that 100% works and will cure [insert list of ailments here]."

It's completely and wholly intellectually dishonest. It's put a sour taste in my mouth over the whole thing. It's gone from personal experiment to fund raiser and company structure in what? Five months? All of the early adopter "testimonials" sound like little more than confirmational bias rearing its head. "Oh, you bought a magnetic bracelet on the internet and you do actually have more energy now that you're wearing it!? Whoa! Amazing that it worked out exactly how you wanted it to!" These testimonials carry the exact same weight.

I feel like there's green in their eyes. Rigor be damned if riches can be had. Also, his ego is now on the line. I'm sure his brain is still being objective about the results.

IF is works, and IF it's safe, and IF the claims can be backed up with ACTUAL DATA, then by god, more power to the guy... but in the mean time, at the very least, can a guy get a trial with some other vanilla flavored sludge acting as a placebo?

Hell, I'll settle for an footnote on the page that says "None of our claims are backed by any form of relevant data."

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

While this product clearly doesn't meet the risk-reward profile for you (or me), do you not enjoy the idea that a few thousand people are about start an interesting experiment?

One though I had was, if Ben and Jerry are adored for making a product that is delightful but contributes to the obesity epidemic, why can we not also praise people trying to do the opposite?

kamakazizuru4• 13 years ago

IT´s definitely very snake oilish - in fact - reading his blog posts - the snake oilish tone has been around for a while "I feel my scars disappearing". That said - I do think its an interesting experiment - and if it gets even a few people of the classic - pizza burgers tacos and beer diet that a lot of America and increasingly many parts of the world currently live on - I see no wrong in it. That was his original goal in the first place - to get him off a cheap unhealthy diet - to a cheap healthier diet. The fact that he´s now trying to market it as the ultimate solution is what´s wrong here.

kamakazizuru4• 13 years ago

also - I´m not sure about the US - but in many other parts of the world you can eat well for 65$ a week anyways (i mean real food - including maybe a meal or 2 out).

papsosouid18• 13 years ago

The big flaw with this line of reasoning is that 90% of people are already eating diets that we know, 100% for certain, are worse than soylent. Yes, it could be missing something. You are almost certainly already missing or short on several things. For the vast majority of people, this is going to be a significant improvement.

nopinsight• 13 years ago

> "Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition"

If he tempers his claims and recommends it as a time-saving meal, the danger to consumers should be mitigated and the reactions here would likely be a lot less violent. Say,

"Use well-balanced Soylent for 1 to 2 meals a day to save yourself a great deal of time. You should have varied diet in other meals to ensure even more complete nutritional composition for your body."

djt2• 13 years ago

None of the people on the team have a nutrition background. That makes no sense to me.

The body is complicated and stopping eating this diet if you feel sick doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have ongoing health problems even when you go back to a normal diet.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Isn't calling critics "haters" merely another form of hate?

"Finally: this is being presented within the context of "an experiment". If you start eating soylent, and you get sick, STOP EATING IT!"

Really? So if a mega corp drugs company just handed out experimental products to who ever wanted it with out and controls what so ever, you'd not be worried by that? It would be a national, perhaps international scandal. But that doesn't bother you because it is "neat"?

Yeah, sure entourage people to experiment, I agree. Make your own goo, and eat it yourself, fine. But encouraging people to participate in unregulated medical experiments is reckless and negligent.

DanBC18• 13 years ago

> Yeah, sure entourage people to experiment, I agree. Make your own goo, and eat it yourself, fine. But encouraging people to participate in unregulated medical experiments is reckless and negligent.

I'm a harsh critic of soylent, but even I'd be fine with it if they said "try this at your own risk! here's the research we're using. Here's what our critics say."

d233• 13 years ago

This is clearly parody. This is clearly parody. This is clearly parody.

I am genuinely surprised that the people of HN can not see that. I expected the conversation to at least be about whether it was parody vs. not, not about whether it was healthy or not.

alex_c2• 13 years ago

A few of us are discussing that, at least... much, much further down the page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747100).

tripzilch3• 13 years ago

> What he's selling (although selling is a bit of an incorrect word here) is effectively a big power bar, except his comes in powerdered form. There are some hippies that sell power bars at my local coffee shop. They are terrible.

do these hippies claim you can replace your entire diet with just those power bars?

hey I'm all for this project btw, and really not having to deal with preparing food a few times a day sounds ideal (I do love cooking, but I have a lot of other things on my plate (haha) recently).

one thing I simply do not understand is how this guy went from being a single dude experimenting with food replacements on himself, to expanding his team with five other people, and NONE of them has a background in nutrition, medicine or even biology. why?

sure you can figure out this stuff by reading up on it, looking things up, but someone who has studied even slightly related subjects for 6 years knows things that you don't even know you didn't know, or know you might want to look up something on a particular subject that you would never have considered. that's what education is useful for, crazy idea I know.

I'm not saying doing this with only technical computer and marketing people on your team is going to make you fail automatically, but he is definitely cutting himself short on some valuable knowledge and ideas.

mousefad• 13 years ago

"I ran 3.14 miles non-stop. This is an irrational improvement."

[checks date]. Late for April Fools.

postfuturist2• 13 years ago

"... antioxidants, probiotics, and nootropics. It's everything the body needs." - Soylent video

"It's a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs." - from The Matrix

songzme• 13 years ago

does soylent expire?

chm• 13 years ago

Ignorant crooks wanting to make a quick buck.

cpeterso2• 13 years ago

What does Soylent taste like? What does "the body doesn't have to get rid of unused waste" mean? I'm reminded of the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer goes on an all-yogurt diet for a week. :\

Also, it's a little disconcerting when the only founder with any food or biotech background is the sales guy.

gems• 13 years ago

Let people take risks. They can die if they'd like.

saalweachter2• 13 years ago

How well does this stack up against the milk-and-potatoes diet?

According to the popular science/history book 1493, it is more-or-less a complete diet in itself. The two datapoints it uses to back this up are a story about two Polish scientists who ate nothing but potatoes and milk (or milk products, like cheese and butter) for a year, and remained in perfect heath for the duration, and the claim that prior to the Potato Famine, 25% of the Irish population was already surviving on nothing but milk and potatoes indefinitely, and they were regarded as a healthy and hale race.

A 2000 calorie diet of milk and potatoes (4 cups 2% milk, 5.5 300g potatoes) costs around $65 / day. Preparation time involves as little as microwaving a potato and pouring a glass of milk.

ceejayoz8• 13 years ago

I don't know where you buy your milk and potatoes but they shouldn't be costing you $65/day. :-)

saalweachter2• 13 years ago

Whoops, meant $65 / month.

papsosouid18• 13 years ago

That isn't a healthy diet, merely one that you can survive on for several years. Potatoes and milk will leave you deficient in vitamin E eventually.

outworlder• 13 years ago

I can't believe this is anything other than a carefully constructed joke.

I guess that a few months from now we'll see a New York Times article explaining how a fake startup with a fake product managed to raise seed capital.

leot3• 13 years ago

I have a soylent-like thing that I've started eating, and I've personally found the impact to be wonderful. It's arguably easier, and it's potentially healthier.

It is extremely inexpensive, delicious, vegetarian/vegan-if-eggs-are-omitted, flexible, nutrient rich, high in fiber, high in good fats, relatively "slow-cal"/low glycemic index, wheat gluten-free, protein rich, easy to digest, and very quick to prepare.

Pre-cooked in large quantity weekly/every-two-weeks:

- quinoa (2 minutes total prep time, in a large cheap rice cooker) - sweet potatoes (4 minutes total prep time -- simply baked in foil 30 mins to a side at 425 F) - beans (I do black beans, Mexican style -- this can take a fair bit longer, but they're super tasty, and can last 2-3 weeks if portions are frozen)

In the morning ...

Ingredients - olive oil (1/4 to 1/2 a cup) - pre-cooked quinoa (3/4 - 1.5 cups) - pre-cooked sweet potato (1/2 - 1 cup) - pre-cooked beans (1/2 - 1 cup) - eggs (1-4) - greens (kale/spinach/chard/whatever) - salt and peper - hot sauce!!

I pour the olive oil in a large cast iron skillet (cast iron is the best!). I then add the cooked quinoa and fry at high heat for maybe five minutes -- the quinoa should absorb most of the oil (there should be no smoking or anything!).

Then I add some beans and some sweet potato (skins on! and, for the last few mornings I haven't had beans so it's been sweet potato only) and mix it all up. Then comes some chopped up vegetables (kale/spinach/chard). When the vegetables are 70% cooked or so I add one to four eggs (this morning it was four). I mix the eggs in with the rest of the hot conglomeration and cook them very briefly, being careful to avoid having them spend too much time on the hot skillet (which makes them rubbery).

I then put the hot mess into a bowl. If I have avocados (as I do now) I chop one up and mix it with some salt and lemon juice and put it on top of everything. I usually douse it all with hot sauce, repeatedly.

I estimate that my breakfasts are typically between 1800 and 2800 calories, though some days (like today) I only get through a part of it, in which case I save it for later. If I get through it all, it usually means I don't have to worry about eating anything more than a snack at dinner time. This has the benefit of avoiding the afternoon food-coma caused by lunch.

I wash the meal down with some homemade carrot-ginger-apple-greens-beet juice (mixed in with a bit of creatine).

papsosouid18• 13 years ago

What you described is absolutely not healthier. You are clearly not meeting 100% RDI on many vitamins and minerals. Where is your vitamin E? Why is the quinoa even there? That is only "protein rich" if you are eating 4 eggs, and are very generous with your definition of "protein rich".

leot3• 13 years ago

That wasn't a very helpful criticism. The basic principle of pre-cooking quinoa, beans, and sweet-potatoes is a good one for many people who want ease of preparation, tastiness, "real food", and something much healthier than what they're currently eating.

Also, the nutrition data site says that it's got ~124% of the recommended vitamin E (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/recipe/2832909/2)

What would you add to this to make it better?

owencm• 13 years ago

I've started a wiki page on Slant.co for people to outline the main arguments why Soylent may or may not be healthy since these threads can be very hard to follow all the great discussion going back and forth!

Please help me flesh it out so it can help people come to their own conclusion about Soylent's safety: http://www.slant.co/topics/695/~is-it-safe-to-replace-my-die...

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

The most depressing thing about this whole thing is the alarmingly high number of commenters here who seem to not have the most basic grasp of how science works, and what types of evidence are necessary before something can be deemed safe.

Here is a hint, folks: it is called a random controlled trial. Until these Soylent guys conduct a few of those and show that their product is not only just better, but also safe for consumption, it needs to be dismissed and ignored.

flippyhead• 13 years ago

The audio on their video is sooo bad!

bfung• 13 years ago

A request for those who might go on the Soylent diet, starting in july (a month before the estimated shipping date), during your Soylent diet:

  1. Record your current height
  2. Record daily: weight + timestamp, sleep start time, sleep stop time, 
     food consumption (http://www.livestrong.com/thedailyplate/ perhaps to help 
     or alternatives), exercise, 
     and how you feel physically (tired, energetic, sleepy...).
  3. Blog about your experience and contribute the data to science.

No point in bashing or hyping this up, we'll have some data points in a few months.

Disclaimer: I will not be participating in this experiment, but am interested in the results. =D

gclaramunt• 13 years ago

Only one individual and only three months is far from enough to claim that works. I bet you can go better (and safer!) with military rations. Pretty sure the army/air force would have those experiments nailed down in the 50'

Selfcommit• 13 years ago

Anyone else pick up on the fact that they claim to be allergen free? They use whey protein in the drink, so way are they even close to allergen free.

They also have a poor understanding of what constitutes an allergen.

notdrunkatall• 13 years ago

Good god, $184k as of this writing. Are people retarded?

aviv• 13 years ago

I don't understand why they had to name their product "Soylent". It doesn't even contain soy. Many people avoid soy products and/or have negative associations with it (GMO, Monsanto, phytoestrogens, allergy).

Why would you alienate potential customers with a product name that beings with "Soy"?

anuraj• 13 years ago

Has it been vetted by FDA? What is the long term effect of having a supplement instead of regular food? Where is the controlled trial data?

jchook• 13 years ago

1:07 "no waste" -- did he just say he doesn't poop anymore?

atarian• 13 years ago

You know, some of the things that ended up being super successful (Velcro, shopping carts) are the things that a whole bunch of people initially panned and rejected.

I feel pretty confident that this is the case right now. A lot of people here are shitting on these guys for creating something that completely contradicts our notion of nutrition. I for one, support this new venture and wish them the best of luck.

djt2• 13 years ago

- I don't care how much money these guys make out of this

- I don't care what they do to their own bodies

- I do care that they don't have any rigorous testing done before offering this to the public without disclaimers.

cookingrobot2• 13 years ago

We're smart - the disclaimers aren't necessary. If we weren't smart, they wouldn't help anyway.

I agree they've gotten carried away in their claims and are focusing the pitch on some silly stuff.. for ex I don't think they're going to solve world hunger. But these are criticisms of this particular pitch, and don't change at all the actual product they're pushing: a best effort implementation of medical science's actual nutrition guidelines + some nootropics.

cookingrobot2• 13 years ago

Relevant XKCD (the current one!) http://xkcd.com/1215/

cmccabe3• 13 years ago

Ugh, every discussion about soylent follows the same pattern.

person #1: But he hasn't proven it's safe!

person #2: But you haven't proven that it isn't!

person #1: But he doesn't have a PhD or any qualifications in food science!

person #2: But you don't either! And anyway the real experts admit they don't know what they're doing anyway. The fake experts are busy pushing colon cleanse products and miracle diets.

person #1: But he's playing with people's lives! Think of the children!

person #2: But so are the guys who invented the Doritos taco shell, the twinkie, and the super-sized french fries. Why the double standard?

How about injecting some reality into this debate and admitting that nobody is going to actually eat nothing but soylent every day. OK, maybe possibly the original inventor will stick to it for a while, but I can't imagine anyone else possibly doing this. Most Americans can barely make it between meals without grabbing a snack. Do you really think someone is going to eat nothing but green snot for a year? All these arguments are irrelevant, really.

Kiro• 13 years ago

I personally don't find the promises hard to believe. Losing or maintaining weight is all about energy in/energy out. If you keep a consistent kcal intake controlling weight will be easy. For the cognitive effects it's easy to understand once you realise how taxing it is to digest food. Anyone who has been fasting or been on a lean diet knows that it makes you much more vibrant and sharp.

Tenoke• 13 years ago

TL;DR The guy's marketing is questionable, he makes misleading claims, hasn't done proper testing but the product or a spin-off still has the potential to be useful to many people.

Neepy• 13 years ago

Does anybody know about international exporting restrictions for goods such as this? My freight forwarder restricts food and beverage, but not sure if it's technically classified as such?

qwerta• 13 years ago

Hilarious. After 3 years and 2M$ spend they will reinvent the bread. Now we only need similar startup to reinvent the water and maybe air :-)

juskrey• 13 years ago

Guys, do not worry. When they will raise enough money, they will fund 10 or even 100 appropriate researches that will prove the credibility, safety and superiority of this product to natural food. And everything will be ok. They have been doing that for ages.

wldlyinaccurate2• 13 years ago

If Soylent actually takes off and becomes popular (I really hope it doesn't btw. See my other comment for why), I wouldn't be surprised if some of the big food companies come down on them really hard. I mean, just imagine what this product would do to the food industry.

talmir• 13 years ago

When will the green version come out?

benjah• 13 years ago

guys guys guys. . .

"It's made of people."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sp-VFBbjpE

This is marketing genius

milesf• 13 years ago

I apologize for behaving badly and deleting most of my posts. I've cooled off now, but am still very concerned for people being taken in by this.

This gif pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter: http://i.imgur.com/twkp3So.gif

Soylent Campaign

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