First, EGFR is not "Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor", rather is it estimated glomerular filtration rate, which is a metric of kidney function and is derived entirely from age, sex, and Cr.

Second, all his labs are normal, well within the range of normal and stay normal after two weeks. There is normal daily fluctuation (for example, my Cr will probably go from 1 to 1.2 just by not drinking water for a day) which the labs show. All the changes he mention in his metabolic panel does not even register to me as changes and most likely would happen had he ate a regular diet.

Third, the body is a powerfully homeostatic system, even had he not ate for two weeks, most of the labs he got would stay the same. Recently, on HN there was the article of the guy who didn't eat for a year - his BMP would have been similar. The only potentially reasonable medical test to get would have been the lipid panel, which stayed grossly the same.

Finally, a DEXA scan is really silly in this scenario. It's for old ladies and others at risk for osteoporosis. Your bones are a large of reservoir that it wouldn't put a dent on your Ca levels even if you had no Ca for two weeks, and even if it did, it would not show up as a meaningful change on a DEXA scan.

Not: "we're a large company with deeply-interested professionals who've made this their life's work, our own multi-million dollar labs and decades of accumulated experience in the development, testing, validation and manufacture of temporary food substitutes". Because that's boooorrrrinnnng.

Basically it's getting buzz because of novelty (to people who didn't know there were existing products) and homophily (Rhinehart is "one of us").

The actual product is at this point nearly completely tangential to the marketing.

It's a bit like a dietitian bursting in and saying "I've invented a new thing, I call it 'computertalk'. What you do is you 'type' your 'instructions' into your computer. It's going to change everything, you won't need programmers any more!"

Why do those ads use "school teachers"? Because it is relatable to the target audience and sufficiently anti-authoritarian that they don't question the credentials.

I'm not for or against Soylent, and I usually find this kind of advertising annoying, but it's also entirely possible that people further down the chain of command in any system discover things that people higher-up won't or can't.

That's part of the entire premise of why startups work, no?

Here we're talking about people who aren't even in the same system!

Einstein was someone who went up the academic course for physics, but had a brief detour during a jobless interval. I imagine many of us here can relate to that. He's not some sort of quintessential outsider.

(He's not a quintessential insider either; while the rumors about his poor grades are overstated, he did have a rough relationship with any academic subject he didn't really care about. He certainly wasn't the valedictorian type or a groomed, perfect academic from tip to toe. But neither was he an outsider. He's just an average everyday genius who combined tons of hard work with immense native talent.)

I think it's not because it sounds boring but because it sounds like a marketing bullshit. Guy in a suit tells you "trust us, we have a whole basement of experts and years of experience" but when you check them out, the company was funded few months ago and only one employee doesn't have some sort of "manager" or "director" in his job title.

I guess openness of soylent and creator's low experience in bullshitting is what makes it attractive. Those of us who eat to live don't expect much from industry after McDonalds and sugar everywhere but we still desperately hope for something better. That hopes fuels enthusiasm for soylent.

But this is an aspect of the large nutrition companies that can be checked out. Unless you're talking about the other companies.

They do have a lot of people with respected qualifications working for them; they do produce all these different products.

The bullshit with these companies is that they push multivitamins as useful for everyone, when really there's a limited market. They push a bunch of other stuff as useful for all kinds of conditions, when really the evidence is weak at best.

> Those of us who eat to live don't expect much from industry after McDonalds and sugar everywhere but we still desperately hope for something better. That hopes fuels enthusiasm for soylent.

That's fair enough. It's your body, and you can make your own choices. You know that as well as Soylent there are a bunch of these liquid feeding products, so if you wanted to experiment now you can?

Sometimes a fresh set of eyes are valuable, because the industry culture has developed some pathologies. Sugar in the food industry is a prime example.

And sometimes, it's just a cover for charlatans.

you don't need to know about dietary supplements or supply chain management to understand the rhetorical distinctions.

I want to be able to take a good fuel for my body and indulge in great food whenever I want.

I want to be able to back-pack for a week with only a 4-pound food supply.

Then eat some meat and some vegetables.

> I want to be able to back-pack for a week with only a 4-pound food supply.

Then take trail mix.

P.S.: I am currently eating Chicken I made with a side of snap-peas from my garden. I do what you say already -- I just also want an alternative which has incredible shelf-life, portability, cost-benefit, etc. etc. etc.

By the way -- there are such alternatives already available. Have you bought any before?

https://www.google.com/search?q=meal+replacement+shakes

Almost all of them are marketed to the diet crowd. There are a bunch of 'atkins' branded bars, too, if you are going the low-carb route. Slim-fast, I know, can be had in giant tubs for relatively little money per serving; I remember as a kid, looking through my grandparent's pantry and finding a giant tub of slim-fast.

This is a huge industry. I mean, sure, marketing it to hackers is a new thing, and something I, personally, would have never considered, and the guy is doing a hell of a job of it, but yeah; the product itself is nothing new, even if he's selling to a group that has not yet been targeted.

Really, it's textbook. He's using his ties and understanding of a subculture demographic to market to it specifically.

Sure, but the execution (to me) looks good. He is doing a way better job, for example, than I've done at marketing VPSs - a product that is much more natural to this market. Better, I think, than I did even back when I had a compelling price advantage over the competition.

I actually kinda like the McDonald's salads. I mean, as far as you can like fast food at all. If you go easy on the dressing, (the dressing comes in a package that looks like a giant-size katsup packet, so you get to decide how much you eat.) I think it's probably pretty healthy, I mean, at least when you compare to shakes.

I have used meal-replacement shakes in the past as supplemental breakfast; I like to load up on calories in the morning, but eating can be... hard before my system wakes up, so the meal-replacement shakes (with as much breakfast as I can choke down) is a reasonable way to consume as many calories as I can in the morning.

Of course, for me? meal-replacement shakes have never quelled hunger like real food, so I'm no longer using them just because I'm trying to reduce the number of calories I consume. If I eat something, it had better make me feel not hungry for a good long time. I'm having the best luck with meat and vegetables... the carbohydrates tend to make me hungry shortly afterwards. On the other hand, I have not lost significant weight. (I vary from 200 to 195#, and that has been true for some time now. As far as I can tell, most of that 5# is either water gain or loss, or inaccuracy of my cheap bathroom scale.) so "you shall know him by his fruits" - don't take my advice on losing weight, as I've not managed to do so myself.

Also, a big, sarcastic thanks. after that 'meal replacement shake' query on google, now just about every webpage I load is trying to sell me some sort of 'optimized nutrition' (Google seems to get that I'm male-identified and thus is trying to sell me the shakes targeted at 'building lean muscle' - you know, the stuff with the rippling abs on the can. Google does not seem to be smart enough to notice that I quite often google things I don't intend to buy. Really, books on what I'm searching for are usually more appropriate than products I'm searching for. Not that I often buy books through ads... but it's more likely than me buying nutrition shakes targeted at bodybuilders.)

About the targeting, either use incognito mode or opt out of targeted advertising (it's in your Google account preferences).

Fibre and protein can increase the satiety of a drink, though.

I've also started doing slow-cooker pork. I pan fry it when I'm done, and it comes out kind of somewhere between pulled pork and carnitas. I slow-cooked a bunch of boneless beef short ribs last night, I haven't tried them yet. more expensive per pound, but short ribs are so good.

Especially if I cook something in sauce (like chili) I put it in little ziplock baggies and freeze it.

Personally? I dismiss those claims as marketing fluff. I am not competent to evaluate those claims; I'm not saying that the guy is lying or anything, soylent may in fact be perfect. I don't know. but the claims sound so out there that I don't think they are worth evaluating. I am treating them as marketing fluff until/unless credible people do a credible study.

I suspect that none of the other meal replacement drinks make such claims due to fear of legal liability. "A delicious shake for breakfast, lunch, and a sensible dinner" is the standard formula, which is reasonable; I'm sure Soylent would work just fine on a similar plan. (hell, for most of us, water would work just fine.)

I bet that as Soylent accumulates money (and lawyers) they will move towards a model where they emphasize 'And a sensible dinner'

And really, if you think that the RDA is good enough, just take your vitamin pills.

Or do we all just think that because of the original blog post?

The number of bad habits I engage in over my days is one thing, I am not about to jump from fad to fad in hopes of out smarting the medical community.

That's doable already. 4-pounds of dehydrated food will last you a week, and has the advantage that you get to eat something different for every meal.

Would you care to link to where people can purchase these existing products? It seems that every time someone makes that claim they are either referring to medical products not available to the public, or to crap like MET-Rx that doesn't provide a complete, balanced micro nutrient profile.

Very few of these products are prescription only or even pharmacy only products. It is possible to persuade companies to sell to individuals. To answer your question - Ensure brand includes complete meal replacement products; the Fortisip range also includes suitable products. There are a bunch of others but these are easiest to obtain.

Most companies are very careful about selling these products. Some people think that's a good thing.

Enshure: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes click buy online from the product page.

Fortisip: http://www.fortisipdrink.co.uk/. Again, click the buy online link from there homepage. (Though I think this is a UK brand.)

PS: You can find a wide product range at http://abbottstore.com/

No, that's almost exactly what these products are designed for.

EX: Similac, Complete nutrition for your baby's first year.

It should be noted that most of these are balanced nutritionally but not calorie wise because it's easy to backfill empty calories with soda etc and people generally drink quite a few extra calories. But, you really can live off of ensure complete and empty calories or just ensure if you don't mind spending more money.

How is 13% of one micronutrient and 65% of another balanced? In order to get complete micronutrient coverage from ensure, you have to drink 5 a day, putting you at risk of overexposure to manganese assuming you drink water still.

http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/DRI/DRI_Vitamin_A/394-419_150.p...

The Manganease recommendation is based on observed western diets not actual need. From existing studies it looks like there is a fairly wide tolerable range for Manganease with some people needing quite a bit to maintain Manganease levels. Anyway, 5x ensure is well within the 'Tolerable Upper Limit' and thus Not an issue.

Edit: If it's really bothering you. Ambient manganese concentrations in seawater have been reported to range from 0.4 to 10 μg/l (ATSDR, 2000), with an average of about 2 μg/l (Barceloux, 1999). Levels in fresh water typically range from 1 to 200 μg/l (Barceloux, 1999). ATSDR (2000) reported that a river water survey in the USA found dissolved manganese levels ranging from <11 to >51 μg/l. The United States Geological Survey’s National Water Quality Assessment Program has gathered limited data since 1991 on representative study basins around the USA. These data indicate a median manganese level of 16 μg/l in surface waters, with 99th-percentile concentrations of 400–800 μg/l (Leahy & Thompson, 1994; USGS, 2001). Higher levels in aerobic waters are usually associated with industrial pollution.. (http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/chemicals/man...)

So, again there may be people that need to be consurned to it's less than 1% of the population and they can get buy by drinking bottled water if nothing else.

You keep making this claim and it is just not true.

And no, this is not an "every opinion deserves equal airtime" claim. The vast majority of nutrition and health experts draw on a mix of science, pseudo science and superstition, and assume it is all science.

(Quick check: Think salt intake causes hypertension? That dietary cholesterol (and cholesterol in general) is bad for you? That you can only get B-12 from meat, or that cows make it? If you answered "yes", your answers are not based on science)

When someone who isn't trained at all in a field claims to have made a revolutionary advance in that field, the rational response for a non-subject-matter-expert member of the public is deep skepticism. The discovery might indeed be revolutionary, but the way we find out is by running proper scientific tests on it, not by pioneering the revolution.

The rational objective news angle on this is as a human interest story. Until a proper, falsifiable scientific test is at least planned, this project is genuinely interesting, but has no scientific merit.

(FWIW, health advice condensed into headline "do" and "don't" edicts is bad science reporting as well)

Human nutritional science is HORRIBLE from a "meta-science" perspective. Gary Taubes, who admittedly is a bit of a one trick pony, has written extensively on the failings of the nutritional scientific community to adequately fund real, controlled studies that test out poorly performing hypothesies that have been taken as gospel.

Eggs are good for you now, but a few years ago every doctor was saying they were bad for you, along with butter. Why is that? Because nutritional science SUCKS. The general public thinks that eating a serving of bacon is worse for their body than eating a serving of raisin bran. The actual data shows that the opposite is true. The fault for this lies 100% with the nutritional science community in the United States.

As a person who fell victim to their bullshit for years until I tried the Atkins diet (tons of green vegetables, meat, minimal carbs/sugar) and subsequently lost weight, improved my blood profile (HDL went up, triglycerides went down, LDL decreased slightly) and all the while going against the conventional wisdom on diet. I tried low fat, I tried vegetarian/vegan, none of it worked. It was scientifically unproven bullshit due to a flawed scientific community embedded in the study of human nutrition.

I'm not saying reject the scientific credentials of individuals in the community. I'm saying reject the establishment. They have repeatedly failed the public, so fuck em.

What most people don't realize is that their gut is probably the single thing with the biggest influence on nutrition, and it is practically its own goddamn biome. Also, what we know of human metabolism would fill an entire wall with an intricate nightmare spaghetti chart, and that would be the abridged version.

At this point, the only viable way to proceed is to continue research and empirical data on large populations. This is why traditional diets and whole foods win, because we already have a lot of data.

Most of the criticism directed at soylent is of "this doesn't seem right" variety, rather than the "this detail is wrong" variety. The latter is what I read the discussions for. The former is a waste of bits.

And the response in question is not deep skepticism, but equally non-scientific and inaccurate nonsense. "Soylent will kill you because you need the magic spirits of whole foods!" is not skepticism, it is bullshit.

Well, maybe "meat sources (dairy products under the umbrella) are the only significant source of B-12 without supplementation" is more accurate.

Cereals are "fortified" so I count that as supplementation.

Sure, many yeasts contains B-12 too, some quite a bit. I'd even agree that it is significant, but it doesn't occur in foods people normally eat (maybe a guess here, but if that were true, vegans wouldn't need to supplement with yeast, etc), so it's taken as a supplemnt.

After the discovery of antibiotics, many people in the western world became B12 deficient - especially vegetarians. However cows and other animals are just as incapable of making it - and in the last 30 years or so, just as deficient as humans, as they've also been getting lots of antibiotics.

So we give them supplements. Thus they have enough B12, and meat eaters do too. According to some estimates, 80% of the world's B12 production goes to animals these days. So, likely, your B12 coming from meat is still from supplement, albeit one given to your hamburger while it was still alive.

I have no dietary sources of B12, and yet have good levels, way above population average. You might call me a liar, more then one MD did. But they usually apologize if they actually research this (Wikipedia B12 has enough info)

Anyway, my guess is you are in your early to mid twenties, and probably have only been a vegan for a handful of years, am I right? Give it 20, 30 years and lets see if your B12 levels are still good.

I've never heard of a study claiming B12 in animals in vivo is not synthesized by bacteria (or archaea). Care to give a reference?

> sorry, It's a fallacy, but I don't like getting my "facts" from programmers and Wikipedia

Programmers, ok. Wikipedia - why? and "dieticians and health professionals" - sorry, most of them have no idea what they are talking about - they are just parroting what they learned. You admit yourself it is a fallacy. What's the point then?

> Anyway, my guess is you are in your early to mid twenties, and probably have only been a vegan for a handful of years, am I right? Give it 20, 30 years and lets see if your B12 levels are still good.

Your guess is very wrong. Been vegetarian for over 35 years (only a few years of those vegan, but not having a B12 source in almost any). And my B12 levels are very good, although they weren't in the past.

That's not what I was referring to. I'm referring to the (implied) claim that the B12 synthisized in our gut by bacteria is available to us.

Wikipedia doesn't support that claim, and Wikipedia is editable by anybody, so while it's mostly trustworthy, if a heavy portion of the editors have a bias, it's going to show in an article that is heavyily political/quasi-relisious like veganism. Or vice versa if Wikipedia editors are heavily carnivorous (e.g Atkins) and hate vegans or something like that.

"Been vegetarian for over 35 years (only a few years of those vegan, but not having a B12 source in almost any)."

Well, I don't know you, and can only assume you aren't lying or bending the truth, so I'll say that it is possible you are an outlier. In a cursory search yesterday (a couple hours only) I found references on both sides of the fence claiming that we can use B12 synthisized in our gut, and about the same number of sources saying we couldn't.

Who to believe in such a hot, political topic. A guy with an axe to grind (vegan trying to defend/promote his lifestyle) or the fact that there seems to be no concensious in the sciencific community?

If you can actually link to them, I would be grateful. I can only find yahoo-answers style discussions that claim people cannot.

> A guy with an axe to grind (vegan trying to defend/promote his lifestyle) or the fact that there seems to be no concensious in the sciencific community?

You are making an awful lot of assumptions about me. I'm not a vegan (I was for a few short years; I've been vegetarian for 35 though). And I more often in these discussions advocate against veganism and vegetarianism because even though they can be very healthy, most people do them wrong - and if you can't stand your ground with science in these discussions, you shouldn't be vegan.

And about consensus in the scientific community - I believe I have science backing me here, but let's put it aside - I gave two other examples in which the (so-called) scientific consensus is provably wrong (and others mentioned egg consumption). Personally, I'm not ignoring scientific consensus on everything and try to look at the details. Follow the common/average belief, and you get common/average results. If you like mediocrity, all power to you.

Could you link to a few relevant medical studies?

The causal relationship between salt and blood pressure appears to have historically been under debate. I don't however think it should be so readily dismissed as not backed by "Science". In fact the evidence appears to suggest that there is now little to debate.

A study called INTERSALT [1] in the late 1980s appears to have muddied the waters, and is often brought up. It supported the causal link - but was subsequently seen to be the victim of poor statistical analysis.

This seems to have been the theme of those arguing pro-salt, finding flaws in studies. Fair game - but it doesn't disprove the link. More recently though the general consensus seems to be that a long term reduction sodium has a measurable and beneficial impact on BP[2]. A key study in demonstrating the link was the DASH-Sodium study, a randomized controlled trial [3].

The Harvard School of Public Health has some great articles[4][5] discussing the "Salt Debate" and points to a number of papers.

Personally, having taken time to read (and understand what I can), I think the evidence supporting is pretty compelling so have reduced the levels of sodium in my diet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersalt_study [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23558162 [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11136953?dopt=Citation [4] http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2010/07/10/its-t... [5] http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-and-heart-d...

However, iirc (can't review now), the data supports the following:

A) on average, if hypertension, reducing salt reduces blood pressure. But so does adding potassium.

B) despite that, there is a population with hypertension for which salt reduction does not reduce blood pressure.

C) In healthy individuals, increase of salt intake increases blood pressure slightly, but does not get to the hypertension realm.

But the often repeated meme "salt causes hypertension" is not supported by data. Furthermore, sodium deficiency is a serious condition, which was practically unheard of before the low sodium craze.

Have a look at the relationship between potassium/nacl and Blood pressure.

TLDR: Focus on unprocessed foods and foods you like that are rich in potassium. Lower your bodyfat percentage and exercise in same fashion regularly.

Analogy: peanut allergy is not caused by peanuts. But if you have it, you should avoid peanuts. It is possible that your hypertension is related to salt intake, in which the advice to cut back on salt is a good advice. But that's not generally true - not any more than general the advice to avoid peanuts is good.

Maybe "no human" is over stating it.... I could easily just slot "the vast majority of intelligent adult humans" into the sentence and it should still be mind blowing.

People have used their brains to explain nuclear physics, create a network of computers which spans the globe and landed a man on the moon. Yet no one can clearly tell me what I should be fueling my brain and body with?

One of the worst parts is watching how ill equipped most of society is to detect something is off-kilter. This pretty much applies to anything requiring technical understanding beyond that required to visit a mall.

As the author himself, I can corroborate your statement that I don't understand medical tests as well as a trained physician. :) However, the point of the post was to present the data so others could interpret / draw conclusions. I gave my observations and perspective, but I made every attempt to indicate the potential weaknesses in my experiment. I do hope people don't lose miss the forest for the trees here.

The EGFR thing is regrettable. Thanks for pointing it out!

If you want to call something an experiment, you should know how to conduct an experiment in that respective field. Your experiences only show how a product like Soylent induces magical thinking in its consumers.

If you want to produce a single data point with Soylent (that would hardly be relevant, as it would be a sampling size of one, but still, it would be one sampling of data rather than zero), eat nothing but Soylent for at least 6 months.

Of course it was "an experiment" but that doesn't mean you can automatically draw useful or even valid conclusions from it. If I ate nothing but peas for a day, my "experiment" wouldn't say much (if anything) about the effects of a pea-only diet on the human body, but if I did it for a year, I might get some useful data. Except that would still only be the effects of peas on my body, and may not generalise to other humans anyway.

That's why clinical trials are running in double-blind modes, to remove as much as possible the placebo effect. A self-assessed experiment is, and will always be, meaningless.

You could provide a different meal replacement powder and compare the results (provided the subjects don't know which one looks like what)

Yeah, you could at least do that.

1. Read the article

2. Analyze. Establish your position/beliefs

3. Read the comments

4. Adjust your beliefs in the light of new evidence

:)

I have nothing against Tim Ferriss in general. I think he's an interesting character, and in a weird way, he's to be commended for his exceptional skill at self promotion. He's sort of our generation's equivalent of P.T. Barnum. And occasionally he'll even make a really insightful point. But I take at least 70% of what he says with a grain of salt.

EDIT: It wasn't my intention to offend if that was the reason behind the downvotes. It wasn't about anybody specifically, I was just trying to elaborate on a slippery slope issue that seems to be common among smart people.

Imagine if there was a new drug that gave the mental benefits the guy reported after two weeks of use and saved you money too. It would be front page news.

The guy doesn't claim to be a medical expert, he just did his best to report the results of a bunch of miscellaneous tests that were suggested to him.

With a drug for which if you took 40x the daily dose you might die, or a drug that might cause significant harmful side effects at normal dose, you need careful studies to prove a benefit and quantify risks. With a dietary change, the risks are orders of magnitude lower. I'd be surprised if the average American wouldn't improve their nutritional status doing this for a while, with an existing diet likely low in magnesium, copper, zinc, vitamin c and d and probably more.

The need for careful studies is greatly reduced for a food product like this one. People can try it, report how they feel. If other think is worth trying, they can see exactly how it works for them by giving it a try. That is the power of self experimentation.

I'm not trying to refute what he says about how he feels, whether that saves him money, or his mental ability - those aren't my areas of expertise. I do know a little about medical tests, and I think it's valid to point out that he clearly does not and how the results he reports are either incorrect or irrelevant. I'm just suggesting you shouldn't consider his medical tests in deciding how good this product is.

I have no horse in this race, but I'll tell you if this racetrack is not standard regulation. Self experimentation might be useful, but only if you understand the metrics you measure and whether it's stochastic noise or meaningful results.

Perception is different from reality, as exemplified by an Apple anecdote:

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

- Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.

- The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

Interesting article. I'm sure the $50M in studies were of non-power users, though, and so irrelevant for developers with sufficiently powerful keyboard shortcuts.

I can guarantee it doesn't take me 2 seconds for my top 20 keyboard shortcuts, any more than it takes 2 seconds for me to hit "return" at the end of a line, or to move around with arrow keys. That said, I frequently use the mouse as well, and always prefer to work in a GUI instead of a text-mode editor.

What I found most revealing, though, was the admission that part of the problem was the awkward location of the command key. Whenever I'm on a Mac I end up remapping it so that I can hit Control (in the corner of the keyboard) -- Control-ZXCV are all easier to hit than Command-ZXCV.

Which just goes to prove that most studies are wrong [1], or at least can't always be generalized.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

From observing developers I've worked with over the years, I doubt most developers know more keyboard shortcuts than "normal people".

In fact, I've come to realise just how appallingly bad most of us are at using our tools.

I don't disagree. I know developers who use Notepad to develop, which boggles the mind.

In fact, I don't know why I bothered posting. I'm enough of an outlier in keyboard performance that, even if I'm right, it proves nothing. I've had many developers' jaws hit the floor as they watch over my shoulder. I've even shocked vi and emacs users into no longer trying to convince me their ways were better.

Maybe I should teach a class on how to use a GUI efficiently.

Without measuring it A/B I cannot guarantee anything. Those people were just as sure. And I don't think they were keyboard un-savvy -- at that point in computing, they were far more proficient with a keyboard (AppleII etc) than a mouse.

You don't need to guarantee anything; I know my navigation and coding are way faster my way than if I were to ignore my shortcuts.

>And I don't think they were keyboard un-savvy

As a sister comment to your mentions, MOST users, even developers, are still extremely limited in the number of keyboard shortcuts they use. I'm an outlier.

If I want to save, my fingers hit Ctrl-S before I could even FIND where the mouse pointer is on the screen. Same with Ctrl-A for Select All. Or Shift-Ctrl-Left for select the previous word. No A-B testing required; it's seconds using the mouse for any of those, and 300-700ms for the keyboard.

And those aren't even my most powerful shortcuts; they're just the ones ANYONE can use on Windows. If you get into "complete this word from [above/below] in this file", "jump to definition of this function" or "show references for this function", or "jump to previous bookmark", or "set bookmark" even, all of these are sub-500ms key sequences that would all take longer than a second if I had to use a mouse. It's not even close.

Part of the problem with the study is that it was comparing using shortcuts vs. mouse on the Mac, where shortcuts are far less useful than they are on Windows. Navigating through menus by keyboard is easier for me with the keyboard on Windows as well; that's not even an option on Mac.

No, no you don't. That's the whole point of doing scientific experiments. Your brain is very, very, extremely bad at judging objectively. Any subjective "test" is simply no test at all.

> Also, numbers like weight and computer mental agility tests also can be quite reliable if you are consistent in your testing...

That's a pretty big 'if', plus a 'can' and a 'quite'.

> ...and they aren't subject to misinterpretation or wishful thinking

That's the whole point of the OT in this discussion thread. They very much clearly are subject to misinterpretation. A zillion factors can impact weight and "mental agility".

People aren't lab rats because they don't live in labs and aren't rats.

> Below, skore is skeptical that a person can notice a significant change to their own health.

Yes, a point which still stands.

> Roberts studies rats, and he is the ultimate human rat.

No, Robert might be the ultimate rat conducting experiments on himself. He cannot be his own lab rat, he can only be running his own asylum.

> He records many subjective measures qualitatively, and feels he has made some significant discoveries doing so.

That sums it up perfectly. I suppose all this boils down to is whether you want your science science-y or feel-y. I prefer the science science. Because while I trust them in many things, I don't trust human emotions when making important decisions that are supposed to influence millions over millions of other humans.

I don't know Seth Roberts and I hope I don't come across as overly disrespectful. I'm not saying that it's impossible to make scientific discoveries this way. The problem is that any discovery you make is N=1 and as far away from a double-blind trial as it can be. So this might be an important tool to pre-select what you want to concentrate your actual science on.

But as with the Soylent stuff, I would never in a million years base my own health decisions on some quantified self guy on the internet.

This is exactly why we have science: people have prior beliefs that affect how they perceive the thing they're trying to measure. People cannot objectively judge their own health in response to a variable. There are thousands of placebo studies that demonstrate this.

You mean like the people who take homeopathic 'medicine'? They know. They're wrong, but they know.

I found this drug that makes me feel way relaxed and totally content with the world. I don't do anything while on the drug, 'cause life's great just sitting here on the couch. As a consequence of sitting on my couch enjoying my great life, I don't spend any money, so I'm totally saving compared to before I took this drug. Pass the joint, man.

I'm legitimately not sure if your argument in this thread is serious. You are basically recommending we throw out any pretensions of objectivity or science or knowledge in favor of "do what you feel".

Not so. Mental agility, weight, blood pressure are all easy and inexpensive to track.

A person's perception of how well they slept, overall feeling of well being, etc., can also be tracked if they are careful to quantify and record them.

I think you underestimate the power of carefully recorded data, which is at the core of the quantified self movement.

>If your aim is for improved mental function, more energy, less health problems, etc., you don't need to know how to interpret any obscure tests. You'll know.

The above directly contradicts your most recent reply, since it obviously precludes the possibility of any meaningful quantification.

"Screw the tests, you'll know" is precisely the opposite of objective analysis. We'll know what? Nothing objective, that's for sure.

Since you appear to be arguing both for and against quantified self-style living in this thread, I can't help but wonder what your angle is. Are you actually just arguing for Soylent? Your position makes no sense, but you're enthusiastically defending the product, and you've done it in prior threads about Soylent, too.

Many argue against Soylent by arguing that we need some careful studies before anyone should try it. I think that is overkill for a food product like Soylent.

As for how to tell if Soylent or anything else is helping you, big changes should be obvious, smaller changes would require careful quantified-self style tracking to detect. Sorry if I wasn't more clear, but by obscure test I'm referring to blood work and other harder to interpret tests. Easy to interpret tests are reaction time, weight, fast arithmetic tests for mental agility, as well as recording qualitative feelings of health quantitatively, in a consistent and rigorous manner.

Edit:

As for this article on the Soylent trial, my take was it had "some promising initial signs given the short duration of the trial". Hardly blind enthusiasm.

I'd like to see some proper triple-blind studies involving people who haven't strongly invested themselves in the outcome.

People will see in this what they want to see. This is why case reports are evidence of the lowest grade. This is more a curio than it is evidence, and there is nothing wrong with writing a blog post about a curio.

1 = I think the creatinine bump is quite likely due to stochastic fluctuation, but if for discussion's sake we attribute all positive changes to Soylent, we should do the same for the negative ones.

It could be just fluctuating in his case, or it could very well be, given his past diet (how could he survive on that), that he was finally getting decent amounts of protein.

For creatinine, there is peer-reviewed data demonstrating that in people without renal disease, increasing the protein in your diet tends to improve your eGFR, not decrease it (which is what happened here). So for him, it either fluctuated or was a marker of true kidney disease, but in any case this is not just a marker of adequate protein intake.

Also, while you may very well be right that GFR would improve, the little bits of reading I've had time to do indicates that unless they did eGFR by measuring his urine over 24 hours, then they likely estimated it from his creatinine levels, and so anything increasing creatinine levels would presumably cause the eGFR value to drop whether or not the increased creatinine levels are due to renal function or anything else.

Also, creatinine is measured in serum to estimate gfr. Urine creatinine is more used as part of a test to look for nephrotic syndrome.

Creatinine is produced constantly, filtered and not resorbed, without active secretion, which is why it is an excellent proxy for glomerular filtration rate.

The article doesn't give many details, but it looks like changes in diet can be dangerous.

Of course changes in diet can be dangerous (you just try switching to an all cyanide diet).

But "liquid protein products"? Like milk? Or protein shakes? There are certainly plenty of "liquid protein products" on the market, and heavily used, and tons more protein products sold as powders to be mixed with water, milk or juice by consumers.

Somehow we don't have weightlifters dropping like flies.

It is far easier to stomach large amounts of protein (due to taste and consistency) when mixed with a lot of carbs than alone, and unless you're cutting you generally need a lot of carbs too when training hard, so there's little incentive for most general protein supplements to keep carbs down.

In fact, there are a large number of protein supplements on the market where the majority of calories comes from carbs and fat, and many will have more carbs alone by weight than protein (many often also are specifically advertised for weight gain / bulking).

They are still commonly referred to as protein products because the main basis for calling something a protein supplement amongst suppliers and people using them is generally large amounts of protein, not low amounts of carbs and fats. (And yes, that means some of them - intentionally - have massive amounts of calories)

You also probably talk about "pure" milk, but there's also a number of milk products on the market that are milk + extra casein extracted from milk, for very high protein concentrations - my favourite has about 40g of protein per 300ml; you are free to not accept that as "milk", but it tastes like milk and is generally marketed as "protein milk" or similar.

But milk alone is also frequently used by weight lifters for the decent protein content and good ration of protein, carbs and fat (a well known "supplemental diet" for bulking for lifters is called GOMAD: Gallon Of Milk A Day)

The main point being that large amounts of protein is being ingested in liquid form every day all around the world, and has been for decades, and we're not seeing mass deaths.

Barring actual evidence to the contrary, there's very little reason to believe that the deaths referenced in the article had anything to do with getting "liquid protein", and very good reasons to believe it was hysteria.

He used

> Finally, I took some tests on Quantified-Mind.com to measure my mental alertness while I was eating my typical diet of burritos and Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi. In this way, I could try to reproduce Rhinehart’s claim that Soylent improves mental acuity.

Those tests tend to exhibit substantial practice effects until you've done them a lot.

And then there's the obvious placebo effect. I present to you a training regime which due essentially to an expectancy effect by subjects can increase your IQ by 9 points... or 2 points: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis Quite a difference.

Sell people a green pill and tell them it'll make them want fast food less. Done.

Make it more dramatic and you'll get a better effect. Expensive helps, requiring it to be injected would help even more.

Benefits are not self-assessed for drugs.

Actually, DEXA can be used for very accurate calculations of body fat %, so it could be used to show how much lean body mass (as opposed to fat) the author lost.

I LOLed at that one. He clearly didn't get the acronym and went for one of the cancer mutation indicator seen in several lung cancers.

This article is about a cell surface receptor. For estimated measure of kidney function (eGFR), see Glomerular filtration rate.

The author could have taken a few minutes to research both the EGFR for cell surface receptor and the kidney function measure and come to a reasonably good conclusion as to which one is used on the lab tests. Instead...

You don't need to be a nutritionist to know thats going to have a terrible impact on his life later down the track.

Postnote: Now that Ive read the whole article, I wonder if all the benefits he attributes to Soylent could actually be attributed to cutting so much crap out of his diet?

I'm guessing from this that you've never cooked in your life?

(Hint: Pretty much nobody cooks five hours a day unless it is their job. I mostly cook for myself, and I don't think I've ever really spent more than 30 minutes of active work on it).

Everyone here saying anything along the lines of "ZOMG, my healthy meals like toast+juice only take me 15 minutes each" has no idea what they are talking about. The list of healthy whole foods (those that don't come out of boxes or bags) that can be prepped and cooked and cleaned in 15 minutes is a short one. I know because I spend a lot of time planning, shopping, and cooking a variety of foods. If anyone cares, right now I eat 90% paleo with occasional dairy and legumes. For years I was involved in veganism/vegetarianism, but quit when I realized it was more like a food religion than a rational healthy choice.

Think of the average grocery store. All that crap lining the aisle shelves is going to get bought by somebody, and even if we allow for the longer "residence time" of packaged food products compared to fresh produce/meats we can infer that the average shopper is leaving with the preparations for a depressingly monotonous and nutritionally poor diet of mostly corn-derivatives, flour, and sugar. If you had to empty out a standard grocery store one cart at a time, the average haul would be far worse than anything the writer admits eating. As fun as it is to get self righteous about food ideology, anybody who actually thinks the writer's diet is poor in comparison to the average American diet isn't thinking far enough beyond their own experience.

Also, your argument here is silly. This guy's diet is not "above average" in quality by any means and a Chipotle Burito Bol is not a "legit meal" based on what one would consider to be a healthy lifestyle. The amount of sodium alone in those things is enough to make me and some of your organs cringe - literally.

Go to the grocery store. Pick up some raw foods. Cook them on a Sunday night. Put them in the fridge. Pat yourself on the back. You've just managed to prep your lunch/dinner for the week and you did it all without having to find a stay-at-home wife.

Go play around with their nutrition calculator [1]. It's fast food.

[1] - http://www.chipotle.com/en-us/menu/nutrition_calculator/nutr...

So? It's not like he's eating two of those a day.

I was also amazed by the cost of his daily diet: $24 per day, excluding restaurants on weekends?!? I eat natural, 'normal' food for much less than $10 per day, and I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

PS That said, I'm intrigued by Soylent and would like to try it -- although not at its current price point.

The health hysteria over aspartame hasn't really been fully debunked, there are still countless conflicting studies about the effects of aspartame, one of the more recent ones finding the metabolic effects of artificial sweetener to be the same as an actual HFCS-sweetened soda.

Soda may or may not be bad for you, but it's certainly empty calories. He shows a picture of Diet Coke but mentions Vanilla Coke throughout. Your parent comment is on the mark.

Not diet soda. There are NO calories in it. It's not "empty calories". With your level of ignorance, I'm surprised you haven't poisoned yourself.

>Even the veggie burrito bol is in the 800 range for calories, and based on how employees heap stuff on,

The calorie counts have to be based on the average serving size, or they will be fined by the FDA for lying.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsSodium/

Yeah, and that is above average. You are seriously over-estimating how healthy the average american's diet is. This is one of the big reasons people are interested in soylent, getting 100% of all your vitamins and minerals by just eating "real food" is actually very difficult.

Getting people to eat better is not an easy problem to fix.

(BTW, it's also easy to paint restaurant food as bad, without actually examining why. It's also easy to make unhealthy home-cooked organic food.)

You can't say it's cheap because it's not being sold to consumers. There's a promotional price that works out to $10 a day which is cheap but not out of line with similar products.

"reasonable, healthy nutrition" give the benefit of the doubt here.

"no planning" - doubtful, it's a powder mix you make into shakes. That requires some planning.

"no decision making" - identical to any "eat only x" diet, many people would not consider this a selling point.

"easy" Ok, we'll give them a pass here. Not the easiest though.

I assumed it was going to be way cheaper than that.

"Soylent fans" who are fans before the actual product has been seen or tested in any significant way might self-identify as people who need to be targeted by the first paragraph of this reply, however.

I think soylent would have a hard time beating my diet WHEN I eat correctly (some recent issues resulted into me drifting far from my normal diet, but now I am returning to it again).

My normal diet,

breakfast: toast, cheese, chinese tea (I like all colors) or matte tea (it remembers black tea, but with a less harsh taste and less caffeine)

lunch: vegetables and proteins (meat, cheese, sashimi, whatever..)

dinner: proteins (usually, fish)

and then you can sprinkle some fruit and cereal bars during the day.

When I did this diet for the first time (while ignoring my nutriotionist and doctors) my weight plunged from 125 to 100, most of that in fat, my cholesterol dropped from the dangerously high 270 to 170, and several other stuff in my blood tests that were unhealthy got fixed.

I see here lots of "healthy" people like the author, that avoid meat because it is supposed to be "healthy" that are quite unhealthy. Well, several of them are not obese, but they are obviously weak and have nutrition issues.

I met REALLY FEW non-cow eaters, vegetarians and vegans that really knew what they were doing...

(by the way, the advice that I ignored from my medics was eat more grains, like rice, and avoid fatty foods, specially red meat... I did exact the opposite and it worked, while when I followed their advice strictly I got fatter, to me it is clear that even the fat in the meat is useful and important for the body)

I'm a bit pessimistic, so I think that his diet is probably not far off from the average American's diet, probably a lot better. That's a depressing idea in itself, but does lend credence to the idea that a simple, cheap alternative would be beneficial to people who are too busy/stupid/ignorant/poor to solve the problem for themselves.

I'm pretty sure I can do this with less than 60 seconds of attentive time, the rest can be spent catching up on tech stories, pull requests or whatever.

Frying it all would be even easier, too. Heat pan, put steak and eggs in, leave for a couple of minutes. Turn steak, leave for a couple of minutes. Slide everything onto a plate, eat.

I refuse to live a life where I regularly cannot find time to boil water. That's just absolute insanity.

> but it takes a solid 4 minutes cook time and 10 minutes rest time to make a proper steak, that's not fast.

If we're comparing it against eating soylent, then I don't think resting it is going to be vital. An unrested steak is still tasty, which means we're talking about 4 minutes.

Maybe we've got vastly different ideas of "quick".

That's fine for you; others don't want to have to take that time just to refuel. We don't all think of eating as an event or a treat, it's often just a burden of being biological.

> An unrested steak is still tasty, which means we're talking about 4 minutes.

Then we seriously disagree about the proper way to make a steak. :)

Boiling a kettle is so burdensome it's only done by those looking for a treat or some special event?

I'd understand if we were talking about preparing a roast (I still think that takes very little time out of a day), but boiling a kettle or frying a steak? These are things that can be done while thinking, reading, playing air guitar.

I mean seriously we're talking about very small parts of a day here.

> Then we seriously disagree about the proper way to make a steak. :)

Well we're talking about people who seem to find boiling an egg such an ordeal they're giving up food altogether as it's a "burden of being biological", I don't think the difference is going to be a deal-breaker.

> Well we're talking about people who seem to find boiling an egg such an ordeal they're giving up food altogether as it's a "burden of being biological", I don't think the difference is going to be a deal-breaker.

Yes it would be, eating a meal replacement doesn't change the way I like my food prepared and an un-rested steak is just awful IMHO.

The original question was "I have not been able to find a breakfast food that's quick, tastes ok, and isn't high in carbs.", not "What can I make in less than 20 seconds?". You introduced that

I'm saying if you're regularly in such a hurry then you're doing things wrong. This is an extreme hurry. Yes, yes, every so often you'll sleep through an alarm and need to run out of the door but if you're always doing this then something is very wrong with your schedule.

> Yes it would be, eating a meal replacement doesn't change the way I like my food prepared and an un-rested steak is just awful IMHO.

Well then you might have to plan in an entire 10 minutes of reading or coding into your schedule. Shocking I know, but such is the terrible price of haute cuisine.

I really don't get how this is such a terrible thing. Read HN? Steak on, read a couple of stories, take steak off, go through a docker tut or read more, eat. That's the amount of time required to have steak for breakfast. Or start reading your emails, or coding, or ...

Or cook something other than steak. Bacon and eggs on toast, or just bacon and eggs. You can even take it with you if you don't have time to eat at home.

Guess what, some of us don't like other people that much either and can't stand the idea of having to regularly eat meals with them. Michael Pollan is a foodie and an English major, he has no credentials with which to say what is or isn't psychologically healthy. His "opinion" on the matter is just that, an opinion.

I'll agree that Soylent is healthier fast food than McDonald's. I just won't agree that eating Soylent on a regular basis is as healthy as taking your time and sharing non-McDonald's meals with your friends and/or family. Everyone has friends and family. I guess I feel like Soylent is encouraging social isolation, and helping people to deprive themselves of the physical pleasure of eating.

I'll also agree that spending hours a day preparing food sucks. That's for professional chefs and stay-at-home spouses to choose. But a maximum average of an hour total per day is pretty reasonable in my opinion.

Assuming you're an extrovert. I'm an introvert and I eat alone. Most days, it's the only time I get to be alone and recharge.

I guess I feel like Soylent is encouraging social isolation, and helping people to deprive themselves of the physical pleasure of eating.

Not everybody is wired the same. I know plenty of people who get no physical pleasure from eating. They look at those with food addiction and simply don't get the appeal. They'd rather be doing something productive/social/physical/recreational. I'm personally not one of those people, but I can understand where they're coming from. For some people, running marathons gives them a high bigger and better than any drug. I look at those people and simply don't get the appeal. :)

And you're a bit disconnected from reality, no everyone does not have family and friends; you should think really hard about why you think they do and about how insensitive it is to presume that. Tons of people have no family left, and tons of people are friendless either by choice or not.

For me, it's an hour, tops. That's lunch and dinner, I don't eat breakfast. It's probably the single highest cost/benefit ratio activity I engage in on a daily basis.

Saying that preparing and eating real food is "not psychologically healthy" is the dumbest thing I've read in quite some time. If you're an extrovert, eat with other people. If you're an introvert, eat alone and think. If you think that's psychologically damaging, how do you feel about meetings? Or maintaining other people's code? Or paying taxes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantain_%28cooking%29

I wasn't able to take the post too seriously after that since Soylent, as simples as it is, apparently is still better than his previous diet.

"...The white stuff that was mixed into the tan stuff was floating to the top and congealing together... So I just started just scooping them out... I’m pretty sure the white chunks were the rice protein, and perhaps something else important."

You're the first review of Soylent, and you throwing away blobs because ...? It looked icky? This is a meal replacement focused on giving you exactly what your body needs, and it just seems like a terrible move to throw 'what your body needs' away.

He still drank a shake, and at no point does he claim to have reformulated the mix by adding to it, or deliberately attempting to chemically alter it, or switch to different products.

Anyway, human nutrition must be capable of tolerating human error and envionmental hazards. It's not like this is some kind of a high-powered pharmaceutical. If anything, there should be room for that kind of error, because an inability to tolerate mistakes would actually be worse when it comes to food. You really don't want a casual fumble to cascade into some unforgivable and horrific, punishing mistake. You want to have some flexibility for spills, or maybe drinking an extra shake here and there, if you skipped dinner and breakfast one friday night/saturday morning.

If this behavior actually did introduce augmented outcomes, then consider this an important caveat of the product. This means it's sensitive to specific mixing habits, and is prone to user error. This would be an important detail to shake out during trials.

If the powder settles oddly during shipping, or mixes unevenly, and demands thorough mechanized blending, those are important instructions to communicate explicitly. Otherwise, if a bag lasts two weeks, and all the fine particles of vitamin powder settles at the bottom, leaving the fiber at the top, and you don't mix and shake the bag, it might take you a week to reach the bottom of the bag, and you'll inadvertantly be overdosing yourself with fiber one week and vitamins the next, when you try to finish off the bag.

I'm just speculating, but when consuming Soylent I would assume that one needs to eat all of it (or rather, all of the dose, if that's the right term).

My only beef with the paragraph was that he's reviewing a food source, the first review by a non-member of the team. If he'd done this for a publication, you can be sure his editor would be chewing him out for such an action.

Real life consumption, sure, I've spilled plenty of dollars worth of protein powder. I, also, wasn't the first one reviewing it and/or testing its claims.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3625315

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/130/5/1378S.full

There are many other reasons to be skeptical of Soylent, even from a cursory read on Wikipedia, the website, and Kickstarter page. First, the diet has caused Rob Rhinehart anemia, tachylcardia, arrhythmia, and joint pain from taking Soylent (from Wikipedia, Economist article). While the formula has changed since, do you trust a diet that only months ago caused the creator serious health ailments? Secondly, even if Rob Rhinehart has no nutrition background, and neither does anyone else on the Soylent team. I would expect someone on the team that knows something about nutrition. Looking on the website the Soylent team includes no mention of a nutritionist or dietician or foods manufacturing expert; key people in developing a new meal replacement product. Thirdly, anything to do with creating a new, stand alone meal replacement product requires someone know about the foods business or operations or something along those lines. It is not clear that their current team understands how far you can go with marketing claims, how to test medical claims, nutrient interactions, etc.

This is not the first time people have been skeptical of Soylent, and certainly not the last. There are so many red flags from just a quick search and gut checking against their claims that I would definitely not recommend it to anyone I know, let alone trying it out myself.

I was irritated from that point on-wards.

I've fasted for 2 days. I felt weak, dizzy and unwell on the second day (yes I had plenty of water). I was unable to do normal activities. It was a big deal.

My brother is a diabetic. Whenever his suger level dropped from 80, he'd start shaking, have headaches and other hypoglicemia symptoms. A few years now and he can hit much lower levels without feeling any ill symptoms.

Try fasting for a day, see how that works out. Then do it more frequently. Then try two days.

Our ancestors were probably(*) used to spending days hunting for food without success, so occasional fasting should not be that big of a deal.

Also, do some checkups. You might have a condition which is preventing you from spending that much time without eating (low blood pressure, for instance, or even existing nutritional imbalances).

It depends on what your model is. Compared to the average person, he's more fit, but the average person is rather unfit, so it's a poor comparison.

I think 'out of shape' out to be an objective measure, not a relative measure.

And you would be wrong. It's completely subjective. There is no quantifiable definition of 'in shape' other than fat %.

I'd also like to suggest it's possible to be "mildly out of shape" and active. For example, if he was "out of shape" and recently started working out.

On the subjective lines, it's possible to be out of shape for certain activities due to the musculature you've built for the activities you do frequently. If all you do is bench weights, you'd be out of shape when you go to run a mile.

I'm like 8-10% body fat if I calculate it (electronic things say about 13%), would you consider me "in shape"? I wouldn't, not in any sort of normal means (running, lifting weights, whatever else).

This is not a way to determine someone's fitness or physical health. Body fat percentages are highly misleading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VO2_max

This guy is going to make a ton of money but I think that people should be thinking, "Do I really want to live a life where I don't have time for food or I don't enjoy preparing and eating it".

Personally I think it is kind of sad and hope in the future that 'Eating' doesn't become what 'face-to-face communication' or 'playing outside' has become today.....

note: i'm not saying solyent is eating right. its hard to define what eating right is, but basically no soda, no processed foods (well, solyent sort of is:P), etc.

So this kind of first hand report has close to zero credibility.

That's it. Game over for nutrition science.

You can convince someone's mind to change physical attributes of their body using psychology.

Who's to say this guy's brain wasn't really excited about the prospect of a new diet that he was told by a really smart dude was going to make him more productive and healthier? Hook, line, sinker.

This also doesn't address any of the social rituals associated with food. Personally, for me, breakfast is the only meal that is removable, but that's because I'm not a morning person. I telecommute and have a family. Sitting down to lunch with my kids and wife (or just wife, joy when the kiddos are in school), is a great break in my day.

And dinner ... don't even get me started. I love sitting down to dinner. Makes me really just feel sorry for single folks whose lives revolve around productivity to such an extent.

I also, on occasion, find cooking to be a good way to de-stress. I get to make something that nobody else will ever care about. (My SO just loves that I made something, so in a sense, I'm fulfilling the soylent's "too lazy to cook" … but my way is tastier.) I get to snack (I regularly sample the (safe!) raw ingredients, the partially cooked meal…). I get time to just think to myself. Eating the same thing every day would be depressing. Mouse said it well:

> Dozer: It's a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.

> Mouse: It doesn't have everything the body needs.

(I'm also of the mindset that cooking isn't hard. Boiling water can make a lot of things, requires little oversight, and is dead simple. And oh so much tastier. That said, I know someone who would sign up for something like this…)

I laughed when I read this. I'm an introvert, so meals offer me a valuable break in the day to NOT interact with people. :)

On one hand, the entire field of nutritional science (and several associated topics), coupled with a wealthy and powerful nutrition industry who, despite literally decades of research, have never succeeded in creating a total meal replacement. Oh, and don't forget the world's militaries, who throw enormous amounts of money at research groups for anything even remotely useful and for who full meal replacements would be a holy grail.

On the other, this one computer hacker dude who is going to 'disrupt' the expert opinion and hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. He read some papers guys!

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And yet the sum total evidence is 'Me and my friends haven't died yet, and we feel good'. His company still has no staff with biology experience, and the blog sells more merchandise than science.

Still, otherwise incredibly smart and driven people on HN eat this up.

Not a good objection, because for military purposes, Soylent is completely unacceptable. How well do the ingredients tolerate extremes of heat and cold, no access to a kitchen, being stored in crates for months or years...? Not too well. And those are just the obvious requirements for an MRE.

I wonder what that is, and if he has written about it some where?

Oh well. I guess there must be people out there who spend all their time doing things more fascinating and enjoyable than eating a tasty meal.

From the post:

------------------

Among the Soylent claims Shane outlined, there are the below. I’ve added my comments:

Soylent provides all the energy and nutrients the body needs. [TIM: I'm not convinced Soylent can prove this.] The body can absorb all the nutrients Soylent provides. [TIM: I'm not convinced Soylent can prove this.] Soylent makes one more alert. [TIM: If measured, this could potentially be demonstrated.] Soylent can help people cut fat and maintain good body weight. [TIM: Be wary of any structure or function claims. Reword.] Soylent saves time and money. [TIM: Provable compared to another defined group (e.g. eating at Chipotle), but not across the board.] And at the end of the day: Soylent isn’t dangerous. [TIM: I'm not convinced Soylent can prove this. Where are the data? Safe for how long?]

If you've followed Tim Ferriss, it's clear this is something he'd be interested in. His first company was a sports supplement manufacturer, and he's written two books that touch on nutrition.

I don't see this as a shallow post aimed at promoting a product. Did you even read it?

Not what I said, and yes I did. I know why he'd be interested in it, or more to the point I know why his readership would. Having someone else do the (unscientific) experiment pulls all the traffic while allowing TF to look objective without investing anything. It's shallow in that (as shown above) the medical claims made are quite meaningless.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience

> Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status.[1] Pseudoscience is often characterized by the use of vague, contradictory, exaggerated or unprovable claims, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at refutation, a lack of openness to evaluation by other experts, and a general absence of systematic processes to rationally develop theories.

I'm 35, and I've known I have Celiac disease for about five years now. I still have that dream about every month or two, excepting of course that I realize I'm going to be very sick instead of being supposed to eat/drink/consume only Soylent.

I'd love to try something like Soylent when away from my kitchen for weeks at a time. I'm going to be in the Nevada desert for two weeks doing something I enjoy (NOT Burning Man! A bunch of shotgun/pistol classes at Frontsight next month!), and not having to deal with food when waking up at 0430 and going to bed at 2230 every day would be really nice. It looks a bit too heavy on carbs and too light on protein for my taste, but it wouldn't be hard to cut it with protein powder or something.

The biggest practical problem I see is "tastes best at <42F". Powders, especially with fat and protein, mix poorly in cold water, and cold water isn't always available. Something which worked better at 60-80F would be ideal.

(As it is, the most practical thing for me is probably beef jerky, fiber and vitamin pills, lots of water, and a few trips to steakhouses. Maybe some Capriotti's sandwiches in a cooler.)

Here's an advertisement for a bunch of full meal replacements for people of normal health or crappier:

http://www.abbottnutrition.ca/static/cms_workspace/en_CA/con...

As you can see, they've been on the market for decades, and people have been using them as sole-source nutrition for decades.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...

I don't want to sound harsh, but you are missing something big about life if you dismiss the pleasure of tasty food, the social moment of eating, and health benefits of a varied, natural diet.

I'm from Spain, eating is important here. It's something beyond nutrition, is about people. You sit at the table while chatting and enjoying the taste of the seasonal ingredients. There are gastronomic events during the whole year, and having conversations about this or that thing you ate, or a new restaurant found, is common. Some of my life "best moments" were around a table.

To my eyes Soylent proposal is akin to replace the sexual act from reproduction just because it's a waste of time.