The guy who invented the spreadsheet didn't have to absorb all available accounting literature first, and Elon Musk didn't spend 30 years in the Apollo program before being allowed to send his own rocket to space. Nutrition is a field full of pseudoscience and highly susceptible to disruption. People should be encouraged to try new things here. If this guy is wrong it's at his own cost, and if right the potential benefits are enormous.
I figured he had physicists, engineers, mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and you name it. But I guess he just read a few books on his weekends and that was enough to design and launch the rocket.
This guy is a hobbyist who is claiming his diet has cured most of his ails. You aren't the least bit suspicious of that claim?
Ah, I love it when people think they're sarcastic but they're correct:
>"I was sitting behind [Elon Musk] on the flight back to London when he looked at me over the seat and said, 'I think we can build a rocket ourselves.'" He showed Cantrell the spreadsheet he'd been working on. "I looked at it and said, I'll be damned — that's why he's been borrowing all my books. He'd been borrowing all my college textbooks on rocketry and propulsion. You know, whenever anybody asks Elon how he learned to build rockets, he says, 'I read books.' Well, it's true. He devoured those books. He knew everything. He's the smartest guy I've ever met, and he'd been planning to build a rocket all along. [1]
[1]http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2012/elon-musk-int...
At the very least, this guy is probably more aware of his calorie intake than he was when he was free-eating.
(free-eating is when you eat what you feel like whenever you want to, without worrying about what or how much you're eating)
Both of your examples are poor.
Dan Bricklin had earned a B.S in computer science from MIT and was studying for an MBA at Harvard when he wrote a software program that was useful for businesses. He had a very good background for the product that he created.
Elon Musk was able to send his rocket into space after he hired a team of smart engineers to build it for him. His engineers benefited from the knowledge gained from NASA research that cost (when adjusted for inflation) hundreds of billions of dollars.
Musk absorbed a few books on rocketry (see my related comment) and constructed an accurate theoretical model before hiring anyone.
This guy pretty much falls into the not so much category.
He forgot to include iron!
Did Musk forget to include $ROCKETRY_COMPONENT?
I'm glad that there are people willing to do interesting new stuff. I'm glad that some of these people are happy to experiment on themselves. I'm even glad if some of these people turn out to be idiots.
I get a bit unhappy when someone who doesn't appear to know what they're talking about (and who has demonstrated their ignorance) goes on to say that they've got some answer that other people should be listening to. When these people say "It worked for me! You need to try this!" all sorts of bells start ringing.
Asking people not to push their uninformed experimental pseudo-science is not the same as asking very clever people to not be clever in other fields.
He does invite people who would like to try it to contact him. That's far from a hard sell. He also says things like "At this point I think scepticism is completely reasonable."
If an Elon Musk were to attack this problem in the way such a problem needs to be attacked, then things would be interesting. Humans are more complex than rockets.
Even if it does turn out to be the perfect drink, though I would think you could find something similar as a meal substitute shake, MRE, or for people who can't chew. There's probably already a market for something like this that is being targeted.
It's a medical market, which means he's going to fail getting through the tricky regulatory problems.
See, for example, Ensure or Ensure Plus.
One fair point (in defense of the Scrawny Pale Guy Diet he is advocating) is that the food industry in general devotes a large majority of its funding to making foods that TASTE really really good. If that gets in the way of nutrition, taste wins every time.
But you are correct in the fact that this is crazy. Hell, I drank and smoked a lot when I was 24, and still looked healthier than this guy. Does that mean that I stumbled across an amazing new diet of beer, burgers, and weed when I was 24?
It's actually worse than that. A major current research thread is on the low-level mechanisms of "food reward" and the interaction of the brain and obesity. For example, Stephan Guyenet at the University of Washinton researches this area[1]. Even if nutrition is fine, hyper-palatable foods[2] can have a negative impact on health for a variety of reasons. In good part, they basically make it impossible to avoid overconsumption, but there are other implications being studied. Check out Guyenet's blog and twitter feed for references on this developing area. (N.B.: The work that Guyenet does and references isn't always the most accessible or easily interpretable in some cases. He's emphatically not a top source if you're just looking to learn a high level approach towards improving your diet.)
[1] example blog post: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2013/02/food-reward-fr...
[2] The idea of "hyper-palatability" refers to engineered button-pressing of the human brain by modern processed foods and food ingredients. It doesn't mean "food that tastes good", of which there's a world's variety that this moniker doesn't apply to.
Let me expound on that: with a few exceptions, most scholarly papers on diet, metabolism, gut function and disorders, metabolic syndrome, etc. are difficult to digest in isolation. Interpreting and critically reviewing new results often requires a large amount of domain knowledge and context by way of other research results.
What makes you think he's unhealthy? Because he has whiter complexion and he isn't bulky?
What? He looks a bit chunky to me. Does he list his height / weight anywhere?
(Yes, I'm aware that BMI is flawed. You have olympic athletes with almost no body fat but 'obese' BMIs. This guy? He's no athlete.)
BMI is very flawed as a measure of any imaginable health outcome. You'd be better served to ask about blood pressure, pulse, blood glucose, albumin, etc.
I am wrong to call him chunky. (Although I do wonder if he's a thin-fat person, with all the fat around internal organs. But this is just noodling, and has nothing to do with anything he's said.)
And I strongly agree about your BMI comment. I should have been a bit more careful - BMI is only useful as a guide that a person may be overweight. (If that person doesn't do any kind of exercise.)
It is possible that the nutrient powder (and similar) industry hasn't given much thought to this idea because its radical and potentially risky, especially as a business venture where legal liability might be very, very high (all it takes is one person to die or be seriously injured as a result of this drink, and they are in big trouble). I'd say that IF any of these supplement producers did consider this type of drink, they probably dismissed it as too risky (both legally and financially, as I don't see the demand exploding for this).
Also, he's not claiming that he has solved any problem. He's only claiming that after some research, he whipped up this drink, and that it seems to be working fine for his body chemistry. In fact, he's pretty clear about this being experimental and potentially dangerous (Though apparently there have been no negative effects as of now). I think its a really interesting idea, but nonetheless, I'd feel much better if he was a scientist focusing on a similar field. This seems like the exact kind of thing where small, seemingly unimportant details may propagate into significant risk.
I seriously wish him well though. Personally, I wouldn't do much more than use this as a supplement (perhaps to replace lunch), but Im not the risky type when it comes to things like this.
The stuff bodybuilders consume is not as well controlled as anything called 'food'. In fact, bodybuilding forums are full of 'I bought brand X and it was mostly filler, better stick to brand Y'.
Marketing it as a food replacement would be very difficult because of subtle differences between people's bodies. I think they stick with supplements/protein powder because it reduces the possibility of wrongful death lawsuits (and similar) while still allowing leeway with federal regulations.
In other words, by declaring 'Soylent' as 'not food' he sidesteps lots of regulations and tests.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/07/02/dietary-supplem...
> While on its surface this would appear to be a reasonable distinction, given that it doesn’t make sense from a policy or scientific standpoint to hold food to the standards as rigorous as the standards to which drugs are held, as implemented by the DSHEA this distinction has the pernicious effect of allowing manufacturers to label all sorts of botanicals, many of which possess pharmacological activity, as “supplements,” and supplements, being defined as food and not medicine, do not require prior approval by the FDA before marketing. In other words, supplement manufacturers basically work on the honors system when it comes to deciding what they will market as a supplement, and the FDA can’t do anything about a harmful supplement until after it has been on the market and caused harm.
> Some firms don’t even have recipes, known as master manufacturing records, for their products.
> Others make their supplements in unsanitary factories. New Jersey-based Quality Formulation Laboratories produced protein powder mixes and other supplements in a facility infested with rodents, rodent feces and urine, according to government records. FDA inspectors found a rodent apparently cut in half next to a scoop, according to a 2008 inspection report.
>Others make their supplements in unsanitary factories
That's equally true of all sorts of food.
No, it isn't, thanks to the FDA.
You have no idea how bad food was prior to the FDA.
It may also be the case that "drink one of these a day and lose weight" is more marketable than "drink one of these a day and never eat real food again" ;)
About 18 months ago I gave the Four Hour Body diet a whirl, primarily to lose weight. I was very surprised to notice that my psoriasis improved. A lot. While I was eating well. Took a stressful contract gig, resumed eating poorly, psoriasis came back with a vengeance. So I tried harder to stick the diet and my skin's health improved.
Maybe 9 months ago I saw Dr Terry Wahls TEDx talk. I thought "Aha!" I'm a software guy, not a nutritionist. And I really just want to know what I'm supposed to do, the bullet points, not really needing the details.
Since then I've tried very hard to eat like Wahls suggests. My psoriasis is now about 2/3rd gone. From bleeding breaking skin plagues back to normal skin mixed with flakiness.
I see my dermatologist next week for my yearly. I'm quite eager to see if he notices the improvement. I've been dealing with this stuff for 10+ years and have gone to great lengths to treat it. I'm a bit chagrinned (grumpy) that all I had to do is eat more vegetables.
So I believe, but cannot prove, that I lacked the proper nutrition and now that I'm eating a very diverse diet my health has improved.
It's pretty uncontroversial. I'm impressed by the commenters who take great exception to your points. Like my scientist cousin is fond of asking skeptics (e.g. creationists, climate change, economics) "What level of proof do you require?"
Exactly. Yeah, he seems to have done a pretty good job of making sure his glop includes all the things we know we need.
It includes exactly zero of the things we don't know we need.
As a young developer I was often told "you can't do that" or "stop jumping to solutions" and as a now much, much older and very slightly wiser man I recognise that these were the knee-jerk fears of threatened reactionaries stuck in their ways, not the wise voices of experience that they thought they were.
As someone else implied, the appeal to authority is one of the least credible forms of supporting argument.
But, being stupid help solve BIG problems. This guy is risking his health for the sake of science. He has a very high risk/reward ratio. I don't think he is not serious. He is not even trying in animals (which I thought he was doing before reading the rest of the article). He's obviously stupid when it comes to experimentation, but this is when it yields interesting results.
Many new things were invented by people who had no idea how large the problems were when they started.
And less relevant, I had to chuckle at the "if I had any money or a girlfriend" part. He's not doing anything to break any stereotypes, there.
Incidentally, all you have shown in this thread is some bullshit about "processed foods" and "mitochondria", plus some TEDx talk "based on personal narrative" that shows all signs of being made by a fucking crank, about how your mitochondrial bullshit will, in fact, cure cancer. Well, not really. Just multiple sclerosis. (... are you fucking kidding me...? To think I had upvoted you at first... )
When you study, say, biology, you'll probably learn about all the wrong turns that very smart people made along the road to where we currently stand: self-moving principles in Aristotle; vitalism; spontaneous generation; enzymes as living organism; and many many more. That background gives you a sense of how hard it is to be right, and the importance of modesty and self-doubt.
Whereas with computer science, what you learn about is the (relatively short, historically speaking) string of amazing successes in the field. And the more practical side of it (e.g., what software we produce for consumers) is even more unique in having this underlying exponential growth (Moore's law) foisting it up, and drastically changing at every moment what is possible, so that in fact there are very many opportunities that no one thought about simply because they weren't opportunities three years earlier.
And then programmers start thinking that, not only is improvement easy in all fields, but also the fact that other fields don't have as much to show for themselves by way of these improvements (whereas they do) just indicates how much better and smarter and innovative they are, and how in light of this it really isn't surprising at all that they may, even as outsiders, have a lot to contribute to any given field.
> when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science...
When a random nutter makes some woo, we just call them random nutters and ignore them.
...But when that random nutter happens to be a software engineer during the day, suddenly it is game on for slagging engineers? Clearly it must be indicative of some sort of common hubris in the industry?
There is some selection bias going on here.
One key thing I learned in university: Once you start reading papers, you're quickly going to turn into the world's leading expert on the tiny corner of science that you're reading on. (Of course, this has nothing to do with being a genius, and everything to do with no one else ever having cared about that corner before. :-P )
That being said, I hate that stories like this get more attention because everyone here is irate over how obviously wrong it is while someone's great Show HN project gets passed over.
Maybe this particular example is missing something, I don't know. But you seem opposed to the very concept, which makes no sense to me. Why does it matter whether you take your food in as a bland mix or as individual pre-blended components?
It's a crappy analogy, but imagine this guy was trying to construct a human body out of parts. He's wired up a brain, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, a lymphatic system, and all the rest to a skeletal system. What do you think his chances of success would be?
Additionally, we have only the faintest idea how this might affect gut bacteria, which is an enormous component of both our digestive system as well as immune system. Without giving them our "table scraps", what happens to them?
No offense but we've heard the exact same thing about every successful idea.
And what's more:
People look at the human GI totally wrong anyway. They think, what can I put in to get the best results? When in reality, the human GI evolved to support an extremely broad range of inputs as it's most significant factor.
With humans all over the earth eating an extremely disparate diet pre-civilization (and even post), the most significant factor of the human GI was it's ability to handle the wide variety of chemically diverse inputs and provide a consistent, reliable output.
So why do you approach this, which is nothing more than a new input, and claim that the output is going to be different? Dangerous? Impossible?
Seems to me like you're indignant with a touch of ego: "How dare he pretend to do my job. It's an insult to me that he is doing this!" That's the feeling I get from you reading this post.
I certainly don't want to rain on some new visionary's parade, but I spend a lot of time tracking folks who I consider to be the real visionaries in this field. As in we are currently in the midst of the greatest revolution in human health of our lives, and this guy is running in the wrong direction. We're seeing astonishing results with dietary remediation of a vast array of conditions that were previously considered unrelated. And this isn't just "remedial eating", it's discovering that our current ways of eating are killing us but that diet can likewise help heal us. It's a Khunian revolution out of "the pill and the scalpel" mindset and into a deeper understanding of root causes of wide classes of disease and general unhealthiness in 21st century society. I must certainly be writing in an aggressive posture, for which I'll apologize. I'll have to account my overenthusiasm to the long-term health and well-being of literally everyone I've ever met being at stake.
Current research is showing that we are only just beginning to gain understanding of the complexity and health of the GI. An analogy is that our GI and GI microbiota are essentially a recently discovered vital organ. One which the industrialized western diet (now well exported globally) has been systematically destroying. Diet has direct and immense impact on GI health, which in turn impacts such matters as: chronic systemic inflammation, autoimmunity, hyperinsulinism, neurotransmitter production (a vast amount of which happens .. in the gut!), hunger signalling, and more.
I don't have time to put the references in here that this deserves, but I'll leave you all with this to whet appetites, as it were.
Dr. Terry Wahls, "Minding Your Mitochondria":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc
Watch that, so my bluntness to follow makes sense. I see this guy's protocol as nothing but poisonous in the long run. He's off and created yet another processed food product that must be assumed to fail to meet the needs of the human body. Current research hammers home the idea that we don't yet have a complete and constructive model of nutrition, so why in the heck should I believe a nonspecialist that claims otherwise? Extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof, or GTFO.
She needs some reputation management, because at the moment there's a bunch of flags that make her sound less than reputable.
1) "Mitochondra" - unless this is a peer reviewed respected journal most people using htis word are cranks.
2) TEDx - Sadly, now tainted as home of cranks.
3) Cured MS through diet - ridiculous claim
etc etc.
Mitochondria raise flags because of people like the UK Dr Ruth Myhill. She claims to be a researcher on chronic fatigue syndrome. CFS is real, but sadly is an area rife with cranks. Myhill appears to have a lot of crank-like beliefs. Her "research" is hopeless, and amounts to unlicensed unethical experimentation on desperate people.
I guess, although I have no supporting evidence, that the word mitochondria is used more often by cranks than other organelles.
On a tangential note, I haven't read it, but http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21792218 might be an interesting review on CFS. Also, I assume you are referring to Sarah Myhill rather than her daughter.
There are lots of drugs, for example, which are useless because although they target the right protein and have the desired effect they can't actually get to it via normal metabolism and the like.
It's the equivalent of saying you could cure cancer with diet.
EDIT: I didn't mean to say that changing to a healthy diet/lifestyle after being diagnosed will magically cure you (if that's why I'm being downvoted) but I believe it certainly can in some cases. If it's for lack of references, well, when it comes to cancer, you can find a study to support just about any view you want.
This is the most stupid and obnoxious thing I've ever seen on HN. Chemotherapy saves lives every day. You can believe that good diets are healthy and helpful for sick people without insulting people that sell nasty but powerful medicine that is proven to work.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=turmeric+cancer
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=piperlongumine+canc...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=bromelain+cancer
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=frankincense+cancer
https://www.google.com/search?q=ashton+kutcher+fruitarian+di...
In general when someone says "I cured this chronic, uncurable, disease through diet" I need to read what they say very carefully. At best it's an overblown claim and they actually mean "this food has a strong evidence base to help you manage your illness and reduce relapse". At worst it's evil people cynically cashing in by selling nonsense to desperate dying people.
In the sense that history is littered with people attempting to apply cross-domain knowledge to processing for health and failing utterly, that's absolutely true.
so stop.
>"I see this guy's protocol as nothing but poisonous in the long run."
You place a burden of evidence on him that you yourself in this very post violated on a number of occasions. You CANNOT call his diet poisonous simply because you disagree with it.
You admitted it yourself:
>"Current research is showing that we are only just beginning to gain understanding of the complexity and health of the GI."
So no offense, but you have literally no ground to say that this is poisonous in the short OR long term, no evidence to back that up, and you cannot rely on a field that cannot support your view.
You have a view on this, congratulations, but it is nothing more than a well-informed opinion. It is not fact, it is not supported by fact and as you've admitted -- it CANNOT at this point be supported by fact that does not yet exist.
Even your link to a TEDX (aka, unvetted content) states upfront: "This talk is a personal narrative and is not yet backed by larger experimentation."
I'm sorry, but you've been consistently and narrow-mindedly against what the OP has put forth. You dismiss his views for their lack of credibility but turn around and post sources that themselves have no credibility (admit to being anecdotal).
You seem to have picked what is correct and are now looking for evidence to support your preconceived notion. You also seem to be falling for the naturalism fallacy by pretending that since his food is "pill and scalpel" it is therefore wrong/bad.
Just my conclusions: obviously he hasn't posted data or even analyzed it, but you present many issues in your posts that I disagree with more strongly than what he puts forth (and I'm not a layman).
Nutrition science is in its infancy. It's clear that the complexity of the interaction of food as it is digested and interacting with our organism has barely had the surface scratched. Also, if you look at the rise of processed foods along with obesity, diabetes, and other health problems that have increased over the past century it's clear that there are some serious problems, and they haven't been explained conclusively by this or that macro-nutrient trend.
So given the state of the evidence, a vague evolutionary assertion that whole foods are generally healthier than a distilled diet of completely isolated nutrients is not granola flag-waving woowoo nonsense, it's a perfectly reasonable belief based on imperfect evidence.
Put another way, the idea the ability to construct a perfect diet given the knowledge we have is likely to fail due to the overwhelming number of unknown details that simply aren't an issue when you're eating whole foods.
If this guy wants to experiment on himself than I'm happy to reap the benefits, but I do believe it's risky. Let's not whitewash common sense just because of "a lack of data". The fact that we have imperfect data does not make all approaches equal, and the fact that this guy is an engineer and wants to follow a scientific approach does automatically make his ideas superior to someone who holds certain nutritional beliefs for slightly more hand-wavy reasons.
>So given the state of the evidence, a vague evolutionary assertion that whole foods are generally healthier than a distilled diet of completely isolated nutrients is not granola flag-waving woowoo nonsense, it's a perfectly reasonable belief based on imperfect evidence.
Isn't it possible that this is more indicative of the rise in an imbalanced diet? Processed foods may have lead the majority of people into having an imbalanced diet, but if they were instead eating a perfectly balanced diet of processed materials like this man is doing, isn't it possible there wouldn't be the whole diabetes, obesity, etc. health crisis?
To put it bluntly, is there actually evidence that a balanced processed diet is any worse than a balanced whole foods diet?
If not, I think professionals should attempt to recreate this type of experiment to find out, obviously safely on animals first. The whole principal of science is that you don't hold onto preconceived opinions when testing theories. Holding onto a "processed foods are bad, because look what's been happening" POV is very unscientific and harmful.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...
> Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.
And of course, "he lost weight" doesn't unequivocally mean "he got healthier".
If there is a risk, it is that his diet is potentially more homogenous than a typical diet, and doesn't include anything from some class of foods that nearly everyone on a more heterogeneous diet eats occasionally.
What I'm wondering is is this any more risky than, let's say - eating at McDonalds instead of drinking this stuff?
"I am reticent to provide exact brand names and instructions because I am not fully convinced of the diet's safety for a physiology different than mine. What if I missed something that's essential for someone of a different race or age group"
But he is interested in actually gathering more data, even if not exactly formally enough for a proper study:
"So…I'll just ship you some of my batch. If you are willing to consume exclusively soylent, and get a CBC, chem panel, and lipid blood test before and after the week and share your results with me it's on the house. Bonus points for getting a psych evaluation before and after. The brain is an organ. I can ship it worldwide but it would be nice if you were in San Francisco so we can meet in person."
Further down on his blog, he has also posted PDF's of his bloodwork.
While he certainly does not have sufficient evidence of general safety and effect, he is aware of that and seems to be actively interested in learning about any flaws in what he's done so far.
> The burdon of evidence should be even greater when it's a non-natural source, as Nassim Taleb argues in Antifragile
This, to me, is ridiculous. A vast range of dangerous poisons are readily avaiable in nature.
I used to pick a lot of mushrooms, and can safely identify perhaps a dozen types common where I grew up. But every year there are people who die agonizing deaths from consuming various nasty toxins because they didn't pay close enough attention to what they picked. And the safety of most mushrooms is unknown - we simply don't have data, and the effects can take a long time to show.
In some cases, popular mushrooms are known to be toxic, such as false morels that contains gyromitrin. They are seemingly safe after boiling. Except there is still gyromitrin in the mushroom, just in small enough quantities that you're ok as long as you don't ingest too much. It's typical to recommend no more than one meal per season, as the poison is stored. But many mushrooms contains compounds we don't know the effect of, and where it is perfectly possible that no effect would be noticeable for a very long time - properly cooked false morels for example, might have no effect on you for years, until you get a bit careless with the cooking (a common way for people to get poisoned by false morels is to stand over the pot while boiling it...)
Nature has an abundant supply of horribly nasty toxic substances that might pass for food for a while.
This is before getting into what "natural" even means.
Everything has to prove its harmlessness. It's just that some things we have a lot of existing data for that at least demonstrates a certain level of safety.
But in the absence of data, I'm no more going to be willing to chew on some random "natural" substance than I'd be willing to ingest some random synthetic substance.
Diets vary crazily much, even within small geographical areas. Things like lactose intolerance is something we only "recently" started seeing on the wane, and it is wildly dependent on your heritage. I'm Scandiavian, and growing up I didn't even know there were people who had problems with dairy, as it was a total non-issue. I used to drink about a litre a day of milk on average growing up.... It was first as an adult I realised there are large parts of the world where people pretty much don't drink milk.
At the same time, I also consumed vast quantities of Scandinavian salted licquorice candy. Except most of if is ammonium chloride based. I doubt that would fit very well into the idea of something "natural", but it is an integral part of Scandinavian culture.
As is fish dissolved in caustic soda an integral part of Norwegian culture, and something we have "successfully practiced" for a very long time.
And processing such as hanging/drying, burying (until half rotted in some cases) and salting various types of food have been an essential part of human culture for a very long time.
And, yes, picking mushrooms and facing the risk of poison have been integral to our culture for a very long time as well, even though many of the most poisonous mushrooms keep claiming deaths up to this day.
Many of the traditional "natural" foods I grew up with are significantly less healthy than a modern heavily processed microwave meal, or the protein powder I use to supplement for my weight lifting.
In that case, his rule would be a good one. If you drift in to a new area of human endevour, the people who follow you out there are taking a risk until the area is well-traveled
[1] In the Aristotelian sense: human nature is the proportionate sum of all human activity. We mostly eat, drink, sleep, walk, talk, etc. so that makes up the bulk of our nature. Cannibalism and incest are acted out much, much less often, so that is a much, much smaller part of our nature, though it is tucked in there.
There are almost 2 billion Chinese. They love to eat chicken paws and cow intestines. So that is human's natural diet?
Your point is dead on: if you make a generalization that broad, you lose a lot of information.
He's not written a scientific paper - don't assume that every single word he has written is meant to be interpreted in the strictest way possible.
By all means be sceptical, but while he might very well be wrong, at least he appears to be earnestly looking to identify and correct any flaws which already puts him far above a lot of charlatans selling risky diets.
It's all produced by self replicating lifeforms we've only begun to comprehend, right?
There's no reason to think we can't science out what that input needs to be, or at least to be able to find one or more valid subsets of input.
This is a rather large improvement over what most people do; one typically applies little to no science whatsoever. :-P
I'm getting the idea that people profess a "belief in science" in the general case, but then absolutely deny its applicability in the specific case here. ;-)
If nobody has a right nutrition model today(1), including exeprts doing this whole life, somebody who just read a few books has no chance to cover everything that has to be covered long term. Or in other words, don't you think that military with practically infinite funds wouldn't already use his drink or equivalent for all extreme circumstances, if something like that were enough?
(1) Because biology is darn complicated, like in "we still don't even know all the bacteria that live in our bodies." Not to mention organic chemistry 3-d effects like in http://folding.stanford.edu/
The shake may well not be an optimal awesome diet -- I'd bet it won't be -- but billions of humans survive on non-optimal, awesome diets. The idea that the incredibly varied, constantly evolving, often appalling diets of the whole world all fulfill whatever criteria are necessary for human survival, but that this shake doesn't is magical thinking.
Especially when you consider that -- thread title notwithstanding -- the guy eats a few regular meals a week. What are these magical micronutrients that we don't know about, that are present in sufficient quantities to sustain humans in all traditional diets, but which are needed in such quantities that shake guy isn't going to get them?
I, personally love food way too much for this to work for me... I've been working on my diet, and getting to a point where some of my Metabolic Syndrom issues are now getting better (can feel my feet again)... most of that has been from a pretty high fiber, low carb intake. Almost no processed sugars or rich starches (bread/pasta/rice/potatoes). I do have a savory crepe a couple times a week (essentially a low-carb sandwich wrap. I also eat lots of greens, and have been eating 2-3 pieces of fruit a day. It's hard enough not binging out on pasta, let alone only eating a couple times a week.
Billions of people get sick because they don't have a diet varied enogh. Specific, well studied examples abound.
If you want to use some kind of idiosyncratic definition of "sick" that pronounces somewhere between a substantial minority and a majority of the world as "sick" at any given time, I guess I can't stop you. But as a practical matter, we're comparing shake-guy's food to the other foods that people actually eat, not to whatever your idea of the best diet in the world is.
In my opinion: the use of supplemented food like this will only improve our understanding and increase the speed at which those models are made.
By approaching the problem from BOTH sides we can create the most full expression of what is needed and why.
Still I dislike this excuse because: you run the risk of missing micronutrients every single day on a traditional diet, too.
Your body doesn't care if you forgot a micronutrient due to carelessness or if it simply wasn't in the profile of the whole foods you ate. Missing is missing. Eating popcorn, soda and fast food for a week straight means you miss a lot of important nutrients. And yet you survive.
Let the pioneers have fun and play and learn, that's what I say!
I think the actual criticism is more along the lines of "It's so complicated that it's incredibly unlikely this guy has been truly successful."
> "Let the pioneers have fun and play and learn, that's what I say!"
Which is all well and good when they're merely experimenting on themselves. But this guy has gone from tinkering to claiming success and safety and begun distribution.
That's beyond tinkering and well into tampering.
He should absolutely feel free to tinker and explore and even publish his recipes and personal data for anyone similarly-motivated to build upon. But there's a line between doing that and doing what he's begun, the way he's begun it.
What we don't do is go all "hurr durr it's too complicated, let's not even try".
> You place a burden of evidence on him...
It isn't saidajigumi placing the burden of proof on him, it's the scientific method. Everything we know about nutrition tells us that we don't understand it enough to pull something like this off. It would be a breakthrough if it turned out we can, but the null hypothesis is that it won't work, so that's what our position should be.
If our default position is that this doesn't work, and the guy is really relying on his mix for most of his sustenance, that means we think he's going to experience adverse health effects because of his diet. Perhaps we have no evidence to suggest they'll be adverse enough to qualify his diet as "poisonous", but the assumption isn't completely baseless, as you've asserted.
Again, I have no idea who's right and who's wrong, but the two claims are certainly not equally likely.
Furthermore he makes the mistake of assuming correlation is causation. I.E. he claims the recent rise of processed foods and the increased incidence of poor health are a cause and effect relationship when in fact no evidence to such a connection exists other than the very weak correlation between them. He then goes on to extrapolate from this false causation that what he perceives as the opposite of processed foods, I.E. whole foods, are therefore inherently healthy.
The fact is whole foods are not special in any regard, being unprocessed does not magically confer health benefits on them. There are plenty of unprocessed substances, including various plants that are unhealthy or in many cases poisonous.
What the man in the article is attempting is a vital first step in better understanding human nutritional requirements. By breaking down nutritional inputs to carefully controlled individual compounds and then monitoring the results we can gain a much better understanding of what the real nutritional requirements of the human body are.
I mean look at the warnings on what is basically the next step, TPN http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/nutritional_disorde... . He is basically drinking almost exactly this. Look at all those scary scary warnings. Some of them are IV dependent, but things like "Metabolic bone disease, or bone demineralization (osteoporosis or osteomalacia), develops in some patients given TPN for > 3 mo. The mechanism is unknown. Advanced disease can cause severe periarticular, lower-extremity, and back pain. Temporarily or permanently stopping TPN is the only known treatment." and such are probably some odd nutrient problems.
Any nutritionist will tell you that there just isn't a great long term complete meal replacement. If this guy has one that is great, but he has done nothing to prove it yet. I mean he isn't even completely replacing meals, and has only been doing it for 6 weeks. Which is shorter than some people have done entirely cabbage based diets. Heck he could have subsisted on beer for this long. ( http://blogs.menshealth.com/health-headlines/the-beer-diet/2... )
It is sort of like some blog post claiming to have solved scaling and not actually had any real workload. I mean sure it doesn't look completely broken at a glance, but it hasn't been shown to even work yet. Come back in a year or two when you've dealt with some load (or merely a couple years of drinking the same thing in this case).
As much as I share the fantasy of perfectly balanced, easy to prepare "bachelor chow", I hope he doesn't damage himself.
Bad as it sounds, I hope he does. That would be the equivalent of "failing fast", I guess.
Here's the worse outcome: he goes happily for some time, inspires some people to follow his lead, the group grows ... 5 or 10 years down the line - bam, they all end up with some irreparable damage to their health ...
No I didn't think so. If Soylent Dude and his merry band of poor cooks can prove our current nutritional understanding wrong by dying five to ten years from now, then they should.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-us/201106/wh...
In her early 30's, Staci's health started going downhill. After twelve years of strict vegetarianism, she began to suffer from anemia and chronic fatigue syndrome, and she experienced stomach pains for two hours after every meal. "I was completely debilitated," she tells me. "Then I changed the way I ate."
The point here is not to bash vegetarianism, but to point out that it took her 12 years to develop health issues. And that's with vegetarianism, that is often considered a very healthy way to eat. So I would expect more potential hazards from something new, untried and untested.
After 12 years of no health issues, and with a low general reason to believe that vegetarianism causes health issues, I'd be slow to attribute the reversal to the thing the person thinks worked.
(I would also expect more potential hazards from something new, untried, and untested, but I've signed up because I like the idea and am willing to risk it. Fortune favors the bold.)
What do we know about completely eliminating fiber from the diet for an extended period of time? Or what do we know about chewing food being beneficial for dental health? It was mentioned he hardly poops on Soylent - were there prolonged studies on this subject?
Willingness to risk is something I respect, anyway.
When put to the test by a pair of scientists who replicated the diet though, they found few ill-effects - except at one point where they were hitting a nutritional deficiency, but corrected it by putting semi-rotten fish product (which is a dish in Inuit cooking) into their diet - because it turns out that provided certain key nutrients.
The human body can handle some surprising and varied diets, a lot simply evolved by trial and error over a long period. With modern technology, we should be able to "fail fast" over a much shorter time.
Probably more importantly: anyone putting that much thought into what they eat, what the effects of it are etc. is already doing 10x the thinking of most people about their nutrition.
I know a bit about Inuit and their diet - I've read "My Life with the Eskimo" by Vilhjalmur Stefansson
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Eskimo-New-Vilhjalmur-Stefansson/...
Stefansson and another explorer, Andersson, participated in an experiment where they did not eat anything but meat for a year - and remained in excellent health
http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com.au/2009/09/two-brave-m...
But I haven't heard about the 'rotten fish' and specific nutrients that can be obtained from it ...
"Rakfisk", a Norwegian variation, could be left to ferment up to a year. Iceland has Hákarl, - fermented Greenland shark that is also left for 6-12 months: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1karl containing ammonia (the process is used because it is poisonous when fresh).
My total guess is that it's more about having access to a wider range of types of food throughout the winter, when many other dietary choices disappear. Traditional food in the Nordic countries at least is very centered around processing that allows for longer term storage, and I'd guess Greenland has much the same.
No, it took her twelve years to admit to and respond to health issues. They presented very early on. She was simply on a terrible diet, and was deficient in iron. No mystery, no "unknown unknowns", just a very simple, straightforward, common deficiency we've known about for decades.
It's not about your body suddenly running out of a nutrient five years down the line. It's about your body starting to repair and build structures that need to last for years while missing key ingredients.
As a random example, people can develop osteoporosis after years of drinking diet soda.
citation?
6 weeks on some combination of stuff that contains good things like olive and fish oil and other nutrients can't be as bad as the 'supersize me' diet, and even he managed to survive for 30 days...
hardly scientific or even "common-sense" evidence of any long-term viability.
You do realize there is a substantial difference between drinking it and injecting it right? You are talking about the side effects of completely bypassing the entire GI system and providing for all nutrition through an IV.
- Carl Sagan
Sure, he could be on to something. But we also need an enormous amount of skepticism when evaluating it, just as we do when evaluating any large claim. What pings my radar is that we're still trying to understand how our body processes "whole food" as opposed to vitamins in supplement form.
If they hadn't happened across the Americas, they would all have died. India was nowhere near where he thought it was, and almost exactly where the common knowledge of the time (and Eratosthenes) said it was.
Sorry. It's just a pet peeve of mine when people think Columbus was somehow right, or even worse, that people believed the world was flat pre-Columbus.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not implying you think that, but it seems to be implied in the Sagan quote that Columbus was something other than completely wrong in his assessment of the situation (or possibly lying 'cause he wanted to explore the other side of the world. He certainly seems to have been brave enough)
From my perspective, both sides of this argument have supporting examples, and neither takes a clear lead. I would say that hackers who throw together disruptive successes tend to be innovating on market capture, not underlying technology, otherwise they wouldn't have quite as much success without proper education. (Either that, or the hacker is working in Information Tech, where they do have insider knowledge.) That said, market-capture should equate to commercial success, so it does matter. I just don't think it's directly correlated to the innovation you're suggesting.
As for the ability of the natural genius to emerge without formal training, of course that's possible-- and increasingly likely thanks to the Web-- but it's still rare enough that I'm skeptical of the claim.
While we can agree that innovation should not be stifled, the idea that we can determine the processes by which the body utilizes nutrients and their interdependent effects, after a few months of research, is utterly hubristic.
I often make the claim that the human body (other animals are close too) exhibits one of the highest levels of complexity out of all the known systems in the universe, far exceeding the complexity of man mad systems. I challenge anyone to put forward a counter-example...
I've been researching nutrition for 5 years and read hundreds of papers on PubMed and, involved with QS (quantified self) and life extension movements, track my bloodwork in Google Spreadsheets etc.
You may be wondering, why would someone invest such an extraordinary amount of time (1000+ man hours) an energy in this topic? Well I used to think very differently about my health. As a young strong-willed software developer, I arrogantly assumed like many before I knew it all in my teenage years. My mental model of the body, was not dissimilar to your current views on GI (the body will just handle whatever you throw at it). As a result after 10 years of eating badly I ended up with a chronic disease (Psoriatic Arthritis).
Being a teenager I knew better and ate anything I wanted, which specifically was an extreme diet consisting entirely of pasta, milk and coke. Because that's what my body "wanted". Now I'm in my 30's and undoing the damage, but I've learned that this system really is complicated, more so than a rocket or microprocessor. You're right in the sense that the body can tolerate it for a while, but it's not designed to cope with abuse over a period of many years. Eventually you will pay the price.
Even now though, I wouldn't consider myself an "expert", although some of my peers might. But I have learned enough know when someone is out of their depth. This guy is well intentioned but that does not mean he's justified in making such grandiose claims.
For example he says "Vitamin D" and "Vitamin K", without acknowledging various forms exist.
For example he says he takes "Vitamin D(400IU):"
What exactly is 'Vitamin D'? Cholecalciferol (D3) [1] is quite different from Ergocalciferol (D2)[2]
D3 levels are particularly important when talking about overall health.
Or take "Vitamin K" for example, are we talking about the philoquinone (K1) [3] or the menaquinone (K2) [4] group?
Even if then, if one is talking Vitamin K2, there are various menaquinones forms so is he suggesting Mk4, mk7 or some other form? [5].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholecalciferol
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergocalciferol
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloquinone
Not as far as nutrition is concerned. Some studies have indicated that D2 is slightly less potent, but the majority have shown equal efficacy.
>Or take "Vitamin K" for example
Same deal. You are confusing the notion that there are multiple chemical compounds that fulfill the role of a vitamin, that you need them all. They fill the same role, you need something to fill that role, not one specific form.
Your whole argument seems to be an attempt at pointless pedantry, when the pedantry presented doesn't even matter to the subject at hand.
The evidence does not support that claim. If anything we don't know, and that's my point. [1][2]
>Your whole argument seems to be an attempt at pointless pedantry, when the pedantry presented doesn't even matter to the subject at hand.
No I'm saying similar to "Vitamin B". You body may be lacking in pyridoxine or cobalamin or one of the other B vitamins. They are not equivalent. The B group has been studied in far greater depth, compared to say the menaquiniones (K2 group), and there simply does not exist the same level of research. Similarly K and D are groups too, and treating them like it's a single chemical with a specific effect is just plain wrong.
If you want to continue to argue please backup your claims with studies indicating K2 (any form) is equivalent to K1.
A study of 11000+ men by a German cancer research center found this:
"Our results suggest an inverse association between the intake of menaquinones, but not that of phylloquinone, and prostate cancer. Further studies of dietary vitamin K and prostate cancer are warranted." [3]
In other words K2 intake was correlated with reduced levels of prostate cancer, and K1 was not.
They are NOT the same thing and it's arrogant to dismiss this them as being functionally equivalent or assume one's body will perfectly convert between various forms as needed.
[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/84/4/694.full
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21289249
[3] Dietary intake of vitamin K and risk of prostate cancer in the Heidelberg cohort of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18400723
What claim?
>No I'm saying similar to "Vitamin B"
There is no vitamin B. You clearly know this, and are deliberately posting complete nonsense.
>In other words K2 intake was correlated with reduced levels of prostate cancer, and K1 was not
And in the studies that found no such correlation to begin with? Pretending a single study is evidence that there's an entire family of vitamins we know noting about is so incredibly stupid I refuse to believe you are actually doing that.
>it's arrogant to dismiss this them as being functionally equivalent
No, it is arrogant to claim that you know everything and this guy is a total moron because he did a great job of 100% completely and totally covering all vitamins, but you want him to worry about what form of vitamin D he uses based on absolutely no evidence that it matters at all.
Emotionally charged strawman. He's done some homework. My argument is that it's simply not enough. IE it's possible to be ignorant of how much one is ignorant of. There are also unknown unknowns that exist.
>Pretending a single study is evidence that there's an entire family of vitamins we know noting about is so incredibly stupid I refuse to believe you are actually doing that.
Another misrepresentation. I'm saying that the Vitamin K2 group is not widely understood and only recently gaining more attention in the last few years. [1]
Also there is no pretending going on, simply advocating skepticism and that it's an extremely complex topic with ongoing studies often refuting "obviousness" of a prior generation of thought.
I haven't even started on the role the microbiome plays in our health. The fact that there are 10x more non-human cells (100 trillion cells) in our bodies should be pause for concern and a little humbleness. We literally carry around thousands of different strands of bacteria and are only now in this decade starting to map the genetic material to figure out new advances and how these interact with the food we ingest and their systemic effects. [2][3][4]
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Vitamin-K2-Calcium-Paradox-Little-Know...
[2] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubiome-sequencing-your-mic...
[3] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/american-gut-what-s-in-you...
An argument that you did not support, as I said.
>I'm saying that the Vitamin K2 group is not widely understood and only recently gaining more attention in the last few years.
And I am saying that just because you want to pretend there's magic pixie dust that we need to live, doesn't mean it is actually true.
Another misrepresentation. I started the thread by saying that the human body can take a lot of abuse for many years without apparent ill-effects. That said, many would argue the difference between "living" (or surviving over a certain time period) and optimal health, is not an insignificant consideration.
It's quite possible to develop chronic conditions, that are not apparent at first, and only manifest themselves after years of nutritional deficiency.
Oh, well that is certainly a reasonable basis to pretend a very complete diet is dangerous and lacking. Oh wait, no that is a completely nonsensical basis.
I find it incredible that you will not concede any significant difference between D3 and D2 or between K1 and K2 groups. When the facts show the opposite. [2] Have you actually read the book on K2 and the evidence that it reduces arterial calcification?
You act like it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss studies and because of your preconceived notion that this diet is a perfect and "very complete" and "100% completely and totally covering all vitamins" (your words) and therefore any counterclaims means <insert strawman attack>.
I like this Rob fellow. I'm a huge supporter of ground up approaches, but this is simply not a black and white issue, and no amount of bullying from your quarter is going to change that.
[1] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424#comments
[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120531102338.ht...
But that is not what you claimed. You didn't say "this carries some risk", you said he is out of his depth, doesn't know what he is doing, and will pay the price. You are the arrogant one.
>You act like it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss studies
You are the one doing that, not me.
Reads like a sleazy wonderpill ad.
Despite what else I've written in this thread, I'm not against the idea of healthy, cheap, time efficient nutrition options. But I don't think we know enough yet to nail the "healthy" part, and the human cost of our failures to date has been truly terrible.
>> My mental performance is also higher. My inbox and to-do list quickly emptied. I 'get' new concepts in my reading faster than before and can read my textbooks twice as long without mental fatigue. I read a book on Number Theory in one sitting, a Differential Geometry book in a weekend, filling up a notebook in the process. Mathematical notation that used to look obtuse is now beautiful. My working memory is noticeably better. I can grasp larger software projects and longer and more complex scientific papers more effectively. My awareness is higher. I find music more enjoyable. I notice beauty and art around me that I never did before. The people around me seem sluggish. There are fewer 'ums' and pauses in my spoken sentences. My reflexes are improved. I walk faster, feel lighter on my feet, spend less time analyzing and performing basic tasks and rely on my phone less for navigation. I sleep better, wake up more refreshed and alert and never feel drowsy during the day. I still drink coffee occasionally, but I no longer need it, which is nice."
Yeah, I'm the one exaggerating.
>> "Consuming only Soylent costs me about $50/month, another order of magnitude improvement, and would be cheaper if I didn't need the energy for running every day. At scale the cost would be even lower.
>>Edit: this was a miscalculation from a mistake in my spreadsheet, at personal scale it actually costs me exactly $154.82/month."
...Again. I'm exaggerating.
His blog is overly sensationalized. It really does read like a sleazy ad. He even gave his experiment a product name 'Soylent'. Sure, I was being funny about it, but I wouldn't call what I said an extreme exaggeration of what I just read.
This, to me, is also why for many athletes, their performance doesn't begin on the field but rather it begins with their food intake.
I don't trust the data he provided because it isn't rigorous, reviewed or even analyzed at all.
But I'm curious, regardless.
That being said, there is a lot that is important off of the field (e.g. sleep, stretching, etc). Just nutrition is fairly low on that list.
[1] http://www.active.com/triathlon/ironman/Articles/Nutrition-T...
And the evidence to support this claim is what exactly? People keep acting like nutrition is magic and involves lots of pixie dust. It is not. We have a very thorough understanding down to the exact chemical reactions occurring. Anything he is missing that would cause damage only seen after 50+ years is also causing that same damage to millions of other people as we speak.
This actually is a hard problem and the science well short of consensus. The surface area of the problem seems to grow every year as scientists publish new research. That seems like a good indication that the odds of this (relatively) uninformed approach being a great one is low.
It is a mix of politics and economics and ethics and a very small probability of doing any real experimentation on other people.
So far I have more faith in Internet communities doing self-experimentation than with big corporation-sponsored studies.
Nutrition isn't some old-guard field with a hundred years of solid decided science weighing it down. In my opinion it's like genetics, a fast moving, exciting field full of interesting ideas and disruptive possibility.
Quite frankly, our understanding of the human GI and human nutrition is still rather pathetic, and a lot of the "common wisdom" is based on misinformation and bad evidence.
Anna Karenina, Part Two, chapter 19:
"He had no need to be strict with himself, as he had very quickly been brought down to the required light weight; but still he had to avoid gaining flesh, and so he eschewed farinaceous and sweet dishes."
No offence but we've heard the exact same thing from every amateur that "learned programming" by toying with Wordpress or Jquery copypasta.
Just because someone can survive on something doesn't mean they're getting good nutrition. Humans have adapted to eat many types of food, but that doesn't mean everyone was equally as healthy, disease-resistant, etc.
Further, you don't really know what the hell you're doing to all 100 trillion of the little beasties living in your gut by drinking that stuff. We're really a very carefully balanced system for homeostasis and shortcuts rarely appreciate the subtlety and complexity of the system they are shortcutting.
We also heard the exact same thing about every kook, and his idea of a "perpetual motion engine", "cold fusion in my backyard" etc idea.
And that has happened far too many more times than the "successful idea" thing -- so much, that "the idea being shot down by critics" && "it being successful" case is like statistical noise.
Which is also true about your startup example. Most startups DO fail. A staggering majority of them actually.
With that said, the question becomes what's the goal. Is it to cover the bases while keeping room left over for desert? Is it to find something better than the average western diet? Because, while perfection is going to depend on your DNA and activity levels finding a good baseline substitute for breakfast and lunch is vary possible.
PS: Now if you read what was written then this is sounding a lot like a 'fad' food with wondrous super powers. But, there are fairly good substitutes out there that cover most bases.
That doesn't mean that there isn't something you can put in to get the best results for yourself.
My point is that there are likely very many things you can put in to achieve a similar optimal result.
What does the food industry have to do with anything? They aren't trying to get nutrition "right", they are trying to sell their products. This is the same reason people who don't know anything about nutritional science claim that "science doesn't really know anything about nutrition, one day fat is good, the next day it is bad". Science never said fat was good or bad, marketing weasels for food companies deliberately misrepresent research to support unsubstantiated claims.
>finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods
Except, there is no evidence to support that claim at all.
>It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods
Not just theoretically, but practically too. What exactly do you think they are feeding people on feeding tubes? It isn't salads. http://abbottnutrition.com/Adult/Adult-Tube-Feeding-Products...
This sounds like the naturalistic fallacy.
What utter bollocks. We're (as in, scientists studying nutrition and how utterly wrong food industry has gotten that in the 20th and early 21st century) finally starting to get our collective heads around the benefits of whole foods vs. highly processed foods, and just how badly our bodies deal with the latter. It may be theoretically possible to create some processed food that's on par with the nutrition of whole foods, but I doubt that anyone alive today knows how to do it. He may see "good" results on some metrics due to a lack of any desire to go hypercaloric -- i.e. there's probably no artificially boosted food reward[1] mechanisms in his glop. But that won't make up for the glop's likely deficiencies.
So an impatient _software engineer_ comes along and claims to have whipped up a drink that eliminates all that. A task that specialists have so far failed at.
> "I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient."
I've seen this enough to be sick of it; it seems to be form of the software "everything is just an [easy] problem" mindset gone badly wrong. The supplement and meal replacement powder/drink industry is a multi-billion dollar market. First sanity check: _no_ staff scientists for any of these companies thought to go look at a textbook and the intertubes and do the same thing? DOH! Egg's on them!
Another example of this failure: when software/CS types wander off to do experimental science (e.g. human subjects) without _any_ training in how to do experiment design, data collection, or analysis. "Just ask 'em some questions!" The general form of the problem seems to be a blindness to the depths of domain knowledge required to be effective in other disciplines.