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Dorikka comments on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 - Less Wrong
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As there was some interest in Soylent some time ago, I'm curious what people who have some knowledge of dietary science think of its safety and efficacy given that the recipe appears to be finalized. I don't know much about this area, so it's difficult for me to sort out the numerous opinions being thrown around concerning the product.
ETA: Bonus points for probabilities or general confidence levels attached to key statements.
They included vitamin D2 instead of D3. From what I read about vitamin D that seems to be a bad decision.
I'd rank it below existing dietary replacements.
Thanks for your input. Are there any existing dietary replacements you recommend that are similarly easy to prepare? (Soylent Orange seems to be working well for you as a solution, but I don't think I would actually go to the trouble to put the ingredients together.)
On a related note, do you have any new/more specific criticisms of Soylent, other than those that you presented in this post?
None that I would recommend. None of my criticisms are original, Soylent still seems a very haphazard concoction to me. I do have a bunch of specific issues with Soylent that I haven't discussed in detail e.g. lack of cholesterol and saturated fat not being great for hormones. But yeah, I'm not super motivated to get deep into it unless I decide to try to turn the latest variant of Soylent Orange into an actual service. I'm still working on it.
Easy as in time requirements or easy as in money? The kind of fluid food replacement that they use in hospitals is probably better than what Soylent produces.
Liquid diets are not exactly a new idea, and most of them don't have to be prepared at all but come in portions. Since most of them have been developed for medical use, the price tag is significantly higher. Some of them have been developed for patients who can't swallow normal food at all, so I doubt they lack anything important that Soylent contains and probably have been much more rigorously tested. If anyone knows studies that have been done on these people, I'm all ears.
I'd like to see creatine included, just because most people would see mental and physical benefits from supplementation. The micronutrients otherwise look good. I've read things to the effect that real food is superior to supplementation (example), so I don't think that this is a suitable replacement to a healthy diet. I do think that this will be a significant improvement over the Standard American Diet, and a step up for the majority of people.
The macronutrients also look good -- especially the fish oil! 102g of protein is a solid amount for a non-athlete, and athletes can easily eat more protein if desired. Rice protein is pretty terrible to eat, I hope that they get that figured out. I'd probably prefer less carbs and more fat for myself, but I think that's just a quirk of my own biology.
Given that dogfood and catfood work as far as mono-diets go, I'm pretty hopeful that personfood is going to work out as well. I don't know enough about nutrition in general to identify any deficiencies (and you kind of have to wait 10+ years for any long-term effects), but the odds are good that it or something like it will work out in the long run. I'd go with really rough priors and say 65% safe (85% if you're willing to have a minor nutritional deficiency), up to 95% three years from now. These numbers go up with FDA approval.
They mostly seem to, but if they cause a drop in energy or cognitive capability because of some nutrient balance problems, the animals won't become visibly ill and humans are unlikely to notice. A persistent brain fog from eating a poor diet would be quite bad for humans on the other hand.
Most of the selective breeding has been done while these animals were on simple diets, so perhaps some genetic adaptation has happened as well. Besides, aren't carnivore diets quite monotonous in nature anyway?
I am not so sure of that. People have been feeding cats and dogs commercial pet food only for the last 50 years or so and only in wealthy countries. Before that (and in the rest of the world, still) people fed their pets a variety of food that doesn't come from a bag or a can.
In terms of what you kill and eat, mostly yes, but in terms of (micro)nutrients prey not only differs, but also each body contains a huge variety (compared to plants).
There's probably seasonal variation-- Farley Mowat described wolves eating a lot of mice during the summer when mice are plentiful. Also, I'm pretty sure carnivores eat the stomach contents of their prey-- more seasonal variation. And in temperate-to-cold climates, prey will have the most fat in the fall and the least in the early spring.
It wouldn't surprise me if there's a nutritional variation for dry season/rainy season climates, but I don't know what it would be.
I actually thought this way at first, but after reading up more on nutrition, I'm slightly skeptical that soylent would work as a mono-diet. For instance, fruits have been suggested to contain chemical complexes that assist in absorption of vitamins. These chemical complexes may not exist in soylent. In addition, there hasn't really been any long-term study of the toxic effects of soylent. Almost all the ingredients are the result of nontrivial chemical processing, and you inevitably get some impurities. Even if your ingredient is 99.99% pure, that 0.01% impurity could nevertheless be something with extremely damaging long-term toxicity. For instance, heavy metals, or chemicals that mimic the action of hormones.
Obviously, toxic chemicals exist in ordinary food as well. This is why variety is important. Variety in what you eat is not just important for the sake of chemicals you get, but for the sake of chemicals you don't get. If one of your food sources is tainted, having variety means you aren't exposed to that specific chemical in levels that would be damaging.
I still think it's promising though, and I think we'll eventually get there. It may take a few years, but I think we'll definitely arrive on a food substitute that has everything the body needs and nothing the body doesn't need. Such a food substitute would be even more healthy than 'fresh food'. I just doubt that this first iteration of Soylent has hit that mark.
I'll be watching Soylent with interest.
It seems to me that Soylent is at least as healthy as many protein powders and mass gainers that athletes and bodybuilders have been using for quite some time. That is to say, it depends on quality manufacturing. If Soylent does a poor job picking their suppliers, then it might be actively toxic.
Well, my estimates for long-term consequences would probably be:
Soylent is fine to consume occasionally -- 98%
Soylent is fine to be a major (but not sole) part of your diet -- 90%
Soylent is fine to be the sole food you consume -- 10%
What are your credentials w.r.t. nutrition?
What exactly do you mean with fine?
Um. Probably lack of noticeable health/fitness problems. But yes, it's a vague word. On the other hand, the general level of uncertainty here is high enough to make a precise definition not worthwhile. We are not running clinical trials here.
By the way, the vagueness of "major ... part of ... diet" is a bigger handwave here :-/
The more I read about nutrition the more I come to the conclusion that most diets do have effects. Some advantages and some disadvantages.
I thing there a good chance that A diet without any cholesterol might reduce some hormone levels and some people who look hard enough might see that as an issue.
The first one sounds underconfident (at least if you don't count people allergic or intolerant to one of the ingredients, nor set a very high bar for what to call “fine”).
The first one can be read as saying that 2% of people occasionally drinking Soylent will have problems because of that. That doesn't sound outlandish to me.
Never mind it's safety, I do not like it's hedonics at all. Basic: If you currently are eating blandly enough that shifting to a liquid mono-diet for any reason other than dire medical necessity is not a major quality of life sacrifice, you need to reprioritize either your time or your money expeditures.
Loosing one of the major pleasures of life is not a rational sacrifice. Life is supposed to be enjoyable!
Preparing food is an annoying hassle which tends to interfere with my workflow and distract from doing something more enjoyable. Food does provide some amount of pleasure, but having to spend the time actually making food that's good enough to actually taste good (or having to leave the house to eat out) is enough of an annoyance that my quality of life would be much improved if I could just cease to eat entirely.
Perhaps eating isn't a major pleasure of life for everyone.
I'm imagining an analogous argument about exercise. Someone formulates (or claims to, anyway) a technique combining drugs and yoga that provides, in a sweatless ten minutes per week, equivalent health benefits to an hour of normal exercise per day. Some folks are horrified by the idea — they enjoy their workout, or their bicycle commute, or swimming laps; and they can't imagine that anyone would want to give up the euphoria of extended physical exertion in exchange for a bland ten-minute session.
To me, that seems like a failure of imagination. People don't all enjoy the same "pleasures of life". Some people like physical exercise; others hate it. Some people like tasty food; others don't care about it. Some people like sex; others simply lack any desire for it; still others experience the urge but find it annoying. And so on.
Strong agreement-- I've read enough from people who simply don't find food very interesting to believe that they're part of the human range.
More generally, people's sensoriums vary a lot.
It's a weak analogy as humans are biologically hardwired to eat but are not hardwired to exercise.
True, but two comments. First, let's also look at the prevalence. I'm willing to make a wild approximation that the number of people who truly don't care (and never will care) about food is about the same as the number of true asexuals and that's what, 1-2%?
Second, I suspect that many people don't care about food because of a variety of childhood conditioning and other psychological issues. In such cases you can treat it as a fixable pathology. And, of course, one's attitude towards food changes throughout life (teenagers are notoriously either picky or indifferent, adults tend to develop more discriminating tastes).
Additionally, if one's schedule is so tight that preparing simple home-made meals (nothing complicated, just stuff that can be prepared with 5 minutes of work) is out of the question, that seems like a fast route to burnout.
Soylent's creator argues that it increases the quality of life benefits of food, since the savings from the Soylent diet meant that when he chooses to eat out, he can afford very good quality food and preparation.
For myself, while I enjoy eating good food, I do not enjoy preparing food (good or otherwise), and in fact I enjoy eating significantly less than I dislike preparing food. So the total event (prepares good food -> eats good food) has negative utility to me, other than the nutritional necessity.
Here's the one pro-Soylent friend I have discussing why he likes it(tl;dr, he's bad at eating and figures it'll balance him out):
http://justinsamlal.blogspot.ca/2013/06/soylent-preliminary-stuff.html
I noticed that the micro quantities appear to be very different between Soylent and Jevity. Dropped a post on the Soylent forum here if anyone's interested.