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.

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: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.