Soylent is going to have a very, very hard time with new customer acquisition. Right now it's riding a wave of novelty, but as it solves a problem very few people have, and solves it in a way that leaves people craving the innate satisfaction of eating, it's not going to go far. But there are founders with more ambition than sense. In fact I suspect that's most of them.
That wave of novelty could just as easily gain them a critical mass of customers as well. Ultimately it will depend on their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the product.
What lunatic would bet their money on whether people will stop eating? It is a fundamental biological need and evolutionary drive. That's a tough sell for Soylent, and it has nothing to do with "critical mass". And of course it will depend on the satisfaction - that's entirely vapid.
Soylent is not even disguised as food, like most of our industrial food-like products. It tastes like oats according to that blog. Nobody is going to replace all of their food with fortified liquid oatmeal.
Even _they_ don't claim that you'd replace every single meal with Soylent. It's supposed to act as the "default", when you're either too lazy, low on time, or just would rather not deal with preparing or going out to buy a meal. It's a basic meal that can't replace the satisfaction of normal food, but sometimes you just don't care about that. You could consume it as often or as little as you want, and know that you're getting something balanced and healthy at the same time.
It's riding a wave of novelty, but it's hard to argue that it's actually solving the problem that it claims to (busy/lazy, want healthy food-substitute).
The post doesn't actually tell you much about the nutrition without evidence about levels of actual nutrient absorption, but a quick google scholar search finds that calcium inhibits iron and copper absorption, especially in the presence of phytates [0,1] (which Soylent contains from the oat flour) and that zinc, manganese, and iron have similar uptake pathways and limit each others absorption by competing for use of those pathways [1,2]. No idea if there's any other interactions, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to rely on this stuff much for nutrition.
Aside from that, he vetted the formula by an uncontrolled, unblinded study with a sample size of n=1 (i.e. trying it himself for a few months), and he says on his blog that he "started having joint pain and found [he] fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as [he] consume[s] almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day." [3]
In that same post, he says that "After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did", and makes major revisions to his formula, apparently assuming that he's figured it all out this time. He puts a significant amount of fiber in the formula for the first time, going from 1.2 grams to 40 grams, in line with the 38 grams recommended for men under 50 [4], which was probably a good idea considering how much low fiber intake increases the risk of heart attack [5].
A month later, he responds to criticism by saying that "there have been no deficiency symptoms, and if this becomes a problem the amounts can be changed to compensate" [6]. His dismissal of concern ignores the fact that many known nutrient deficiencies can take much longer to manifest, and have severe irreversible harm (like B12 deficiency leading to nerve damage, or developing heart disease after years of insufficient fiber intake, or calcium deficiencies and osteoporosis). He also says that "The initial sample size was small and the timeframe short, but the results are easily reproducible, as shown by the community site discourse.soylent.me", as if having a greater amount of data overcomes the fact that the sample was extremely biased, still short-running, and with nothing even resembling a credible study design or consistent data collection.
Maybe it's not a bad thing that Soylent's probably not going to take off?
There is also no evidence that the quantities and ratios of nutrients in the formula are anywhere near complete or optimal.
The easiest way to illustrate how this can be a problem is to compare the difference between growing cells in minimal media versus complex media, where they grow much faster.
Soylent is basically a crude minimal media for humans. The proper comparison for soylent will be against someone who is eating a complete diet, not someone who is skipping meals or eating poorly.
To be honest, neither am I - although part of it seems to be the idea of this as a complete diet replacement rather than a supplement (although I suspect the existing products are marketed as a supplement for legal reasons more than anything else and Soylent may have to use the same language)
"According to Arthur Whitmore, a press officer with the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, Soylent would fall into the category of what the FDA considers food. Unlike a medication, Soylent will not require FDA approval, unless it contains some new type of food additive, which Rhinehart would need to disclose.
It’s important to Rhinehart that Soylent be considered a food, as opposed to a medicine or supplement, so that food-stamp recipients can buy it using EBT cards."
One month of Soylent is currently $255; the maximum SNAP benefit for a single person is $189. If he makes his $5/day target, maybe, but the SNAP benefit for the Nth person in an N person household decreases to $142.
Within the Soylent community, there are two acknowledged classes of soylent. The two are distinguished by using "Soylent" when referring to the "official" recipe, and "soylent" when referring to DIY versions.
Rob has stated several times that he isn't going to patent the Soylent recipe. The reason is because the only product on the market that comes even close to Soylent for complete nutrition (without lots of harmful other components) is Plumpy'nut [1]. Plumpy'nut's recipe is patented, so even if someone could produce it cheaper, they can't legally produce it.
Rob is keeping the Soylent formula open in large part so that other people can produce exact and comparable versions. In addition, Rob has not only allowed others to develop comparable version, but outright encouraged it. So much so that when NickP developed a tool to develop recipes based on a list of ingredients and individual goals, Rob promoted the tool and gave it a home on the official soylent.me domain - http://diy.soylent.me/
tl;dr - Your concern has been already been acknowledged by the community; there are alternative recipes, including one that works out to $74.73 a month, which is well under the $225 SNAP allowance.
The product you link to contains 100kcal/serving. If you attempted to live off of this @2000kcal/day, you'd be going through 2/3+ of your container every day. It seems likely that you'd overshoot some of your micronutrients. Finally, Amazon has this GNC product as $40/can or $0.013/kcal.
Soylent is alleged to provide an appropriate amount of kcal, carbs, fat, protein and micronutrients/vitamins in a normal number of servings per day (e.g. 3). It's currently much less expensive than the GNC product at roughly ~$0.0038/kcal (assuming $255/mo, 84 meals/mo, 800 kcal/meal for men's formula).
bzzt you ran out of context. The context of the post is "micronutrient" things, which a vitamin supplement powder surely provides a comparison for.
The Soylent post reads like someone re-inventing a programming language and writing a paragraph each about "Now, we are including a 'for loop' because people want to iterate over variables while increasing their values. This can be used for activities like..." — it's all just very elementary school boot report feeling.
We're not talking about eating 20 scoops of vitamin powder a day to live off of. That would hurt pretty bad.
Sorry, I misunderstood the context. You said something to the effect of 'still don't understand how this varies', except the micronutrient profile was released on 12/12, so that kind of bounds your curiosity at one day, which is confusing.
Unless you really meant the product as a whole in comparison to the vitamin and mineral powder, in which my reply was an overcomplicated way of saying "it's not a basic bulk vitamin and mineral powder."
The amount of potassium in Soylent is interesting. I noticed a while ago that I wasn't getting enough potassium in my diet, went searching for a supplement, and found that you can't buy an OTC supplement that contains more than 100mg. It turns out the FDA severely restricts the amount of potassium you can get in OTC supplements to prevent certain health risks.[1] I wonder how they get around that restriction.
The FDA has different restrictions and requirements depending on if a product is labeled a food or a nutritional supplement. A nutritional supplement is limited to 100mg of potassium while something that is a food is free to have up to 1500mg. Soylent is a food and is thus able to have 3500mg of potassium.
One cup of orange juice = 500mg potassium, one potato = 900mg; greens, yoghurt, beans, fruit, almost everything has good amounts of it. It shouldn't be hard to reach the recommended intake if you're eating a healthy diet.
Per serving/dose/pill. The pills I've seen usually contain about 400-500mg of inactive ingredients (about the same ratio Soylent uses), so the pills are ~500-600mg, which is fairly large. To equal just one serving of Soylent, you'd need to ingest 35 of them.
Whenever food preferences come up as a topic of conversation at work, I have a co-worker who says, "As soon as they come out with Soylent, I'm in. That's it, that's all I'm going to eat for life." I want to see him do it.
For the truly hardcore, you can also buy complete sources of intravenous nutrition. Expect to pay hundreds of thousands a year for this extreme productivity boosting option.
> Soylent is not the first drink with calories in it, nor was Google the first search engine. There are many liquid diets. You'd probably be surprised how long you can survive on just cow's milk. No one says 'solid diets exist already' when someone makes a new food. I don't see how the viscosity makes up an entire category. I considered Ensure but found it much too expensive, low calorie, unpalatable, and an ingredient make up that was far from complete or optimal.
> The goal of soylent is to make something ideal, not just a quick shot that will get rid of hunger for a few hours. I need something that allows me to run and lift and think, not just survive, and something considerably cheaper than normal food. A big part of soylent is its personalization as well. There is no 2000 calorie human. If you want an ideal diet you have to personalize it.
The bones holding your teeth get a 'workout' when you chew, helping to keep them strong. The saliva produced while chewing is also beneficial, helping to clear food particles from your mouth and wash away bacteria so there may be less plaque buildup and tooth decay.
--
Note that saliva also contains enzymes to break down food, and if you only drink Soylent I doubt you produce much saliva for digestion.
Quote: "Brawndo, it's got what plants crave!" Sorry, but 'teeth get a workout' sounds like something you'd tell a 4 year old.
I admit I don't know about the enzymatic action of saliva. I am not sure how important the loss would be if there's not large pieces of complex food to break down.
I have prepaid for some. If it's not awful I plan to try using it for the majority of my nutritional needs.
I like eating, but I don't like sourcing, preparing, cooking or cleaning up. I don't like eating in at restaurants either. I'm lazy and antisocial. So my intake is currently pretty bad, mostly take out or processed items. Soylent would definitely be an improvement for me nutritionally.
You may not be snarking, but a lot of people seem very upset that this product exists and that people are interested in it. I'm not sure why.
I assume people are upset with the idea because it epitomizes the worst parts of nothing but numbers reductionist tech ideology. They're upset with the product because it preys on such people, and is possibly a net negative. It's not a major concern of mine.
That still doesn't make any sense. They're not forced to do anything with it - it's the "offended it exists" thing which I simply do not understand (well that, and all the people creating 5-star gourmet cuisine every night, who seem to show up).
> Why are you following this story? Why are you voting it up? Do you actually want to buy and eat this nutritionally balanced gruel? Why?
I don't like the idea of Soylent. I enjoy cooking, eating out, and trying new things. If you are so busy that you absolutely can't manage to make things (even in advance) or eat out, there's likely other lifestyle problems that Soylent won't solve for you.
However, I'm interested in it because of a) whether it is healthy long-term; b) what this could mean for our eating habits/nutrition in the future, and; c) potential ramifications for those who are not well off.
Healthy, fresh food ain't cheap, and if something in the future (perhaps not Soylent itself) can alleviate the nutritional side of things it'd be a step forward. Obviously, fresh food shouldn't be restricted only to the wealthy, but I don't think an option would be bad.
There are still a lot of questions about what constitutes a "complete" diet, how much regulation should surround products like Soylent, and so on.
Soylent is a leading application of an analytical/techie approach to the "question" of food (i.e. what do we eat?), which is even bigger than online advertising, electric cars, or video games.
No, you're describing a number of well-established scientific fields along with basic human instinct and intelligence.
Eat food. It has worked quite well for a very long time. There is nothing better to eat than food. No data analysis is required to eat food. Interestingly, any biological creature is capable of eating food. There are a variety of foods that you are capable of digesting, and it's likely that you were introduced to these foods as a young child. You will enjoy eating these foods and they'll manage to help you live out your natural lifespan. Maybe you'd also like to take a vitamin, but it's probably unnecessary and possibly harmful depending on your health status.
Food is fairly simple unless you pretend that it's not.
So food is "simple", yet obviously depending on the type and quantity of food eaten, we consume a different assortment and balance of nutrients. I don't think anyone can argue that there isn't a huge percentage of the population that does a bad job of managing that balance. If that's the case, then Soylent could help those people - more power to them.
If, on the other hand, the body is resilient, and we don't have to be that precise about what we eat (as in, just eat "reasonably healthy" foods and you'll be fine), then soylent should be a reasonable substitute, even if it isn't without flaws.
Either way, they should keep going with their plan - I wish them well.
Personally I hate food: shopping for it, preparing it, and eating it (most times). I'd rather take a pill or chug a drink and be done with it for another 24 hours. Soylent came in and it was a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel (that is, if it's workable)
It's an interesting question, just what nutrients does the human body need in order to sustain itself? We have a good definition of what individual cells need but not a lot of data for how the body copes long term with just those nutrients. My guess is that will power will lose out in the end.
Thank you for answer. I swear I'm not just trolling, but I'd really like to push you a little further on that point. First, I should be clear that I'm not trying to argue with you or convince you of anything. I just want to understand what people are thinking.
Bearing that in mind, would you be so kind as to read on while I make the "Dr. Spock" case against Soylent?
Scientifically, the questions about human nutritional requirements you alluded to were largely answered 70 years ago by British government researchers. They put volunteers on controlled diets, with varying quantities of different micro-nutrients, and studied the effects carefully. It's thanks to their work that Britain avoided mass malnutrition during the war.
As a nutritionist, Rob Rhinehart isn't fit to hold a clipboard for those pioneers. What kind of incompetent neglects to add iron to his initial formulation?
And there's plenty of precedent for these kinds of nutritionally balanced rations, usually developed for military or medical purposes. E.g. check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy'nut. If I were to make my own Soylent, I'd probably use that as my starting point: it's cheaper and better tasting that Rhinehart's formulation. I don't see anyone getting excited over those.
So ... that's the "Dr. Spock" argument. But Dr. Spock wouldn't buy a Rolex, or get a tattoo either, and yet people do.
Whatever the case is for investing in Soylent, it's not rational. It's about your emotions, or it's a status symbol, or a it's statement of identity. Something fuzzy and humanistic.
But what? What is it? I truly don't get it. Can you enlighten me?
Thanks for your answers, guys. I get it now. In hindsight, it's obvious.
It's marketed at people who want to solve two problems:
1. How can I be sure that my diet is healthy?
2. How can I avoid expending so much time, effort and money on food?
And given some of the weird diets I've seen some geeks subsist on ("Only ham and pineapple pizza."), I guess it's not so surprising that some would like the idea.
It's also about safety in numbers. If 10,000 other guys are eating the same formula, you can be pretty confident that any "bugs" are likely to be found and fixed pretty quickly.
In a sense, this is a giant nutritionist experiment. If it's a success, there will probably be a few people who eat almost nothing but Soylent for years on end. Let's see if it keeps them healthy.
Personally, I think soylent, as a daily meal replacement, is a horrible idea but, like a lot of things, it will find it's place.
I'm not sure I understand what point you are trying to make above. The argument (as I read it) is that we studied nutrition 70 years ago, Rob isn't a nutritionist, and there is something else you prefer to soylent so it's irrational and no one should use it? That may be an esoteric argument against soylent and Rob but not the idea of soylent.
If you could theoretically develop a solution that you only needed to drink once a day to get all of the nutrients your body needs and feel satiated, why wouldn't you drink that? You could then spend your time doing other things that are more important to you. While for some people they may prefer preparing and cooking food, which is fine, it's not a substantive argument against soylent for those who view eating differently.
The value people get from eating seems a lot fuzzier and humanistic than soylent, which, to me, seems incredibly robotic and rational.
If it's the case that there are other existing solutions that are simultaneously as {cheap, nutritious, tasty, storable} as Soylent, then the problem is marketing. I don't know about them.
If, however, the existing solutions have a major downside (I would assume cost or taste, but could be wrong), then that's the reason. I wouldn't be surprised if there were existing solutions that just aren't catering to the audience of "silicon valley hipster" and therefore simply getting ignored.
According to your link on Plumpy nut, it's only $60 for 2 months for a child. Even though a 280lb. man certainly needs much more than whatever the amount is for starving children, it still sounds like it would be cheaper than I would normally spend on food even if I just bought groceries and never ate out. So... could I eat that food for 2 months straight and be perfectly healthy (assuming I have the willpower)? Could I reasonably use it as a meal replacement whenever I wanted and not have any negative consequences?
No. Of course not. Plumpy'nut is just an example. But there are formulations for people with digestive ailments, military rations, and so on.
Alternatively, it's perfectly possible to design your own "Soylent style" diet, optimising for cost and convenience. I knew of someone (friend of a friend -- a rather eccentric math teacher) who did that many years ago. A large part of his diet was spaghetti and vitamin pills ... not so different from Soylent, really.
Calcium carbonate, really? Basically, it has some basic nutrients, but most of them are pretty low quality. I'm not sure about you, but I personally get stomach sick even just with 5g of Potassium Gluconate - I can't imagine the (pukey) effect of 15g!
I'm interested to see how Soylent works out in the long run. I've read the articles and blog posts about people going on it for a month at a time and doctors telling them they're perfectly healthy. But how does their health look after 6 months? A year? Several years? That's what I'm interested in hearing about.
So for a couple years I'll still have my suspicions. I hope it works out, though.
I did a random sampling of 3 and it seems to be 100% of the US recommended intake, although I recall them mentioning that even if you only consumed 1/3rd (or 2/3rds?) of the Soylent packet for a day you'd reach your recommended levels, which seems at odds with these figures.
As a european this is what I wonder about most, I'm toying with the idea of ordering Soylent but I'd prefer to get the UK RDA... but it seems that mixing vitamin supplements with Soylent runs the risk of an excess of a number of vitamins (and I'm too lazy to mix my own... maybe I should stick to cooking!)
Extracted via command line, of course: