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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.'"
A real people person ;)
it could be that it's just flat out bad for you.
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Maybe the Gut bacteria found the soylent concoction particularly tasty and were eating more of it than the human, hence the weight loss.
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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.
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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>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.
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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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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.
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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?
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This looks like Soylent Beige.
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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.
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lol, that explains a lot
No it isn't.
FFS. We seem to have this discussion weekly on Slashdot.
A little review of the literature: http://www.ketotic.org/2013/09/the-ketogenic-diet-reverses-indicators.html
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's pure PHYSICS that if you need a certain number of calories, and if you do not consume enough, you will lose weight.
There are several edge cases, things like fiber that your body can't digest (or lactose if you're in the unlucky few). And there are some that some that will suppress your appetite, versus those that stimulate it. But those DON'T MATTER at allon a strictly calorie controlled diet... that's only affects your un-monitored calorie consumption, or possibly your will-power at sticking to the stringent diet.
Absolutely ZERO doctors or scientists will claim you can maintain a healthy weight without consuming the number of calories the math says you need. If there was ANY WAY to do that, the US Military would be paying HUGE amounts of money to get the secret formula that lets them transport half as much food, halfway across the planet (through war-zones) to feed all those hungry soldiers.
The reverse isn't so strictly true, but honestly, there aren't THAT many examples of foods that don't properly digest (like fiber), or that stimulate your metabolism (like caffeine), and they neither cause HUGE effects, nor can they go unnoticed by the person who constantly running to the toilet, and/or who's sweating through winter and can't get to sleep.
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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 actual product being shipped to customers is being prepared in a fully FDA certified and inspected facility. The place where they were making the prototype formula was just that - a place for prototyping.
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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?
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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.)
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.
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But a little rudimentary unit analysis suggests that it's bullshit.
Unit analysis on miles per gallon works out to an area (inverse area, actually), but that doesn't mean its a bullshit figure.
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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.
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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.
What utter nonsense.
At the end of the day, you eat more than you burn = you gain weight; you burn more than you eat, you lose weight.
Do we all burn calories equally? Not really -- our levels of activity, our genetic makeup, our body composition, and many other variables play a role in determining this.
When I'm active, I can eat ~3500-4000 calories a day and I still stay in great shape. When I've fallen off the wagon, I will gain weight at ~2500 calories because I just turn into a lazy mash that couch surfs.
Does blindly counting calories make sense? Of course not -- you have to figure out what *your* threshold is. How many calories do YOU need before you start losing/gaining weight and adjust it from that point on.
But to discount counting calories in its entirety is just rubbish. Because ultimately, if you are not eating more than you burn, where is your body getting the excessive calories from?
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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.
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1) Car engines are extremely strict devices. Talk about turbines, stirling engines, or many others, and there's no problem changing fuels. Your body, similarly, is more than adaptive enough to digest extremely diverse foods, effectively. Steak and lettuce are about as far apart as you can get.
2) I absolutely *did* address exactly this "output" silliness. Read my previous post again, more carefully.
3) I also addressed this, and it's not relevant to this topic at all. In the more general case, I can say that it's only a small effect that definitely can be overcome with simple thought and will-power. But it is an interesting topic that certainly should get more study.
People who claim there are huge differences in calories from foods are just as guilty of misinformation (I'd say even moreso) as those who over simplify it down to pur calorie counts and will power. And in this case, all the other factors you named are not relevant to the topic, in any case.
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Not to go all ad-hominem but could you find a source supporting the Ketogenic diet that isn't called ketotic.org?
It might be a great resource, and their literature review might be unbiased and very high quality. But they could also be a pair of diet evangelists outside of their field of expertise who are cherry picking and misrepresenting studies (intentionally or not).
They could be completely accurate and reliable, but they've also got all the hallmarks of YAIC (Yet Another Internet Crank).
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Sigh ... low carb is nonsense, it is a NAME.
You have to understand what that NAME means.
It does not mean low carb per se, it means: low sugar combined with low fat! If you eat carbs that can easy be converted into sugar *plus* a lot of fat, the fat is not digested but stored in your fat cells. That is a simple matter of insulin level in your blood.
So this: That's why fat Westerners (like myself) do well on low carb high fat diets, whereas low sugar societies (like the Japanese) stay skinny despite having lots of carbs later in life. is complete nonsense and if you become fat or not has nothing to do with your age anyway.
You eat low carb, so the fat is not put into the fat cells. The asians eat low fat AND low sugar, so AGAIN the fat is not put into fat cells, super simple.
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Unit analysis on miles per gallon works out to an area (inverse area, actually), but that doesn't mean its a bullshit figure.
That's because MPG is still related to a physical metric. You can see this better if you think of gallons per mile, whose units are (as you note) an area. Yes -- it would actually be an area precisely equivalent to a cross section of a long thin tube of gasoline stretched out to cover the distance your car goes on that amount of gas. MPG is just the reciprocal of that area. Just because you can't figure out how the units are physically meaningful doesn't mean that they don't actually have a physical representation or correlation to the measurement.
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.
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" 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.
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And as I said repeatedly, if you aren't getting enough calories, it is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE for your body to deposit excess fat.
Nobody ever gets that few calories. If they did, there are all sorts of other health problems the person would be facing. So, you are repeating a hypothetical situation that never happens. Not with trim people. Not with fat people. Not with people who have made fitness the primary focus in their lives. About the only place that you might find this is in third world countries where people are literally starving to death.
It does not mean low carb per se, it means: low sugar combined with low fat!
That right there is absolutely key. Complex carbohydrates and small amounts of sugar consumed with lots of fiber are perfectly healthy. Starchy low-fiber foods are almost as bad as sugar (they're broken down into sugar very rapidly by the digestive system) for you, and sugar is outright terrible if it isn't properly moderated.
If you eat carbs that can easy be converted into sugar *plus* a lot of fat, the fat is not digested but stored in your fat cells.
It's worse than that. If your insulin levels spike high enough your fat cells will happily draw in sugar and make it into fat for long-term storage. Eat all sugar all the time and you'll get just as fat as if you eat a mix of fats and sugars.
You're actually better off eating more fats than carbs (all things in balance, of course, carbohydrate-rich foods are great sources of the nutrients we need) since our bodies have evolved better regulatory systems to deal with fats than starches. And if you're going to eat a lot of carbs, make sure they're in a form that comes with a good amount of fiber, since it slows down digestion and reduces the sock of sugar your system would otherwise receive.
That is a simple matter of insulin level in your blood.
Insulin is probably the most important hormone when it comes to regulating hunger (I've heard this extended to mood in general, though I think that's reaching), metabolism, fat production and storage, and some stages of digestion. Fuck up your insulin levels bad enough for long enough and you'll become fat, lethargic, and eventually diabetic.
Avoid foods which are high in sugar (or starch) and low in fiber. That combination is very common in modern cuisine, but it's been exceedingly rare for the bulk of our species' history, and we're not equipped to gracefully handle it. The digestive system processes the carbs too quickly, and that makes the pancreas overreact with insulin production. The hour or so following the sugar rush gets spent in a state of mild starvation since blood sugar has dropped faster than the body can remove the absurd amount of insulin it had to make (which means that the fat cells spend that time hoarding energy instead of releasing it for consumption) to deal with the sugar spike. The brain notices the low level of energy available in the bloodstream and response by switching hunger back on, despite the fact that the body's energy reserves would soon be released for consumption as insulin levels fall off.
Desserts are awesome, of course, and not much is going to go wrong with you if you indulge in moderation. But if you do this constantly (constantly eating lots white breads, pastas, cookies, drinking sweetened drinks, etc), then you'd better be getting a ridiculous amount of exercise to offset the damage you're doing yourself.
(Of course, people get fats for lots of other reasons besides sugar consumption. I'm not your doctor, I'm just some guy who's had to take care of diabetic friends and family members. If this advice doesn't work for you, see an actual doctor or dietitian. Imagine some other standard disclaimers here.)
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.
When you restrict calories in, the first thing that happens is your body lowers it's energy expenditure by making you tired and lowering non-essential processes in the body. Then it will catabolise muscle, because muscle is more expensive metabolically than fat. Only then will it start to lower fat. You will get to your target weight, but you will have less muscle mass (unhealthy in itself) burning less energy and a body which thinks it's in a state of famine and will drive you to binge eat to increase fat stores whenever food is available. In short you will lose weight but will set yourself up for even more weight gain in the future, or at least a lifetime of chronic stress inducing hunger. This is why 98% of people who do calorie restriction diets fail.
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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.
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.
I know I'm late to the game replying to your post, but is this true? This seems like the exact opposite of what I hear and read a lot. The concept of doing strength training for example, because "muscle burns more calories than fat". In other words, by building muscle you are increasing your RMR. Which is basically completely different than what you said.
Or am I missing something? This is an honest question...I, like many USians, am trying to lose weight.
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The difference between the "at rest" metabolism and "currently exercising" metabolism for the same person is small, but the difference between the "at rest" metabolism for someone who exercises regularly and the "at rest" metabolism for someone who doesn't is large. Changing the "at rest" metabolism is what the exercise is actually for.
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