
The drab stupidity of Soylent - swombat
http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/column/4264/the-drab-stupidity-of-soylent/
======
gabemart
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.

~~~
kevingadd
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
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.

~~~
freehunter
Jaime from the Mythbusters does this; he explains it in an episode where they
are testing fuel consumption of cars over a long distance and can't stop to
eat. Adam brought snack foods, Jaime brought what he calls "444". 4 fruits, 4
vegetables, and 4 beans ground up in a blender for him to drink. He put his
recipe in an email that someone posted to reddit at one point.

Jaime claims it's healthy and full nutrition, but he only eats/drinks it when
he can't be bothered to actually eat something.

------
rwissmann
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
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.

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

------
ph0rque
_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?

~~~
kevingadd
The ~10% is what matters.

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

~~~
kevingadd
So they fed their baby candy instead of breastfeeding it?

~~~
dagw
Most experts generally agree that it's OK to stop breastfeeding your kid when
they're 4 years old

~~~
kevingadd
Yes, my point is that people's dietary needs change. Breastfeeding is the most
obvious example that nobody would deny, but there are others.

You simply can't rely on a one-size-fits-all diet without some risks. One
person might be lactose intolerant, another might have nutritional deficiency,
and a third might be at risk of overdose due to genetic or medical factors
preventing them from offloading excess amounts of Sodium, Potassium, etc.

~~~
mcv
I don't think anyone is arguing that Soylent could replace breastfeeding
(though there are plenty of people who use something similar: formula).

But for everybody else, Soylent sounds a lot easier to customize to personal
needs. You can avoid allergens without losing the required nutrients, you can
tune the amount of sodium and potassium to whatever you can deal with, etc.
With normal food, you don't get that kind of fine-grained control.

------
thewopr
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.

~~~
Steko
"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.

------
chollida1
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.

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

~~~
rexreed
He named the product based on the Soylent from the book Make Room! Make Room!,
which was a Soya / Lentil product meant to feed the masses, but the movie
version Soylent Green had turned that into a mix consisting of human parts.
While I understand he references the original book, the majority of folks
familiar with Soylent from the movie context associate it with the human-
composed product. This is what makes it unfortunate and unintentional -- I
don't think they wanted / intended this association. And that's what marketing
is -- it's creating a market perception and demand for a product.

It would be as if someone came up with a new, super-high end car and called it
a Yugo. No matter what you do, you could never completely erase the pre-
existing market perception even though the new product might be totally
different.

~~~
mcv
He can't possibly have been unaware of the fact that the movie is far better
known than the book. Even if he meant it as a reference to the book, he must
have been aware of the movie.

------
trekky1700
"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...

------
lmg643
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.

~~~
oblique63
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).

------
nemof
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.

------
cabalamat
> 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_chester
You may have noticed that WW2 rationing was of _food_.

~~~
cabalamat
Soylent is food.

------
durkie
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."

~~~
mcv
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.

------
oinksoft
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.

~~~
kevingadd
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'.

~~~
drharris
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.

~~~
kevingadd
That's blatantly ignorant. To give a few obvious examples: Changes in
metabolism, bigger life changes like puberty and menopause, obviously
pregnancy - these all change your dietary needs.

~~~
drharris
_> The body's needs change on a regular basis

> Changes in metabolism, bigger life changes like puberty and menopause,
> obviously pregnancy_

I do not think these things happen on a regular basis.

~~~
kevingadd
They happen to _everyone_ at least twice in their life! Some people dozens of
times! How common do they need to be for you to believe that messing up
nutrition is problematic? It can literally kill people!

If you're going to argue that all the nutritional changes can be accounted
for, I won't disagree with you. But to argue that people's dietary needs don't
change is just uninformed.

------
alisson
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_chester
> _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".

~~~
sejje
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.

~~~
PanTardovski
If you're hiking significant distances carrying light, dry trail mix is much
better than carrying heavy liquid Soylent.

~~~
sejje
You're not supposed to carry it as a liquid; in fact, I believe it doesn't
keep well.

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

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

------
pothibo
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
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.

~~~
jacquesc
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.

------
blackdogie
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).

------
fnordfnordfnord
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.

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

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

------
northwest
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
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.

~~~
northwest
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.

~~~
dsego
How about that one guy recently on HN that didn't eat anything for over a year
and lived off his body fat? He defecated once in a month or so.

~~~
king_jester
The vast majority of "person doesn't eat and still lives" stories are fakes or
the person in question actually does eat and drink, sometimes secretly.

~~~
glenra
If you start out weighing ~450 pounds, the math on living without eating is
pretty straightforward. The person in question did a medically supervised
fast. He consumed water, a multivitamin and a small amount of yeast. (Also
potassium tablets for a few months) His weight went from 456 to 180 pounds
over the period of the fast; he regained about 15 pounds in the following 5
years.

He apparently defecated every 40-50 days.

(Though the stories about this are pretty recent, the event being described
happened in 1965.)

[http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...](http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.htm)

------
dsego
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.

------
timmm
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.

------
drharris
_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.

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

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

And still I buy pants at the Gap.

------
RTesla
This needs to be downvoted

------
tokenadult
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...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-
why-we-die-global-life-expectancy)

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...](http://www.demographic-
challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

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....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

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...](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/period-and-cohort-life-
expectancy-tables/2010-based/p-and-c-le.html)

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...](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1963392_1963367,00.html)

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.

------
dudeonthecouch
Finally!

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

~~~
spuz
Feel free to market and produce your own cheaper alternative.

