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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.'"
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.
That's what most people forget about dieting, and where food labels are often misleading. Sure 1 cup of sugar contains the same number of calories as 2 cups of whole wheat pasta (according to Google). But the latter requires much more energy for your body to actually process, and it's questionable if you're body could even get at 100% of that energy, where as with sugar, it would be able to process it very efficiently.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
The blood work tells you pretty well what is and isn't supposed to be in your body (if a given nutrient isn't carried in your blood serum, then nothing gets it)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Reference_ranges_for_blood_tests_-_by_mass.svg
The only problem his had was being D deficient. I think D is one of the most expensive ones to test for (I heard it costs around $500) so I think if they included that in his blood work panel then they were probably very comprehensive in their testing.
With that being the case, it probably is that this isn't (fully) healthy for you in that it doesn't satisfy your D requirements, but that is actually easy to address.
There exists the possibility that this wouldn't satisfy every persons metabolic requirements as well (for example, some people need different amounts of electrolytes such as potassium and sodium than other people, which genetics are known to play a heavy role in) so if/when they do clinical tests they should also isolate based on race and do the same regular blood work throughout the trials.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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!)
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.
Absolutely right. Which means 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.
But it's not used for that generally: instead, it's compared to how much bodyfat one has to determine things like "obesity." Except obesity is usually correlated with a three-dimensional addition of fat onto the body frame, not a two-dimensional one. That leads to the obvious conclusion that the formula will overestimate adiposity (fatness) for tall people, while underestimating it for short people.
My theory has been that the ONLY reason this formula ever got any attention at all is because that very defect makes it applicable for both average men and average women. Women naturally tend to have slightly higher bodyfat than men, and they also are shorter on average. That means that the formula will give similar results in predicting adiposity for women and men of average height. But it will be TERRIBLE for predicting it correctly for men who are short and as tall as the average woman, or women who are as tall or taller than the average man.
All of this does come from basic unit analysis.