The drab stupidity of Soylent

http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/column/4264/the-drab-stupidity-of-soylent/

by swombat • 13 years ago

81 122 13 years ago

kernelmag.com

northwest2• 13 years ago

The real question seems easy:

Why should one start to "eat" in a way that our body was never made for?

For how long has humanity been eating natural and solid things again?

davidcollantes• 13 years ago

What do you mean, "to eat in a way that our body was never made for"?

You real question is non-sensical. Pre-humans and humans have eaten in many different ways throughout, and will continue to do so.

lclarkmichalek• 13 years ago

Sure our diets have changed over time. But I don't think we've ever lived on one food alone?

northwest2• 13 years ago

Just one more point: the colon depends on solid material in order to push things through (it's how it works). Get rid of solid food in there and its muscles won't create any real transit.

IanCal2• 13 years ago

We inject things that make us live longer and replace body parts with mechanics. For how long has humanity been not inserting pacemakers or giving vaccinations.

I don't particularly like the idea of soylent, but coming at it from a "but it's not natural" is just ridiculous. You know what's natural? Dying in horrifying ways, with no hope or understanding of what's happening. Fuck natural.

Remember natural smallpox? Not a single person in the world has it. How many people die during childbirth now compared to 150 years ago?

a way that our body was never made for?

We weren't made for anything. We're a loosely connected series of insane reactions that just about doesn't die. We put load on non-load bearing structures (hi, spine), we have our optic nerve running through the centre of our retina giving us a blind spot, our body can decide that peanuts = a threat so bad we should stop breathing and occasionally some of our cells will rebel and try and kill us. We don't even produce vitamin C thanks to a single error, something we need to live and could easily produce.

We weren't made for anything, we just are.

bluedino3• 13 years ago

> We weren't made for anything.

No, but our bodies have been fine-tuned through evolution over the last million years, up until probably the last 20,000 or so. Your digestive tract is different from a cow, snake, or wolf for a reason.

dsego4• 13 years ago

Should I ambush a wild cow and bite down on it's neck until it bleeds to death? And then the rest of the family joins the feast, sinking our teeth into the raw flesh?

zimpenfish• 13 years ago

Yes. Also please video this and put it on YouTube.

Would make an interesting "how far a person can get trying to bite a wild cow in the neck before being trampled to death" case study.

dudeonthecouch3• 13 years ago

Finally!

dudeonthecouch3• 13 years ago

Yeah, vote me down. How are you not getting that this guy is charging you $70 for a bag of powdered oatmeal and maltodextrin?

spuz2• 13 years ago

Feel free to market and produce your own cheaper alternative.

pothibo2• 13 years ago

I think people enjoy eating, but the tradeoff (cooking, having a good recipe, etc) is too big for them so they go for fast food, skip meal, etc.

Could I be wrong?

ssharp• 13 years ago

There are already products available to satiate hunger/nutrition without having to cook and aren't fast food and have been around for decades.

I'm not going to knock Soylent as being dangerous or stupid. Quite frankly, I don't know enough about nutrition to make such a judgement, but I don't think it's design is anything revolutionary, either.

Soylent's angle on this isn't really positioning itself as a "meal replacement", but rather a full "diet replacement". When I eat a protein bar in the morning instead of eggs and veggies, I have no expectation or desire to live the rest of my life eating nothing but those protein bars. Soylent is specifically saying "you can live your life eating nothing but this". That's a ridiculous, if not dangerous, claim to make without having substantial data to back that claim up.

pothibo2• 13 years ago

I agree that meal substitutes have existed for years before Soylent. But when I read their KickStarter campaign, it seemed like they wanted to remove meals completely.

Maybe I didn't understand their mission.

jacquesc• 13 years ago

While I agree with you, I think you may have missed his point. Enjoying eating is different than satiating hunger/nutrition.

People enjoy eating food that tastes good. Fast junk food tastes good to a lot of people (including me, even knowing the health risks).

The only thing that has a chance of replacing this is food that still tastes good, or that you can convince them is good for them (Subway has been pretty successful with this tact).

I'm definitely skeptical that something mildly sweet tasting (like watery cake batter) is going to get the masses on board with it.

gabemart2• 13 years ago

This kind of article seems to ignore the fact that almost everyone eats poorly.

In other words, the proposition "Soylent will not provide close to optimum nutrition for everyone" is extremely different from the proposition "Switching to Soylent will improve the diet of most people".

Most people get most of their calories from sugar, refined starches, and refined vegetable oils. They do not finely-tune their nutritional intake based on their gender, weight, age, activity level, stress level or time of year. I'm interested in the pros and cons of Soylent for this type of typical person.

I'm extremely skeptical of Soylent, but this vector of attack seems incorrect to me, applicable only to people who already have extremely health diets.

weego• 13 years ago

Shouldn't a nutrition/meal replacement startup strive for more than "well, you're eating shit anyway, why not buy our almost entirely untested and unregulated shit!"

gabemart2• 13 years ago

Shouldn't a nutrition/meal replacement startup strive for more than "well, you're eating shit anyway, why not buy our almost entirely untested and unregulated shit!"

Sure, but I think the size of its success or failure for each person should be measured against their health if they were to go on eating their regular diet, not some hypothesized perfect diet.

The alternative to me seems a little like saying condoms will always be a terrible method of STI prevention because their prevention rate is less than 100%, and you can achieve 100% prevention with strict abstinence. For people who can't or won't practice strict abstinence, that comparison doesn't seem very useful.

cliveowen2• 13 years ago

You might be right but the solution is to educate people, not to feed them a powdery substance of dubious nutritional value.

oblique634• 13 years ago

This is true, but the problem is that the education out there is highly fragmented, polarizing, hand-wavy, and/or impractical most of the time. If you have an idea for what this education might look like, I guarantee you there will be no shortage of "experts" to counter-act your ideas from numerous different viewpoints, each with surprisingly valid points of their own.

The fact that nobody likes to admit is that nutrition is still a large 'black box' in the human system, and we only know a handful of basic correlations that involve it. Macro nutrients aren't nearly as important as 'low carb' dieters like to think they are; glycemic index and blood sugar levels aren't nearly as important as some others like to think they are; similar story for acidity and all kinds of other theories. Then for caloric intake, most arguments stand on top of the high-horse of having the most scientific backup and leave it at that, without ever giving much practical information. No, exercise is not an efficient way to burn calories; and No, just because a diet is backed by some misguided theory does not mean it's not a significantly more practical approach to take. However, because there is such polarization, nobody ever reaches a consensus for what's a good practical (!) approach to eating healthy that's actually backed up by significant data. Personally, I don't see this happening anytime soon either, at least not until we discover everything there is to know about human digestion (and that includes developing the understanding of the relatively 'new' microbiome as well).

kevingadd9• 13 years ago

You say people don't tune their nutritional intake, but the human body does have ways of telling you if you're missing essential nutrients. There are lots of various cues caused by people's diets that they adapt to, either by going out and eating something different, taking supplements, etc.

I don't think the OP is arguing that everyone needs a nutritionist to regulate their diet; rather, he's arguing that a drink like Soylent is inferior to even the basic amount of dietary adjustment that normally happens in a person's life.

If all you care about is calories, sure, Soylent is probably fine. I'd be concerned that if you get used to how it feels to mostly subsist on Soylent, you might be intentionally tuning out important cues from your body.

marknutter• 13 years ago

This bears repeating, over and over and over again if necessary, in every HN thread related to Soylent: most people who purchase Soylent will not exclusively eat Soylent. They will instead supplement their diet with it for times when they don't want to be bothered to make a meal.

auganov2• 13 years ago

I eat a fixed amount of calories everyday. What self-regulating mechanism are you talking about? Appetite? There's no clear consensus on that. We do know we have desire to eat. There are drugs that are pretty decent at suppressing appetite. But the claim that it's good at optimizing for life expectancy has little substance.

Just as sexual-desire might have been a nice mechanism for ensuring reproduction many years ago. But nowadays we can do better. There's no need to have it from a life-expectancy perspective. Hormones responsible for it are pretty toxic.

Appetite has it's role. But to claim somethings superiority based solely on being a 'natural'/'innate'/'genetic' is pretty naive. By extending this logic to other behaviors it's patently obvious that it's just not sound.

I see a lot of potential problems with Soylent. This part might or might not be a big problem. But the kind of simplistic arguments that are thrown around against and in-support of Soylent are depressing.

I replied to your comment but I address it to everyone. The article itself is just so low quality. Basically a very close-minded attack on Rhinehart with ambiguous mumbo-jumbo claims about nutrition.

Having been interested in nutrition for a long time I actually read many papers in search for answers. Finding high-quality research in that field is HARD. Doing good research is hard too. We're very very far from even resolving the whole carbohydrates vs protein vs fat war.

danparsonson2• 13 years ago

Most people get most of their calories from sugar, refined starches, and refined vegetable oils. They do not finely-tune their nutritional intake based on their gender, weight, age, activity level, stress level or time of year.

Do you know this or believe this?

bluedino3• 13 years ago

Have you been to a supermarket or restaurant in the last 20 years?

bluedino3• 13 years ago

> This kind of article seems to ignore the fact that almost everyone eats poorly.

An argument could be made that most people don't eat poorly, they simply eat too much. Over half of the US population is fat. It's insane.

corresation3• 13 years ago

This kind of article seems to ignore the fact that almost everyone eats poorly.

"Poorly" is relative. Most Westerners suffer no deficiencies, and are unhealthy more from a lack of activity and excess intake. This turns people mystical about their food, as if finding the magic elixir will cure lifestyle issues (such as the current hysterics about carbs: The Japanese get 70%+ of their calories from very simple carbs -- white rice, which is of a nutrition profile closely related to table sugar -- and they have marginal obesity and excellent health profiles. They just eat less of it and maintain active lives).

There is the paradox that the US is one of the least healthy people's, yet one of the most absolutely obsessed about their food.

A Big Mac has an enormously complex nutritional profile, as hard as that may be to imagine. An egg and a slice of bread is a superfood. Both have been maligned because of excess or sedentary lifestyles, but either in moderation can be an ideal part of your diet.

Nonetheless, I dislike the linked article: It attacks Soylent mostly from a defensive, elitist attitude that tries to hold information freedom as some sort of anti-intellectualism. While there are legitimate complaints about Soylent (and I don't think "everyone is different!" is a good approach), it seems like the creator(s) are trying to find the relevant information, and trying to use the accumulated knowledge of nutritionist. Just because they didn't classically train as a nutritionist does not invalidate their work.

magnusson2• 13 years ago

White rice is a starch, which is a complex carb, and does not have "a nutrition profile closely related to table sugar." Other than that, this is on-target. All of longest-lived populations eat primarily carb-based diets.

mcv8• 13 years ago

Exactly. I have some doubts about Soylent, but the only real argument this article provides is: different people have different nutritional needs.

Fine. So how well does normal food adjust to those needs? Who the hell tunes their food intake exactly to their needs? Do we even have the science to determine what your personal needs are?

The vast, vast majority of people simply eat what tastes good. Or even just what's available. Some people try to stick what they think is healthy, but they often do that on a much narrower scientific basis than Rhinehart uses. Lots of people follow thoroughly unhealthy diets hoping to lose weight for a few months become they gain it again.

Soylent, in contrast, is pretty easy to tune to your needs, once you're aware of them. You're not stuck with whatever the nutritional value in your favourite food is, you can actually tweak it (or let a qualified nutritionist do it for you). In the future, I can imagine Soylent dispensers that dispense your perfect mix when you insert your chipcard with your nutritional needs.

So despite the author's dislike for amateurs, his only argument sounds to me like it's in favour of the direction Soylent is taking.

jacques_chester13• 13 years ago

It's worse than that. The Soylent guy is so ignorant of basic nutrition that he had iron-deficiency arrythmia, for crikey's sake[1]. Even a diet composed entirely of Big Macs would have been better.

Ignorance of such a broad field should not be seen as heroic when you are potentially placing people's health at risk. Placing a legalistic figleaf over the top does not make the ethical problem go away.

I advise all to read the comment through to the conclusion.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1jvsie/the_man_w...

fnordfnordfnord4• 13 years ago

The Soylent guy is so ignorant of basic nutrition that he had iron-deficiency arrythmia,

So? Once you add feedback (blood tests, medical supervision) to your dietary "loop", these mistakes have the potential to sort themselves out.

Ignorance of such a broad field should not be seen as heroic when you are potentially placing people's health at risk.

Some people's health is at risk simply by maintaining their normal eating habits.

Placing a legalistic figleaf over the top does not make the ethical problem go away.

What ethical problem? Don't participate if you don't like the terms. It is not as though the stuff is being tested on schoolchildren, or anyone who is unwilling.

thewopr• 13 years ago

There is a bit of two-way extremism going on here. On one side, Rob says this can replace food. On the other, this guy, Greg, says you can't replace food because of metabolism differences in humans.

Whatever, it doesn't matter. Soylent will probably still succeed. It's the power-bar of a modern era. You won't eat it all the time, but it will be nice to have around as an alternative when you don't want to cook a meal. I'm actually quite looking forward to having this around to take with me each day as lunch. Probably better for me than the crap they sell in some of my local cafeterias.

dudeonthecouch3• 13 years ago

Thats a very different idea from eating it exclusively.

For only using it as a replacement from one meal a day you might as well buy a blender, mix (frozen) fruit, oatmeal, wheat germ, honey, yogurt, milk and drink it.

cliveowen2• 13 years ago

That's against the value proposition of the product, it's meant as a one-size-fits-all time-saver food. We have enough power bars et similia, we don't need another.

Steko• 13 years ago

"It's the power-bar of a modern era."

Let's not go overboard. Soylent is non-dairy Slim Fast that some guy mixes the chemicals for in his basement which at the moment offers no cost savings to the customer.

dsego4• 13 years ago

A reactionary article that doesn't offer anything except vague criticism, based on the age old principle "it's always been like this, don't rock the boat". Nothing to see here, move along.

blackdogie• 13 years ago

I wonder what long term effect this would have on say your digestion / absorption / urinary systems as well as your teeth and gums. I do think that this could be a way to elevate hunger, being able to drop supplies to places where it's needed quickly. But as a long term diet, I think it's dangerous (most of the points are outlined in that article).

ESUNTU• 13 years ago

Can someone comment on if there is a serious downside to not using our teeth at all?

ph0rque2• 13 years ago

Metabolic needs are also dynamic, and change over time based on factors ranging from the season to how much sleep a person got the previous night. So there literally is no such thing as “the perfect mix of vitamins, minerals and nutrients” for all human beings. A mix that is optimized for a 20-something inactive underweight male could quite easily kill a 60-year-old woman or a 30-year-old athlete.

So in my family, everyone from the 4-year-old girl to the 33-year-old man (me) eats the same food 90+% of the time, just in different amounts... and we all seem to be doing fine. Should we be dropping dead at any moment now?

kevingadd9• 13 years ago

The ~10% is what matters.

mcv8• 13 years ago

That 10% probably consists of candy for the kids and alcohol for the adults.

ph0rque2• 13 years ago

So by that argument, I can replace 90% of my food with Soylent, and get the other 10% as I normally would?

Also, how do I know I'm getting the correct mix of everything? If I go by cravings, then the stuff I'm missing is usually ice cream or cake or candy...

nemof2• 13 years ago

most amusing watching people getting trolled. The paragraph towards the end is particularly cutting:

Rhinehart might not realise it, but he is a classic symptom of a generation and, even, a cultural movement within the United States that appears to believe you don’t actually need to know facts: all you need to do is be creative and enthusiastic.

which particularly made me think of that tech journalist Virginia Heffernan, a creationist, who refuted the big bang in place of her own story because essentially she preferred it and found it more appealing.

alisson• 13 years ago

Just think of Soylent as an alternative and not the only way to go. Soylent could help bring food to areas where people starve to death. It could be a good alternative to take when camping and hiking for days. And many others... People already eat a lot of crap food (like McDonald's), Soylent could be a better crap food. I wouldn't take it unless really necessary. I think it's a really good idea, but I wouldn't recommend to anyone who have good food available.

jacques_chester13• 13 years ago

Soylent could help bring food to areas where people starve to death.

I think most people would prefer food if they're starving. And for genuine medical emergencies there are already genuine medical food substitutes intended to be used on a temporary basis.

It could be a good alternative to take when camping and hiking for days.

Google "trail mix".

sejje2• 13 years ago

I think most people would prefer to live if they're starving. Soylent potentially solves a lot of logistical issues in feeding starving populations.

Also, trail mix doesn't negate Soylent being a good alternative.

chollida1• 13 years ago

Sadly I think most of this could have been avoided if the Soylent team thought a bit more about their marketing.

If they had of come out and said, its a meal replacement then I think more people would be open to trying it.

However they came out and stated that you will never need to eat again and this can replace all your meals.

kevingadd9• 13 years ago

That's my PoV too. Soylent sounded interesting in concept and then I saw the combination of the creator advertising it as a replacement for all your meals, while quietly noting that he hasn't actually used it to replace all his meals? Just feels kinda shady, and makes me concerned for the people who are gullible enough to actually try subsisting on it. I hope it doesn't injure anyone.

In a general sense, meal replacements are great - they let you simplify eating and save money by buying in bulk, and the regulated intake can help if you're trying to lose weight, too. But you better believe the friends of mine who try to lose weight using a completely replacement-based diet are being supervised by a doctor!

spuz2• 13 years ago

They got the marketing exactly right. It's because it's being sold as a potential complete replacement for food that makes it interesting. There are already plenty of meal replacement products on the market today but no one before has tried to survive on one of these alone.

If you believe that you can survive consuming nothing but Soylent then that should give you all the confidence you need to use it as a simple quick meal when you're feeling too lazy to cook. The way I think of it is the marketing works in the same way as it does for the advanced technical gore-tex jackets people walk around in when it rains or the 4x4s mums drive their kids to school in. Sure I don't need to take my use of these products to the extreme but it's good to know that I can if I need to.

Of course the article still makes a good point - how can you possibly design a complete meal replacement formula for everyone?

rexreed3• 13 years ago

For one, the choice of name, is quite unfortunate given Soylent Green. At first, I thought the name choice was intentional, a play on the concept from the movie, but alas, it was unintentional and therefore just adds to the perception that the research into Soylent is amateurish. Whether or not this is the case is not something I'm saying, just saying that from a marketing perspective, Soylent (not the Green version) is in need of improvement.

randallsquared• 13 years ago

How could it possibly be unintentional?! Did they actually say this, or have they just been coy about the naming process?

mcv8• 13 years ago

Of course it's a play on the movie. Where do you get the weird idea that it might be unintentional?

oinksoft2• 13 years ago

This is drivel. It is nothing but anecdote and conjecture.

When I was in college, I had a room-mate who lived on nothing but pizza, mac and cheese and marijuana for a year. Aside from being thin, pale, and subject to periodic, inexplicable bouts of coughing, he “felt fine”, too.

There are people in the third world who would kill for a daily diet of pizza and macaroni-n-cheese. The author fails to address that his roommate ("stupid pothead! lolz") was eating food and that Soylent is not food, rather being synthesized raw nutrients. That is the key issue at hand, not the question of variety in a diet.

kevingadd9• 13 years ago

I don't know if you can just claim that variety in diet is unimportant. The body's needs change on a regular basis; do you really think dietary needs don't change? I thought his point with the anecdote was not 'this anecdote proves x', but rather 'we all do stupid things and get away with them when we're young'. He's trying to discourage the kind of one-size-fits-all thinking that leads a guy to leap from 'this meal replacement works good for me' to 'this meal replacement will work good for everyone'.

oinksoft2• 13 years ago

Be it in prison camps or the "Big Mac" guy, we have so many case studies of people living, and remaining able persons, for long periods of time with an utterly static diet. A varied diet may be key for optimal health or for perceived quality of life, but the human body is surprisingly adaptive and resilient.

The frightening thing about Soylent (to me) is that I am not sure if it constitutes a "diet" any more than the mud patties and other non-food yet objectively nutritional foodstuffs consumed amongst the poorest of the poor in Africa.

drharris3• 13 years ago

The body's needs only change because you're not getting everything you need with every meal. Soylent gives you everything you need all at once. I don't see why people in the 21st century still believe there's something magic about the food we eat.

rwissmann• 13 years ago

There seem to be two main points of criticism in this article, neither of which holds up:

1. "Rhinehart does not know much about nutrition and he cannot learn everything he needs to know from Wikipedia and textbooks."

True, but irrelevant. Soylent's basic proposition is that you can make a food substitute like this one work and they are iterating on a promising candidate. Who is to say they cannot or will not partner with various nutritional specialist in the future to improve the recipe and mitigate risks? You get the best of both worlds: Enthusiastic creativity powered by some necessary naivety combined with extensive domain knowledge. This formula can work amazingly well. Case in point: Elon Musk/SpaceX.

2. Nutritional needs are specific to each person and change over time.

Again, true - but if anything, this is an argument in favour of Soylent. In the future, it could easily and automatically be tweaked to everyone's individual habits, biomedical indicators or even genetic tests. As others have pointed out, most people currently eat extremely sub-optimal and are typically not keeping track of their nutritional intake. Soylent in its current form will give a well-rounded base level that is surely more healthy than the average food intake in developed countries. With an individualised formula it has the potential to among others thing be a convenient to consume a more healthy and balanced diet.

russelluresti• 13 years ago

The problem with people is that they tend to have the thought process of "that's how it is today so that's how it will always be."

Like you said, when he mentioned that everyone's nutritional needs were unique, my mind also went immediately to bio-feedback devices that would not only indicate what you needed but also create a meal plan and order the food for you. There's no reason this also couldn't be done with Soylent. But because these things don't exist today people assume that they'll never exist.

spacecadet• 13 years ago

Collectively we are not even in the infancy of nutritional understanding and Soylent claims to have the answer to nutrition.. good luck with that.

mcv8• 13 years ago

Wait, is your argument that because we don't know, we shouldn't try to figure out?

timmm• 13 years ago

One of his arguments is that people have varying needs and soylent fails to address that, but it is tweak-able... and let's be real most people just eat what they like not what they need.

pejoculant• 13 years ago

This whole line of argument presupposes that there is some sort of magic ratio of nutrients for each person and that if they don't hit exactly those numbers they will suffer some vague disastrous consequences (coughing a lot from eating too much pizza and mac-and-cheese?).

Our metabolisms are way more adaptable than that. Generally if you're even in the right ballpark you are fine. There's clearly no exact optimal diet (even at an individualized level). If it were this way people would be keeling over left and right.

xutopia• 13 years ago

I thought the author had made it clear that the coughing bouts were caused by the marijuana.

jacques_chester13• 13 years ago

Whose line of argument?

RTesla• 13 years ago

This needs to be downvoted

durkie• 13 years ago

They probably could have worded this better:

"Greg Stevens, a lifelong diet and work-out enthusiast, is unimpressed..."

"...It’s all part of the cult of the amateur enthusiast."

mcv8• 13 years ago

I don't know how they could have worded it better. More detail about the author:

"Greg Stevens is an ex-academic and corporate mathematician who writes about science, philosophy, history, fitness, politics and the intersections between them."

So he's every bit as unqualified as Rhinehart.

drharris3• 13 years ago

I once heard a truck driver call in to a talk radio show to explain his theory that global warming is caused by a decay in the Earth’s orbit. The planet is gradually falling into the sun, which is why things are getting hotter, he said. This man was too uneducated about physics, cosmology, and climate science to realise how comically ill-informed he sounded.

Actually, the writer is the one that's ill-informed. The Earth is constantly falling into the sun. We call that an orbit. Doesn't lead to the truck driver's conclusions, but the author of this should be ashamed.

dmamills• 13 years ago

I can't help but wonder what makes the idea of a meal replacer so special? Ensure, Boost, Nutrilite, etc. There is a plethora of products exactly like this available on the market. The only thing that seems to make this one 'original' is it's name.

FiddlerClamp• 13 years ago

Nursing home patients, some seniors, and those who cannot eat regular food (i.e. those with advanced MS) depend on them to survive.

lmg643• 13 years ago

soylent strikes me as yet another meal-replacement shake (slimfast, ensure, etc), only with clever and up-to-date guerilla marketing, targeted at tech-savvy 20-somethings who often don't put a lot of thought into food. since meal replacements are a proven, decades old, multi-billion dollar market, i am sure they will find at least a reasonable sized customer base.

oblique634• 13 years ago

Pretty much this. I've been drinking a concoction of Spirulina, Hemp fiber+protein, Rice milk, and MCT oil, for a couple of months now, and not only is it cheaper than most commercial MRPs (including soylent), I've found it to be much more satisfying and about as nutritious as well. That being said, I haven't exactly ever tried to live off any MRP for any prolonged period of time, which I guess is the 'novel' claim this product is being pitched under. At least they seem to be open-sourcing the recipe and keeping it relatively simple (as far as MRPs go).

jacques_chester13• 13 years ago

An entirely untapped, cashed-up market segment.

trekky1700• 13 years ago

"Greg Stevens, a lifelong diet and work-out enthusiast, is unimpressed by Silicon Valley’s attempts to re-engineer – or completely do away with – food. It’s all part of the cult of the amateur enthusiast."

Is it ironic that his position of expertise here is as a amateur diet and workout enthusiast as he berates amateur enthusiasm everywhere? This article is definitely part of the cult of amateur enthusiast...

cabalamat2• 13 years ago

So there literally is no such thing as “the perfect mix of vitamins, minerals and nutrients” for all human beings. A mix that is optimized for a 20-something inactive underweight male could quite easily kill a 60-year-old woman or a 30-year-old athlete.

The writer seems to be making two assumptions:

(1) if everyone eats the same food, it will cause health problem, including death, for many

(2) if people individually choose what to eat, they'll mostly eat healthier than if they all have the same diet chosen for them.

Are these assumptions true? To find out, we'd need to do an experiment. However, the experiment has already been done: during WW2 in Britain food was rationed and everyone ate what bureaucrats in Whitehall decided they should, not what they wanted to. The result? The nation's health improved.

So Stevens appears to be wrong.

jacques_chester13• 13 years ago

You may have noticed that WW2 rationing was of food.

cabalamat2• 13 years ago

Soylent is food.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

"It's bad because it's not tailored."

And still I buy pants at the Gap.

fnordfnordfnord4• 13 years ago

Alternate title: "Shooting Ducks In A Pond - It Is So Much Easier To Snipe From The Weeds Than To Actually Create Something Valuable"

What is this guy's argument? That doctors and nutritionists had to study hard, and if none of them decided to do it then it must be a bad idea? Rhinehart's idea isn't even new, he just managed to get it in front of the right audience.

Unfortunately, such idealism doesn’t survive contact with reality.

Maybe Rhinehart will fail. So what? It is a pretty low-risk project. I don't think anybody is going to drop dead, and if anyone does manage to hurt themselves, they will probably only do so after ignoring some warning signs. OTOH, if he is in some way successful, he will have advanced nutritional science where domain experts failed to do so.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Several of the interesting comments on the blog post kindly submitted here suggest that a reason not to be so doubtful about Soylent is, in the words of one of those comments,

most people currently eat extremely sub-optimal

Are we really sure about the EXTREMELY suboptimal for people in the developed world who are not morbidly obese or dangerously underweight? I have much doubt about this assertion, because for sure my diet, as a middle-class North American, is much more varied as to number of different foodstuffs eaten per week or number of foodstuffs available per season than the diet of, say, my grandparents, who lived to the ages of 48 (death in car crash), 82 (death in car crash), 87, and 99. General rates of morbidity (illness) and mortality (death) are decreasing at ALL ages throughout the world known to most Hacker News readers. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,

http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."

http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....

A comparison of period life expectancy tables and cohort life expectancy tables for men and women in Britain

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/period-and-cohort-l...

helps make the picture more clear. ("Period life expectancy" is what is usually reported for a whole country. But cohort life expectancy provides a better estimate of future lifespans of young people today,

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1...

and is still steadily on the rise around the world.) So if many people today are eating "suboptimal" diets, as claimed without particular evidence by some of the supporters of the Soylent startup, it would appear that the health effects of that suboptimality are, at least, swamped by more favorable trends.

danpalmer• 13 years ago

Is The Kernel paying their writers yet? They seem to have had a few good articles recently, perhaps they have.

The drab stupidity of Soylent

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