Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks

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!

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.

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.

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.)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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?

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?]

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.

And it is the case. But because most people vary their diets, the deficiencies are not so severe. For instance, most diets lack magnesium, but on average, people also rarely go long periods without eating something like fish or sea food, which provide a good amount in one meal and keep the person above dysfunctional levels for some more time (it will still be a problem later in life).

This is why restrictive diets (vegetarian, vegan, zero-[something]) and other fads should never be taken lightly. Nutritional deficiencies compound over time and wreck havoc on your body. That includes concoctions like Soylent (and even the ones used on patients in critical condition, which cost way more, are more complete, and still are not advertised as perfect meal replacements).

Here's an easy counterpoint to that:

Which mushrooms are poisonous?

The answer is: We don't really know.

We know a tiny subset that we know we have not been able to implicate in any harmful effects. So far.

We also know a number of mushrooms that are lethal uncooked and unless cooked in certain ways (commonly you have to boil off the poisons) and where poisons are known or suspected to accumulate in the body and where people are thus recommended to avoid more than a meal or two per season with the expectation that this will keep your total exposure to below dangerous levels over your lifetime. But most of these have been discovered because they have toxins that are strong enough to kill or cause serious illness if the mushroom is not treated correctly. An example is Gyromitra esculenta, which is frequently implicated in cases where people who didn't bother to read up on it before preparing have gotten sick after standing over the pot while boiling it, or even just keeping windows closed.

But toxins in mushrooms are incredibly tricky. Many known poisonous mushrooms first affect people after weeks, at which point if you're unlucky, some vital organ just shuts down and it's already too late. In the case of many of the known poisonous mushrooms, we don't know how they work, or are not even sure exactly which substance in the mushroom is dangerous. The connection between the mushrooms and the negative effects are in many cases a "recent" (as in last hundred years") discovery as we've gotten more sophisticated about identifying the causes.

Given the nature of a lot of mushroom toxins we do know about, we have little to no basis for saying that none of the mushrooms that are commonly eaten have substantial long term negative health effects. (Yet they are too yummy to resist..)

In the vast majority of mushrooms, we simply don't know if they are dangerous or not, at all, or even if they are used as food, as there is a lot of poor knowledge of mushrooms amongst people who do in fact pick and eat them, and mushroom species are frequently confused by pickers, which both means a lot of the knowledge we have about them are dicy.

This is intentionally an extreme example since you made an overly broad point.

It is probably true that for a lot of "natural foods" we can say with reasonable certainty that they are safe. But the history of identifying dangerous mushrooms have amply demonstrated that people have trouble connecting cause and effect in terms of diet when the events are separated by even a few days, and that even scientific investigations into it can take a lot of time to determine harmful effect even when caused by - in some cases - powerful neurotoxins.

There's really no reason to assume that the long history of natural foods would lead people to realise harmful effects from it that are separated from ingestion by all that much more than that, so apart from the really immediate effects you can pretty much ditch most experience older than a couple of hundred years as irrelevant in proving the safety of foods. Of course that still leaves a substantial amount of time and scientific inquiry into natural foods that gives it an edge in claiming safety over something completely new, but the scales are nowhere near as clearly tilted in on direction as you make out

EDIT: Another interesting thing to look at, is how the knowledge of how to prevent scurvy was long limited to the extent that it was a military advantage for the British for a long time, and how they subsequently lost the knowledge: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/forg...

We don't "know" this. There is strong anecdotal evidence showing that it MIGHT be true. But Alan Aragon, Lyle McDonald, and others (including those in the IF community) dispute this claim.

I would caution a rebuttal to what we "don't know" with Soylent with what "we know" which may not even be true.

As for my unsolicited opinion, who gives a shit if they make it and people eat it. Tim Ferriss is usually a shill for ridiculous products and information (like his Four Hour Anything crap), but he makes good points about Soylent needing to rebrand and change how they advertise. You can't just make a bunch of claims that it's all the body needs because it fits XYZ macronutrient panels (even though they are very, VERY likely correct - the laws of physics don't get trumped by biology, sorry) for the simple reason that the FDA will wield the banhammer with extreme prejudice.

But no one is being coerced to use the stuff, so who cares?

Innovation only really works if you're solving a problem. I don't really see much of a problem with our food/nutrition system as is. Yes, there are parts of the world where people are starving, so maybe there is an application for this there, but if the aim is to test this product out in the Bay Area, I don't really see it going anywhere. I could be wrong, but that's my 2 cents.

> One additional problem of soylent: the designers assume we need a steady inejection of the same macronutrients every time we eat.

No, they don't. They assume that a steady delivery is sufficient, unless you're basing this on claims elsewhere that I've not seen.

The effects of immediate post-workout delivery of carbs and protein are also quite small if you get sufficient protein. You can get much the same effect by simply increasing your overall protein intake to ensure it is not all used when you eat it, as amino acids can remain available in the blood stream for at least a couple of days.

We had thousands of years of history of humans doing well on earth, and zero evidence that the human body could survive in space. How do you find out without testing?

If it's true that we don't know what we don't know, then how did you arrive at the whole foods conclusion? What's the difference between whole foods and Soylent?

I think you're doing sex wrong.