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Comment by throwaway898908 | Hacker News Reader

Not putting solid food into your system for long periods of time (months, years) will destroy your ability to digest solid food when you start refeeding. I've seen people in eating disorder facilities who have lived on diets of liquid food (historically Ensure, basically the same thing) who have not defecated for months, and when they start eating again suffer for weeks and weeks from horrendous constipation, often requiring further hospitalization. This has happened to me.

Your ability to digest basically shuts down, your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you.

Not eating solid food is not good for you. Don't do it.

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I don't advocate for or against liquid diets necessarily - and I realize this is overtly a throwaway account - but this sounds pretty pseudo-sciency to me, anecdote notwithstanding.

At bare minimum, include some citation here.

He just told you what he lived through, and you're asking for a citation?

Never change, HN.

No he told us about something he claimed to see at a place. A lot of people say the same thing about UFOs.

"Not putting solid food into your system for long periods of time will destroy your ability to digest solid food when you start refeeding"

That is an unscientific statement based on no citation.

Top it off, I have personally lived of Soylent for a year. I go out to eat only a couple times a month and I do not die from horrendous suffering everytime. In fact, nothing changes.

Anecdata... strawman... no citations of your own despite requirements for same... somethingsomething 'unscientific'?

The point is that one unsubstantiated anecdote cancels out the other. Why is the first comment okay but this one isn't? You can't have it both ways.

The comment I responded to was mockingly talking about dying with the original wasn't. It was being smarmy when the original was talking cleanly. Abusing someone for lack of science when you're being snarky is a footgun.

My point is that if you are chiding someone for a lack of quality, you shouldn't use even less quality to do so.

"Your statement is unscientific because anecdotally I've had no problems with it"

Where's your citation backing up your suggestion that it's safe?

One counterexample is enough to contradict the "will destroy" claim in the grandparent.

"Smoking will destroy your lungs"

Gonna give me a counterexample there too?

Dear down voters: it should be obvious that just because smoking is not literally guaranteed to destroy your lungs, and you can find plenty of counter examples, it's still a very good idea to warn people that "smoking will destroy your lungs".

And it would have been a good idea to do that back in the 50s when doctors were calling it safe without the science to back up their claims. "You have no evidence" is what you say to justify avoiding something suspect, not what you say to justify consuming it!

Pretty sure smoking is literally guaranteed to destroy your lungs.

If you find a long-term consistent cigarette smoker with no lung damage, I believe you have a medical miracle on your hands.

"Destroy" does not mean the same thing as "damage".

Destroy = something big enough ruin your quality of life.

Sure, counterexample: my grandfather. Hyperbolic claims like "it will destroy your lungs" are counterproductive in the long run; far better to give a measured, accurate description of the actual level of danger.

Your dismissive attitude discounts:

1. People lie.

2. People believe things to be true that are not, in fact, true.

"Somone would to that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"

I grew up with AOL chatrooms. I will believe whatever someone presents about themselves up to the point at which it leave the magic circle of the internet.

A throwaway account gave us a wholly unsupported anecdote. This isn't gospel and it's not taboo to ask for some scientific support.

Even if the anecdotes are 100% true, they have no causative evidence.

Look I get it, but there are citations. https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3orq9s/is_diarrhea...

Its not quite what was described but refeeding syndrome is an interesting somewhat related thing https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC390152/

I have to agree. I'm not saying that people on liquid diets don't have digestion problems, but the liquid diet alone likely didn't cause it.

Even if you eat no food, you'll still have bowel movements as your intestines shed cells and mucus. If you have a colostomy done (intestines no longer connect to your rectum) you'll still pass small small amounts of stool out the normal way (anus).

Your bowels are muscle. Like any muscle, if it doesn't get used much, it wastes. Just because you're passing some stool, doesn't mean you're in good digestive shape, no more than an irregular heartbeat is healthy "because at least the heart is beating"

What does "good digestive shape" even mean? I've never heard of "digestive muscle wasting" in any of the medical literature. Your digestive muscles are smooth muscle (different from the heart) that are autonomically innervated (more than just food stimulates them).

The fact that people have gone on extended fasts and then broke them without much trouble suggests a "breakdown" of digestive function is a weak argument.

I would say that a change in the biome of the digestive tract is probably more responsible for any digestive upset after breaking a fast than "muscle breakdown".

You have it exactly backwards.

Anyone suggesting Soylent is safe with arguments like "glucose is glucose" and "it has the right macronutrient ratios" is spouting pseudo-science.

If you have insufficient evidence that something is safe and a strong anecdote suggesting otherwise the logical option is to abstain.

Attempting to bring science into the decision making process when the science has not been done is pseudo-science!

There is still so much science to do related to food, we just do not have a good grasp of all the nutrients your body needs and what allows you to absorb those nutrients the best. One form of protein from a plant can have completely different absorption rates than that of protein from a cow, its a complete crapshoot to try and blaze a trail with processed staple food products due to the lack of understanding we have of nutrition, and its going to take decades of research to even start to unravel the mysteries of the human bodies digestion system.

> You have it exactly backwards.

I would call either argument pseudo-science, but only one was presented here and it's the one I responded to.

Having entirely lived on Soylent for a full year and having went back to solid foods with no weaning period and no ill effects, I doubt the veracity of your unsubstantiated claims.

Two people in my family also experienced it, but I think it's likely related to your particular gastrointestinal system genetics, really. Doesn't happen to everyone, but those it does happen to it's pretty horrific; that said, my family has a huge history of Crohn's, et al. so there's probably a bit of cross-pollination between the two, so to speak.

As someone with Crohns disease, who has been on an elemental diet not by choice but by necessity, I can assure you it is very much a real world effect.

Unfortunately, we lack a corpus of evidence of long term liquid diet feedings (and intestinal investigations), mainly for ethical reasons, but there is at least one good rat study I could quickly recall: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01308310 There are, however, countless great articles I suggest you read on liquid diets and their impact on satiety and other important illness recovery markers. One of the important topics for researchers has been how to safely transition patients more quickly to solid food, given some of the less desirable side effects of the liquid food diet.

And yes, I understand that the Soylent team is confident that they've solved, for example, all gastric emptying issues by adding exogenous fibres. I'm positing that for every variable they're convinced they've figured out, they're opening up another potential set of problems that they've not even considered. Their latest opacity on this recall isn't giving me hope that I'm wrong here.

@timdorr: "Crazy to think that over the last year and a half, more than 50% of my diet has been in the form of liquid @soylent." [1]

So not all of your diet. I very much doubt your ability to refute my claim, given that you did not meet my criteria of not eating solid food.

[1] https://twitter.com/timdorr/status/694271673248264192

Isn't 100% more than 50%?

I switched to 50% Soylent for the 6 month period following the year, with a break for "normal" food in between. The first year was almost 100% Soylent, with some occasional solid food when Soylent wasn't available. I had no ill effects from any of these temporary diet changes, nor the period immediately following either period of long-term usage.

Not to mention, a major part of digestion begins in the mouth. Saliva breaks food down and prepares it to be broken down in the stomach, so that it can be assimilated in the intestines.

When you consume liquid calories, you miss out on this important part of the digestive process (and subsequently lose out on absorbing a portion of the nutrients), unless you are "simulate chewing" or leave the liquids in your mouth long enough for the salivary enzymes to "get to work."

Granted, this doesn't mean you can't survive off of liquid calories, but digestive issues are bound to happen. Nutrient-dense, whole foods should always be the first option.

Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saliva#Digestion

It's not clear that salivary digestion is categorically different from non-salivary digestion -- it works on compounds the rest of the GI tract also deals with -- but as a matter of degree, as a matter of the extent to which your food is digested, it certainly seems important. 30% is nothing to sneeze at.

Ensure is not intended to be used as a complete nutrition source, so it's not surprising that subsisting on it for long periods would cause problems. For long term use a nutritionally complete formula should be used such as Jevity or Twocal (made by the same company that makes Ensure).

> Ensure is not intended to be used as a complete nutrition source,

Why did Soylent promote it like that? When did that message change?

On the front page at Soylent they have "We engineer foods that offer complete nutrition, value, and convenience." -- here "complete nutrition" means it can be used as a sole source of nutrition.

On their about page they say "Soylent™ is a pioneer in food technology, producing convenient, complete foods designed to provide maximum nutrition with minimal effort."

They also make reference to Rob's experiment of living off Soylent for a month: "and the co-founders quickly realized that this experiment solved a problem not only for themselves but for thousands of people around the world."

In their blog post announcing v1.6 of the powder they say: "r latest iteration in convenient, complete powdered food. We have redesigned the formula to create a superior mouthfeel and taste, while still providing a nutritionally-complete staple meal."

All the language points to these products being usable as a sole source of nutrition, even if they don't actually come out and say "you can use this as a sole source of nutrition".

Ensure is not made by Soylent.

Sorry, yes, I made a stupid error.

Ensure is most assuredly designed to used as a sole source of nutrition. This happens in hospitals every day where it's used in naso-gastric feeding, sometimes against the patient's wishes. It's used in prisons as a naso gastric feed on hunger striking prisoners. It's used in hospitals for ill people.

The makers of Ensure have a wide range of products, many of which are designed to be sole-source of nutrition products.

The fact they don't advertise these to the general public as sole source of nutrition products just means they're a bit more responsible than Soylent.

Ensure is not indicated for tube feeding so hospitals should not use it for that. I have first hand experience with this after having been hospitalized for Crohn's and put on a liquid diet. For sole-source nutrition in a hospital setting a formula designed for that, such as Jevity, is used. If a hospital tries to give you Ensure as sole-source nutrition they are doing it wrong.

I get 100% of my daily calorie intake Mon-Fri from powdered food (not Soylent, but a different brand). I shit fat bricks, two to three times a day. No diarrhea, no bleeding, no constipation, nothing.

It's all about proper macronutrient intake and exercise. People on Ensure probably had drastically reduced daily calorie intakes.

Edit:

> your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you

If you think there are ANY solids in your intestines, you better read on anatomy and human biology.

The founder may have thought for a while that maybe he could get away with just Soylent for extended periods of time, but I don't think very many people actually tried using it to the exclusion of all other food.

I lived on liquid food for about a month after a surgery and when I started eating solid foods again my stomach was actually handling it better than it ever had.

I'm not advocating eating liquid foods for months, I thought it was hard as I was hungry all the time in the first week or so. But doctors tell patients that go through some surgeries to eat liquid foods for at least a month before the surgery. How can it be bad? It's not that the bowel movement stops like you are suggesting.

Like others have said, please submit some kind of referral if you're going to make such a statement.

Doesn't Soylent contain extra fibers specifically for this purpose? I don't use it, but I recall Reinhart blogging that he added fiber because he was worried about this exact issue.

I've been drinking only protein shakes for breakfast for years, and recently the Coffiest product from Soylent. My poops are coming out just fine (of course I'm having regular solid food for lunch and dinner, and for all my meals on the weekend).

Did you know some people don't even eat breakfast?

Yes I did, I've even gone without breakfast for periods. Unfortunately it seems to kill my ability to focus in the mornings, perhaps because I don't eat that much generally.

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