[hermaj]

I'm starting to think this has to be a viral marketing campaign / social experiment.

It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health to unqualified individuals, who lack the resources to employ qualified individuals, simply for an extra hour everyday.

[cabalamat]

> It's an interesting premise that people would entrust their long term health to unqualified individuals

I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.

> simply for an extra hour everyday

An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.

[bloopletech]

One of the most surprising things about the commentary on Soylent, is the level of vitriol and anger that they are pushing out a meal replacement product without an exceptionally high level of testing and scientific design; and that the entire _concept_ of trying to create a meal replacement product is morally wrong, or totally and completely impossible.

(For examples, just read the comments on this article, or any of the Soylent-related articles).

It seems to be based on a presumption that we all have amazing, carefully designed and scientifically tested diets as is, and Soylent is going to make our diets demonstrably worse, or (apparently) make us really sick, or (even) kill us.

Given that 69.2% of the adult US population is overweight, it would seem that our current amazing diets are perhaps not working.

Of course, the vast majority of us make it up as we go along, influenced by food manufacturers and marketing, and the people around us, as well as our parents.

Sure, food manufacturers have more scrutiny than you or I, but no one is making sure that any particular combination of food in the supermarket is going to lead to a healthy diet - nothing stops me from choosing and carrying out a bad diet - and many many people 'choose' and carry out bad diets as is.

Do you seriously think that, when the supermarket put in an entire aisle of confectionery, that they were doing it as some attempt to give us a good diet?

Or that coke is attempting to help us lose weight when the dump all that sugar - or HFCS - in?

If you think the person buying Taco Bell for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch, and KFC for dinner is following a carefully designed, healthy diet, you are deluded. If you think these people don't exist - you're deluded there too.

To be not evil, Soylent only has to be _not worse_ than the average existing diet.

Now, I agree that a complete meal replacement product should get more scrutiny than the average person's diet - and Soylent is! I certainly haven't had my diet designed by a group of food scientists or dieticians.

[cabalamat]

> the level of vitriol and anger [...] that the entire _concept_ of trying to create a meal replacement product is morally wrong

You're right there. Some people really do have a strong emotional response against the idea, which makes them put forward nitpicking arguments against it.

Will the initial implementations of Soylent be perfect? Probably not. But there is no reason why it's impossible to make an all-in-one food that is tasty, nutritious, convenient and cheap, so I'm sure that if enough effort is put into doing so, eventually it will happen.

When it happens, it's unlikely that I will solely eat Soylent; I like cooking and I like varienty. But I wouldn't be surprised if I come to use it for 30% of my calorific intake.

[hermaj]

> I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.

If you live in a country which adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health then I disagree. You entrust those bodies and the qualified individuals within them because they ensure what you purchase is what it says it is. Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.

> An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.

If Soylent works completely as advertised yes you gain time. Should it lead to any kind of health problems it's more than likely you lose time.

[bloopletech]

> Soylent has not reached this level of evaluation.

Do you actually know that? Presumably if there is US regulation/law around selling and marketing food products, then Soylent will have to be compliant just like everything else?

Though, given I live in Australia, a country which

> adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health

and I can still buy all the Quarter Pounders and chocolate I want, it seems these bodies are more about food safety, than choosing my diet for me.

[asdasf]

>If you live in a country which adheres to standards of food safety and has regulatory bodies to protect and promote public health then I disagree

Soylent has to adhere to all those same standards.

[fingerprinter]

No it won't, in the US at least. It will likely not need FDA approval just like most sports supplement don't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_food_and_dietary_...

[asdasf]

Did you even read that? It says you are wrong.

>The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 mandated that the FDA regulate dietary supplements as foods

Soylent has to adhere to the exact same standards as all the other food you buy right now.

[fingerprinter]

You either needed to read more or more closely. According to wikipedia linked:

"Like other food substances, dietary supplements are not subject to the safety and efficacy testing requirements imposed on drugs, and unlike drugs they do not require prior approval by the FDA; however, they are subject to the FDA regulations regarding adulteration and misbranding. The FDA can take action against dietary supplements only after they are proven to be unsafe. "

[kamaal]

>>I trust my diet to an unqualified individual (me), as do most people.

Sorry, but this is straight out wrong. You will lose nothing and it will cause no harm in anyway, and I mean it literally if you experiment with natural foods. Go eat bananas, or apples, or mixture of those. Or say mixture of 20 fruits. It will never cause you any harm. Eat rice, wheat, meat, ragi, vegetables you name it. It will cause you absolutely no harm if you eat what is supposed to be eaten by a normal adult.

This is true, even if you occasionally eat junk food.

But if you go and pull only the essential 'ingredients' of these foods separately, mix them up in water and drink them. You are likely to cause a good enough amount of damage.

There is a very big reason, why our tongues have taste buds,why our stomachs have hydrochloric acid in them,why the stomach has a mucus lining, why we secrete digestive juices/enzymes, why we secrete bile. You see the whole functioning of the body is not designed to receive dosage of macro nutrients back to back in hourly dosage.

On a macro level if you look close, the food chain and the digestive system is perfectly optimized to survive and even thrive in the hands of unqualified individuals like us. If our body needed back to back dosage of macro nutrients in precise quantities to survive, our species would be extinct by now.

So the definition of efficiency when it comes to human digestive system is not, time saved in cooking food, or ability to receive and absorb exact chemical nutrients in precise quantities.

Also note the aim of the human digestive system and the way it measures efficiency is very different than our way.

>>An hour a day is 6% of your waking life.

You could say this about playing a game in the Google doodle, or say reading the news paper.

Its not like your receive 6% of your life in one shot. You receive it an hour at a time. For the kind of job we do an hour is not sufficient to even get started.

[fc2]

The stuff that goes in Soylent and their quantities come from FDA recommendations.