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Soylent: No Food For 30 Days
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Senior Editor of Motherboard Brian Merchant went an entire month without eating regular food. Instead, the journalist whisked up a concoction called soylent, an efficient take on the future of nourishment and nutrition. Merchant says: 'It was my second day on Soylent and my stomach felt like a coil of knotty old rope, slowly tightening. I wasn't hungry, but something was off. I was tired, light-headed, low-energy, but my heart was racing. My eyes glazed over as I stared out the window of our rental SUV as we drove over the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge to Oakland. Some of this was nerves, sure. I had twenty-eight days left of my month-long all-Soylent diet—I was attempting to live on the full food replacement longer than anyone besides its inventor—and I felt woozy already. ... By the third week of Soylent, not eating food seemed normal. I saw a doctor, who said I was healthy; I was still losing weight, but nothing serious. Yet, given that a daily mixture of Soylent contains 2,400 calories, both Rob and Dr. Engel thought it was odd that I’d shed so much. Dr. Engel said that given my weight, height, and body mass, I should only require about 1,800 calories a day. I could still be adjusting to the new diet, or I could have such a hyperactive metabolism that before Soylent, I was tearing through hundreds of extra calories per day and staying trim.'"
Seriously, it's people. He knows this, right?
A real people person ;)
it could be that it's just flat out bad for you.
"We wonder why other countries hate us? I love that! We have a game show in our country called "Survivor." Thats a GAME in our country! ...You can win a million dollars for surviving on a place where people already live! Do you realize what kind of message that sends? Not a good one!"
Maybe the Gut bacteria found the soylent concoction particularly tasty and were eating more of it than the human, hence the weight loss.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That might be because the whole calorie counting thing is pure BS. Its all about the glucides baby :) i can tear through 3 eggs + bacon for breakfast and I still lose weight.
some people are going apeshit over the stuff. It's a revolution! They've apparently never been in a supermarket. There is a fucking aisle dedicated to ensure, slim fast, protein shakes, protein bars, etc. I guess it's not disruption if it was done 30 years ago.
Summary notes that he lose weight at 2400 kcal/day, which is relatively high. This is not surprising: fat storage or burning is controlled by insulin, which is controlled in healthy subjects by blood glucose level. If the food does not rise blood glucose level (either because it is low carb, or because it contains carbs that take time to digest), insulin remains low, and fat is burnt.
Could have added some food coloring at least after choosing that name, given its provenance.
But hey, if some Californian dude wants to starve himself by drinking some awful looking concotion, instead of eating, you know, actual food, then the sum total of knowledge gained from human scientific research will have increased by at least the words "what a fool".
Oh, please.. It's food, just not the chewy kind we usually stuff ourselves with.
Dude is over six feet tall. There's no way his maintenance calories was only 1800, 2400 sounds right. For example, if he's a mildly active 170 pounder, this calculator says he should eat 2560 calories a day to break even. Sure maybe I'm guess wrong or he's not active or what have you, but 1800 isn't even in the realm of possibility.
Surely, it's that eating measured amounts of a controlled substance forced him to measure his calories accurately...study after study show that people wildly mis-represent how many calories they consume.
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It takes at least 3 months to determine if a diet is having any effect on you and much longer to determine if it's positive or negative.
In other words, this experiment shows nothing.
According to Charlton Heston and Ernest Robinson ... it was.
When you eat, you are not only feeding yourself. There is an entire ecosystem of bacteria that you are feeding.
All that stuff that is NOT calories, can becomes calories, vitamins, and various other things, depending on your gut bacteria. That is one of the reasons to eat fiber, vegetables, and similar stuff. Gut bacteria is the reason why eating too much meat causes heart disease. Etc. etc.
If you do not feed your gut bacteria, there may be consequences that neither you nor your doctor can understand. And these consequences could be long term and maybe not even easily reversible.
As a summary and FYI, our shit is 50% bacteria (mostly e. coli.) by mass. That bacteria is more critical to our health than almost anything else. And that is why we still eat - to feed that bacteria. Otherwise, we could just live with intravenous system without the need for stomachs and related, messy plumbing.
How is this different from any of the thousands of MRPs(Whey shakes, post workout shakes, etc.) already on the market? Sounds like a gimmicky marketing strategy.
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So... oat flour, corn sugar (maltodextrin), rice protein and olive oil plus a bunch of vitamins and minerals. I don't see how this is much different from those powered breakfast drinks and things like ensure.
Some Australian guy already did this, and the movie is on Netflix.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If you ate Soylent Yellow made from Chinese people, would you be hungry again in an hour?
I don't see how "soylent" is superior to any of the other meal-replacements we've had for the past half-century. In fact, with all the problems people have had adjusting to the soylent diet, it sounds like the old ones were vastly superior.
I've known people who have survived entirely off of items like reliable old Nutrament, after surgical procedures made it too difficult for them to eat *any* solid foods for weeks... I've seen nurses preparing some generic forms of Carnation Instant Breakfast (powder), as meals for their feeble patients. And I've seen kids eating nothing but lots of chocolate milk for days at a time. With none of those do you need to FORCE yourself to consume them, nor do you get gastrointestinal distress after a couple days of use, and you certainly don't waste 1/3rd of the calories you consume.
Of course 30-days is really going to be too short of a time-frame to determine the long-term suitability of any meal-replacement. A little bit of up-front weight-loss sounds like a good thing for a few days, but *months* of losing weight would be a clear sign of a major show-stopping problem with the concoction. The same goes for the nutritional balance, as 30 days without fruits and vegetables won't show obvious medical signs, but would be obvious after months as your whole body turns strange colors...
It seems the only thing Soylent has going for it, is clever marketing and extreme claims, with a name that grabs reporter's attention.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm not usually one to particularly worry about sterile environments etc, "clean enough to be healthy, dirty enough to be happy", but seriously, that factory, and the practices in general, just, nope. That's food poisoning just waiting to happen right there.
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The thing that bugs me the most about this product is that the press is acting like it's something new and unique.
It's not. This sort of thing has been around at least 50 years or so.
Back in the late1950s/early 1960's, scientists from NASA didn't know for sure if man could even swallow in zero-gee. So they concocted a liquid meal that could be pumped into the astronaut's stomach via a gastronasal tube. Now the astronauts didn't want to be fed by a plastic tube going up their nose and into the stomach. And after several Soviet and US flights, it was proved that you can eat and swallow just fine in zero-gee.
The research didn't go to waste. Gastroenterologists and nutritionists became interested in the mixture for special needs patients. Patients that were born with malformed intestines, patients that had lost large parts of their intestines due to disease or injury, patients that couldn't swallow normally, stuff like that. These medical food products have been around for a long time.
Google words like "Vivonex", "Tolerex", "Peptemine", and "elemental diet." Think Ensure, but broken down even more. Not proteins, but amino acids that can be directly absorbed by even the smallest portion of active intestine.
It's a shame journalists today don't bother doing research. Or maybe they aren't journalists? Maybe they're actually spin doctors hoping to cash in?
lol, that explains a lot
This was an article by Steve Hendricks published in Harper's that involves the history of fasting and the authors experience eating nothing for 3(+?) weeks.
Needless to say, if a person can adapt to no food for 3 weeks, 30 days is not enough to evaluate a minimalist diet.
Some people have to live a specially-prepared supplement through a tube, sometimes for years. How is this any different?
But at night I'd had these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zucchini, fettucini or Bulgar wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat!
As I recall there's not even any insoluable fiber in the stuff. Pass.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
but the comments on the vice.com article are just insane. Do people really buy into this crap?
Due to a medical condition I've been living on a liquid food, Jevity 1.5 for over a year and a half. I take in about 1700 calories a day through a tube into my stomach, have maintained a steady 145 for the whole time.
Not having food or drink was very hard at first, a form of torture almost. Be gradually I accepted it. I still spend a good bit of time watching cooking videos. Used to watch the Food Channel for hours a day, something I NEVER did before all food was denied to me.
There are actually some benefits here. My entire food shopping, preparation, intake, and clean up takes about 1/2 hour per day. So I have more time for other things, including watching cooking videos.
http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/12/vice-investigates-soylent-finds-rats-and-mold/
It's being sold as a supplement so they don't have to prepare it in a facility that meets FDA rules for food preparation.
This is a typical food fad fraud organization.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
And this is why Weight Watchers subtracts 4 calories per gram of dietary fiber before dividing by 35 to get the PointsPlus value. It's also how low-carbohydrate foods during the Atkins fad could get away with mentioning attractive "net carb" counts in large type absent an official FDA definition of "low carb".
The early stage of wooziness and cloudiness, and then the later stage of alertness because his body has switched to burning fat cells? So the caloric intake doesn't matter, unless and until he hits more than 25g of carb a day?
I'm sure the product keeps him from starving to death; I'm just not seeing how his doctor saw the fat loss and other things as such a mystery. Is there something I'm missing here?
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
You need stuff like proteins, complex carbohydrates and vitamins to function. Food is not just fuel (calories), it's the building materials needed to conduct running repairs and repel nasties and it took millions of years of evolution to get to where we are now in terms of efficiency. OK, scientific research can lead to cures of specific diseases, etc, but the idea that we can replcace our millenia-old diet with some foul brown sludge is a leap too far for me.
If you want an all-in-one food, it's available. Most drug stores stock "liquid nutrition" drinks which offer a balanced diet. In Japan, such products are popular. Calorie Mate, from Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. "Handy solid type Balance protective foods which gives your lips. Each 100-kcal serving contains Protein, Lipid, Carbohydrate, 6 different types of minerals, 11 different vitamins, Contains dietary fiber." Popular with Japanese salarymen who eat lunch at their desks.
It's not a dimensionless constant, it's M / L^2.
Once you multiply the mass by gravity to get weight, you end up with F / L^2, or pressure units. Assuming the length and width of your feet are proportional to the rest of your body, BMI is proportional to the pressure between the ground and your feet. (Unless, of course, you have no feet.)
Sounds like it's got soy in it. That stuff is an allergen. No wonder his stomach went in knots.
I was wondering about that - doesn't lack of fibre lead to an increase in colon cancers?
I don't think the "inventor" has given enough thought to the complex dance of gut flora (good and bad), macro and micro-nutrients, and the sheer diversity of humans. One size does NOT fit all. For example, if you're somewhat prone to colon cancer (genetically), a healthy diet of conventional food with lots of fibre may be all that's keeping that cancer from developing.
What about the decrease in effort for the digestive system to process "soylent". Wouldn't your digestive tract eventually weaken and degrade from not having enough work to do?
At least he doesn't advocate giving up conventional food completely.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I love food, and I love sharing meals with friends. But many of my meals are purely functional. It would be awesome if there was a meal replacement for those purely functional meals. I hate everything currently on the market that I've tried, it's all too sweet and usually has a strange aftertaste (presumably because of artificial sweeteners or flavors.) If I could replace about 50% of my meals with something like Soylent and still be healthy, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I have no idea if Soylent is a viable meal replacement, nor if it's any better than what's already on the market. But I hope it is.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
$255 per month, for a single person, seems kind of expensive to me.
Not to mention... why bother doing stories on this now, we can't even buy the thing even if we wanted to (well, yes, you can, but won't be getting anything until 2014, and US only)
Shit, even when you're broke there's always the dollar menu. I'd take McDonalds over a glass of snot, any day. I do have to wonder about his dating prospects. "Uh, hey baby, want to come back to my place and drink a glass of that food from The Matrix?" Yeah, that's a pickup line for the ages.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Do the ingredients here have non-food plant or animal sources? Are they actually made of completely synthetic chemicals? If not, then how is this considered *not food* as opposed to *extremely processed,* food fortified with synthetic vitamins, with most food-like characteristics stripped from it? I don't get it.
When I can buy a six pack at wally world let me know.
Exactly -- NASA created the first complete liquid diet (called Vivonex 100) way back in the late 1950s for astronauts. It became a core treatment for infants &kids in a dangerous "failure to thrive" state due to malabsorption or malnutrition (often due to GI defects) and prodded companies to start producing commercial nutrition-replacement beverages. IMHO it's a good example of how NASA's research has helped everyday regular people and even (as in my case)saved lives.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
"Soilin' It" sounds like a more fit name for this drink...
To get below 2200 is pretty impossible, regardless of your body build and daily activity.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Soy contains phytoestrogens, There have been incidents in which men eating mostly soy have started to develop breasts. Wonder if that's a problem with soylent.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
Actually with no fiber, you won't.
The need for carbohydrates has never been established. True, the body needs fuel, but the body can burn fats and protein. The brain is actually designed to run more efficiently on ketones than sugars. People have lived healthily for years on meat-only and mostly meat diets. However, if you don't take in carbs you pretty much need fats and oils for fuel.
I'm more worried about the soy content than anything else; There seems to be strong evidence that lots of soy is antagonistic to testosterone balances.
As for vegetarianism: http://www.amazon.com/The-Vegetarian-Myth-Justice-Sustainability/dp/1604860804 . This is a great basis for lively discussion from a former vegan.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
a slashdot advertisement almost every day.
As long as you get the nutrients you need, its doesn't matter what form it takes. I would rather get those nutrients from a delicious varied diet than drink a few glasses of chalk water daily.
You've never had hot dogs?
Blank until
A U.S. and Russian General are discussing troops rations. The Russian says: "Every day, each soldier consumes 1500 Calories". "Oh yeah?" says the American. "Well, our troops consume 3000 Calories a day." "This is not possible," replies the Russian, "how can one man eat entire sack of potatoes?"
Aren't there some Vitamins in it? Don't we need those?
Note that he also survived 30 days with only H2O and a N2 O2 mixture.
I enjoy eating food, and these assclowns are trying to replace the concept of food with nasty liquid. I consider this a direct assault on my person.
Does Rhinehart know what soylent was made of in the original story. ref
Maybe some of the negativity is based around the reporter's description of a rat leaving the food processing area, and receiving packages which are mouldy.
If a company that has food creation/production as it's prime purpose allows this failure in quality, can you trust the rest of their claims?
Some of the negativity may also be around a closed source model of nutrition (how can I tell what's in the foodstuffs that make up 100% of my nutrition? would I trust one company to be a monopoly on such an essential aspect of my survival?), and I suspect also around the social / psychological aspects of food preparation and consumption.
LOL. You just made my day, sir or madam. :)
I got down to a healthy weight by counting calories (or so I thought). Much later, I decided I wanted to lose more and see my sixpack, so I divided my caloric intake by 3... and gained 25lbs. I'm now overweight again. That is impossible I thought, thermodynamics works! But I realized I was sleeping almost 12hrs a day, and barely moving the rest of it. It seems fairly clear that at least *my* body can save energy. The military studies that indicate the body will not enter starvation mode until you hit 6% body fat no matter how little you eat only worked that way because the soldiers maintained the same level of daily activity. They were forced to. You have to monitor your calories expended, it can vary. The previous time I had lost weight, I had been doing a lot of weight lifting just before cutting calories, and I think my lost weight was a combination of losing a huge amount of muscle mass, and the high number of calories burned by that resting muscle that I had built. So now I'm off building muscle again and eating the number of calories I would expend if I were the weight I want to be, so that I asymptote down to that weight.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I remember a similar story from the late 80s on Australian version of 60 minutes. A couple in the United States were living on a diet of raw chemicals mostly in capsule or powder forms formulated based on the scientific knowledge of the time meet all nutritional needs of the person. I have occasionally wondered what happened to the couple. I never heard about them again and the practice didn't seem to take off.
Dont get me wrong. I practically live on home made juices. But for the life of me, I need solids. So many people are in the same boat with these new wonder diets that are out there, detox or whatever. Many eventually drop the wonder diet because of IBS. I see this no different, sure treat it as a partial suppliment. Like I said cant get enough juice but atleat 1 solid per day ... otherwise the stomach gets lazy because it doesnt need to break anything down, from there it only goes down hill.
Also, unless this guy has fabricated some new chemical that is his food replacement (which he hasn't) then he is using what eveyrone else is using but in different proportions (maybe). It's pretty much a known science what the body needs as far as carbs, protein, vitamins, and minerals are. Ensure and its variants are fairly decent meal replacements (and come in flavors). For dry powder, I like Tru-Food Vegan (http://www.nowfoods.com/Tru-Food-Vegan-Berry-Flavor-2-2lbs.htm) and Vega also makes their version as do many others. These have been on the market way longer and have a reputation. Not some guy who got a million from kickstarter to do exactly the same thing.
It's not impossible, I've been doing it for about 5 months and I've lost 22lbs. I actually have been eating about 2000kcal/day but exercising for about 500, for a net calorie of 1500kcal/day.
I weighed 181lbs and now weigh 158.4 lbs, I'm five feet 8 inches tall.
I can tell you I can more or less comfortably eat less than 1800 kcal/day at the cost of being sort of hungry, not VERY hungry. I assure you it's quite doable. I like the exercise though because it lets me eat more.
All you have to do is not eat junky food, eat more of the less calorie dense foods like fruits and vegetables, and have other things to do in life other than eat--these make managing hunger on less than 2000 calories/day really, really doable. It also helps to track EVERYTHING you eat.
I would call it "moderately hard" not "pretty impossible", and it gets easier when you're talking about 2200 instead of 1800kcal/day.
--PM
BMI might be a good measure of potential for diseases and disorders highly correlated with excess downward "pressure" within the body -- joint problems in the legs, back problems, foot issues, perhaps some circulation issues, etc.
And a lot of these problems are comorbid with obesity or with the type 2 diabetes mellitus that is in turn comorbid with obesity.
Except obesity is usually correlated with a three-dimensional addition of fat onto the body frame, not a two-dimensional one.
At a constant height, body fat is added to the cross-section. I guess that's part of the rationale for the ballpark guess that is BMI.
But it will be TERRIBLE for predicting it correctly for men who are short
Is there a better obesity metric that is as convenient to measure as BMI?
When referring to food, the term "hacking" already has a meaning - and it's not a good one.
This is an old and unbelievably bad idea. Does anyone read history anymore?
btw - I was a PhD at Stanford, so by the rules of "the valley" I have instant credibility. Cower at my awesome hubris!!!
Soylent (red) was made of [b]soy[/b]beans and [b]lent[/b]ils.
Soylent (green) is people.
Come and get your snake oil!
Guaranteed to lose weight or your money back.
Only pay for postage and packing!
My cause drowsiness, fatigue, measles, mumps, unhapiness, the vapours, premature ejaculation, nosebleed, shinsplints, haermorhoids, hare lip, gigantism, ingrowing toenail, flu, syphilis, impetigo, unexplained lesions, a limp, breast growth in men, breast reduction in women, farting, hysteria and baldness.
I doubt this product can cover all the micronutrients your body needs. Fats, fibers, proteins and some vitamins aren't enough. Live entirely off of this stuff, and you're in for dementia at an early age.
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Yes, I will be the first to say, Let us all start eating more pussy!
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
and yet burning calories is a means of weight loss. If you do nothing but burn more calories in a day than you consumed, this amazing thing happens: you lose weight! Takes 5 weeks for the change to occur but it is 100% proven to work.
Just for fun, here's a test ( "Vitamin-D-25-Hydroxy-Blood-Test" ) for about $60.
test writeup excerpt: "You should know your Vitamin D blood level. Life Extension offers a reliable vitamin D blood test at a fraction of what most commercial blood labs charge. Optimal blood levels of vitamin D are often far greater than the standard reference range."
Just as an aside, in case you haven't had your bloodwork done, it can be a useful benchmark health-wise. "Blood Tests A to Z"
Ordering a test this way may be less headache than talking a doctor or insurance company into doing the same.
Some things to consider for Women and Men.
btw - I have no stake in LEF.ORG, I just find their tests and articles useful. Since we are talking Vitamin-D, for example, if you know anyone supplementing calcium then this is worth reading: "Brittle Bones and Hardened Arteries: The Hidden Link".
The thermodynamic model of representing food as energy measured as calories is about as wrong as the stork model for reproduction. Sure a stork could physically bring a baby, but it's just not how things work. One way a body decides whether to store fat is insulin response. How exactly do calories account for that?
The simple equation for computing calories needed by a given person based on their weight, height and gender has been long debunked.
I don't think I could do longer than a day without "real" food. Ugh. I hope I die before soylent is necessary.
Just in case you don't know, in the book, Soylent Green was discovered to be made out of People !
Bad choice of names...