Speaking of food allergies, the recent Radiolab podcast about people developing a sudden allergy to non-primate red meat is worth a listen. Of course, if you are a vegetarian, cannibal or monkey-eater, nothing to worry about …
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Nah, Rob just likes to feel superior. Remember when he said you should throw your cell phone away? Guess he thought he was smarter than everyone else.
i think the point was that it is overly simplistic to think soy is more environmentally friendly and has a lower impact then animal products, likely in reference to the slew of recent articles exposing the high environmental impact of soy and how it is specifically higher then many animal products, especially the forms commonly processed for consumption. At the very least it was a nudge to drop the outdated simplistic model that the lower on the food chain you go the less environmental impact a diet has, that isn’t really how it works. a grass fed local cow can have a lot lower impact then imported soy protein isolate.
Soy is currently one of the primary drivers of rain forest deforestation. The processing of beef is fairly minimal, cutting, antibiotics and feed are not processing and akin to fertilizers and pesticides, meaning they fall under production impacts rather then processing.
read up on the environmental impacts of soy. the wwf maintains links to lots of articles, but i’d start here or here or here.
It is quite an interesting thing to read up on. cheers.
(disclaimer: i was vegan for over 9 years so i’ve eaten my fair share of soy.)
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Mathmaticians no. String theorists tend to come out of theoretical physics and sometimes cosmology so yeah.
But I still think your looking at science from an engineering perspective. Soylent are not making observations under experimental conditions then drawing conclusions from those observations. They have an end goal product in mind, And they are creating and releasing versions of that end product based on existing knowledge and input from their customers. There is no indication that they are experimentally tracking the effects or results of their product, And especially not to learn anything specific as a result.
And you keep mentioning Mendel. As if his being a monk meant he was a non-expert or not a professional scholar.
Clergy are, And have traditionally been highly educated. Shit Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method was a priest. And the roots of formalised theory of science as we know it today are in Catholic theological and academic structures. Which are themselves derived from roman/greek rhetoric, logic, And legal thought. Mendel was educated in philosophy, theology and served as university faculty in a department of natural history. After he became a friar, but before he trained as a priest.
He was very, very much an expert in the field in which he worked. And he was very much a credentialed academic. But even when that’s not the case, as in the story of the hairdresser I linked to. Expertise is absolutely necessary to “doing science”. That there’s a person with no formal credentials in history or archeology. But she’s also absolutely an expert in something the academics she works with aren’t. And that’s styling hair. She was able to apply her expertise to gain further expertise in a very particular subject within archeology. Even if that acquisition didn’t involve formal education, but practically doing the thing in question. You can’t study or work within a subject without having or gaining understanding of it. And I do not believe the soylent guys are much interested in doing so.
They have their preconcieved notion. Cooking and food are a horrible waste of time! And tech can save us from it! And they’re picking and choosing established information, regardless of its quality that allows them to believe they are accomplishing their goal.
This is a bit of a nit pick but I think it’s pertinent. “MD nutritionist” isn’t so much a thing. Nutritionists arent doctors or credential medical professionals. Ben goldacre’s cat is a registered nutritionist.
http://www.badscience.net/2007/02/ms-gillian-mckeith-banned-from-calling-herself-a-doctor/
They appear to be working with a dietitian. Who are doctors. That they know the difference is encouraging. But as I said it doesn’t cover all the fields or areas that come into play here. And the consensus among dietitians, medical experts, And food scientists who have publicly commented on the subject seems to be that Soylent specifically isn’t nutritionally adequate. And that meal replacements, especially liquids are not safe or healthy for long term use or as a large portion of the diet.
I don’t see Soylent producing research to challenge that. Or even attempting to.
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No, I’m outright saying that the energy required to render soy protein isolate down for feel good milkshakes is far more damaging to the environment than simply eating soybeans or regular soy products.
You don’t need fossil fuels to make tofu.
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My brother thought he picked that up. Lone star tick bite. Learned more than enough about the subject to avoid going out with out mountains of deet.
3 meals a day * 365 days a year = 1095 meals a year.
0.1% chance of a nasty dose of the shits plus other horrible symptoms after a meal * 1095 meals a year ~= 1 nasty dose of the shits etc. per year.
Looks sound to me (pace the point about the 0.1% referring to individual sensitivity rather than batch quality).
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You do realize that the vast majority of that soy is grown for use as animal feed, right?
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I have no horse in this race – I don’t eat Soylent and don’t plan to – but to claim that they are just making shit up and throwing literally anything in a blender they can get away with that resembles food just isn’t true. They’ve researched this extensively, done experiments (on themselves, too), and consulted with a myriad of professional dieticians, nutritionists, and so on. They also listen to community feedback and have reformulated the stuff significantly based on what they learned at least five times so far over the last 3 years.
Now, whether they have done these things to @Ryuthrowsstuff’s personal satisfaction … I can’t say.
And none of this is to say they are right, or have done everything right. Like I said, I don’t ever plan to consume Soylent. But I have seen zero evidence that they are operating in bad faith. They are shipping a product they would personally consume for years.
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Fair point but if you don’t get at least one nasty dose of the shits per year eating anything, you’re quite lucky.
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Also a fair point (though I must have the stomach of a concrete elephant, because it’s not happened to me for 11 years).
Though the symptoms listed weren’t just the shits, but uncontrollable shits plus vomiting and dehydration.
If that’s happening to you once a year, maybe you should consider tighter quality control on the restaurants you visit?
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Except that it’s none of those things. Unless you compare it to the meat industry, which is a horribly low bar to set for declaring something more healthy, more environmentally conscious, and cheaper. If those were really their goals, they’d just start a vegan advocacy group or whatever. This is clearly a case of (software) engineers treating a non-engineering non-problem as an engineering problem, and being too smug to adequately properly test their solution to the (non-)problem before making the product publicly available.
You know those shitty infomercials that open with the obviously fake footage of someone failing to do something trivial before they try to sell you on their product that makes that trivial task easier? Soylent is basically following that model by ‘solving’ the problem of feeding yourself.
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The huge amounts of soy farming that results in the massive deofrestation is grown to use as animal feed for the huge-and-growing livestock industry. If we cut out the unsustainable and wasteful practice of raising livestock for food, while there would likely be an increase in human consumption of soy, there would be an overall decrease in the amount of soy being used.
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They’re trying to make a buck. The rest is just marketing. Meal replacements have existed forever. How do you sell it to people who don’t want to be associated with their usual market of elderly people? Marketing.
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Pea protein is where the cutting edge meal replacements are going. No gastro problems - no phyto estrogens being added to people’s systems.
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Has anyone thought that maybe the problem is that SOYLENT IS PEOPLE!! (really … all these comments and no one made this joke yet?)
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The important thing to remember is Tuesday is Soylent Green day…
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You beat me to the first Soylent green reference by four minutes.
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