
Why would anyone want to live on Soylent? - houseofshards
http://www.raptitude.com/2014/05/why-soylent/
======
sciguy77
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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

------
JacobJans
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.

~~~
DanBC
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.

------
muhuk
From the article:

    
    
        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.

~~~
canjobear
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.

~~~
livingparadox
Currently they have employed an on-staff nutritionist. That part is
unfortunately not very well known...

------
gexla
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.

------
rdmcfee
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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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.

~~~
rdmcfee
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.

(1)
[http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1789253](http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1789253)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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!

------
argumentum
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.

~~~
johnny99
What's your poop like?

~~~
argumentum
Fairly normal, maybe a bit paler.

~~~
johnny99
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.

------
jqm
Why "live on it"?

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"?

~~~
disbelief
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".

------
tiatia
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.

------
gibybo
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.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-
Flavor...](http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-
Flavor/dp/B0007XXPLQ) [1] [http://www.amazon.com/Optimum-Nutrition-Serious-
Chocolate-Po...](http://www.amazon.com/Optimum-Nutrition-Serious-Chocolate-
Pound/dp/B000GIPJ0M)

------
papa_bear
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](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).

------
Zigurd
It's possible that living on Soylent is healthier than the way the majority of
people eat, maybe a large majority.

------
codezero
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.

------
corysama
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.

~~~
Flenser
> 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.

~~~
whazor
Calculate how much calories you eat. You can find online the max amount of
calories to lose weight.

~~~
Flenser
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.

~~~
maxerickson
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.

~~~
Flenser
> 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).

------
jeswin
> 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](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.

~~~
DanBC
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).

Here's what the world food programme does: [https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-
wfp-fights-malnutrition](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](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...](http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/communications/wfp255508.pdf)

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.

------
cperciva
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.

~~~
arg01
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.

~~~
cperciva
_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.

------
ThatGeoGuy
People keep going on and on about the nutritional value of the drink overall,
but I'm somewhat curious to the effects it might have on the digestive tract.

For example, if you ate soylent for a full year, and then went straight back
to regular food, would your body have trouble digesting solid food now that it
hasn't had to do so for a long period of time? What if we extend this time
period to 5 years, or 10? I think we can maybe pull some insight from
astronauts in this regard, as we should have some information about the change
from tube-food to solid food from extended space missions.

I can see soylent being a fantastic replacement in some respects, particularly
with regards to coeliac's disease or with dairy allergies, but I'm still
partially skeptical about the kinds of change that soylent will introduce in
the future. One of the great parts about food nowadays is that you can
basically grow and manufacture it anywhere, with the obvious caveat that not
all food is available everywhere at once. On the other hand, with soylent, our
food is almost "centralized" in a sense, since it is likely more difficult to
create soylent than it is to throw seeds in the ground, or hunt and scavenge.
This is sort of the reason why I'm curious to how the human body will react to
such an abrupt change in diet. If humans just eat liquid food for an extended
period of time, or their whole life, will they eventually lose / have
difficulties with eating solid, more traditional food? Should a crisis arise
(something akin to great floods or an earthquake), will it be possible to
produce / ship enough soylent fast enough to fulfill the dietary needs of the
population in need of aid?

Of course, these sorts of questions assume that soylent will become a dietary
replacement, rather than an occasional meal replacement, but I get the
feeling, at least from this article, that replacing the diet is the plan of
Rhinehart et al. I won't personally test soylent out, I love fancy food and
flavours too much to bother, but in some sense I will follow the product and
see what happens with it. I don't think something on this scale has ever been
attempted before with regards to dietary / meal replacements, so it should be
interesting (not necessarily good or bad, just interesting) to see what kinds
of disasters / utopias unfold thanks to a full dietary replacement.

------
leorocky
Maybe "soylent profitable" is the new "ramen profitable" or whatever.

------
meisterbrendan
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).

~~~
cperciva
Aside from "know someone who knows someone" hacks, I don't think so -- the 12
week delay is due to production constraints, not shipping constraints.

------
DanBC
So many people are saying "i don't want to think" \- Indians need to expand
"tiffin" to the US. Make it nutritious and you'd make a freaking fortune.

------
phazmatis
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.

------
patrickdavey
I assume if you subsist on a diet of liquids alone that your teeth get upset
due to complete underuse.

Anyone know if that's true?

~~~
sciguy77
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.

~~~
Evgeny
_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.

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.dk/2009/12/malocclusion-
di...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.dk/2009/12/malocclusion-disease-of-
civilization.html)

 _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)

------
Thiz
Soylent bars sound like a cool idea. No dishes to do, no groceries to shop, no
time spent in the kitchen.

Pure gain.

------
benguild
It seems like a great solution to the “forgetting to eat” issue while
hackathoning.

------
nether
Another "stop liking what I don't like" view. You could make similar arguments
against fast food and other products of convenience.

~~~
disbelief
The author is actually coming out mostly in favour of Soylent. The title asks
a question and the article tries to answer it.

------
mantrax5
Just because the ad says you'll want to live on Soylent, doesn't mean you
would.

There's a certain kind of people who like to buy into simple formulas for
health, success and so on. There are more of them than it's comfortable to
admit.

The ad is worded to appeal to them, because after all Soylent is a business,
and which business would ignore the large segment of the market that'll be
buying your product regularly, _every single day_?

For those who are more balanced thinkers, Soylent remains an interesting
option when you need to have a meal on the go. Better than fast food.

A side reminded, just like with vitamin pills, you should be skeptical of some
of the claims made about Soylent's ingredients. Say, just because a product
has calcium in _some form_ doesn't mean your body can assimilate it in that
form.

------
chemmail
All this really is, is ground up rice, a vitamin pill, and some oil. No
Thanks.

------
yaketysax
1\. There are a lot of (nonessential) nutrients that you get from plants that
you won't get from this drink.

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.

~~~
Scoundreller
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.

~~~
yaketysax
[http://www.webmd.com/diet/phytonutrients-
faq](http://www.webmd.com/diet/phytonutrients-faq)

"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.

