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Comment by gabemart | Hacker News Reader

My concern about Soylent has never been about the macronutrient ratios, nor the quantities of (comparatively) well-understood micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. The amounts of these substances seem relatively easy to get right, or at least within the range of "healthy" accepted by a consensus of mainstream nutritonal experts.

My concern is about the thousands or millions of micronutrients and phytonutrients that are poorly understood or even yet to be isolated by nutritional science, and the subtle and complex way they interact with our bodies and each other.

To me, the entire premise of Soylent is predicated on the idea that we know, on a compound-by-compound basis, what's good for our bodies nutritionally. The more I learn about the state of nutritional science, the less I believe this to be true.

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> To me, the entire premise of Soylent is predicated on the idea that we know, on a compound-by-compound basis, what's good for our bodies nutritionally. The more I learn about the state of nutritional science, the less I believe this to be true.

Well Soylent is going to be an interesting test to confirm what we know and do not know about nutrition. As long as there are some willing volunteers to put their health at risk, I'd say why not. It will benefit mankind as a whole to know more.

I don't know if that's really true. How much can an uncontrolled, unrandomized, unmonitored nutritional experiment really tell us? OK, it can confirm that i) Soylent isn't poisonous, and ii) Soylent isn't the key to everlasting life. But I'm not sure what other data it can yield outside of a clinical trial setting.

I'm not going to say you will have a ton of valuable data, but safety confirmation is certainly something you will get from large numbers of participants. If nobody gets extremely sick, dies or develops some kind of illness after years of Soylent consumption, at least you'll know that it could be an acceptable form of food.

> If nobody gets extremely sick, dies or develops some kind of illness after years of Soylent consumption, at least you'll know that it could be an acceptable form of food.

If Soylent is used by even a modest number of people, the probability approaches 1 that some people will get sick, develop a chronic illness or die after years of Soylent consumption. The probability is the same for a modestly-sized group eating a regular diet over the same timespan. Is the morbidity caused by Soylent? Is it caused by a regular diet? Is it caused by uncontrolled variables, or random chance?

In an uncontrolled environment, it would be extremely difficult to establish a causal link between Soylent consumption and a particular health outcome, even if that health outcome were so radically more or less prevalent in the Soylent group vs. the general population that it was actually noticed as a trend and people went looking for it.

But it's far likelier that, if Soylent consumption were associated with a particular health outcome, the trend wouldn't be so clear-cut or obvious as to stand out outside of a controlled environment, and people wouldn't go looking for it. Especially if it took years or decades to manifest.

> If Soylent is used by even a modest number of people, the probability approaches 1 that some people will get sick, develop a chronic illness or die after years of Soylent consumption. The probability is the same for a modestly-sized group eating a regular diet over the same timespan. Is the morbidity caused by Soylent? Is it caused by a regular diet? Is it caused by uncontrolled variables, or random chance?

You can easily confirm or infirm that with statistics. If Soylent is used by hundred of thousands of people and the health issues reported are about the same rates as issues reported in general population, it means there's no additional risk. The only bad thing it may get is more media attention, but media is well known to care shit about statistics.

Because these people do not know that they are experimental volunteers. The product is not being marketed as experimental. It is being sold as a mass market product suitable for anyone. It is being sold as a finished, tested, product.

Well, If someone tells you that you can replace all your food consumption with a SINGLE food item, I'm assuming you realize it may sound too good to be true, and that risks may be involved. But it depends on the target consumers of Soylent, I guess.

On top of that, it will be interesting to see if people stick to Soylent on the long term or just get bored once the novelty wears off, and return to traditional food consumption.

Unfortunately reality is much more complicated, and this is why nutrition science is an extremely hard and fuzzy field (and in my opinion, generally sketchy).

The problem is that nutrition, at least at this stage, is simply not analyzable, unless we're talking about very large effects - as somebody in a post has explained.

Supposed that, say, soylent, kills people in 30 years of consumption. What's going to happen in the meanwhile?

Or, worse, suppose instead that the effect is subtle, for example, that it causes debilitation in the long term. How's that going to come out?

Sadly, some nutritionist will make 50.6 people run for 25.3 minutes on a treadmill, then come up with the conclusion that there is no significant negative effect, which is going to be trumpeted on mainstream publications.

Let's talk about iron. One problem with vegetarians is that some fall very ill if the don't eat meat, even if they take iron injections. How nutritions science explains that? Unfortunately, it can't. (actually, this is a serious doubt in vegetarian circles. There is the suspect that some big vegetarian advocates are secretly eating meat because of this or similar problems).

The big problem is that products like soylent carry the underlying message that science has a clear idea of how the human body works, while in reality, it doesn't, and this is a very, very serious problem.

> Or, worse, suppose instead that the effect is subtle, for example, that it causes debilitation in the long term. How's that going to come out?

The very long term effects are extremely difficult to assess anyway, and it's not just Soylent, it's everything else you eat or take on a frequent basis out there. Until we have more sensors in our bodies to monitor numerous indicators in real time and understand their significance, it will be very hard to understand if anything is making your body worse in the course of dozens of years.

I agree - and that's why I'm advocating for a much more cautious approach to nutrition. In this perspective Soylent, is the opposite of cautiousness, as it's certainly going to be marketed as the mother of all foods. I'd much like see a company developing drones for shipping healthy sandwiches lunch time.

This feels to be like an appeal to magic. We are simply animals, many pets live long healthy lives on single sources. Soylent doesn't have to be magically perfect, it just has to be better than the mass manufactured foods we are currently eating.

This is also a concern of mine, however there are multiple examples in the world of people who have an incredibly restricted diet and still live long enough (Don Gorske with Big Macs, or many eastern countries that focus a lot on rice, or generally non-cooking people who eat frozen cheap food all the time). It would seem that Soylent, as a single source of nutrients, still does a better job than many other restricted diets, and sometimes it may even be preferable if cheap and easy enough to prepare.

My understanding was that Soylent isn't intended to be an exclusive food replacement, rather a food source that is quick and hassle free to prepare and consume. Your concern over micro/phyto nutrients is obviously valid (and would be very interesting to study!) but probably won't be validated as long as Soylenters fulfil their occasional cravings for hamburgers / coffee / micronutrient containing food stuffs.

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