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.'"

Comments

Re:Who was eating all those excess calories?

[vux984]

Or more likely he was just dumping them out the other end because, for whatever reason, he couldn't absorb them.

Was the green one the tastiest?

[argee]

According to Charlton Heston and Ernest Robinson ... it was.

Re:Calories

[TechyImmigrant]

>That might be because the whole calorie counting thing is pure BS.

This.

The absence of causality in the CI-CO = dW has been well established for centuries. It was lost briefly in a period between the 1970s and mid 2000s, but I think we're back on track mostly, provided that you don't listen to doctors.
 

Other meal-replacements?

[evilviper]

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.

Re:Who was eating all those excess calories?

[erice]

Maybe the calories were not absorbed. He did say that "my stomach felt like a coil of knotty old rope, slowly tightening". His digestive system wasn't very happy and was likely dumping calories and nutrients out the other end without processing.

People's ability to digest food and absorb it's nutrients is highly variable even without considering major digestive disorders like lactose intolerance and Celiac Disease. Even if it worked for the inventor, that doesn't mean it will work for you.

Re:Calories

[kamapuaa]

BMI was intended as a look at an overall population, however it's generally a good representation of people without really unique body types or lots of muscle.

If your friends had 100 pounds to lose, bringing up BMI worked well for him. BMI is a way of showing that he's what most people would consider obese. You wouldn't use it to decide whether to lose 5 pounds or not, but sure it's accurate to within 100 pounds.

Counting calories is a very effective way to lose/gain weight. Sure you don't know *exactly* how many your body is burning, but if you don't lose or gain weight at 3000 calories, and maintain the same lifestyle, you can be sure that you will lose about a pound a week at 2500 calories, or gain a pound a week at 3500 calories/day. Sure not everybody wants to or has to do that, but it works.

Re:Who was eating all those excess calories?

[icebike]

Pretty much covered by the first respondent.

I had a friend in College from Australia. He found he always had digestive problems returning home for a visit after every semester. A semester was just long enough for his native flora to die off, and it took a day or three of cramps and trots (a bad case of the "dampass" as he called it) to get his gut primed again.

So he got these pills from his doctor, who got them from the military, and would take them on the flight home. They were nothing more than "seed stock" for his gut. This was back in the 60s and apparently Australian Diet of that era was just enough different from American fare that some people had trouble adjusting.

Re:Daniel Tosh was right

[uvajed_ekil]

In poor countries, only the rich can afford to get fat.

In rich countries, only the rich can afford to stay thin.

Nice try at saying something catchy or clever there, but you are very, very wrong. Obesity is in fact a problem in some developing countries, due to poor nutrition (no lack of calories) and a lack of education and/or diet alternatives. And many of us po' folks in the west manage to stay thin on our own, by making informed decisions about what we eat.

And since Daniel Tosh is in the title, I must mention that I think he's not only unfunny but more than a little date rapey, at best. As far as his comedic prowess, he is a master of the lowest common denominator. Sophomoric rubbish. That's not a compliment.

Re:Calories

[evilviper]

" It is only physics in universes where the human body cannot reduce it's work load to use less energy."

Nope. Your body's "at rest" metabolism absolutely dominates. Even a high activity level only BARELY changes the number of calories you need. It takes something on the order of running marathons to significantly change your metabolism. The level of deviation from base metabolism is positively tiny, across a wide range of physical activity levels.

" In fact, you are fooling yourself if you think that different people's bodies don't behave differently with regard to what gets burned vs. what gets stored with the calories they do digest"

This is utter nonsense. There are a few variations, in the form of lactose intolerance and the like, but those are ridiculously obvious. The differences in burning calories versus storing them as fat are not between "people" but between body types. A morbidly obese person who stays on a diet will eventually get the same metabolism and behavior as the skinniest person. If there were these huge differences, they would have shown-up in the endless diestary studies that have been performed. Instead, EVERYONE'S bodies behaveexactly the same to identical diets (eventually). And as I said repeatedly, if you aren't getting enough calories, it is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE for your body to deposit excess fat. You can't build a house out of one sheet of plywood, no matter how much some crazy "diet expoert" has said so, peddeling snakeoilthat's so much more appealing than the boring a difficult calorie constricted diets, that you'll keep coming back, even as you see no lasting results.