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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.
"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.
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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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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.
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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Soylent Green is people.
This looks like Soylent Beige.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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
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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The difference, if you don't doing a quick search or taking a minute to RTFA, is that the substance in question is far more balanced. It is a complete nutrition solution, not a protein or vitamin supplement. Big difference. It looks like it works, and there's no reason it shouldn't completely satisfy a person's nutritional needs, but I like food way, way too much to use it by choice. Of course if I had no access to interesting food I might change my tune, but eating a variety of foods is very pleasurable to most people.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
Check out the nearest meal replacement to this (Ensure) and compare costs, then realize why you're a dumbass.
Seriously, there've been a hundred articles about this just in the past month. Read one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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).
I stole this Sig
Nope. It's old PC towers. Turns out, they DO blend!
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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.
" 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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