Soylent Micronutrient Breakdown

http://blog.soylent.me/post/69835344439/soylent-micronutrient-breakdown

by ph0rque • 13 years ago

52 65 13 years ago

blog.soylent.me

I wish that they would show how these compare to the recommended dietary intake of the micronutrients.

I did a random sampling of 3 and it seems to be 100% of the US recommended intake, although I recall them mentioning that even if you only consumed 1/3rd (or 2/3rds?) of the Soylent packet for a day you'd reach your recommended levels, which seems at odds with these figures.

jonah• 13 years ago

Though, generally the US RDA is around the minimal needed level.

garblegarble3• 13 years ago

As a european this is what I wonder about most, I'm toying with the idea of ordering Soylent but I'd prefer to get the UK RDA... but it seems that mixing vitamin supplements with Soylent runs the risk of an excess of a number of vitamins (and I'm too lazy to mix my own... maybe I should stick to cooking!)

applecore• 13 years ago

Macronutrient breakdown:

http://blog.soylent.me/post/68180382810/soylent-1-0-macronut...

jlas• 13 years ago

And here's a compact version: http://pastebin.com/WNZnF1N7

Extracted via command line, of course:

  curl http://blog.soylent.me/post/69835344439/soylent-micronutrient-breakdown | grep -o "<strong>.*</strong>" | sed "s/<strong>\(.*\)<\/strong>/\1/"

seiji2• 13 years ago

Still not sure how this varies from a basic bulk vitamin and mineral powder (besides the übernerd ego "this one weird nutritional trick" loyalty marketing): http://www.gnc.com/graphics/product_images/pGNC1-9331188_gnc...

garblegarble3• 13 years ago

To be honest, neither am I - although part of it seems to be the idea of this as a complete diet replacement rather than a supplement (although I suspect the existing products are marketed as a supplement for legal reasons more than anything else and Soylent may have to use the same language)

yaddayadda3• 13 years ago

The FDA considers Soylent a food.

"According to Arthur Whitmore, a press officer with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Soylent would fall into the category of what the FDA considers food. Unlike a medication, Soylent will not require FDA approval, unless it contains some new type of food additive, which Rhinehart would need to disclose.

It’s important to Rhinehart that Soylent be considered a food, as opposed to a medicine or supplement, so that food-stamp recipients can buy it using EBT cards."

http://www.healthline.com/health-news/tech-is-powdered-soyle... http://discourse.soylent.me/t/fda-press-officer-comment/3783

gnoway4• 13 years ago

The product you link to contains 100kcal/serving. If you attempted to live off of this @2000kcal/day, you'd be going through 2/3+ of your container every day. It seems likely that you'd overshoot some of your micronutrients. Finally, Amazon has this GNC product as $40/can or $0.013/kcal.

Soylent is alleged to provide an appropriate amount of kcal, carbs, fat, protein and micronutrients/vitamins in a normal number of servings per day (e.g. 3). It's currently much less expensive than the GNC product at roughly ~$0.0038/kcal (assuming $255/mo, 84 meals/mo, 800 kcal/meal for men's formula).

seiji2• 13 years ago

bzzt you ran out of context. The context of the post is "micronutrient" things, which a vitamin supplement powder surely provides a comparison for.

The Soylent post reads like someone re-inventing a programming language and writing a paragraph each about "Now, we are including a 'for loop' because people want to iterate over variables while increasing their values. This can be used for activities like..." — it's all just very elementary school boot report feeling.

We're not talking about eating 20 scoops of vitamin powder a day to live off of. That would hurt pretty bad.

itafroma3• 13 years ago

The amount of potassium in Soylent is interesting. I noticed a while ago that I wasn't getting enough potassium in my diet, went searching for a supplement, and found that you can't buy an OTC supplement that contains more than 100mg. It turns out the FDA severely restricts the amount of potassium you can get in OTC supplements to prevent certain health risks.[1] I wonder how they get around that restriction.

[1] http://www.berkeleywellness.com/supplements/minerals/article...

rlwolfcastle6• 13 years ago

Is that 100 mg total or 100 mg per serve?

itafroma3• 13 years ago

Per serving/dose/pill. The pills I've seen usually contain about 400-500mg of inactive ingredients (about the same ratio Soylent uses), so the pills are ~500-600mg, which is fairly large. To equal just one serving of Soylent, you'd need to ingest 35 of them.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

Ensure has lots:

http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes

(I accidentally clicked the one with the most though)

itafroma3• 13 years ago

Interesting: so it's not just Soylent. I wonder why liquid supplements aren't affected by the 100mg limit.

manicbovine7• 13 years ago

Low sodium vegetable juice has 900mg per serving.

maxk42• 13 years ago

Potassium chloride is used as a salt substitute. It's often the cheapest way to get potassium in your diet.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

One cup of orange juice = 500mg potassium, one potato = 900mg; greens, yoghurt, beans, fruit, almost everything has good amounts of it. It shouldn't be hard to reach the recommended intake if you're eating a healthy diet.

Pitarou4• 13 years ago

Can anyone explain why there is any interest in this story? I'm not snarking: I genuinely want to know.

Why are you following this story? Why are you voting it up? Do you actually want to buy and eat this nutritionally balanced gruel? Why?

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Soylent is a leading application of an analytical/techie approach to the "question" of food (i.e. what do we eat?), which is even bigger than online advertising, electric cars, or video games.

manicbovine7• 13 years ago

No, you're describing a number of well-established scientific fields along with basic human instinct and intelligence.

Eat food. It has worked quite well for a very long time. There is nothing better to eat than food. No data analysis is required to eat food. Interestingly, any biological creature is capable of eating food. There are a variety of foods that you are capable of digesting, and it's likely that you were introduced to these foods as a young child. You will enjoy eating these foods and they'll manage to help you live out your natural lifespan. Maybe you'd also like to take a vitamin, but it's probably unnecessary and possibly harmful depending on your health status.

Food is fairly simple unless you pretend that it's not.

rlwolfcastle6• 13 years ago

Defined Human Minimal Media.

It's an interesting question, just what nutrients does the human body need in order to sustain itself? We have a good definition of what individual cells need but not a lot of data for how the body copes long term with just those nutrients. My guess is that will power will lose out in the end.

Pitarou4• 13 years ago

Thank you for answer. I swear I'm not just trolling, but I'd really like to push you a little further on that point. First, I should be clear that I'm not trying to argue with you or convince you of anything. I just want to understand what people are thinking.

Bearing that in mind, would you be so kind as to read on while I make the "Dr. Spock" case against Soylent?

Scientifically, the questions about human nutritional requirements you alluded to were largely answered 70 years ago by British government researchers. They put volunteers on controlled diets, with varying quantities of different micro-nutrients, and studied the effects carefully. It's thanks to their work that Britain avoided mass malnutrition during the war.

As a nutritionist, Rob Rhinehart isn't fit to hold a clipboard for those pioneers. What kind of incompetent neglects to add iron to his initial formulation?

And there's plenty of precedent for these kinds of nutritionally balanced rations, usually developed for military or medical purposes. E.g. check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy'nut. If I were to make my own Soylent, I'd probably use that as my starting point: it's cheaper and better tasting that Rhinehart's formulation. I don't see anyone getting excited over those.

So ... that's the "Dr. Spock" argument. But Dr. Spock wouldn't buy a Rolex, or get a tattoo either, and yet people do.

Whatever the case is for investing in Soylent, it's not rational. It's about your emotions, or it's a status symbol, or a it's statement of identity. Something fuzzy and humanistic.

But what? What is it? I truly don't get it. Can you enlighten me?

gnoway4• 13 years ago

I have prepaid for some. If it's not awful I plan to try using it for the majority of my nutritional needs.

I like eating, but I don't like sourcing, preparing, cooking or cleaning up. I don't like eating in at restaurants either. I'm lazy and antisocial. So my intake is currently pretty bad, mostly take out or processed items. Soylent would definitely be an improvement for me nutritionally.

You may not be snarking, but a lot of people seem very upset that this product exists and that people are interested in it. I'm not sure why.

tedunangst• 13 years ago

I assume people are upset with the idea because it epitomizes the worst parts of nothing but numbers reductionist tech ideology. They're upset with the product because it preys on such people, and is possibly a net negative. It's not a major concern of mine.

elithrar• 13 years ago

Why are you following this story? Why are you voting it up? Do you actually want to buy and eat this nutritionally balanced gruel? Why?

I don't like the idea of Soylent. I enjoy cooking, eating out, and trying new things. If you are so busy that you absolutely can't manage to make things (even in advance) or eat out, there's likely other lifestyle problems that Soylent won't solve for you.

However, I'm interested in it because of a) whether it is healthy long-term; b) what this could mean for our eating habits/nutrition in the future, and; c) potential ramifications for those who are not well off.

Healthy, fresh food ain't cheap, and if something in the future (perhaps not Soylent itself) can alleviate the nutritional side of things it'd be a step forward. Obviously, fresh food shouldn't be restricted only to the wealthy, but I don't think an option would be bad.

There are still a lot of questions about what constitutes a "complete" diet, how much regulation should surround products like Soylent, and so on.

manicbovine7• 13 years ago

Maybe you know about this, but Plumpy-nut is pretty interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy'nut

It's a ready-to-eat therapeutic food with an excellent shelf life. Aide workers give it out in famished areas.

8ig8• 13 years ago

I just cannot believe this exists. It's both fascinating and absurd to me. All I think about is the food from Repo Man.

http://www.google.com/search?q=repo+man+food+labels

The future is here: http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-oy9fSDl0lIQ/TxK4mMDa0QI/AA...

ehPReth2• 13 years ago

Personally I hate food: shopping for it, preparing it, and eating it (most times). I'd rather take a pill or chug a drink and be done with it for another 24 hours. Soylent came in and it was a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel (that is, if it's workable)

pushedx• 13 years ago

Whenever food preferences come up as a topic of conversation at work, I have a co-worker who says, "As soon as they come out with Soylent, I'm in. That's it, that's all I'm going to eat for life." I want to see him do it.

droopyEyelids• 13 years ago

If he's really that excited about it, we've already been able to buy complete liquid nutrition for decades.

http://www.nestlenutritionstore.com/departments/therapeutic-...

For the truly hardcore, you can also buy complete sources of intravenous nutrition. Expect to pay hundreds of thousands a year for this extreme productivity boosting option.

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

yaddayadda3• 13 years ago

From the creator of Soylent

Soylent is not the first drink with calories in it, nor was Google the first search engine. There are many liquid diets. You'd probably be surprised how long you can survive on just cow's milk. No one says 'solid diets exist already' when someone makes a new food. I don't see how the viscosity makes up an entire category. I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal.
The goal of soylent is to make something ideal, not just a quick shot that will get rid of hunger for a few hours. I need something that allows me to run and lift and think, not just survive, and something considerably cheaper than normal food. A big part of soylent is its personalization as well. There is no 2000 calorie human. If you want an ideal diet you have to personalize it.

http://discourse.soylent.me/t/comparing-soylent-to-existing-...

rlwolfcastle6• 13 years ago

You should remind him that biology is not computing.

ekianjo2• 13 years ago

It will be fun to see his gums and teeth decay early on because he stopped chewing food.

ehPReth2• 13 years ago

Is this a thing? I too would like to go all Soylent for the foreseeable future but am looking for the potential risks

codex• 13 years ago

Soylent is going to have a very, very hard time with new customer acquisition. Right now it's riding a wave of novelty, but as it solves a problem very few people have, and solves it in a way that leaves people craving the innate satisfaction of eating, it's not going to go far. But there are founders with more ambition than sense. In fact I suspect that's most of them.

epenn• 13 years ago

That wave of novelty could just as easily gain them a critical mass of customers as well. Ultimately it will depend on their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the product.

manicbovine7• 13 years ago

What lunatic would bet their money on whether people will stop eating? It is a fundamental biological need and evolutionary drive. That's a tough sell for Soylent, and it has nothing to do with "critical mass". And of course it will depend on the satisfaction - that's entirely vapid.

Soylent is not even disguised as food, like most of our industrial food-like products. It tastes like oats according to that blog. Nobody is going to replace all of their food with fortified liquid oatmeal.

arbitrarilyHigh• 13 years ago

It's riding a wave of novelty, but it's hard to argue that it's actually solving the problem that it claims to (busy/lazy, want healthy food-substitute).

The post doesn't actually tell you much about the nutrition without evidence about levels of actual nutrient absorption, but a quick google scholar search finds that calcium inhibits iron and copper absorption, especially in the presence of phytates [0,1] (which Soylent contains from the oat flour) and that zinc, manganese, and iron have similar uptake pathways and limit each others absorption by competing for use of those pathways [1,2]. No idea if there's any other interactions, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to rely on this stuff much for nutrition.

Aside from that, he vetted the formula by an uncontrolled, unblinded study with a sample size of n=1 (i.e. trying it himself for a few months), and he says on his blog that he "started having joint pain and found [he] fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as [he] consume[s] almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day." [3]

In that same post, he says that "After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did", and makes major revisions to his formula, apparently assuming that he's figured it all out this time. He puts a significant amount of fiber in the formula for the first time, going from 1.2 grams to 40 grams, in line with the 38 grams recommended for men under 50 [4], which was probably a good idea considering how much low fiber intake increases the risk of heart attack [5].

A month later, he responds to criticism by saying that "there have been no deficiency symptoms, and if this becomes a problem the amounts can be changed to compensate" [6]. His dismissal of concern ignores the fact that many known nutrient deficiencies can take much longer to manifest, and have severe irreversible harm (like B12 deficiency leading to nerve damage, or developing heart disease after years of insufficient fiber intake, or calcium deficiencies and osteoporosis). He also says that "The initial sample size was small and the timeframe short, but the results are easily reproducible, as shown by the community site discourse.soylent.me", as if having a greater amount of data overcomes the fact that the sample was extremely biased, still short-running, and with nothing even resembling a credible study design or consistent data collection.

Maybe it's not a bad thing that Soylent's probably not going to take off?

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1600930

[1] http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FBJN%2FBJN...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2058577

[3] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570

[4] http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fiber/NU00033

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8941095

[6] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=507

rlwolfcastle6• 13 years ago

There is also no evidence that the quantities and ratios of nutrients in the formula are anywhere near complete or optimal.

The easiest way to illustrate how this can be a problem is to compare the difference between growing cells in minimal media versus complex media, where they grow much faster.

Soylent is basically a crude minimal media for humans. The proper comparison for soylent will be against someone who is eating a complete diet, not someone who is skipping meals or eating poorly.

rlwolfcastle6• 13 years ago

Why are you assuming that humans have a craving for the "innate satisfaction of eating?"

If you remove that artificial restriction then something like soylent makes a lot more sense.

manicbovine7• 13 years ago

Soylent really belongs on a late night infomercial for pseudo-scientific products.

kolev• 13 years ago

Calcium carbonate, really? Basically, it has some basic nutrients, but most of them are pretty low quality. I'm not sure about you, but I personally get stomach sick even just with 5g of Potassium Gluconate - I can't imagine the (pukey) effect of 15g!

moeedm• 13 years ago

Can this please just go away? What a load of horse shit.

olva22• 13 years ago

It's a shame they used the cheap, synthetic (and less bioavailable) forms for quite a few of the ingredients. For instance:

Cyanocobalamin vs Methylcobalamin

D2 vs D3 (ergocalciferol is D2)

Folic Acid vs MethylFolate or at the least Folinic Acid

Sodium Selenite vs Yeast based Selenium or Selenomethionine

Why not just eat a bowl of total cereal? Or, eat a bowl of oatmeal and pop a centrum?

xahrepap• 13 years ago

I'm interested to see how Soylent works out in the long run. I've read the articles and blog posts about people going on it for a month at a time and doctors telling them they're perfectly healthy. But how does their health look after 6 months? A year? Several years? That's what I'm interested in hearing about.

So for a couple years I'll still have my suspicions. I hope it works out, though.

Shorel• 13 years ago

I still think this stuff is very conservative with the macronutrients ratios.

I would pay for a keto-friendly version, but as it is, it seems too full of carbohydrates to fit my current needs.

Soylent Micronutrient Breakdown

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