Rhinehart is well aware of the fact that Soylent
isn’t the first beverage designed to replace meals.
He considered using Ensure for his initial no-eating
experiment, but found it much too expensive, too sugary,
too unpalatable, and sub-optimal in its ingredient
make-up.
The differentiating factor seems to be in the intended
purpose. Meal-replacement shakes have never been
presented as a food — something that you could (or
might want to) live on for an extended period.
I hope that the companies making the existing Soylent-like products (though I have yet to find one that is unflavored and isn't targeted to dieting people or to bodybuilders...) take the hype around Soylent as a cue to market their stuff this way. I trust their nutritionists more than I trust the Soylent guys' knowledge, which (as I think I read somewhere) comes from just reading some nutrition textbooks.
Yeah. I have trouble remembering to eat meals regularly - I guess I sort of just don't really like eating? - and Ensure is available at the drug store. It's perfect for that "oh crap I haven't eaten in 24 hours and my problem-solving skills are too compromised by low blood-sugar to figure out how to prepare or buy something that isn't garbage" state that I get into periodically. I'll try Soylent, but I don't see what's revolutionary about it.
They address that - Ensure is absolutely not meant as a food replacement. Its just a supplement. Its too sugary and unbalanced to live on for any length of time.
I'm not sure people will want to live on Soylent, at least the first batch seems to be targeted at people who are intrigued by the idea and want to experiment with it. If that experiment pans out, then maybe there will be a question about why people want to live on it.
I've been enjoying my first week of Soylent. I eat "regular" dinner, but the rest of the day I drink a cup of soylent every couple hours. The best part about Soylent is it's hackable. I'm looking to gain weight, so I use whole milk instead of water, and add 4 eggs and 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream which also dramatically improves the taste (for me at least).
It's almost like drinking melted ice cream, to be honest.
Since you're looking to gain weight, try adding a scoop or two True Mass by BSN to a shake after a workout. That took me from 170 to 230. Syntha-6 is the leaner version which you'll want to switch to when you reach your ideal weight.
Thanks for the candid reply. Some juvenile part of me was hoping you'd say it was now a colorless, odorless gel.
What prompted the question is the recent spate of articles on gut flora. That was the first thing I thought of when I heard of Soylent--what does it do to your microbiome? If anyone can speak or speculate knowledgeably on the topic, I'm curious.
1. Soylent doesn't seem to be entirely based on fine chemicals. When you go through their ingredients list, "fish oil", "oat flour" and "rice protein" likely contain a lot of the "(nonessential) nutrients" you fear missing out on.
I still wouldn't want to be the guinea pig to exclusively live off of Soylent.
2+3. Having said that, there is plenty of research on "Total Parenteral Nutrition" and "Enteral Nutrition" for those that cannot consume regular foods for medical reasons. It isn't exactly a solved problem however, there are still issues.
"More than 25,000 phytonutrients are found in plant foods. WebMD takes a look at these six important phytonutrients -- and their potential health effects: Carotenoids, Ellagic acid, Flavonoids, Resveratrolm Glucosinolates, Phytoestrogens"
Find them in Soylent? It's cute that you put nonessential nutrients in quotes though. It's like this foreign term that only I use.
Not a doctor, but I'm wondering what you mean by "upset"? Teeth are calcified body tissue, if I'm remembering HS biology correctly, and I don't know how having them not mashing down on things could damage them. Curious to hear other thoughts on this.
As a doctor, I'd like to point out that we don't spend much time learning about this kind of thing. I suspect, but have no evidence to support, that veterinarians would actually be your best resources for this type of question.
and I don't know how having them not mashing down on things could damage them
Stephan Guyenet had a series of rather interesting blog posts on malocclusion. One of the factors he mentioned in conclusion was the toughness of food.
There are three main factors that I believe contribute to malocclusion in modern societies:
1. Maternal nutrition during the first trimester of pregnancy. Vitamin K2, found in organs, pastured dairy and eggs, is particularly important. We may also make small amounts from the K1 found in green vegetables.
2. Sucking habits from birth to age four. Breast feeding protects against malocclusion. Bottle feeding, pacifiers and finger sucking probably increase the risk of malocclusion. Cup feeding and orthodontic pacifiers are probably acceptable alternatives.
3. Food toughness. The jaws probably require stress from tough food to develop correctly. This can contribute to the widening of the dental arch until roughly age 17. Beef jerky, raw vegetables, raw fruit, tough cuts of meat and nuts are all good ways to exercise the jaws.
However, this covers development up to age 17. What would happen to the teeth of a grown up man if he stops using them, I'd also be interested to know (from sheer curiosity)
Often, mechanical stressors promotes growth/repair/strengthening. See calluses, bone micro-fractures, and physical therapy. Perhaps if unused, gum lines & jaw bone would recede, or teeth would not recalcify.
My uncle, who admittedly is pretty weird, used to only eat Costco pasta and peanut butter for 95% of his meals. The other 5% of the time he had lavish dinners with friends and family, and felt free to spend quite a bit. His logic was "I would rather have one amazing meal every now and again instead of a bunch of mediocre meals spread out." This may or may not be insane to you in terms of philosophy, but the biggest flaw is that he only ate two kinds of food for weeks on end. I imagine Soylent would be perfect for people like this: on a limited budget they can enjoy the occasional lavish meal without sacrificing nutrition for all their other meals.
From the people I know who like the product, it seems to me that Soylent caters to people whose eating patters are already strange. I find it appealing because I tend to obsess over making sure I'm getting all the right nutrients and food groups (I never am). I like the idea of drinking Soylent every morning as an insurance policy, I know I'm at least getting all the nutrients I need once a day.
Almost everyones' eating habits are strange. Unless you pay close attention to what you eat (which a subculture does, but that's the vast minority) then you're eating randomly. Soylent beats that for nutrition.
Soylent is a huge first step. Henceforth, we'll know "what we don't know" about specific humans, and what is a general baseline throughout. That'll help us (humanity) make directed efforts to automate soylent mixture tweaking. I really can't wait for a device that scans me before each meal and decides what I need. Nutritionists would be in high demand, because who's going to trust a machine? At least for N years until entire generations have been through this system.
I don't live on exclusively on anything else. It's a cool idea and I hope it replaces "some" meals because occasionally I just don't have the time and it has to be better (and more convenient) than fast food. Why do we have to take good things to extremes and set up unnecessary "all or nothings"?
This confuses me too! The first time I ever heard about Solyent, it was this guy who decided to live on it for 30 days. I guess it generates better press than: "I occasionally eat Solyent in moderation, and it's pretty good".
The poor hacker's desk delivered lunch. There's so much overhead which goes into putting meals together. Just having to make ONE more decision is a day can totally derail me. That decision could be "what's for breakfast?"
Personally, I would rather drink from a bag all day and then throw a fiesta for dinner to make up for bag time.
Would be perfect for me. Never heard about it.
I have a nasty food intolerance (rare from of gluten intolerance) that I was not aware off and made my life miserable. Unconscionably I realized that eating is not good for me when I worked as a scientist and had a heavy workload. Hence I lived on coffee, skipping breakfast, skipping lunch and ate my first meal around 5 or 6pm. One day my feeling for hunger was gone. First you form habits, then they form you I guess.
Other people eat because they are hungry. I eat because I know I have to sustain my body. It is often hard for me or even annoying to eat food and I have difficulties getting my calories every day. Yes, I would buy this drink.
I'm someone who loves food. I enjoy cooking wonderful meals. Almost every day I spend twenty to thirty minutes making lunch. It's not uncommon for me to spend an hour or two making dinner.
Generally, I'm pretty confident that my diet is "healthy."
But, when thinking about Soylent, people seem to be comparing it to perfection.
Why not compare it to some other things.
For example, would it be healthier to have a burger, fries, and a milkshake from McDonalds, or to drink Soylent?
Isn't the answer obvious?
Even as someone that regularly eats healthy meals, I still occasionally find it hard to have a healthy meal.
Whether or not Soylent should be a complete replacement for food, it's probably a great replacement for so much of the garbage junk food that many people eat very, very, regularly.
Maybe someday Soylent will put fast food out of business. The benefits would be obvious.
>Maybe someday Soylent will put fast food out of business. The benefits would be obvious.
Not as long as fast food continues to taste as good as it does. While soylent covers the nutritional portion, it doesn't have the flavors that are in fast food. People like to complain that fast food tastes like crap, but there is a huge chunk of the population (including me) that loves the flavors of burgers, fries, pizza, wings, etc. I rarely choose fast food because of the speed/convenience. Microwavable meals already beat them in that regard.
You make reasonable points. Why do people compare Soylent to perfection?
Here's what they said when fund-raising:
> "You can finally join the easy, healthy, and affordable future of nutrition."
> "What if you never had to worry about food again?"
> "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."
Soylent invites comparisons to existing replacement meal products (there are many) and makes false claims.
> The big-picture implications are also interesting. Rob Rhinehart definitely has grand ambitions for this product and hopes it will play a role in alleviating hunger.
Well, this is the part that excites me a lot. Industrial scale production and distribution of a nutritionally sufficient meal could do wonders in the developing world. As of now, even though there are food subsidies for the poor, there are additional expenses (gas, stoves) and wastage involved. And the saved time could be put to work.
A different incarnation of solyent could change the world.
Last time I said this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765697], I was surprised I got downvoted into oblivion. I was genuinely curious why this isn't a good idea to take up at the governmental level.
Because there is already enough food for the world, that food is just poorly distributed.
But concentrating on just the specialist end of disaster nutrition: World Food Programme et al already have products that are vastly cheaper than Soylent.
20% of the world population live on less than $1.25 per day. About one billion people lack access to clean drinking water (the primary ingredient in Soylent).
Soylent is far far too expensive for this role. It requires clean water. Rob making the claim that Soylent could help world hunger is yet another sensationalist sleazy claim made in ignorance of existing market.
I'm seriously considering it, at least as an experiment. I have type 1 diabetes, so I'm constantly trying to figure out how much insulin to take -- and I don't always get it right. This is mostly a matter of judging the food I'm consuming, but not completely; there's also endocrine issues which affect blood glucose levels (usually pushing them up), and exercise usually pulls blood glucose levels down.
I think having a "standard diet" which takes food out of the picture would make it much easier to figure out how all the other pieces fit together.
You'll know how to manage your condition better than others but I'll point out that there is talk about a rather high GI for soylent thanks to the maltodextrin. Which could possibly mean it's not suited for you (or rather you might have to have a lot of smaller meals). Alternatively you could lookup DIY soylent and roll your own more appropriate recipe.
rather high GI for soylent thanks to the maltodextrin
That's certainly a concern, although I think the GI has dropped since the initial version thanks to the introduction of oat flour.
But for the purpose of figuring out how all the variables interact, it doesn't really matter if Soylent is good T1D food or bad T1D food... as long as it's consistent. I certainly wouldn't switch to Soylent long-term without seeing how it affects my A1Cs, but as a short-term experiment it might be worth having worse numbers in order to learn how to get better numbers.
Can folks in the Bay Area pick up Soylent sooner than the 10-12 weeks it takes to ship to new customers? I'd totally be willing to drive to pick up a shipment--I want to try this life hack out NOW (or as close to now as possible).
I think it could find a big market in people who care A LOT about eating specific nutrient proportions.
I'm working on the website Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).
This was touched on in the article but I still feel it's necessary to point out that nutrition is one of the least understood fields in science.
The primary reason is that there are almost zero proper clinical trials and interventional studies. We have thousands of cohort studies which prove almost nothing.
For example, for 60 years saturated fat has been considered the enemy of cardiovascular health (because of some poorly conducted cohort studies in the 60's and 70's). Just this March, BMJ published a major meta study that showing that there are no proven causal links between saturated fat and heart disease. In fact it is now being suggested that avoiding saturated fat has been detrimental because Americans have replaced fat intake with high glycemic index foods causing obesity and T2D.
Personally I have no doubt that Soylent will fail to provide some required nutrient or fail to induce a certain hormonal or chemical response which is obtained via natural food intake. We simply don't understand nutrition well enough to check all the boxes. That said, if Soylent wanted to follow the scientific method and conduct a proper interventional clinical trial with a control group, adequate study population and duration I would be happy to consider the results.
So by that logic Soylent is exactly as acceptable as any other food eaten regularly. Except Soylent at least tries to cover all the bases, constituting a variety of known food components. While a constant diet of cheeseburgers and waffle fries has not.
I've heard folks trot out the "what about the unknown food components?" That's a spurious argument - eating random processed food has no guarantee of including magic mythical food ingredients. And I'm skeptical of imaginary ingredients that are essential to health - how would that work? Man in the wild would die unexpectedly unless consuming some vitamin present only in Zimbabwean ground-nuts? Evolution must have screwed up royally for that to be true.
Soylent could be considered exactly as acceptable as any specific food but most other diets offer a very wide diversity of foods. The current thinking in nutrition science seems to be that diversity in diet gives us a better chance of eating how we should be eating. Because we don't actually know how we should be eating we rely on that diversity. It's naive to think that the definition of "nutritionally complete" (which Soylent adheres to) isn't going to change over the coming decades. A traditional diet will still have a chance of being "nutritionally complete" under future requirements whereas Soylent's exact formula almost ensures that it won't.
I think what's even more important are some of more complex functions of digestion and nutrition response. For example, what is the glycemic response of Soylent? In December Annals of Internal Medicine published a study (1) showing that a daily multivitamin has no benefit to the longevity and health of the average American but we do know that dietary interventions which increase dietary intake of certain vitamins via actual foods are beneficial to health. Scientists are still figuring out why but it is apparent that you can't just take a pill or formula containing certain nutrients and gain the same benefits of getting these nutrients through food.
I'm doubtful the majority of human throughout history have had a diverse diet. We're not adapted to require that; in fact we're adapted to conform to whatever diet we regularly consume. Lots of folks report stomach problems when eating food different from what they normally eat!
Using the oil packets and purchasing the most cost effective plan (28 bags for 255/month), Soylent gives you 220 calories per dollar. For a relatively sedentary averaged sized adult male (2100 calories/day), it will cost you about $285/month.
Ensure powder from Amazon[0] gets you to about 205 calories per dollar, which comes to $305/month for the same adult male. I don't buy the 'it's a lot cheaper than Ensure' line.
Another competitor, "Optimum Nutrition Serious Mass" is on Amazon in 12 pound bags for $49. It works out to 408 calories per dollar. Only $154/month for the same example male.
Admittedly Ensure and Serious Mass have different marketing than Soylent (Ensure for old people and Serious Mass for bodybuilders), but if you compare their ingredients you'll find they aren't very different.
The explicitly stated purpose of Soylent is NOT to live on. NOT to "End Food". It is to be a better occasional meal replacement. It's a nice improvement on many boring products that preceded it (Ensure, etc). But, that doesn't make for good linkbait headlines nor revenue-generating eyeballs on sidewall ads. This is yet another in a long series of manufactured-controversy articles propping up Soylent as either the Savior or the Devil. YOU DECIDE!
Not that I mind. I'm a backer of Soylent. When my month's supply arrives, I'm looking forward to living on it 100% for 30 days for a few reasons:
1) I need to lose a bit of weight. I know that for me, the best way to do that is to significantly change my "generally good but occasionally indulgent" diet. I know from experience that I can't willpower that into happening. But, I think that if I commit to a defined, strict diet, I stand a chance. Soylent should be particularly good for that because supposedly it won't leave me with carb/protein/fat cravings like every other diet I've tried.
2) I like the idea of going on a cleanse. What better cleanse than supposedly exactly what your body needs and nothing else?
3) I'm interested in the chemical science vs. mystical vitalism theory of nutrition debate. I.e. do we need certain chemicals or do we need "something to do with Real Food" to thrive? Supposedly, people feel really fine living on Soylent. I want to see for myself first-hand. I plan to get my "blood work" numbers measured before and after.
Carbohydrates are, however. From the Soylent 1.0 ingredients list:
> Maltodextrin (165g) - As the primary source of energy for the body, carbohydrates are the largest component of Soylent by mass. The starch in Oat Flour makes up the bulk of this nutrient and the rest is provided by Maltodextrin.
"Boring"? While they aren't particularly pleasant those boring products come in a variety of flavours and styles (soup; juice styles; shakes).
Everytime Soylent comes up and someone mentions the existing product Soylent supporters claim that Soylent is a peoduct you can live on. (Ignoring the fact that you can live on those other products) you've just removed the only differentiator.
"The explicitly stated purpose of Soylent is NOT to live on."
That's an odd thing to say considering Rhinehart initially got all this attention because he was LIVING OFF OF IT. It's almost like he was trying to make a statement. Hmm...
> I need to lose a bit of weight. I know that for me, the best way to do that is to significantly change my "generally good but occasionally indulgent" diet. I know from experience that I can't willpower that into happening.
I had the same problem. The way I increased my willpower was by:
1) Weighing myself every day (always at the same time if I could)
2) Writing it down.
3) Graphing it in Excel
I found that seeing how my behaviour over the previous days had affected my weight gave me the willpower to eat smaller portions and forgo snacks. And having a short feedback loop allowed me to correct if I started slipping. I still ate plenty, and had snacks/biscuits etc. between meals, (I didn't feel like I was starving myself) but I found that a small change in daily intake was enough to gradually make the weight come off.
Too much work, and I've already lost as much weight as I need to [1]. Weighing yourself every day and recording the result is very easy. All you need is a pad and pen by your scales. And if you want to graph it, once you have a spreadsheet, then updating it (even if only once a week) is very quick, and seeing the graph head downwards, is very motivating.
I found it was the smallest habit I had to form to produce a result.
[1] I've gone from almost 20st 5-6 years ago to just under 11st.
I wouldn't want to do it on an ongoing basis, but the act of calculating out a few meals can be helpful to calibrate one's sense of how much they should be eating.
It can be easy to miss how calorie rich certain foods are.
> It can be easy to miss how calorie rich certain foods are.
That's exactly why weighing myself every day worked for me; I wasn't able to kid myself about how much I was eating. I also found that the odd big meal didn't matter, as long as I didn't make it a habit (which I didn't do thanks to having a tight feedback loop).
69 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadEnsure isn't marketed to the public as such because lawyers.
It's almost like drinking melted ice cream, to be honest.
What prompted the question is the recent spate of articles on gut flora. That was the first thing I thought of when I heard of Soylent--what does it do to your microbiome? If anyone can speak or speculate knowledgeably on the topic, I'm curious.
Pure gain.
2. Our idea of "everything the body needs" can change.
3. We don't know the long term effects of relying solely on it.
The author spends a lot of time on stupid counterarguments. Seriously, do your homework.
I still wouldn't want to be the guinea pig to exclusively live off of Soylent.
2+3. Having said that, there is plenty of research on "Total Parenteral Nutrition" and "Enteral Nutrition" for those that cannot consume regular foods for medical reasons. It isn't exactly a solved problem however, there are still issues.
"More than 25,000 phytonutrients are found in plant foods. WebMD takes a look at these six important phytonutrients -- and their potential health effects: Carotenoids, Ellagic acid, Flavonoids, Resveratrolm Glucosinolates, Phytoestrogens"
Find them in Soylent? It's cute that you put nonessential nutrients in quotes though. It's like this foreign term that only I use.
Anyone know if that's true?
Stephan Guyenet had a series of rather interesting blog posts on malocclusion. One of the factors he mentioned in conclusion was the toughness of food.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.dk/2009/12/malocclusion-di...
There are three main factors that I believe contribute to malocclusion in modern societies:
1. Maternal nutrition during the first trimester of pregnancy. Vitamin K2, found in organs, pastured dairy and eggs, is particularly important. We may also make small amounts from the K1 found in green vegetables.
2. Sucking habits from birth to age four. Breast feeding protects against malocclusion. Bottle feeding, pacifiers and finger sucking probably increase the risk of malocclusion. Cup feeding and orthodontic pacifiers are probably acceptable alternatives.
3. Food toughness. The jaws probably require stress from tough food to develop correctly. This can contribute to the widening of the dental arch until roughly age 17. Beef jerky, raw vegetables, raw fruit, tough cuts of meat and nuts are all good ways to exercise the jaws.
However, this covers development up to age 17. What would happen to the teeth of a grown up man if he stops using them, I'd also be interested to know (from sheer curiosity)
From the people I know who like the product, it seems to me that Soylent caters to people whose eating patters are already strange. I find it appealing because I tend to obsess over making sure I'm getting all the right nutrients and food groups (I never am). I like the idea of drinking Soylent every morning as an insurance policy, I know I'm at least getting all the nutrients I need once a day.
I don't live on exclusively on anything else. It's a cool idea and I hope it replaces "some" meals because occasionally I just don't have the time and it has to be better (and more convenient) than fast food. Why do we have to take good things to extremes and set up unnecessary "all or nothings"?
Personally, I would rather drink from a bag all day and then throw a fiesta for dinner to make up for bag time.
Other people eat because they are hungry. I eat because I know I have to sustain my body. It is often hard for me or even annoying to eat food and I have difficulties getting my calories every day. Yes, I would buy this drink.
Generally, I'm pretty confident that my diet is "healthy."
But, when thinking about Soylent, people seem to be comparing it to perfection.
Why not compare it to some other things.
For example, would it be healthier to have a burger, fries, and a milkshake from McDonalds, or to drink Soylent?
Isn't the answer obvious?
Even as someone that regularly eats healthy meals, I still occasionally find it hard to have a healthy meal.
Whether or not Soylent should be a complete replacement for food, it's probably a great replacement for so much of the garbage junk food that many people eat very, very, regularly.
Maybe someday Soylent will put fast food out of business. The benefits would be obvious.
Not as long as fast food continues to taste as good as it does. While soylent covers the nutritional portion, it doesn't have the flavors that are in fast food. People like to complain that fast food tastes like crap, but there is a huge chunk of the population (including me) that loves the flavors of burgers, fries, pizza, wings, etc. I rarely choose fast food because of the speed/convenience. Microwavable meals already beat them in that regard.
Here's what they said when fund-raising:
> "You can finally join the easy, healthy, and affordable future of nutrition."
> "What if you never had to worry about food again?"
> "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."
Soylent invites comparisons to existing replacement meal products (there are many) and makes false claims.
Well, this is the part that excites me a lot. Industrial scale production and distribution of a nutritionally sufficient meal could do wonders in the developing world. As of now, even though there are food subsidies for the poor, there are additional expenses (gas, stoves) and wastage involved. And the saved time could be put to work.
A different incarnation of solyent could change the world.
Last time I said this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765697], I was surprised I got downvoted into oblivion. I was genuinely curious why this isn't a good idea to take up at the governmental level.
But concentrating on just the specialist end of disaster nutrition: World Food Programme et al already have products that are vastly cheaper than Soylent.
20% of the world population live on less than $1.25 per day. About one billion people lack access to clean drinking water (the primary ingredient in Soylent).
Here's what the world food programme does: https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition
Here's a list of special nutritional products: https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products
Here is the factsheet about existing WFP products (note price and shelf life) : http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/co...
Soylent is far far too expensive for this role. It requires clean water. Rob making the claim that Soylent could help world hunger is yet another sensationalist sleazy claim made in ignorance of existing market.
I think having a "standard diet" which takes food out of the picture would make it much easier to figure out how all the other pieces fit together.
That's certainly a concern, although I think the GI has dropped since the initial version thanks to the introduction of oat flour.
But for the purpose of figuring out how all the variables interact, it doesn't really matter if Soylent is good T1D food or bad T1D food... as long as it's consistent. I certainly wouldn't switch to Soylent long-term without seeing how it affects my A1Cs, but as a short-term experiment it might be worth having worse numbers in order to learn how to get better numbers.
I'm working on the website Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).
The primary reason is that there are almost zero proper clinical trials and interventional studies. We have thousands of cohort studies which prove almost nothing.
For example, for 60 years saturated fat has been considered the enemy of cardiovascular health (because of some poorly conducted cohort studies in the 60's and 70's). Just this March, BMJ published a major meta study that showing that there are no proven causal links between saturated fat and heart disease. In fact it is now being suggested that avoiding saturated fat has been detrimental because Americans have replaced fat intake with high glycemic index foods causing obesity and T2D.
Personally I have no doubt that Soylent will fail to provide some required nutrient or fail to induce a certain hormonal or chemical response which is obtained via natural food intake. We simply don't understand nutrition well enough to check all the boxes. That said, if Soylent wanted to follow the scientific method and conduct a proper interventional clinical trial with a control group, adequate study population and duration I would be happy to consider the results.
I've heard folks trot out the "what about the unknown food components?" That's a spurious argument - eating random processed food has no guarantee of including magic mythical food ingredients. And I'm skeptical of imaginary ingredients that are essential to health - how would that work? Man in the wild would die unexpectedly unless consuming some vitamin present only in Zimbabwean ground-nuts? Evolution must have screwed up royally for that to be true.
I think what's even more important are some of more complex functions of digestion and nutrition response. For example, what is the glycemic response of Soylent? In December Annals of Internal Medicine published a study (1) showing that a daily multivitamin has no benefit to the longevity and health of the average American but we do know that dietary interventions which increase dietary intake of certain vitamins via actual foods are beneficial to health. Scientists are still figuring out why but it is apparent that you can't just take a pill or formula containing certain nutrients and gain the same benefits of getting these nutrients through food.
(1) http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1789253
Ensure powder from Amazon[0] gets you to about 205 calories per dollar, which comes to $305/month for the same adult male. I don't buy the 'it's a lot cheaper than Ensure' line.
Another competitor, "Optimum Nutrition Serious Mass" is on Amazon in 12 pound bags for $49. It works out to 408 calories per dollar. Only $154/month for the same example male.
Admittedly Ensure and Serious Mass have different marketing than Soylent (Ensure for old people and Serious Mass for bodybuilders), but if you compare their ingredients you'll find they aren't very different.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-Flavor... [1] http://www.amazon.com/Optimum-Nutrition-Serious-Chocolate-Po...
Not that I mind. I'm a backer of Soylent. When my month's supply arrives, I'm looking forward to living on it 100% for 30 days for a few reasons:
1) I need to lose a bit of weight. I know that for me, the best way to do that is to significantly change my "generally good but occasionally indulgent" diet. I know from experience that I can't willpower that into happening. But, I think that if I commit to a defined, strict diet, I stand a chance. Soylent should be particularly good for that because supposedly it won't leave me with carb/protein/fat cravings like every other diet I've tried.
2) I like the idea of going on a cleanse. What better cleanse than supposedly exactly what your body needs and nothing else?
3) I'm interested in the chemical science vs. mystical vitalism theory of nutrition debate. I.e. do we need certain chemicals or do we need "something to do with Real Food" to thrive? Supposedly, people feel really fine living on Soylent. I want to see for myself first-hand. I plan to get my "blood work" numbers measured before and after.
Soylent's main ingredient is maltodextrin which is certainly not essential to any diet.
> Maltodextrin (165g) - As the primary source of energy for the body, carbohydrates are the largest component of Soylent by mass. The starch in Oat Flour makes up the bulk of this nutrient and the rest is provided by Maltodextrin.
http://blog.soylent.me/post/68180382810/soylent-1-0-macronut...
Carbohydrates are in no way essential to a diet if replaced with proper amounts of fat and protein. http://eatingacademy.com/
Everytime Soylent comes up and someone mentions the existing product Soylent supporters claim that Soylent is a peoduct you can live on. (Ignoring the fact that you can live on those other products) you've just removed the only differentiator.
That's an odd thing to say considering Rhinehart initially got all this attention because he was LIVING OFF OF IT. It's almost like he was trying to make a statement. Hmm...
I had the same problem. The way I increased my willpower was by:
I found that seeing how my behaviour over the previous days had affected my weight gave me the willpower to eat smaller portions and forgo snacks. And having a short feedback loop allowed me to correct if I started slipping. I still ate plenty, and had snacks/biscuits etc. between meals, (I didn't feel like I was starving myself) but I found that a small change in daily intake was enough to gradually make the weight come off.I found it was the smallest habit I had to form to produce a result.
[1] I've gone from almost 20st 5-6 years ago to just under 11st.
It can be easy to miss how calorie rich certain foods are.
That's exactly why weighing myself every day worked for me; I wasn't able to kid myself about how much I was eating. I also found that the odd big meal didn't matter, as long as I didn't make it a habit (which I didn't do thanks to having a tight feedback loop).