Soylent gets tested, scores a wholesome nutritional label

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/soylent-gets-tested-scores-a-surprisingly-wholesome-nutritional-label/

by cpeterso • 12 years ago

61 51 12 years ago

arstechnica.com

cordite• 12 years ago

I would not say "Surprising" as in the title, it was designed to fulfill nutrition from the beginning.

jaksmit• 12 years ago

exactly what I was thinking

dang• 12 years ago

Thanks. We usually take out modifiers like that anyway, as a way of reducing linkbaityness.

jamesaguilar• 12 years ago

It is surprising to the haters on this site. There just isn't any other word for the treatment and unjustified skepticism soylent has received here.

collyw• 12 years ago

I wouldn't say I am a hater, but I really don't understand the enthusiasm for this product. Eating is one of lifes pleasures. Why reduce it to the most processed forms possible?

(I would make a bet that if it is launched in Spain, it will fail miserably. People here have a real passion for good food.)

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Unethical and deceitful claims deserve hate.

"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."
"Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health,"
"By taking years to spoil"
"there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet."

Those are the claims they made during the kickstarter.

Those would be unlawful in the UK - I have no idea what the equivalent US regulators would make of those claims if Soylent continued to make them.

Using those misleading deceptive claims to raise money puts them firmly in the sham charlatan space and they thoroughly deserve harsh treatment.

001sky• 12 years ago

Jan 29, 2014 10:54 pm UTC

"will begin shipments on a rolling basis at the beginning of March"

so, any updates?

nammi• 12 years ago

"Orders projected to begin shipping 4/21. Backerkit orders will be locked down 4/11. First batches of Soylent 1.0 will not be certified gluten free. Some Backerkit add-ons removed."

This was posted last week, so it seems like they will actually ship next week. http://blog.soylent.me/post/82129644711/weekly-update-4-8

yaddayadda3• 12 years ago

From rob earlier today,

Update coming today -- starter kits scheduled to start shipping by Friday, first Soylent shipments will be next week, though probably wed/thurs rather than Monday.

- http://discourse.soylent.me/t/soylent-update-4-8/12022/95

So the first shipments should be rolling out of the dock by Apr. 24th. Still no word on speed of delivery, but I'd expect the first shipments to start arriving the week of Apr. 28th - May 3rd.

PythonicAlpha• 12 years ago

Just asking: Is this some kind of weird humor?

Can anybody tell the story of this in short words?

I am fearing, that those predicted times will come up, but that somebody would name his product after a product that in a science fiction story was made out of human bodies, is really a little beyond my comprehension. Some kind of self-irony, perhaps? Or reverse marketing?

eurleif• 12 years ago

Why is it named Soylent? Because it made you ask that question.

deckiedan• 12 years ago

I believe in the original book ('Make Room! Make Room!'), soylent was not specified as cannibalistic - that was added in the movie.

nodata• 12 years ago

Yes, you're right. Soylent = soya + lentil steaks in the book.

yaddayadda3• 12 years ago

From the horse's (rob's) keyboard:

I don't know anything about marketing or branding but I'm a big fan of underpromising and overdelivering. You're right it doesn't sound that amazing, but it is to me.
Soylent is supposed to disrupt the food that is all marketing and nutritionally disastrous. I'd like to differentiate by being honest and up front. Most food sold is all branding and taste. I feel there's a wealth of science and chemistry to food and nutrition that is largely ignored by the main players in the industry. They just make what they know people recognize and want. Fatty, salty food is sold because that's what people demand. There is a serious gap in the market for cheap, convenient, healthy food.
The name kind of fades in to the background after you say it enough too. My brain has become accustomed to a positive association with the word 'soylent'. If I've had 'real' food for two meals in a row my mouth waters at the mention of the word soylent. Your body learns. The stomach is connected to the brain. Think about 'coffee'. That's a terrible name. It sounds like 'coffin' or 'coughing'. But no one notices because it's become its own idea and most people have formed an association with it, good or bad.
I own the trademark. It could be sold under a different name in addition to soylent for marketing purposes. That's pretty common. Some conservative people may never be able to get past the name. I considered the name 'manna' but it's heavily trademarked, and a little cheesy. I'm open to suggestion.

- http://discourse.soylent.me/t/changing-the-name-to-something...

gojomo• 12 years ago

I still haven't 100.000% ruled out the idea this is all a long-running concept-art project.

I'm also hoping some studio does a Soylent Green reboot soon, reimagined to cash in on the young-adult dystopia trend. The cross-marketing possibilities! (I'd like to see a CGI-reanimated Charlton Heston delivering the line, "You can have my Soylent when you slurp it out of my cold, dead hands... you damn, dirty ape!")

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

First, in the movie, only the 'green' variant of Soylent was people earlier versions had other starter material.

That said, this product is designed for people who don't cook, don't care what their food looks like, and really would rather it didn't take a lot of time to prepare and make much mess. Oh, and people who believe in the apocalypse but they have their own issues.

Personally I like food and eating as recreation way to much to eat this stuff, but there have been times in my past when I was heads down in some project and eating was sort of an after thought. This would be ok in those times.

The concept is not original, there are various sorts of manufactured foods both for folks who are starving, and for folks who are otherwise incapacitated (like in hospitals) but this is the first version of that sort of product for general consumer use.

ballard2• 12 years ago

Might want to also watch Cloud Atlas.

robobro• 12 years ago

As a type 1 diabetic, this could be handy for eating out / backpacking / regulating glucose. Wish I could have gotten in on the alpha...

ryanmerket• 12 years ago

It's high glycemic, so probably not the best for diabetics.

yaddayadda3• 12 years ago

I don't see a glycemic value on the label, so how do you know it's high? (I'm not a diabetic, I'm just genuinely curious.)

george88b• 12 years ago

This article is from months ago. I thought they had to change suppliers for a few things, wouldn't the nutritional info change also?

spullara• 12 years ago

You know you have an interesting article when the #1 comment has been deleted.

parag_c_mehta• 12 years ago

How long does it lasts ? Does this mean we have perfect food replacement for the apocalypse ?

mikenon• 12 years ago

Up to a year, according to [1]. A staff member on their forum said similar, [2] "We're probably going to stick with 1 year shelf life when kept in cool dark place, thought it'll likely be much longer in actuality."

[1] http://www.rosalabs.com/about/

[2] http://discourse.soylent.me/t/official-word-on-shelf-life-of...

zvrba• 12 years ago

a lot of people are seeing reduction in triglycerides or cholesterol

I suspect that the powder may be oat-based. Oats is a very nutritient-rich cereal, and does in fact lower cholesterol. It has high carbohydrate content, but it is also a rich source of minerals and proteins. See http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/...

If I were to mix my own "soylent", I'd base it on oat porridge, probably some protein supplements, some vitamin and mineral supplement, and a can of fatty fish. At probably a fraction of the soylent price.

thisishugo• 12 years ago

If you are interested in creating your own Soylent, there's a dedicated subsection of the website[0] for sharing recipes.

Frankly, I doubt you could recreate, or equivalently replace, Soylent-the-product for as little money as it will cost to buy[1], but it's definitely possible to replicate Soylent-the-idea yourself. It's much easier if you don't intend to replace every meal with a Soylent-like, as you can substitute the harder-to-source ingredients with foods that already contain them.

[0] http://diy.soylent.me

[1] Partly because of economies of scale, partly because some of the ingredients are complicated to source.

gabemart3• 12 years ago

My concern about Soylent has never been about the macronutrient ratios, nor the quantities of (comparatively) well-understood micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. The amounts of these substances seem relatively easy to get right, or at least within the range of "healthy" accepted by a consensus of mainstream nutritonal experts.

My concern is about the thousands or millions of micronutrients and phytonutrients that are poorly understood or even yet to be isolated by nutritional science, and the subtle and complex way they interact with our bodies and each other.

To me, the entire premise of Soylent is predicated on the idea that we know, on a compound-by-compound basis, what's good for our bodies nutritionally. The more I learn about the state of nutritional science, the less I believe this to be true.

ekianjo6• 12 years ago

To me, the entire premise of Soylent is predicated on the idea that we know, on a compound-by-compound basis, what's good for our bodies nutritionally. The more I learn about the state of nutritional science, the less I believe this to be true.

Well Soylent is going to be an interesting test to confirm what we know and do not know about nutrition. As long as there are some willing volunteers to put their health at risk, I'd say why not. It will benefit mankind as a whole to know more.

gabemart3• 12 years ago

I don't know if that's really true. How much can an uncontrolled, unrandomized, unmonitored nutritional experiment really tell us? OK, it can confirm that i) Soylent isn't poisonous, and ii) Soylent isn't the key to everlasting life. But I'm not sure what other data it can yield outside of a clinical trial setting.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Because these people do not know that they are experimental volunteers. The product is not being marketed as experimental. It is being sold as a mass market product suitable for anyone. It is being sold as a finished, tested, product.

pizza2342• 12 years ago

Unfortunately reality is much more complicated, and this is why nutrition science is an extremely hard and fuzzy field (and in my opinion, generally sketchy).

The problem is that nutrition, at least at this stage, is simply not analyzable, unless we're talking about very large effects - as somebody in a post has explained.

Supposed that, say, soylent, kills people in 30 years of consumption. What's going to happen in the meanwhile?

Or, worse, suppose instead that the effect is subtle, for example, that it causes debilitation in the long term. How's that going to come out?

Sadly, some nutritionist will make 50.6 people run for 25.3 minutes on a treadmill, then come up with the conclusion that there is no significant negative effect, which is going to be trumpeted on mainstream publications.

Let's talk about iron. One problem with vegetarians is that some fall very ill if the don't eat meat, even if they take iron injections. How nutritions science explains that? Unfortunately, it can't. (actually, this is a serious doubt in vegetarian circles. There is the suspect that some big vegetarian advocates are secretly eating meat because of this or similar problems).

The big problem is that products like soylent carry the underlying message that science has a clear idea of how the human body works, while in reality, it doesn't, and this is a very, very serious problem.

piqufoh• 12 years ago

My understanding was that Soylent isn't intended to be an exclusive food replacement, rather a food source that is quick and hassle free to prepare and consume. Your concern over micro/phyto nutrients is obviously valid (and would be very interesting to study!) but probably won't be validated as long as Soylenters fulfil their occasional cravings for hamburgers / coffee / micronutrient containing food stuffs.

svalorzen• 12 years ago

This is also a concern of mine, however there are multiple examples in the world of people who have an incredibly restricted diet and still live long enough (Don Gorske with Big Macs, or many eastern countries that focus a lot on rice, or generally non-cooking people who eat frozen cheap food all the time). It would seem that Soylent, as a single source of nutrients, still does a better job than many other restricted diets, and sometimes it may even be preferable if cheap and easy enough to prepare.

MetaCosm• 12 years ago

This feels to be like an appeal to magic. We are simply animals, many pets live long healthy lives on single sources. Soylent doesn't have to be magically perfect, it just has to be better than the mass manufactured foods we are currently eating.

ColinWright• 12 years ago

Amongst all the comments about poorly-understood or unknown micro-nutrients, and whether or not this is healthy in the long run, I see here a sense of bewilderment from some people:

    fidlefodl : i just hate eating 90% of the time

        riffraff : ... why do you hate eating most of the time?

        ekianjo : [hate eating] two words I have difficulty associating ...

        collyw : I really don't understand the enthusiasm for
                 this product. Eating is one of life's pleasures

Personally, I'm with fidlefodl. I cannot understand what pleasure people get from eating. I cook, I eat, I share meals with others, but if I could get away from eating and never have to eat again, I'd take it in a heartbeat. I derive no pleasure from eating, and a great deal of negative pleasure from cooking. If takeaways weren't a combination of unhealthy and unpleasant then I'd never cook again.

I freely admit and acknowledge that some food tastes great, but on the whole, I'd much prefer not to spend the time eating.

aianus2• 12 years ago

Seriously, I'd trade 10+ years of my lifespan to never have to eat again and still maintain my weight / muscle mass.

pliny• 12 years ago

The shitty years at the end, or would you immediately deteriorate your current health ten years into your future?

fidlefodl2• 12 years ago

Yup, and i expanded upon my thoughts [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7604201).

I'm honestly surprised so many people are shocked by this concept. I've rarely known people to eat great food, and overly healthy food, for 90% of meals which a healthy appreciation of the whole process.

Most people i know eat "real meals" on random dinners through the week, and everything else is just things getting in there way of doing what they want.

Plus, if Soylent ends up being what they are promising (100% perfect meal in each drink), then you're talking about a meal with zero negative aspects. If you're greedy, this lets you sort of eat of in reverse.. Rather than spending all week struggling to eat things you can tolerate so that you can eat something you like in a bit of excess (splurging), you can sort of go nuts with every "real food" meal (assuming most meals are Soylent).

There will be very little guilt in having a burger with bacon.. you've had 100% health food for the last 3 days. Go nuts with your burger!

torrent-of-ions• 12 years ago

If there is a demand for this the only thing I can wonder is what is going on with people's mental health?

aianus2• 12 years ago

It's an expensive and frustrating struggle to maintain my weight and this sounds like a promising alternative to dropping ~$800 a month (in money or wasted time cooking and cleaning) on merely staying alive.

fidlefodl2• 12 years ago

Not sure why you would question my mental health over simply wanting to consume a quick, easy, and healthy meal.

Why is that crazy?

billrobertson42• 12 years ago

There are a lot of mystery carbs in there. 84g carbs, 8g in fiber and 2g in sugar. The remaining 74g?

Soylent gets tested, scores a wholesome nutritional label

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