At bare minimum, include some citation here.
Anyone suggesting Soylent is safe with arguments like "glucose is glucose" and "it has the right macronutrient ratios" is spouting pseudo-science.
If you have insufficient evidence that something is safe and a strong anecdote suggesting otherwise the logical option is to abstain.
Attempting to bring science into the decision making process when the science has not been done is pseudo-science!
I would call either argument pseudo-science, but only one was presented here and it's the one I responded to.
Even if you eat no food, you'll still have bowel movements as your intestines shed cells and mucus. If you have a colostomy done (intestines no longer connect to your rectum) you'll still pass small small amounts of stool out the normal way (anus).
The fact that people have gone on extended fasts and then broke them without much trouble suggests a "breakdown" of digestive function is a weak argument.
I would say that a change in the biome of the digestive tract is probably more responsible for any digestive upset after breaking a fast than "muscle breakdown".
Never change, HN.
Even if the anecdotes are 100% true, they have no causative evidence.
1. People lie.
2. People believe things to be true that are not, in fact, true.
I grew up with AOL chatrooms. I will believe whatever someone presents about themselves up to the point at which it leave the magic circle of the internet.
That is an unscientific statement based on no citation.
Top it off, I have personally lived of Soylent for a year. I go out to eat only a couple times a month and I do not die from horrendous suffering everytime. In fact, nothing changes.
Where's your citation backing up your suggestion that it's safe?
Gonna give me a counterexample there too?
And it would have been a good idea to do that back in the 50s when doctors were calling it safe without the science to back up their claims. "You have no evidence" is what you say to justify avoiding something suspect, not what you say to justify consuming it!
If you find a long-term consistent cigarette smoker with no lung damage, I believe you have a medical miracle on your hands.
Destroy = something big enough ruin your quality of life.
My point is that if you are chiding someone for a lack of quality, you shouldn't use even less quality to do so.
Unfortunately, we lack a corpus of evidence of long term liquid diet feedings (and intestinal investigations), mainly for ethical reasons, but there is at least one good rat study I could quickly recall: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01308310 There are, however, countless great articles I suggest you read on liquid diets and their impact on satiety and other important illness recovery markers. One of the important topics for researchers has been how to safely transition patients more quickly to solid food, given some of the less desirable side effects of the liquid food diet.
And yes, I understand that the Soylent team is confident that they've solved, for example, all gastric emptying issues by adding exogenous fibres. I'm positing that for every variable they're convinced they've figured out, they're opening up another potential set of problems that they've not even considered. Their latest opacity on this recall isn't giving me hope that I'm wrong here.
So not all of your diet. I very much doubt your ability to refute my claim, given that you did not meet my criteria of not eating solid food.
When you consume liquid calories, you miss out on this important part of the digestive process (and subsequently lose out on absorbing a portion of the nutrients), unless you are "simulate chewing" or leave the liquids in your mouth long enough for the salivary enzymes to "get to work."
Granted, this doesn't mean you can't survive off of liquid calories, but digestive issues are bound to happen. Nutrient-dense, whole foods should always be the first option.
It's not clear that salivary digestion is categorically different from non-salivary digestion -- it works on compounds the rest of the GI tract also deals with -- but as a matter of degree, as a matter of the extent to which your food is digested, it certainly seems important. 30% is nothing to sneeze at.
Why did Soylent promote it like that? When did that message change?
On the front page at Soylent they have "We engineer foods that offer complete nutrition, value, and convenience." -- here "complete nutrition" means it can be used as a sole source of nutrition.
On their about page they say "Soylent™ is a pioneer in food technology, producing convenient, complete foods designed to provide maximum nutrition with minimal effort."
They also make reference to Rob's experiment of living off Soylent for a month: "and the co-founders quickly realized that this experiment solved a problem not only for themselves but for thousands of people around the world."
In their blog post announcing v1.6 of the powder they say: "r latest iteration in convenient, complete powdered food. We have redesigned the formula to create a superior mouthfeel and taste, while still providing a nutritionally-complete staple meal."
All the language points to these products being usable as a sole source of nutrition, even if they don't actually come out and say "you can use this as a sole source of nutrition".
Ensure is most assuredly designed to used as a sole source of nutrition. This happens in hospitals every day where it's used in naso-gastric feeding, sometimes against the patient's wishes. It's used in prisons as a naso gastric feed on hunger striking prisoners. It's used in hospitals for ill people.
The makers of Ensure have a wide range of products, many of which are designed to be sole-source of nutrition products.
The fact they don't advertise these to the general public as sole source of nutrition products just means they're a bit more responsible than Soylent.
It's all about proper macronutrient intake and exercise. People on Ensure probably had drastically reduced daily calorie intakes.
Edit:
> your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you
If you think there are ANY solids in your intestines, you better read on anatomy and human biology.
I'm not advocating eating liquid foods for months, I thought it was hard as I was hungry all the time in the first week or so. But doctors tell patients that go through some surgeries to eat liquid foods for at least a month before the surgery. How can it be bad? It's not that the bowel movement stops like you are suggesting.
Like others have said, please submit some kind of referral if you're going to make such a statement.
Your ability to digest basically shuts down, your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you.
Not eating solid food is not good for you. Don't do it.