RomeoStevens comments on Soylent Orange - Whole food open source soylent - Less Wrong

25 [deleted] 26 March 2013 09:20PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 29 March 2013 06:48:13PM *  6 points [-]

It's tantalizing idea, but I think cooking and eating 'regular' solid food is here to stay for the time being.

There has actually been quite a lot of research in modified food intake, because there are many conditions which cause people to need parental nutrition and TPN -- cancer, surgery, improper digestion, etc. There is even an official society -- called A.S.P.E.N. (https://www.nutritioncare.org) -- and they offer certifications, because the field is really incredibly complicated. People have survived on total parental nutrition for years, even decades, but most develop complications. Administering engineered nutrition is still an art, because we still don't know exactly how to give patients the nutrients they need while maximizing their absorption. Also, though our knowledge of the human body's nutritional needs is quite advanced, it is far from perfect. Grants for GI research are not plentiful (in the US, at least).

If you would really like to try a kind of 'liquid food' diet, I highly recommend that you speak with a certified nutrition specialist. Finding a good pharmacist or doctor (depending on state and hospital) in a prestigious cancer/research hospital would be ideal (especially if they have multiple certifications so that they could apply multidisciplinary knowledge), I think. It would be interesting to see what they would say, because usually TPNs are administered intravenously, which is obviously not applicable to your case. I think that at the very least they would be able to give you some official guidelines with which you can refer to as you experiment.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 29 March 2013 09:33:39PM 3 points [-]

The soylent guy spoke with a nutritionist and got a greenlight. Given that I am making mine from whole foods, and am not completely replacing my diet with it I doubt I'll run into any problems. As I said, I've been doing this for 6 months now. Don't most problems with administered nutrition stem from the lack of digestion?