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There's kind of a growing movement around Rob Rhinehart's Soylent thing, dunno if you folks have heard of this.
Basically, he got tired of making food all the time and tried to figure out the absolute minimum required chemical compounds required for a healthy diet, and then posted the overall list, and has now been roughly food free for three months, along with a bunch of other people.
It seems awesome to me and I'm hoping this sort of idea becomes more prevalent. My favorite quote from him I can't now find, but it's something along the lines of "I enjoy going to the movie theater, but I don't particularly feel the need to go three times a day."
There's small reddit community/discourse groups around getting your own mixture.
This is interesting. For years I've blended together various ingredients (mostly stuff like broccoli, lentils, sweet pepper, ricotta, canned tuna, olive oil, various grains and nuts such as flax, sesame, hazelnut, sunflower), balanced these for macro and micro-nutrients using cron-o-meter, further optimized along various axes such as cost, taste, ease of use, ease of preparation, packaging, cleaning up etc. Food is primarily something I do to feed myself in the end, and I dislike it when there's too much fluff.
I'd be more wary of mixing together purified/refined nutrients though. Just as licking iron bars won't provide you with your daily needs for iron (elemental iron isn't very soluble and your body wouldn't be able to assimilate it well), there's more and more evidence that whole plants and animal parts contain more than just the usual nutrients, and that this particular mix may be needed to stay in good health - and conversely that substituting multivitamins and refined macronutrients for normal food may run the risk of missing some essential, complex interactions/packaging that occurs in it and which changes the way your body assimilates it.
Now of course, many people eat junk food and still live to be 60-70 so there's some leeway. We'll only really know whether Soylent is healthy enough (like, for someone interested in life extension, and not just satisfied with a classical life span) if this experiment goes for decades, and if it's done using more people, controlled conditions, etc (in short, using Science).
I find this incredibly fascinating. Especially the ability to save hours every day from not needing to eat. If the guy doesn't die after a year or so, I'm definitely trying this out.
When I looked at his blog last, he was eating out socially (understandable). So we onlookers won't get to enjoy his discovery of any new micro-nutrient deficiency syndromes.
I wasn't especially impressed by his approach. Maybe he'll get some good advice from others, but I didn't think he was anyone to listen to.
It's not impressive as a medical experiment, but it's pretty impressive for actually-getting-something-done.
If it turns out that he can survive comfortably on his concoction plus highly irregular meals at restaurants, that's useful information. Just not as useful as the results of a more thorough experiment.
He actually spent the first two months on a Soylent-only diet, and only recently added social eating. I think he said something in his three month blog post about a week he spent eating normal food, and he ended up feeling way crappier.
Sure. But 2 months is not long enough. Some unaccounted-for vitamin with a long half-life or a low requirement could give deficiency symptoms after 4 months but not 2.
Also, people on restrictive diets post all the time about how crappy they feel when they reintroduce something. For him to slide comfortably into the explanation "thus my product makes me feel better than restaurant food" is typical of such dieters' enthusiasm.
Although bad restaurant food does exist, much of the digestive upset people experience when going out to eat is simply down to overeating, late eating, or alcohol.
That was also a week he spent travelling. Sleeping away from home, long plane/car rides, irregular schedule, and all the other attendant discomforts are quite enough to throw me off my game, even without dietary shifts.
Could also be a temporary effect. Your gut flora adjusts to what you're eating, and a sudden shift in composition can cause digestive distress.
I would be more surprised if, by only eating when you're socially required to, you happened to get the exact essential nutrients the diet would otherwise leave you without.
here's what i was thinking:
"real food" has plenty of vitamins and stuff
some of that stuff might have a long half-life in the body
and be needed only in small (catalytic?) amounts.
so that
you wouldn't know about them if you just studied basic nutrition textbooks (or perhaps nobody knows about them)
if your social eating is frequent enough, you'd never lack them.
so, ideally, people following some soylent-type practice strictly will develop some interesting symptoms, and we'll discover some new stuff. but if they cheat, we don't learn as much.
i admit there's a good possibility that we already know about all the vitamin-like stuff there is. after soylenters start showing better 10-year mortality, i'll gladly join them.
Some people thrive for decades (including Stephen Hawking) tube fed with nutritionally complete enteral formulas. Semi-annual blood tests pick up any deficiencies, and supplements are added if needed. Several companies make "Soylent", the one I am familiar with is Abbott Nutrition.
If there's something there that isn't priced for sale to hospitals, or restricted in sale to hospitals, and has been formulated so as to be edible by people who are tired of real food, go ahead and post it. My understanding is that tube-feeding is not the same use-case as Soylent at all, with tube-fed material needing to be essentially predigested and correspondingly expensive or something along those lines, and no concern for edible taste for obvious reasons.
I've done some looking, but I haven't seen anything out there that looks like it's meant to be eaten, meant to replace food, and priced at an affordable level for sole consumption.
Baby formula. Duh.
IIRC, the nutritional needs of adults aren't those of babies scaled up by a constant.
I'll let you know that I researched the matter ("Could an adult live entirely on baby food?"), and found this answer on answerbag.com:
That settles it, then. And as every doctor knows, children are just small adults ... small Victoria Beckhams specifically.
In seriousness though, you'd be fine. Here's the nutrient data for an infant formula from the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. You can compare what you'd get from the formula with the RDA and check that you wouldn't overshoot the tolerable upper intake levels (UL), but without having done any of those comparisons, I'd place a large bet that you'd be fine.
Your daily nutritional intake based on various Ramen, Pizza, some salad and/or Fast Food doesn't adhere to some "perfect" mix of ingredients either. You'll be just fine.
Good point -- it possibly wouldn't be as good as a formula designed specifically for adults, but it probably would be a vast improvement on what a sizeable fraction of the population are eating.
Well it's not clear there is one optimal level for most nutrients. You should hit all the Recommended Dietary Allowances and stay under the Tolerable Upper Intake Levels (links to both given in the grandparent), but in between that large range (often a factor of ten), who knows, it doesn't seem to make any difference (which is why the ULs are so high).
Given most usual Western diets, the problem isn't malnourishment (although it does exist, Vitamin D deficiencies in general, and problems with low SES populations subsisting on soda and chips come to mind). The problem is simply too many calories (and salts) consumed. Fast food is actually quite healthy ... if consumed in the appropriate amounts.
In other words, as long as you stay in the range, there's probably little difference between a formula designed specifically for adults, and a formula designed for kids which when scaled up is also in the correct ranges.
But there is a significant difference between taking a medical formula under doctors supervision and mixing up the most common nutrition ingredients and claiming it to be a cure-all-be-all food. Didn't the guy forget to include iron in his first mixture?
Another 'Soylent' equivalent I know of is Sustagen Hospital Formula.
Soylent Orange (with new and improved recipe. Okay, I just added marmite, but it's significantly more nutritionally complete than before)
This is a less radical version of the idea using store bought ingredients to achieve roughly the same ends.
I'm curious about how you make your Soylent. Do you just take all those ingredients and mix them in a blender? Do you have another page with more information?
There's a cell with directions on the spreadsheet. But essentially yes. Part of the appeal is that it takes less than 5 minutes.
This is also a reminder for me that I should really turn it into an infographic or at least make a more complete blogpost.
Oh I see the directions now. Yes, it would help if you included all of this into a detailed blogpost and explained what other meals you consume (and how often) to get a complete picture of how to adopt the diet oneself. I would like to experiment.
I'm also trying making a total food replacement this summer. Recommendation for people trying to make their own: start by buying just the macronutrients (oil / carbs / protein), and finding a blend you'll be okay with consuming. It's unlikely that the micronutrients will make it appreciably tastier, so if you can't find one you like without putting the micronutrients in it then you should abort. (The micronutrients represent a far more significant capital outlay, if you buy the ingredients separately rather than going with a multivitamin.)
Further discussion: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hht/link_soylent_crowdfunding/
That sounds particularly appealing to someone like me who outright forgets to be hungry. It seems I shall now be looking into this.
Does anyone know what the time-line is on vitamin deficiencies? I mean might this be like cigarettes - increases your risk of something going wrong massively but only becomes apparent years down the line when you're already screwed.
That wouldn't be consistent with studies showing very strong and consistent effects on children. Source: the section in this blog post from Yvain, the section on Multivitamins.
Direct link to study.
Not sure you can take repair time as damage time. Study was 3 months. Onset of vit c def I believe to be > 60 & < 90 days. Upper bound isn't necessarily consistent with study.
Definitely true, but if the vitamin deficiencies hadn't shown up yet in children the repair couldn't have an affect. So it caps the onset time at the age of the children involved, and shows that repairs can occur after some significant effect of deficiency occurs.
Also, vitamins deficiency might set in at different times for adults and children. Children grow a lot, so their nutritional needs are probably different from adults.
No source, just speculation.
Is there more to the Soylent thing than mixing off-the-shelf protein shake powder, olive oil, multivitamin pills, and mineral supplement pills and then eating it?
Not really. In fact I'm beginning to think that the Soylent guy is obfuscating his source of supplies in order to obfuscate how simple it is. I found a powder that is 100% of everything for $1 a scoop at costco.
... you sure that stuff actually contains everything you need?
EDIT: sorry, not sure if I understood you correctly; you're claiming that a similar, cheaper product exists, right?
It is 100% of the RDA of all micronutrients according to the label. I'm not at all sure that the soylent guy hasn't found something similar and is just adding it to an oil/whey/oats concoction.
Well, there's a thing. These people need better PR.
They sell themselves short as just an anti-aging formula.
This looks like it might solve several food problems I've been having. (Not wanting to interrupt work to get food, being hungry but not wanting any particular food, and needing to eat every 2-3 hours to keep my blood sugar under control. That last one is mainly a problem because eating in the middle of class or a meeting looks weird, and I could probably get away with a drink more easily.) I might try something like it this summer, probably while eating normal food once or twice a day to reduce the risk.
Intermittent fasting solves a number of these issues...
I've thought about it, but I feel sick enough just from waiting too long between meals that I'm sort of scared to.
It'll take time to adapt, and is generally much easier if you are eating a low carb diet.
This makes me want to ask if any of the people on the soylent diet are diabetic and how that's going.
Yes! There will be a Kickstarter soon and I can't wait.
Kickstarter actually rejected them. :(
More here
As a vegetarian, I'm also excited at this.
And as, y'know, a LW-type-person, obviously.