What do you mean by unnatural? What is in Soylent that isn't natural? Food in and of itself is just a mix of different chemicals - be they from plants, animals, or other sources. But at the end of the day, a molecule of glucose from a plant is identical to a molecule of glucose created synthetically.
This attitude is exactly bothered me about the CEO of Soylent when he was first doing PR about the product years ago. It's not a question of being "natural" per se, it's the question of trace elements and how our body metabolizes food. Food is not just a pile of molecules, it's a particular organization of molecules. How your body digests it matters. A bunch of milled and refined powders of macronutrients is simply not the same as anything we've evolved to eat over the last X million years. How different is it? That's hard to say, but when the CEO is so dismissive of the fact that there are real subtleties here and nutrition science still has a long way to go, it's not confidence inspiring.
The reason that oft-derided-as-woo-woo granola crowd is actually making the logicallly sound choice here is because given the lack of conclusive science, the default assumption should be that a diet closer to what our ancestors ate is a safer bet than a brand new diet that we fabricate based on incomplete and presumptive knowledge.
>>It's not a question of being "natural" per se, it's the question of trace elements and how our body metabolizes food. Food is not just a pile of molecules, it's a particular organization of molecules. How your body digests it matters. A bunch of milled and refined powders of macronutrients is simply not the same as anything we've evolved to eat over the last X million years. How different is it? That's hard to say, but when the CEO is so dismissive of the fact that there are real subtleties here and nutrition science still has a long way to go, it's not confidence inspiring.
On the other hand, what you are saying here sounds extremely pseudo-science-y and hand-wavy. You're basically saying "well, 'real' food is different because something something molecules, it's hard to say exactly how but..."
Soylent CEO on the other hand is arguing from first principles:
- Our bodies need macro- and micro-nutrients
- We have a pretty good (although imperfect) understanding of how much of each we need to consume
- Therefore, we can probably get rid of all the extraneous stuff associated with nutrient consumption (prep, cooking, clean-up, etc.) and still achieve the same results
This is science-worship attitude that is prevalent among a certain type of personality, usually a person who prizes their own logical thinking and objectivity, and thus more easily misses their own biases. Essentially you're using "natural" as a dog whistle that says my argument is wrong and the Soylent CEO is right. But the only reason you feel that way is because he fits the sort of engineer-type logical thinker which you trust. It's all emotions.
Here is the hard truth: there is no science here on either side. There's a subjective judgement about how complete our knowledge is. I say nutritional science is still in the dark ages and therefore we don't have evidence to conclude a pile of molecules is the same as traditional food, Soylent CEO says nutritional science is "pretty good" and the only thing that matters about food are its measured consituents and there in the absence of evidence we should just assume that eating the exact same thing in liquid form at metered intervals should be perfectly healthy.
For you to suggest he is arguing from first principles is absolutely ridiculous, his argument is chock full of hubris and assumptions. It's very very wrong to hold that up as an example of sound scientific thinking.
>>I say nutritional science is still in the dark ages and therefore we don't have evidence to conclude a pile of molecules is the same as traditional food
What you say is wrong, though. We have a pretty good understanding of how food works and what our bodies need. How do you think hospitals feed comatose patients? They do it either via a feeding tube (liquid food), or through an IV (fluids containing glucose, salts, amino acids, lipids and micronutrients).
Everything is relative. What you need to survive short-term is much easier to understand then the long-term effects of subtle dietary differences. The core of my point is that treating a pile of molecules as the same as food is not scientifically sound reasoning "from first principles".
>>The core of my point is that treating a pile of molecules as the same as food is not scientifically sound reasoning "from first principles"
Here is what Elon Musk said about batteries when asked to give an example of his first-principles thinking:
Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”
With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”
It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”
It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”
--
Thinking of batteries as being made of cobalt, nickel, aluminum etc. is EXACTLY THE SAME THING as thinking of food as being made of proteins, fats, carbs, etc. There isn't anything special about a piece of chicken - it's a combination of molecules, some of which are digestible by the human body, i.e. nutrients. Therefore, taking those nutrients and putting them into a meal replacement shake is perfectly fine. And incidentally, just like in Musk's example, treating the nutrients individually and assembling them into a shake results in much cheaper food.
I didn’t talk about americans, I talked about the average German. (as Soylent is a product with a global market, but I can only speak from my experience as German, not having experienced how life is like in the US – such simple things as longer working hours can affect such things a lot)
Which spends on average 225 bucks a month[1] on food. That comes down to 7.50€ a day.
Soylent, including shipping, is actually more expensive than this.
> As for eating out, another survey in 2013 showed that 58% of Americans eat out at least once a week. That's way higher than you claim.
The German statistics for that are below 13%.
> I'm also not sure where you came up with "horrible quality." Care to qualify - or better yet, quantify - that claim?
I’m comparing Soylent, a product with no taste, no texture, which is basically torture, with cheaper, higher quality meals, handmade, with organic ingredients.
Soylent can’t measure up in taste or variety even to public cafeteria food.
Soylent doesn't compete with the 'average diet', it competes with eating out 2-3 times a day. I personally save hundreds of dollars a month with Soylent.
Given that a) our ancestors lived a very different lifestyle and b) we would like to live long past child-raising age, which is where evolutionary benefits to longevity would mostly end, a diet similar to our ancestors is by no means a safe option.
s/ancestors/parents. They seem to be living decently long lives, so I'll let someone else experiment with liquid meal replacements for a decade or two, thank you very much.
Decent, yes. On the other hand, if diet changes were able to increase life expectancy by say 10 years (which is what some people claim agriculture reduced it by) then I'd jump at that.
The main problem with most dietary recommendations is that they oversimplify in a skewed and wrongful way.
From a very basic, we can be quite sure that a very simple model roughly describes the system (as in "there are calories and the human body is bound by the laws of thermodynamics"). We also no that it is not that simple, because a biological organism is a very, very complex machine.
Everything else is mostly the attempt to find a "simpler model" than "its a complex biological machine and we need very large empirical studies to understand it" and mostly fails. In that sense, soylent is on a similar level as the "detox" crowd. Pretty sure their mission statement is not right. They might get some stuff right by accident. Other stuff is wrong.
Of course thinking in "right" and "wrong" is also an oversimplification, as we should probably use "better on the average population" or "worse on average population".
The stone-age crowd has a point in using kind of an evolutionary explanation for what food to choose. On the other hand their premise "we eat what our ancestors ate, because thats what our body has optimized for" is seriously flawed in its own logic, because we won't reproduce the hunter-gatherer environment when switching diets, and they don't account for the adaptability of the genome, as well as the variance of diets among hunter-gatherer cultures and early stone age farmers.
Anyone who struggles with digestion and still decided Soylent was a good idea probably deserves at least in some part the gastrointestinal stress that ensued.
There will never be "conclusive" science regarding how and what we eat without experimentation. Soylent is, regardless of how the founders frame it, an experiment. A fairly successful one, at that.
Obviously not completely successful, given that this story is about them utterly failing, but that failure is temporary. They will recover.
That's like saying a puddle of human molecular composition is the same thing as a human. As far as biological interactions are concerned, even in digestion, it doesn't appear that molecular quantities behave identically independent of molecular arrangement.
If you grind beans and rice into a powder, with other stuff, and cook them, do you think that that's the same as cooking whole beans and whole rice with the other stuff?
Can you please expand on how they are different? A powdered bean or powdered rice contains the same macro and micronutrients. Perhaps the quality of the fiber would be different?
To begin with the uptake rate would be different. If you eat a whole bean your body will have to break it down into smaller parts (by chewing initially and so on) and in the end you'll get different amounts of whatever is in it in your system at different times if you eat it whole or grouns up.
another example would be certain seeds. Many seeds contain cyanide (well known poison!?), which is not dangerous in the seed because the amount you'll get into your system is miniscule. however if you ground the seed up, you'd get more cyanide taken up by your body, which could be bad for you. (I can't say how big the difference would be but it is theoretically sound)
That makes sense. I guess my followup question would be whether this impacts how healthy the food is. I guess soy beans and tofu and metabolized differently, but it's my understanding that tofu is still very good for you. Same with peanut/almond butter. Anyways, thanks for the detailed explanation, it does make a lot of sense.
I don't understand why you would think they are the same. Cooking a whole bean vs cooking a powdered bean is different. Digesting a whole, chewed bean is different from digesting a powdered bean. And what happens at the end of your gut is different.
An example of a related principle is "need" vs "what's needed when it's needed". How much vitamin C do you "need"? Oh, wait, it affects iron absorption.
You don't fully absorb the foods you eat. You pass them through your body while absorbing parts. Anything that makes it easier or harder to absorb parts of the food will affect what you get out of the food.
I will speculate that eating liquid food for a prolonged amount of time doesn't do your teeth and gums any favors.
Whether Soylent qualifies as "unnatural" depends on whether its ingredients, and the amounts of them, are nutritious and not poisonous. Humanity hasn't yet reached a point where we have definite answers to questions like that.
