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Soylent: The Totally Real Food Substitute That Totally Isn't Made of People (Probably)
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I get the feeling that the Soylent people primarily think of "work" to be "editing the music video for your indie electronica band's first single" and "coding your new killer app", not "filling out expense reports" or "promoting synergy".
They're saying eating is a waste of time, sure.
But you're putting it together with crap like what's bolded.
No one is telling the people drinking soylent that they can't take their full fucking lunch break if they want it, are they?
-goose-
But seriously there are some jobs where it is impossible to eat as a social activity for at least 1 meal a day, and that's not changing ever.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I just don't like the "you have to be constantly productive and hyperefficient" philosophy they are pushing. Am I not allowed to have my own priorities and expressing them on this thread? I specifically and repeatedly said that was a personal view and that people can of course do whatever the fuck they want.
Except that lots of people feel that way about eating. That it gets in the way of doing things they want to do, which has the unfortunate side effect of some people not getting enough nutrition. Just because one of their marketing avenues doesn't appeal directly to you doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. I mean, I don't give a shit about Windows productivity marketing, doesn't mean I think Microsoft should not be selling Windows on it's business advantages.
Only I never said the product was bad because of that or that it should not be sold or that it should not be used.
I know. I never said you did.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I love food. But I'm also not a morning person by any stretch. I don't have the wherewithall in the early morning to really appreciate my food. At 7am, I'm a zombie looking to kickstart my day with any convenient source of nutrients and caffeine.
That said, I am beyond skeptical that this is safe as a total food replacement for long periods of time.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Its one thing to replace a meal(like breakfast) with a protein shake, its quite another thing to eat nothing but Protein shakes.
you don't have to do what people tell you to do
I see little reason to care about the designers goal. If you want to use it to just replace your breakfast there is nothing stopping you from doing so.
Your not my real dad!
I've been very interested in trying Soylent, but I don't think I can even order it yet from Canada. I wouldn't use it as 100% of my meals, though. I would probably replace breakfast altogether with it, because breakfast is dumb. I would replace lunch five days a week. I'd still eat proper food for supper I think.
What's interesting to me is that reports of experiences seem to vary pretty widely, from constantly feeling great to feeling really shitty and constantly hungry
I suspect that the standard formulation just doesn't necessarily work for everyone, so it's likely safe for most people, most of the time, but if it isn't figuring that out, and in particular figuring out why, is going to be non-trivial
Having said that there are plenty of people that eat very restricted diets with very little variety, and I'm not sure that this stuff is intrinsically worse than doing that. The primary difference is that someone that habitually eats the same things everyday is not consuming things that are being sold as complete foods
I'm vaguely wondering about giving this a go with one of the diy mixes to replace breakfast and lunch on weekdays, given I'm not getting any particular enjoyment or variety out of those meals anyway
Actually, I probably wouldn't use it period. Not because the name is terrible nor because of where I first heard the term soylent. Well those two things don't help. I wouldn't use it because I'm seeing little that conveniences me that the creator has a good understanding of proper nutrition. This strikes me as one of those things, where no, I do not want to take an amateur's word for it.
If I'm going to eat some sort of nutritional liquid that's suppose to replace a meal completely, I damn well better get all my nutrients. Otherwise, I might as well spend a few extra minutes, just tracking down some carrots, yogurt, water and slice of whole grain bread. Maybe get a handful of nuts to go with it or switch the carrots out for an apple. You know, for the meals where I'm pressed for time. I'm still skipping breakfast in most cases or like grapping a slice of cheese, some carrots or a handful nuts if I do feel hungry in the day, so that I can get to lunch without having to prepare breakfast.
The way a food (or drug) product is labeled and marketed is very important. Arguably, the FDA's primary power is to control labeling and marketing.
We don't need to conform to the designer's goal, but if the designer is making claims about the safety or efficacy of his product that he cannot support, then that is an ethical, regulatory, and public safety issue.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Oh, I totally sympathize with this.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
"Who is Soylent?"
Great choice of words of greatest choice of words?
My impression about nutrition is that most people now think you should eat a wide variety of fresh produce, and furthermore that it's generally a bad idea to try to replace the varied fresh produce with supplements because we are more certain that, say, a plum has something good in it than we are certain that we've managed to extract and preserve whatever those good things are. But if that's is true, then trying to mix a constant nutrient slurry out of base calories and supplements as a complete diet is a bad plan from the perspective of health, whatever else it may have going for it. That's not to say that it can't have lots of other great things going for it. But the selling point of complete nutrition seems really dubious to me, and so also dubious for manufacturers to market it as such.
Right but at the moment this is not yet an issue I think. Like, it is a social media buzz and little else.
I find it sort of weird to be accused of being a robot if I can't find the time, money, or inclination to do all of those 3 times a day and thus look for easier substitutes . In the mornings I barely have time to make a nespresso much less eat a full breakfast. Eating a decent lunch at work means blowing 60 or so dollars a week or spending time preparing, packing, eating, then cleaning up packed lunches
Then when I get home I can either summon the willpower to half assedly cook something healthy despite how cranky and tired I am or eat some bread and cheese and hummus
Oh but at least I'm not drinking soylent I guess? I don't know why people get so defensive over this. YOURE DOING IT WRONG kind of stuff
I am unsure to what extent this sentiment is true, though, and to what extent it's just another example of people fetishizing the natural. It's entirely possible that there is some essential plumness that we can't yet recreate, but I don't know if there's any evidence of this beyond standard boilerplate about MAN PLAYING GOD and whatnot.
Eating noting but one type of ultra processed food probably is not going to have great effects on this, and thing like the presence of certain microflora have been linked to decrease obesity.
this seems profoundly unlikely
Mountain Dew is almost certainly worse for you than Soylent unless they're flat out lying about the ingredients
I mean you can live on nothing but whole milk for like, years
there are long term health concerns related to it, but it's not poison and humans are ridiculously adaptable. If soylent causes serious health issues it will be many months or years down the road (beyond just not feeling well which happens with radical diet changes), that's why the concept of it makes me extremely hesitant
If you just use it to replace breakfast there's very little chance of anything bad happening
How Sidney has food trucks and Lincoln does not (as far as I've seen) I cannot fathom.
I'm primarily hoping to have more time for lunch at work with Soylent. Currently the routine is to drive to $fastfoodplace and pay $5-10 for some unhealthy crap that I get to snarf down in the remaining 10 minutes of my break. With Soylent, I could spend the entire half hour leisurely sipping my nutrient slurry and watching TV in the break room. And if it could also save me time cooking at home (again for more leisure), then all the better.
I also tried the DIY Bachelor Chow 2.0 for a time, but stopped for a few reasons. Sourcing the stuff was kind of a pain, especially when you had to try to plan ahead on what you would run out of first. The consistency of it was also difficult to find a bottle to hold it that wouldnt get clogged. Kept me filled though.
I'm mostly frustrated at how long it's taken. I also have had an order for nearly a year, and i fully expect to wait till next year before i see it, due to their asinine order fulfillment scheme.
I'm reasonably sure the main difference between pills and food is that our stomachs aren't as good at absorbing things contained in pills.
Like, maybe you'll get 20% lower absorption with a calcium pill compared to the calcium in a fruit.
So put 25% more calcium into the pill and there's generally no observable nutritional difference, as far as getting enough calcium.
Maybe, I dunno.
Though it can help absorption to hold chemicals in a well-structured solid, like a bit of fruit or a well-designed pill. Helps enzymes to hit the chemicals just so, or something like that.
I think it's less some misguided reverence for nature as such than it is just the state of the science. Again, this is just my impression, but my impression is that the cheapest, easiest, and most common research methodology in nutrition science goes something like this: conduct a large-scale population study correlating some food type to some beneficial health outcome, control for some obvious common causes (do only rich people eat this food? do only physically active people eat this food? etc.), and then if a positive effect remains, start positing some sketchy mechanisms that might account for it (such-and-such chemical may regulate the so-and-so system). But an offshoot of this methodology is that the last step is sketchiest; we're going to wind up being more sure that such-and-such food reduces chronic inflammation than we are going to be of any particular mechanism by which it might accomplish that. Of course, in the end we eventually want arrive at a good understanding of the mechanisms, not least because that would make it easier to intervene on them by way of e.g. making maximally nourishing nutrient slurries. But that's harder to get and, at the moment, more speculative than our knowledge of the positive effects of various foods.
I doubt that you need to literally eat every plant to get a nutritionally optimal diet (and who really needs a nutritionally optimal diet anyway? --nutritionally adequate is a better standard). Even within local ecosystems there can be a wide variety of foods available, more at least than the average person eats.
On the subject of the health comparison with the past, it strikes me that it's not straightforward. You'd have to control both for the other (very dramatic) changes in our living situation and for the fact that most modern people, beset as we are by health issues, are not actually eating the varied diet under recommendation, and so in their aggregate health statistics do not really serve as an experimental group for testing its efficacy. In any case, I would not be at all surprised if the conveniences of modern life enable us make our diets better than those of our forefathers, and don't see anything western-first-world-centric about that.
If by better you mean fatter then yes
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.