How is this any different from mail-order diets and such? Where are the double-blind peer reviewed studies? The original post by Rob Rhinehart sounds no different from the mail-order diet ads that you see on TV. Is it legitimate because it is funded via Kickstarter? Is it legitimate because it is marketed suavely via blogs and such? How does recent research about how differently processed foods are digested differently [1] apply to Soylent?
I think there are multiple differences but in my mind the biggest one is that his post mostly talks about the benefits that he gained himself. There are no promises about what it would do for you.
Now obviously if you're reading critically and you're naturally a bit suspicious of his motives then of course it seems heavily implied that the benefits he feels he's gotten are the ones that you'll get too once you also use Soylent.
There are two (maybe three) ways this can go:
1. He made it all up to launch a startup
2. Everything he says is true
3. He believes everything he says is true
In truth it's not as mutually exclusive as I've presented it. Many of the benefits might be true, he might believe some BS about others, and some of it might be outright fabrications.
I am not sure how you would do a double blind between a supposedly all-encompassing shake-meal and one that is not. Are you going to purposely malnourish people so that you can see they're malnourished? That's ethically dubious at best.
"Are you going to purposely malnourish people so that you can see they're malnourished? That's ethically dubious at best."
Yes, that's what Soylent is currently doing. No suprise the founder got bad news from his cardiologist with an earlier version. "Failing" with their product in this case actually means hurting the customers.
There's a difference between knowingly and willingly malnourishing people and doing so out of ignorance. In order to perform a double-blind you have to do the former. The people making Soylent might accidentally do the latter. Supposing the two are the same sets an impossibly high bar.
Furthermore since it's not a double-blind the people who choose to participate go in with the knowledge that it might not be done yet and that they face risks.
I don't really care about this one way or the other; I think Soylent is an interesting idea but I like eating a variety of food so I'm not participating. But I don't think that the people in charge of Soylent are a hair's breadth from war criminals either, ethically.
This is not about motives. This is about the method of science. There should be scientific evidence to believe such claims as Solyent's, especially since it is possible to do reliable experiments to test many of his claims.
Also, more specifically: he is a single data point. And hardly an objective one.
I was strongly anti-Soylent during the first few announcements.
Some of the claims they made during the kickstarter were shameful exploitative quackery. The Soylent team seem to have dialed that down a bit now. So, at the moment they're selling glop made from food ingredients that they claim has all the nutrients a healthy average person would need to live, and they are letting people chose how much glop to introduce into their day food routine.
I hope they have some good press materials handy in case some idiot does something weird with the product because the backlash could be fierce.
Now that Soylent have stopped making ridiculous overblown claims I am not so worried about what people chose to put in their bodies.
-- Soylent is not a diet. It's not low-calorie, low-carb or anything like that. The simplest way to describe its nutritional content is that a Soylent "meal" has 33% FDA daily value of everything (including fats, carbs, protein, vitamins, minerals). Also, unlike a diet, you don't have to eat it all the time (or according to any sort of regimen) to benefit from it. It is designed to be nutritious enough to replace one's whole diet if necessary, but this decision is up to the user.
-- True, there aren't double-blind, peer-reviewed studies (give it time, though...). But the product was developed over the course of a year, with the help of ~100 volunteers who beta tested it and offered feedback [1].
-- The article you linked correctly identifies the importance of low-glycemic carbs, but it loses me when it argues that all "processed" foods are high-glycemic. Not only does "processed" strike me as a weasel word here, the person they're citing as an authority on this issue is Dr. Dean Ornish, whom many regard as a quack [2]. Soylent's carbs are designed to be low-glycemic. They use a form of maltodextrin ("low DE") that is designed to be low-glycemic, as well as whole-grain oat flour. These ingredients are indeed "processed." But (forgive me) the proof of the Soylent is in the eating: all the beta testers took regular blood tests, and these were checked for any abnormalities, including blood sugar levels. Rob Rhinehart actually had a glucose monitor implanted in his chest to test Soylent's glycemic index directly. The result: "Soylent has a pretty low GI" [3].
I'll add to that by saying: a year isn't really a long time and I'd argue not nearly long enough to understand what the long term effects this stuff has on ones health, both positive and negative.
They might have had controls, for all we know. The team shared many but not all details of the process, as is their prerogative.
Rhinehart is an engineer by background, and his blog posts ( http://www.robrhinehart.com ) evince a serious respect for the scientific method. Now that version 1.0 has been finalized and is shipping, I think we will definitely see a lot more testing of Soylent from both inside and outside the organization.
It doesn't matter if their blog does lip-service to the scientific method. No pun intended, but the proof is in eating the pudding, that is, in doing science.
controls = natural selection, survival of the fittest
oversight, monitoring = culture, language, history
Science has the potential to speed up the process of knowledge acquisition. Our current human diet is the result of thousands of years of trial and error. A scientist attempts to follow cause and effect, minimizing confounding variables that obscure cause and effect.
It is a food, and is designed to be part of a diet.
Given how poor our knowledge is of nutrition, and how it is still very much an area of active research, I'm very skeptical of any new "foods" that are produced chemically instead of biologically.
Our knowledge of biological systems is extremely limited, we don't have the knowledge to create food at this point, and I think any skepticism about long-term effects is well-warranted given the history of the processed food industry.
Personally, I try to avoid all "foods" that were not around at least a hundred years ago. For something to qualify as food for me, it needs to be composed of ingredients that have evidence of promoting health in the long-term, and I measure the "long-term" by centuries, not years or even decades.
Better stop eating then, since any plants or animals you might ingest have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Knowledge of our nutritional needs--this knowledge that we allegedly "don't have"--has completely transformed them.
> any skepticism about long-term effects is well-warranted given the history of the processed food industry
The whole point of Soylent (the creators have basically stated as much) is to take the tools of "processed food" and use them for good, not evil. Seriously, Soylent is not McDonald's. The Atlantic explored this idea in a recent article: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-junk...
I kind of see @zenbowman's point, though I might reword some things. The biggest difficulty I have with accepting isolated mixes of nutrients and supplements is that when we consume and metabolize food, or anything, we don't do it in isolation. There are hosts of synergistic effects throughout biology that are difficult to understand and accurately replicate.
No I'm not a nutritionist or a biologist, so what I'm saying is admittedly highly qualitative. But I did work for several years on a project to curb improper disposal of pharmaceutical waste (into toilets where it gets into the water system), because I read hundreds of papers and articles about how scientists simply don't understand yet how different pharmacological compounds might mix in water and have synergistic consequences for wildlife, especially as it bioaccumulates up the food chain. (Side note, this will be hard to understand since so much of our studies are focused on isolating on variable and looking for effects ceteris paribus, but this isn't how systems work in reality.)
The difference to me when we breed food is that at least we're still consuming something in an evolutionary context, bred over several generations. Certainly it still could be bad for us, but I think that the plant/ animal itself is surviving is better evidence than just taking its component parts and ingesting them. Isn't it general best practice that the whole gestalt is greater than the sum of its parts?
Soylent is certainly different from McDonalds and the rest of the modern profit-driven food industry, but your first sentence is an insufferable straw man:
> Better stop eating then, since any plants or animals you might ingest have been bred by humans over thousands of years. Knowledge of our nutritional needs--this knowledge that we allegedly "don't have"--has completely transformed them.
Breeding food over the course of many generations is completely different from inventing industrial processes that completely restructure food in a way that no organism has ever been exposed to. It gets worse when science is used to reformulate flavor profiles to make food appealing in a way that fools our bodies about its nutritional content. Pretending like the food system today is the same as early agriculture with selective breeding is intellectually dishonest.
The fact is our knowledge of how the human organism metabolizes food is still extremely rudimentary. The thing that bothers me about Soylent is the founder's utter dismissal of any complexity to the issue at all. He seems to unquestioningly believe this reductionist pseudo-scientific hand waving that a certain subset of geeks subscribes to wherein gaining weight is a simple thermodynamic equation of calories in > calories spent, and nutrition is a question of all the correct molecules passing through one's mouth.
This is an incredibly naive way of thinking, and will not allow Soylent to ever find a healthy formula. Of course, if they do start to take it seriously it will still take many decades to perfect as the necessary scientific knowledge does yet exist. A lot of people are invested in the idea of convenience foods because they make life easier, but the uncomfortable truth is that choosing any convenience food, even one with such good intentions as Soylent, is not a smart bet if you want to be as healthy as possible, and demanding scientific proof otherwise is based more on wishful thinking than solid rationality.
Create a hypothesis, do experiments, examine the evidence, revise the hypothesis. Then, restrict your claims to the hypothesis and evidence. 'Knowing anything' is irrelevant and the assertion that 'we know so little about nutrition', etc. in this context is facetious and disingenuous.
Because the focus is different. "I don't want to deal with food" rings a different bell than "Eat this and lose weight".
I would say a big factor is that avoiding food just to avoid food is (to my knowledge) unique, helping it gain traction.
And while I certainly wouldn't trust the long term implications of this yet, I can't blame a company for wanting to sell units before spending money on studies, especially given their size.
AFAIK, this isn't a diet to lose weight, it's just a meal replacement. What would the double-blind be? Whether you can actually live on this stuff alone?
Designing the experiment is also a problem they have to figure out. A part of the challenge is designing hypotheses that best represent the physical phenomena that are also testable. So instead of going for the whole enchilada, work on parts of the project and build to up to a whole. Solyent is pie in the sky the way Elon Musk's hyper-loop is: a bare minimum sketch (not literally, but in scientific terms) that requires a lot of sub-systems to work and a lot of theories to fall in place to be practical.
Answering your question directly, you could give the control-group a Solyent-type drink that is devoid of nutrients, and to the other group you can give a true Solyent drink. This can test if people report feeling better simply because they are drinking something healthy as opposed to the improvement being caused by the nutrients in the drink.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-dieting-not-a...