No, just at the anti-nerd backlash that is far beyond BoingBoing. Can’t show too much deviant interests or you will be deemed a loser.
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Actually, it’s about ethics in food journalism.
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They do, just not to your personal satisfaction.
I think it is also worth pointing out that:
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Cats and dogs live on the same exact cheap pre-packaged food for years on end. I know mine did.
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I fail to see how choosing to eat only or mostly Solent is any different than any other diet fad like grapefruit diet, south beach diet, Atkins diet, paleo diet, or dozens of others.
Comparing this to some high risk activity like surgery is … uh, wrong.
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Huh? Much of the traditional Inuit diet was meat… raw caribou, raw seal, raw whale meat. They had a few berries in the summer months, but mostly ate meat and adapted to a diet rich in raw meat (by burning proteins for energy). I don’t know where you get the idea they mostly subsided on plant fibre… most of the year, there weren’t that many plants!
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Please point me to a single scientific study done on soylent and I’ll evaluate it to see if they use the scientific method or not. Whether or not they do has nothing to do with my personal satisfaction. Either they do, or they don’t.
Yes they do. Most pet food manufactures foods are formulated by animal nutrition experts, have animal safety trials, and ingredients are sampled for contaminants. The cheap ones that don’t can cause serious health issues with pets from kidney stones to death, and unfortunately often do. 
All the reputable human meal replacement companies sell products formulated by teams of nutritionists, have performed human safety trials, and even so recommend a doctors supervision when being used as a meal replacement for any length of time.
Not Soylent, hence the objections. That and the low quality ingredients that aren’t usable by the human body. Doesn’t matter if it contains 100% of the RDA of something if it is a form that is unusable.
Many fad diets are unhealthy. Most have had scientific studies done on them. Most incorporate whole foods and some variety of foods which offsets most of the potential risk. Granted the human organism is very adaptable, you can live off of ramen for a month, doesn’t mean it is a good idea long term. That is where scientific studies are so important.
Not my comparison.
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I think it was just a poor wording choice on his part. Exclusive of, not exclusively of. I had to reread it several times before i caught that.
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I was referring to the I Fucking Love Science cargo-cult brand of “nerd” with more of an appreciation for inspiration than the process.
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So the fact that Soylent has 100% of the US RDA of nutrients from the NIH isn’t sufficient science for you?
https://ods.od.nih.gov/Health_Information/Dietary_Reference_Intakes.aspx
If I walk the pet food aisle of my local supermarket and point to any of the dozens if not hundreds of dog and cat food products and ask “is this safe for my pet to eat for several years” your answer is “nope, show me the scientific study proving this specific cat food is safe otherwise it ain’t science” ?
Like I said, I think this does have to do with your personal satisfaction. Which is fine. I don’t eat Soylent either and I have no plans to start.
Doesn’t mean they are using the scientific method. The RDA, is the recommended minimums to prevent diseases and was established by science, but not by anyone at soylent. The soylent company didn’t contribute to any of the RDAs. Unusable forms of nutrients might meet an RDA on paper, but it only does any good if your body can absorb and utilize it, otherwise you might as well not be getting any at all.
I studied veterinary medicine prior to going to university for computer science and botany. Most reputable pet foods DO have safety studies, test for contaminants, and are formulated by experts. Unlike Soylant. If a certain pet food hasn’t been studied, then correct, there is not science behind any claim that it is safe. The number of health problems regularly caused by cheaper pet foods is staggering which is why when you take your pet to a vet they ask what food it is on and nudge you towards a scientifically formulated one that has had safety trials.
I like human food that meets this minimum requirement, i wouldn’t require less for my pet, let alone for myself.
No, whether or not they use the scientific method is easily verifiable. Either they’ve done studies that use the scientific method or they haven’t. It isn’t a matter of opinion. I’ll gladly concede the point if anyone can point me to a scientific study they’ve done.
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Thus if they meet the RDAs, that is in fact science, as you yourself acknowledge. Granted it is a minimum bar, but it is there.
That is a fair point, and vets do recommend certain brands in fact “Science Diet” is a literal brand they recommend, funnily enough. It is clinically proven, right there on the ad copy on the bag:
So this is definitely a valid point. Food quality varies, but rarely to the point that it would seriously harm you or your pet. Otherwise we would have widespread, epidemic pet (or for that matter human) deaths, wouldn’t we?
Yes the RDAs are based on science. Soylet didn’t do any of that science, nor do they need to do any science to include those quantities. Unless you consider measuring science. So yes the NIH does science, but no soylent has not.
Including all the minimum RDAs doesn’t mean they are properly balanced for meal replacement or that they’ve included usable forms (if you look at their ingredient list, many are poorly absorbed/utilized forms that are cheap industrial byproducts which is why they aren’t the forms used in quality supplements).
Also worth noting that the RDAs are minimums for disease prevention, not optimum levels.
It happens more often then you might think. The number one cause of kidney and liver issues in pets is cheap pet foods.
Soylent uses ingredients that are all GRAS, so yes it is unlikely that drinking a glass would cause immediate death unless there was a contamination of some sort. Long term health effects due to a misformulation would likely not be seen for years, which is why human clinical safety trials are performed by all the major meal replacement companies, well all except one which is why we keep pointing that out.
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Ah, that makes more sense… guess I didn’t read that closely enough. All the same, I suspect it would go badly for most people if they suddenly switched to the traditional Inuit diet…
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You are correct. It has been tried and has gone badly. Ketogenic diets are usually fine, but their traditional diet is exceptionally high calorie and low in plant matter, which the body requires in those extreme conditions living the traditional lifestyle, but which leads to health issues outside of the traditional lifestyle and climate.
It is a very interesting diet to study.
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Indeed. And I wonder what other trace molecules are provided in conventional veg&meat food that aren’t present in an artificial diet? Especially in a varied diet of such food. I can’t believe we’ve discovered everything there is to know about diet requirements. Nor do we know everything that’s in a lot of ingredients. A friend authored a paper on the chemical analysis of coffee, to see how composition affects flavor. He told me there are at least 800 different chemicals just in coffee!
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Would you chose that person over a trained surgeon? Again not looking for an answer, its just a notion to ponder. I’m hoping it’ll give you a clearer idea of what I’m talking about. Though its fun to talk about so have at it.
For my part if you had a guy self taught from books, with some practical (and successful) experience. Even on Animals. I could see that being a thing in the right situation. We can call this scenario “At least one season of The Walking Dead”. If it was some guy totally working off his own notions purely by dicking around with hose clamps and a dremel? Fuck no.
As defined by Soylent. One single staple that provides everything the body needs with no obvious deficiencies. Hence the complete source.
But it wasn’t single source. Staples were multiple animals. Supplemented with wild foraged plant matter seasonally. Single source diets don’t really exist as a default model in history. Though various peoples are close. The Mek, in Paupau New Guinea traditionally eat a diet almost totally based on Sago. Its a nearly pure plant starch ground out of fucking trees, which is amazing. In times of plenty this is supplimented with bush meat, insects, wild and cultivated fruit, and farmed casava and taro.
The Irish for a long time ate a diet heavily focused on the potato, supplemented where possible with (primarily) dairy eggs, and garden vegetables. In both cases hardship lead to reliance on the staple to the near exclusion of all else. Though as a non-perminant solution. And failure of either crop led directly to famine regardless of the presence of other food sources (which were due to the staple focused nature of the diet, insufficient in quantity).
Such subsistence type diets are inexorably connected to poverty, famine, and nutritional deficiency. IIRC Rickets were relatively common in the Inuit during times of hardship. Vitamin D from meat sources supposedly waved off deficiency caused by lack of sun exposure in northern climates. Bad hunting meant lack of vitamin D, even if there was sufficient other food available to cover the short fall. There were similar issues among the Sami in Scandinavia and Siberian peoples. People reliant on Sago are apparently pretty susceptible to this. As its almost entirely carbohydrate. Very few micro-nutrients. It’ll keep you alive because its loaded with calories, but if you don’t have something else you’ll slowly starve or fall to nutrient deficiencies.
Well no. But there was a pre-existing body of finch data to draw from. By Darwin’s time there was at least a few hundred years of modern natural history work on the books. Including a lot of anatomical and taxanomic work. And an increasing amount of work on fossil and extinct life. Including on finches, turtles, and iguanas. A big part of Darwin’s work was in comparing his observations between the different Islands and to published work about similar creatures elsewhere. Hell Taxonomy largely traces itself to Linnaeus who lived almost exactly a century before Darwin. Though the roots and early work go back much further. And Chucky boy was a professional academic who specifically studied these subjects.
Darwin didn’t work in a vaccum. Even in terms of evolution and extinction. Evolution was already a scientific concept being investigated at the time. The concept of species having a specific origin and extinction were both largely, and increasingly accepted. Darwin’s own Grandfather, Erasmus had proposed an Evolutionary theory before Darwin was born. There were even some proposed mechanisms that were widely accepted as true.
What Darwin did was propose the first truly, plausible testable, and subsequently confirmed evolutionary mechanism. He didn’t “invent” Evolution. And he spent decades writing On The Origin of Species. Though he had conceived early inklings of Natural Selection at least by the time he hit the Galapagos, if not before. Because he wanted to make sure he had the base scientific work to back it up down. More data. More new information from other Researchers. More references to established work.
What he didn’t do is start tossing about evolutionary based predictions. Based on those early inklings. Refining them based on how well they turned out.
That’s not food science. Its food science if you take efforts to establish that its really the berries that made you sick and not the day old Antelope you had for breakfast. How often they make people in a given population sick. Or why the berries make you sick. ETC. Its engineering if you work on finding a way to make the berries not make you sick. The former informs the latter.
Fine do the damn studies and publish it. Internal “studies” aren’t the same. Neither is customer feed back. Neither can establish safety, neither can prove this stuff says what it does on the box or gets close. Publish something properly structured. Get it peer reviewed. Let other people attempt to replicate. Bask in scientific glory.
“I enjoy doing laundry about as much as doing dishes. I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me. Shipping is a problem. I wish container ships had nuclear engines but it’s still much more efficient and convenient than retail. Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them, and I donate my used garments.”
“I have not set in a grocery store. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multi-sensory living nightmare. There are services that will make someone else do it for me but I cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through this gauntlet.”
That’s all the proof I need that he’s a monster. The raw, unfiltered, myopia and privilege of this douche is astounding. THE OPPRESSION OF going to the grocery store? He has DEEP thoughts about saving the world from hunger. While buying cloths from what are likely oppressed workers. Then throwing them out to avoid cleaning them. He’s like everyone’s worst college roommate.
The base idea behind “lets discard culture” for … something…something THE FUTURE. Offends me deeply. Its basically “I don’t like it or understand it so it must be bad, let me fix it”. Smeared thickly with smug and misinformation.
But that’s not the point largely. I think it’s clear his product is not what it claims to be, or what he thinks it is. Is not materially different from similar products. And the approach to supposed science here is all wrong. In a way that is sadly typical of food fads, crash diets, and the innumerable bullshit products out there.
Ah. @redesigned is using the medical model of control. Likely because its what is applicable to Soylent. But Cosmologists absolutely use control. They use math to control for things like the visual distortion from the earths atmosphere, the effects of gravity on light etc. They use multiple filters or observation methods to distinguish between two very similar phenomena. Focusing on features that are diagnostic of one, but not of the other. Hell even choosing a place with low light pollution to observe from is a kind of control. Limiting external variables to ensure clean observations. It doesn’t look like the methods of control used in medical studies, but its all control.
ALSO there’s actually a long standing debate over whether certain kinds of cosmologists qualify as scientists. Along with meta-physicists. As the more complicated, bleeding edge of those sorts of things can cross over into philosophy and begin ignoring the scientific method. They get punchy about it.
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Care to share any citations or proof of this? The science if you will? 
I agree that Soylent has a focus on being inexpensive, not to cut corners but to be a viable meal replacement for everyone no matter their income. If that’s the source of the 0.1% of people who have problems digesting these unusual ingredients then that is a flaw in their model for sure.
Oh bloody hell. Now you’re just sea lioning. Every vet I’ve taken my cat to has discussed what food I give her exactly because of the kidney issues. I don’t know a single pet owner who’s not aware of this.
Soylent is what’s being discussed. The onus is on them to produce the studies to show how safe it is, and furthermore what’s causing the issues people are having. So far they’re just trying to victim-blame.
Come to think of it, what needs to happen before legally they have to issue a recall?
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So, er, how inexpensive is it then?
Costs more than I spend on food now, I think.
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Here’s some work from 1987, when it was belatedly realised that cats cannot synthesise their own taurine and die of heart disease if fed on cheap catfood that lacked this essential micronutrient.
No-one seems to have researched feline deficiency as a cause of taurine cardiomyopathy.
Sea-lions may or may not require dietary taurine.
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Can’t speak for the USA version as I got NFI how much groceries are over there.
The Aussie versions are around the $80-$90 as a full week’s meal-pack, so less than half the price of a pre-made calorie-controlled weekly meal plan (Lite N Easy or similar) but really not aimed at poor people. I could live pretty well on $80 a week for my grocery shop.
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