Soylent seems to be under more scrutiny than any other food product I have ever seen. And at the same time, they are being more transparent, and showing more responsibility than any other food company I've seen.
We've all gotten new food at some point that had gone bad; and yet I assume most of those companies just kinda shrug it off as long as it's below a certain threshold.
Except meat and vegetables. How many contaminations have happened with Salmonella or E. Colli that were more dangerous, and so wide spread that product recalls were required. I'm also not sure how many people are actually consuming Soylent multiple times a day, but I would love to know the ratio of one-off orders to subscriptions. Might be interesting.
You don't eat meat and veges from the same farm and same processing plant every day. There's a wide variety.
Also, food poisoning is always a risk when eating but it's not a life-shortening or baby-deforming kind of risk like, say mercury or lead overdose can be. Farmed products can have these contaminants but not usually consistently in every meal just because they're from varied sources.
I hope that more companies come to understand that a problem analysis like this one inspires customer confidence instead of bringing failure to light, reducing confidence.
On a side note, I was one of the early recipients of Soylent 2.0, and I was incredibly impressed with the product. As many have noted, the taste is similar to milk left in a bowl of cereal. It errs on the enjoyable side of neutral, unlike powdered Soylent 1.5, which fell on the unenjoyable side of neutral. The texture is also completely smooth -- the powdered versions were always grainy to me no matter how much I tried shaking.
I have a personal rule of never drinking Soylent more than once in a day and never two days in a row. But I consider it a worthwhile, affordable, and extremely convenient addition to my diet.
(1) I figure that at best Soylent has the nutrients that we know we need, but not the ones that we don't know we need. Over-reliance on Soylent might mean missing out on these nutrients, even if the health effects of doing so are very delayed.
(2) I've read reports on how the simple act of chewing food has an effect on digestion and other processes.
(3) Pure Soylent may not cultivate gut flora in the same way as normal solid diets do.
(4) I enjoy cooking and don't want those skills to atrophy because it's so much easier to just grab a bottle of Soylent.
(5) The rule also encourages me to go out with friends or invite people over more.
It's not a hard and fast rule -- it's just something I generally try to abide by, both as a risk-minimizing mechanism and as a general effort to force me to enrich my life more.
> I figure that at best Soylent has the nutrients that we know we need, but not the ones that we don't know we need. Over-reliance on Soylent might mean missing out on these nutrients, even if the health effects of doing so are very delayed.
Why is it any more likely that your traditional diet provides the nutrients that we don't know we need?
Note: I'm not the parent but like them I like, and consume Soylent and I agree that once a day is probably a good rule of thumb. I'll try and explain the parent's perspective in my words.
Soylent is deterministic. In-fact Soylent's goal is to be deterministic and as such will only become more deterministic as time progresses. Any two Soylent's will be the same.
Traditional food on the other hand, especially through variety, is by its nature non-deterministic. Example: You happen to be a patron of an icecream parlor. Today you buy/eat mango icecream, unknown to the parlor the mangoes happened to be from the east coast of Mexico. Tomorrow you buy/eat "the same" mango icecream, but these mangoes happened to be sourced from the west coast of Mexico. Was it the same? This example, doesn't even account for the variety involved with "traditional food", which only increases the stochastic nature of its nutritional properties.
Having defined that (hopefully we agree on the axioms), we can continue on to discuss the nature of problems where "we don't know [what] we need". Until we know what we need, the optimal strategy to satisfy an unknown goal is through non-determinism (again, hopefully we agree).
Based on the above:
I'll try to make a more succinct argument:
Given that Soylent contains everything we know we need.
And we know we don't know everything we need.
Then only consuming Soylent guarantees we do not satisfy all of our needs.
We must then consume things we do not know, to increase the probability of satisfying all our needs.
P.S. I am all for scientific experiments to better determine the unknowns and turn them into knowns. However, as long as there are any unknowns, the above points still hold.
I don't see why the larger variation in traditional diets guarantees a higher chance of providing some nutrients that we need but that we don't know we need.
Sorry, I guess I'm not able to explain it all that well.
I'll try one last time with an analogy.
Lets play a game: I will think of two numbers (range: 1..10) and you're going to guess which numbers they are.
I'm going to do you a big favor and guarantee you: I'm going to always pick 7. I will also guarantee you, the other number will never be 7.
To reiterate the givens: My numbers will be in the domains: [7] AND [1,2,3,4,5,6,8,9]
You get to pick two numbers. Would you pick 7 AND 7?
I hope not. 7 AND 7 by definition will always lose (probability of winning: 0%). Introducing variety for the second number will clearly increase your probability of winning to 1/8 = 12.5%.
Granted, the probability of winning is still low, and 12.5% assumes a random distribution, but its higher than 0%.
Now, similarly, lets a play a game: I am going to think of all of the nutrition that you need and you're allowed to guess two meals that will encompass all of that nutrition.
I will do you a favor and guarantee you: Soylent will get all of the food that we know we need (if you pick Soylent as one of the meals you will only need a tiny set of additional nutrition to win). I will also then guarantee you, we need things that we don't know, therefore since Soylent only has the things we know, we need at least one nutritional "thing" not in Soylent.
To reiterate the givens: Meals will be in the domains: [Soylent] AND [...everything except Soylent]
You get to chose two meals. Would you pick Soylent AND Soylent?
I hope not. Soylent AND Soylent by definition (in this game) will always lose (probability of winning: 0%). Introducing variety for the second meal will clearly increase your probability of winning. The increase in probability is not calculable, however it is non-zero.
Granted, the probability of winning is still very low, however, variety provides a non-zero probability while only-Soylent provides 0%. Clearly then, variety is the better option over only-Soylent.
Does that at all help? Am I just being trolled?
Either way, this was fun. glhf, and thanks for reading.
The problem with your analogy is that a traditional diet might be missing nutrients we know that we need (most people don't track very closely) and might also contain things that are actively harmful which Soylent does not contain. Lots of people eat traditional diets and have lots of nutrition problems.
To make the issue with your analogy clearer, note that you could invent any somewhat edible product and make the claim that adding it to your diet makes your diet safer, because of the possibility that it contains nutrients we need but which we don't know we need.
You're being downvoted, but I don't entirely disagree with you.
I could instead offer the following weaker form of what I wrote previously. We know that Soylent does not offer any nutrients that we don't know we need, whereas we do not know that traditional foods do not provide any nutrients that we don't know that we need. It does not follow that they do, but this at least recognizes the possibility.
I find it unlikely that nutritional science has reached its end state, so I don't want to bet too much on Soylent being perfect. At the same time, malnutrition was the norm for most humans for most of our existence, so we can't defer to much to traditional diets.
What "traditional diet"? The diet that supported hunter-gatherers was very different from that of early agriculturalists, which was different again from urban populations pre-refrigeration and pre-transport (refrigeration + railroads + ships changed _everything_ about food availability), then post-WWII eating has been steadily changing every decade in an ongoing revolution of food packaging and branding, and in the steady globalization of cuisines. There is no "traditional diet". And to say, without evidence, that there has to be something "better" about the typical person's random food choices than a manufactured product like Soylent is a blatant example of the Naturalistic fallacy.
We haven't known much about nutrition for most of the last ten thousand years, and I don't think we know all that much even now. Malnutrition used to be (and still is, in many places) the norm.
Compare the Ensure[0] nutrition facts with Soylent 2.0[1]. Note specifically that 1 Ensure is 220 calories vs Soylent's 400, so you'll need to basically double everything on the Ensure's nutrition facts page.
I don't take either Ensure or Soylent (and I'm not sure that USDA recommendations for a 2k calorie diet are that good). It appears that Ensure tries to match a 100% USDA recommendation for caloric profile (at 9 servings per day fat/carbohydrates almost add up to 100%), while providing way over the recommendations on vitamin/minerals (~225% for most, close to 500% for a couple). On the flip side, Soylent appears to try to hit the vitamins/minerals 100%, while having a high fat, low carbohydrate profile (175% fat, 60% carbohydrates).
On the whole, it looks like they are not really replacements for each other, other than in the broad category of "meal replacements" since the caloric profile, and serving sizes are so far away from each other.
Personally, I'd go with the high fat, low carbohydrate version since I've found that those types of meals (in general, not specifically for "meal replacements") tend to keep me more satiated for longer periods of time.
Soylent actually has all the nutrients required for an adult human, while Ensure does not. Ensure assumes you eat SOME other food to make up for nutritional deficiencies, while Soylent aims to provide a 100% replacement for all of your meals if you desire it.
It's not black magic, NASA for example has specified exactly what someone eats over long periods so they needed to study this. Historically, Military's have also been interested in this and have developed satisfactory minimum standards ex: http://www.apd.army.mil/pdffiles/r40_25.pdf
That does not mean such things are Ideal just that they work acceptably well for young healthy people.
It's called research. There are good well researched standards of diet for use by prisons, the military and space exploration that have enough real world use to have some level of verification.
> we conducted physical and visual inspections, along with microbial tests, of 2,000 bottles in our distribution center and found only two bottles with the same defect
Wouldn't this put them well above the industry standard rate of 1 in 10,000 bottles quoted earlier in the article?
Summary: Bottles on the production line sometimes got jostled making them splash Soylent onto the exterior, resulting in mold on the outside of the package. They halted shipping and expect to resume on the 8th.
They are entirely different products, with different ingredient lists. From what I understand, 2.0 is not able to be powdered, and 1.5 is not able to be stored as a liquid for long.
Summer 2014 I traveled the US via motorcycle, camping for the majority of the nights. "Real food" takes time. Refrigeration, cooking, cleaning, time, not crushing it in transit... I also don't eat meat (and was vegan that entire summer), which makes finding decent food in many places (if you're willing to eat out) really hard.
I unfortunately didn't get my original Soylent 1.1 in time for the trip, but how I wish I'd had it.
I don't use Soylent on a daily basis, but I always take it camping or on extended trips. I'd rather have a decently balanced food source (nothing is perfect) then eat greasy fast-food or just go hungry so I can make an extra 100 miles of travel before sunset.
And what's the problem with that? Surely you didn't travel via motorcycle complaining that motorcycles are "too slow" for the trip. It was an integral part of your traveling experience and without it it would've been completely different.
Eating is a normal part of life. Any inconvenience in it is exactly part of a human experience, much like what you wanted with the trip. If your bike broke down for that extra 100 miles or if it was too cold in camping it wasn't "an issue", it was just life. You could have solved those two issues by traveling by plane and staying in hotels, but that's exactly the kind of convenience that you wanted to avoid.
Not everyone wants an "experience" every time they need to feed their stomach a morsel of food.
People are pretty capable of deciding that for themselves. No need to try to convince anyone what kind of appetite they should have for ceremony and the, deep voice, "human experience."
Essentially there was next to no way for me to actually have food I wanted, keep it safely, cook it properly, etc. Sometimes I wanted to make it to a specific destination the next day. Fast food not being an option, setting up a small kitchen setup 3x a day really would put a damper on things.
Good question. I use Soylent as a meal replacement once a day. It's easier than cooking when I'm very busy during the day, very cheap, and I like knowing I'm getting some essential vitamins.
Or you could just buy Ensure, which has no trouble shipping and is available at nearly every grocery store and pharmacy.
I don't get Soylent's appeal, and I don't understand what unmet needs in the market it is meeting. My best guess, people that want to feel like they are "hacking" eating. Which is really just different marketing for a meal replacement shake.
2. It has too much sugar and too little of everything else. If you scale the calories to 2000 you'll have 400% of your daily recommended value of some nutrients and 50% of others.
3. It comes in annoying sizes (one bottle is only 240 calories, wtf?).
In addition to what others have said, the transparency of Rosa Labs (the makers of Soylent) is a big deal. Now that they have a manufacturing plant and so on, maybe things will change for the worse in the future, but up to this point they've been very open about their goal to produce a cheap, liquid, easy meal replacement, and they've openly supported the DIY community as well. They've also been adamant from the beginning that it's a process of continual improvement, and that's why Soylent is versioned, almost as if it were open source software.
You could file this all under marketing and not be technically wrong, but it makes a real difference in the experience as a consumer.
It's certainly marketed to the startup crowd as the startup work fast break things beverage.
If you go into a health food store like whole foods, there's a dozen or so other meal replacement options very similar to Soylent. Some soy free, some with exotic herbs and algae, some high protein, and all within the same price range.
No, my argument is I don't understand all the excitement here at HN for Soylent. It doesn't seem novel or exciting, but a lot of people act like its the best thing ever invented. I then attempted to guess at the reason, which is that it's marketed towards techies and hackers in the startup scene, which ensure isn't.
Other replies have given me additional information which I'm going to go over. Your's was setting up a straw man argument.
It has better balance of nutrients. Anyone can throw in some cheap vitamins and call it a day, but having enough potassium (which Americans under-consume compared to sodium), magnesium, protein, is rare. Soylent has 20% of RDA of EVERYTHING. Just check here:
Absolutely. Deciding on and preparing meals is the single biggest regular struggle and unpleasant time sink of my day. I wish I could get Soylent but they're still a bit slow and aren't selling directly to my country so I'd have to go through an importer/smuggler, upping the cost.
I know some people like cooking. That's fine for them. I like coding and I do that for fun. No enjoy-cooking-people I know want to write software. Different strokes for different folks.
We need to get out of the mindset of some kinds of work being "noble". When I was growing up it was "noble" to clean dishes by hand, repair your house yourself and repair your car yourself.
Now that I'm an adult, most people I know have "failed" and are lazily hiring specialists or using machines for those once-noble tasks. And some are very successful in their lives despite that failing! </s>
Here in the USA the modest apartments I was renting more than 30 years ago had dishwashers. However, I didn't always use the dishwasher because it's hard for one person to generate enough dishes a day to make it worthwhile to run. Especially if frozen food made for microwave heating is a large part of your diet.
We've all gotten new food at some point that had gone bad; and yet I assume most of those companies just kinda shrug it off as long as it's below a certain threshold.