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DanielLC comments on Open Thread, May 5 - 11, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Soylent provides ideal amounts of every known nutrient. It's possible that there's some obscure nutrient that people who live solely on Soylent haven't gone without long enough to have noticeable effects. Many people guard against this by having a regular meal once a day.
coughbullshitcough
Soylent provides the currently available estimates of the needed amounts of known essential nutrients for an average person of an average metabolism with no metabolic quirks.
Grandparent's comment is perhaps optimistic, but yours is downright FUD. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I don't think calling it FUD is a good idea. There is good reason to automatically fear something like this. I just feel like he's not taking into account the extent to which these fears have already been addressed. If he said this when Soylent was first made, he would have been right. It took a few tries to get it right. Even as it is, there is still room for error.
Would you care to explain what is wrong in what I said?
Do you plan your diet using future estimates of the amounts needed? Do you account for your metabolic quicks? Do you even have enough detail in your plans that these would have an effect?
I don't know the details, but I'd bet that in the case of not having good estimates for what's needed, they use the much easier to find amounts for what's normally eaten. Again, do you have a way of doing better?
Not to restart the Soylent debate again, but yes, I account for metabolic quirks and yes, I think I can (and do) better than Soylent. Soylent is both one-size-fits-all and same-thing-each-day-every-day.
Note that we didn't talk about criteria and likely have different ones in mind. For example, "Will you die if you eat nothing but Soylent for a couple of years?" is a very different question from "Is Soylent optimal food for me (or anyone)?".
I don't think Soylent is optimal, but I do think it would be very difficult to beat, unless they did leave something out or something like that.
Comparing Soylent to a blow-up doll is at best a huge exaggeration.
Depends on what you compare it to. For complete-nutrition liquids it competes against a few expensive hospital products. But for food it competes against things like WholeFoods and farmers' markets -- and loses handily (IMHO).
It doesn't compete against individual foods. It competes against diets. If you went through the work to make sure the diet was perfectly balanced, than it probably wouldn't be that hard to beat Soylent, although I'm not sure the margin it's possible to beat it by would do much. I don't think things like WholeFoods and farmers' markets would be necessary. On the other hand, if you were trying to make a diet just by looking at a few major nutrients, or worse, whatever you happen to crave, you're not going to beat Soylent, regardless of the quality of food.
Taken as a single meal, it's not hard to beat Soylent. After all, Soylent has a third your recommended daily value of calories. Given how much Americans tend to eat, food with less than a third would be healthier.
No, that doesn't seem to be true. Let's take me. I can drink Soylent or I can eat a variety of food, these are the two choices I am facing. There doesn't have to be any "diet" involved.
Soylent doesn't compete against individual foods. It competes against food, in all its variety.
That's what a diet is, isn't it?
Or were you thinking that I meant "diet" as in reducing your food to lose weight or something like that? I guess that is the more common use. Sorry if I caused a misunderstanding.
In any case, the specific choice of foods you use is more important than the set they're chosen from. It doesn't seem right to say it competes against a farmers' market. It competes against specific selections of food that may be from a farmers' market.