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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!"
Or more likely he was just dumping them out the other end because, for whatever reason, he couldn't absorb them.
He probably went from an unregulated diet (random food when hungry, different foods each day, plus various snacks as desired, etc) to the highly-regulated soylent concoction (2,400 calories with no variation). It's surprising how much we eat if we add in all the little things that we don't really think about, like extra drinks or whatever.
It's also possible his body simply became more efficient with handling the same number and type of calories each day, rather than store the excess due to normal daily variations in consumption.
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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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.
Soylent Green is people.
This looks like Soylent Beige.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
lol, that explains a lot
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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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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.