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Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

Learning about diets and food is also terribly difficult because the internet and books are so full of people who are so dead certain about their pseudo science. There is so much emotion attached to food that getting an objective rational opinion on anything food related is next to impossible. Personally I like the Soylent creators take on it. He seems extremely focused on figuring out the objective truths and ignore all the wishy washy emotional bullshit.

And also with so many eating exclusively the soylent mixture which is easy to control what goes into, they got an excellent opportunity to study many hypothesis about food. E.g. how important is it to eat "live fresh food" vs just getting the micro nutrients in the right mix.

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It would be pretty interesting to do A/B testing starting out with a group of people who regularly drink a lot of Soylent. I haven't heard of anyone doing that sort of testing, though.

The experimentation that the Soylent folks are doing themselves looks like the fairly uncontrolled do-it-yourself kind, not like a real scientific study. It seems like it would be difficult to do properly because the formula of Soylent changes quite often.

Yep, since November 2014 all of the versions of Soylent are vegan. So, we'll see how that turns out. It would be really interesting if some results are reported.

There are diet specific versions of soylent, now: https://www.thebairs.net/product-category/ketochow/

here is the recipe: https://diy.soylent.com/recipes/keto-chow-104-master-rich-ch...

Its true that its hard not to sound like an evangelist when you've lost weight-- but it's not pseudo science when there are studies that support the hypothesis (of course a lot of diets are fad diets and are pseudo science). The thing is its hard to tell the pseudo science from the real science.

Personally, in my experiment, I'm going to try adding Keto Chow to my diet over the next couple of months and see how I feel about it.

You know the dogma is bad when even an innocent comment like this gets downvoted.

While I think the term 'pseudoscience' gets thrown around way too loosely these days, it's no secret that the science surrounding nutrition is a convoluted mess, with various peer reviewed studies showing seemingly conflicting results.

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