>I do not understand the negativity surrounding Soylent.<p>Someone gives free publicity to you and you compare their healthy skepticism to Vitalism. Seriously?<p>No one is upset that you're trying to make something new. <i>No one</i>. More power to you. But here is what pisses people off: The neverending strawmen. The constant jabs at other diets and other approaches. The smugness in every blog post. The assumption that you've mastered in a matter of months what you think others have failed at for years. And the certainty you'll have revolutionized the world in no more than a decade.<p>People don't like that kind of arrogance.
The thing that bothers me about Soylent is the arrogance that the incredibly complex interplay of how the food we eat interacts with our body can be distilled down to a simple formula - X g protein/kg bodyweight, etc.<p>We still don't directly understand how certain vitamins may interact with each other, how much the ratios of Omega-3s to Omega-6s affect overall health, whether there might be other chemicals that affect overall longevity and health, and so on.<p>I understand convenience, but why should we think we've "cracked the code" of the totality of nutrition?
Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" is an excellent, well thought out counter-argument to this position:<p><a href="http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/" rel="nofollow">http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/</a><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/books/03masl.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/books/03masl.html</a>
There should be a name for the fallacy of drawing a specific, practical conclusion from an abstract or metaphysical premise. "Vitalism is false, therefore Soylent is a good idea" is such a fallacious argument. Clearly, the premise doesn't follow from the conclusion at all.<p>What follows from vitalism being false is that something like Soylent, that is, an entirely synthesized meal replacement, isn't metaphysically impossible. But I haven't seen anyone making metaphysical objections to Soylent; all the objections I've seen have been practical: nutrition is a much, much more complicated field than the makers of and advocates for Soylent seem prepared to accept.
The entire food science industry is a long, sordid history of hubris in thinking that science has solved every aspect of human nutrition.<p>- Vitamin supplements don't have nearly the efficacy as getting those vitamins from natural sources.<p>- Baby formula is universally accepted to be inferior in many ways to mother's milk, in ways that food science readily admits aren't completely known.<p>- Junk science like the lipid hypothesis are still regularly spouted, despite very little evidence that dietary fat has a direct correlation to bodily fat.<p>There's a world of difference between believing that food has some mystical power that transcends physics, and that we don't fully comprehend nutrition. Conflating the two isn't arguing in good faith.<p>Even the example of pet food is bunk - pets survive longer when domesticated because nearly all of the hazards they would face in the wild aren't present, not because their diet is better. There's plenty of evidence that pets benefit from raw meat diets far more than the carbohydrate-heavy diets that pet foods provide.
I'll grant you that there <i>appears</i> to be a thin line between mystical thinking and genuine curiosity when it comes to the whole-foods movement. But we do a disservice when we conflate the two.<p>The more rational argument in favor of whole foods <i>isn't</i> that there's something fundamentally, irreducibly complex about them. It's that <i>we don't yet know</i> everything there is to know about how various nutrients work, and we're learning more all the time. While it's true that a chemical is a chemical is a chemical [1], we don't fully understand <i>which</i> chemicals are necessary, which are unnecessary, and which ones need which other ones to absorb or function properly. All we can say is that whole foods offer the whole package; what we can't yet say is that we've completely reverse-engineered that package. Someday we might, but today's science would beg to differ.<p>That's not Vitalism. Vitalism is something very different. It's a belief in some sort of "life force" that imbues the animal and vegetable kingdom, along with the implication that we'll never be able to recreate it. There <i>are</i> a lot of armchair Vitalists in the whole foods and organic foods movements. But dismissing the entire whole-foods hypothesis based on their beliefs is attacking a strawman.<p>[1] To an extent, of course. If we really want to go down this rabbit hole, we need to get into subjects like chirality, enantiomers, methyl groups, etc., and how the food industries tend to choose the cheapest version X if it's <i>similar</i> to Y, rather than choosing Y itself. Y may or may not have the same bioavailability as X, metabolize into the same byproducts, etc. For a good example, look into "Vitamin B12" in methylcobalamin form vs. cyanocobalamin form, as well as its other chemical cousins. All of these compounds can be labeled "Vitamin B12" in consumer products, even though they behave differently in the body.
I have been through quite an up and down cycle regarding my attitude towards Soylent. Upon first hearing about it, I was pretty excited about the idea. But the more Rob talked, the more I thought the idea was a total hoax.<p>For example, in Rhinehart's blog post "How I Stopped Eating Food"[0], he writes:<p><pre><code> My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my
teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone. My
resting heart rate is lower, I haven't felt the least bit
sickly, rare for me this time of year. I've had a common
skin condition called Keratosis Pilaris since birth. That
was gone by day 9. I used to run less than a mile at the
gym, now I can run 7. I have more energy than I know what to
do with. On day 4 I caught myself balancing on the curb and
jumping on and off the sidewalk when crossing the street like
I used to do when I was a kid. People gave me strange looks but
I just smiled back. Even my scars look better."
</code></pre>
I think the only ailment he forgot to mention was his inoperable cancer that had disappeared by day 10 (sarcasm). On a serious note, after I read this, I realized that Rob was going into full marketing mode. He had talked about releasing the recipe for Soylent in on of his first posts, but I realized now that he wanted to build as much hype as possible so he could commercialize his idea. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with that, but I now felt a degree of skepticism towards the whole thing, because his incentive structure was changing. For goodness sakes, he's claiming that his endurance increased 7x simply by switching to Soylent.<p>It is probably not fair for me to judge the entire project based on this blog post, but I have yet to see anyone claim that Soylent did the above for them, especially after 30 days.<p>[0]: <a href="http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298" rel="nofollow">http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298</a>
<p><pre><code> FTA:</code></pre>
<i>>Pets live on synthetic diets and are much healthier and long-lived than their wild counterparts.</i><p>Assuming this is actually true, I bet the reason for it is more complicated that "See! Synthetic is better! The End". What impact has mankind had on the natural habitat of the animal in question is the first thing that comes to mind.
And it's debatable about living longer when the body is so old that it barely functions. Maybe the lifespan of animals in the wild are exactly <i>"what they're meant to be"</i> given the removal of mankind's interference.
I question the assumption that science's "improvements" on mother-nature are always for the better. Unforeseen consequences and all that.<p>That being said, I still find this soylent thing to be interesting and I'd like to see how it all turns out. The same way I look at Bitcoin.
I love cooking (it's beyond a normal passion for me) and I love eating wholesome foods every chance I get. I actually spend more money and time to eat a properly balanced diet. When I'm lazy or lack time to cook properly I'd love to have some alternative that I know would not hurt me in any way. Right now it's pizza or some other god awful take out. Soylent is not what I want to eat every day but I could definitely see it as useful at times.
I wholly agree with what you're saying. It seems too many people think of Soylet as a "total food replacement" which is pretty extreme. Your "taking a road trip versus driving to work" comparison is right on!
I fully sympathize with Rob's frustration. Conventional wisdom can take an incredibly long amount of time to dislodge, especially when it is mixed with tradition. A big part of our culture revolves around food, its preparation and consumption. So naturally there is going to be a lot of resistance to the claim that we don't actually need it, and can instead consume this gooey substance that is even better.<p>I have never tried Soylent myself, but I find the concept intriguing. I hope it takes off.
Viewing Soylent as a replacement for every single meal would be scary and potentially dangerous. However, I think it would be difficult to compare the nutritional value of a meal comprised of McDonalds and Coke to a meal of Soylent and to find the Soylent wanting or not superior in every way.<p>Personally I'm excited to get my month's supply of Soylent, because at the very least I know it won't kill me, and at the very best I'll have some more free time and extra pocket money to spend with good friends or a good book.
He says "My thoughts are clearer, my body leaner", presumbably after eating soylent.<p>I wonder if it's possible to a/b test soylent versus a placebo. By definition, the placebo would have no actual food, so the person would starve. So, how can we test soylent, without the placebo effect?
I can only explain the negativity surrounding Soylent with 2 causes:<p>1. Some people enjoy being righteously indignant. [0]<p>2. Some people see "food replacement" and are teleported to a fantasy movie-land where oranges & wheat are contraban and coffee is only marginally legal because it doesn't contain many calories. These people are using the same logic as those who protested gay marriage because they didn't want to be forced to divorce their heterosexual life partner.<p>[0] <a href="http://xkcd.com/546/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/546/</a>