Comment by rdmcfee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdmcfee | Hacker News Reader

This was touched on in the article but I still feel it's necessary to point out that nutrition is one of the least understood fields in science.

The primary reason is that there are almost zero proper clinical trials and interventional studies. We have thousands of cohort studies which prove almost nothing.

For example, for 60 years saturated fat has been considered the enemy of cardiovascular health (because of some poorly conducted cohort studies in the 60's and 70's). Just this March, BMJ published a major meta study that showing that there are no proven causal links between saturated fat and heart disease. In fact it is now being suggested that avoiding saturated fat has been detrimental because Americans have replaced fat intake with high glycemic index foods causing obesity and T2D.

Personally I have no doubt that Soylent will fail to provide some required nutrient or fail to induce a certain hormonal or chemical response which is obtained via natural food intake. We simply don't understand nutrition well enough to check all the boxes. That said, if Soylent wanted to follow the scientific method and conduct a proper interventional clinical trial with a control group, adequate study population and duration I would be happy to consider the results.

So by that logic Soylent is exactly as acceptable as any other food eaten regularly. Except Soylent at least tries to cover all the bases, constituting a variety of known food components. While a constant diet of cheeseburgers and waffle fries has not.

I've heard folks trot out the "what about the unknown food components?" That's a spurious argument - eating random processed food has no guarantee of including magic mythical food ingredients. And I'm skeptical of imaginary ingredients that are essential to health - how would that work? Man in the wild would die unexpectedly unless consuming some vitamin present only in Zimbabwean ground-nuts? Evolution must have screwed up royally for that to be true.

Soylent could be considered exactly as acceptable as any specific food but most other diets offer a very wide diversity of foods. The current thinking in nutrition science seems to be that diversity in diet gives us a better chance of eating how we should be eating. Because we don't actually know how we should be eating we rely on that diversity. It's naive to think that the definition of "nutritionally complete" (which Soylent adheres to) isn't going to change over the coming decades. A traditional diet will still have a chance of being "nutritionally complete" under future requirements whereas Soylent's exact formula almost ensures that it won't.

I think what's even more important are some of more complex functions of digestion and nutrition response. For example, what is the glycemic response of Soylent? In December Annals of Internal Medicine published a study (1) showing that a daily multivitamin has no benefit to the longevity and health of the average American but we do know that dietary interventions which increase dietary intake of certain vitamins via actual foods are beneficial to health. Scientists are still figuring out why but it is apparent that you can't just take a pill or formula containing certain nutrients and gain the same benefits of getting these nutrients through food.

(1) http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1789253

I'm doubtful the majority of human throughout history have had a diverse diet. We're not adapted to require that; in fact we're adapted to conform to whatever diet we regularly consume. Lots of folks report stomach problems when eating food different from what they normally eat!

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