Rob Rhinehart

He asserted this from the start??? Here's the Tilt crowdfunding page: https://wayback.archive.org/web/20141012152640/https://crowdtilt.soyle… Note, it's titled "Soylent Free Your Body". Here are some phrases in the short post: "What if you never had to worry about food again?" "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash." Packages available: $255 One month supply of Soylent We'll ship enough soylent to fully replace one month's worth of meals This is after he went on a 30 day experiment titled "How I Stopped Eating Food" http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 There are so many choice quotes in this post, I wholeheartedly recommend reading the whole thing. If you haven't, it will make your decade.

Snarky reference to this amazing blog post by the Soylent inventor: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 It uses less water to order new clothes from cheap labor in China than to launder them, so therefore the right thing to do is to buy new clothes and ... donate the old ones to charity where ... magically they don't have to be washed??? If this was from anyone other than the guy who thought inventing Soylent was a good idea, I'd call it a masterful work of satire.

Good to read a critique from someone outside the tech bubble. I had read the amazingly boneheaded blog post about some guy giving up alternating current and always buying new clothes instead of doing laundry ( http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 ) but didn't know it was the same guy peddling soylent. Now that I know, things make a lot more sense ;-)

Looks like someone has tried to make the blog post on High Frequency Dating from Rob Rhinehart (Mr Soylent) a reality: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005 (worth a read, it's pretty funny)

The response is definitely worthwhile, and a bit of it seems to be that the use case is different. It would be a bit expensive to replace a majority of one's diet with Ensure Complete. A 16-pack of 8oz Ensure Complete is 5600 Calories for $42, so eating for a day costs $15. The preorder price of 1 week of soylent is $9.29/day, but worryingly we don't know how many Calories that is... A quote from Vice on the crowdfunding page indicates that it should be about 700 Calories/day[1] (making it several times as expensive as Ensure), while Rob Rhinehart's blog indicated that he was consuming a reasonable number of calories earlier this year (2629 C/day)[2]. [1] https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body [2] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=474

YMMV. "It was delicious! I felt like I'd just had the best breakfast of my life. It tasted like a sweet, succulent, hearty meal in a glass, which is what it is, I suppose." --http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 Gawker staff tried Soylent. Feedback was mixed. Including: "[It] made me feel like joining a cult, after just one sip." "It tasted like when you're baking and you taste the ingredients even if there's not sugar or vanilla in there, you just have a compulsion to taste wet food." "My mouth tastes hot and like old cheese." "It tasted like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass." "It was great and I love it. I don't want to eat anymore." --http://gawker.com/we-drank-soylent-the-weird-food-of-the-future-510293…

Change your diet to anything different for that amount of time and your body will feel better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me I thought we were lovers of Science on this site? I thought we believed in testing claims through evidence, not some slick marketing video. The founder has blogged in detail about the evolution of the recipe and effects on his body, http://robrhinehart.com/ (site currently appears to be down).

Awesome- I was considering doing something like this as well. After following the Soylent posts (http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424), I'm interested to know if I'm nutrient deficient. Since EatThisMuch already shows the micronutrients per meal, is there a way you could show daily deficiencies as well?

He lists all the ingredients on his blog, and talks about why he chose each one. He also discusses effects he felt when experimenting with the proportion/amount of certain nutrients. There's no "magic" in this at all. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424 Thats the link for the ingredients. Blog posts around there discuss some modifications that were made here and there. As for production, I think many things like this can be replicated. However, I'd love to just buy this, or at least a "base version" rather than sourcing all the various nutrients and powders, then measuring/mixing them, etc.

Haha, most excellent. One thing that I'm only now (and stupidly late) realising is that tech journalism almost never critiques new trends. Sure there are some gut "this fucking sucks" but there is never a real effort to provide some critical thinking about the PR emanating from whichever source. For example, soylent is the brain child of someone who has possibly crippling [OCD](http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331) (Having been blighted by it for most of my teenage and childhood.) It looks like one of his coping mechanisms. I'm sure its a great product, but I wouldn't want to emulate someone's OCD lifestyle. Yet we are asked to "emulate the habits of these successful XXX" without stopping to ask, are they happy? Yet no one seems to ask the question: "is this good?" or "whats the logical outcome?" They just seem to be keen to breathlessly relay the PR line, possible with a pithy snap reaction. I'm not suggesting a flame war for every press release, just a health helping of critical thinking, and some research.

Hi, this is Romeo Stevens, cofounder of MealSquares. We’re really interested in feedback. Since Soylent is a similar product in our space, I wanted to discuss some points made by Rob Rhinehart in his post "The Fallacy of Whole Foods": http://robrhinehart.com/?p=874 Rob likes to compare Soylent to medical meal replacements. But medical meal replacements have taken a long time to mature. For example, it took a while for professional nutritionists to realize maybe they shouldn’t pump newborns full of soybean oil [1]. This may sound silly today, but that was the best nutritionists could do based on the science available to them. And that's the problem I see artificially constructed meal replacements running in to--if you do the best you can based on the science available, that still may not be enough. Different forms of the same nutrient do seem to affect the body differently. We see negative health outcomes from substances such as beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid in supplemental form [2], while high levels in whole foods demonstrate no such harms. So bioavailability is complicated, and for whatever reason whole foods seem to have consistently healthier profiles than supplements. Many examples of strong nutrient synergy have been discovered. Vitamin D and calcium, vitamin C and iron, the fat soluble vitamins and dietary fat are some of the most well established. It seems likely that we've still got more to discover. Rob himself seems to acknowledge this in his…

It's riding a wave of novelty, but it's hard to argue that it's actually solving the problem that it claims to (busy/lazy, want healthy food-substitute). The post doesn't actually tell you much about the nutrition without evidence about levels of actual nutrient absorption, but a quick google scholar search finds that calcium inhibits iron and copper absorption, especially in the presence of phytates [0,1] (which Soylent contains from the oat flour) and that zinc, manganese, and iron have similar uptake pathways and limit each others absorption by competing for use of those pathways [1,2]. No idea if there's any other interactions, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to rely on this stuff much for nutrition. Aside from that, he vetted the formula by an uncontrolled, unblinded study with a sample size of n=1 (i.e. trying it himself for a few months), and he says on his blog that he "started having joint pain and found [he] fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as [he] consume[s] almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day." [3] In that same post, he says that "After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did", and makes major…

You have some choice quotes, but here's the smoking gun: >Soylent is perfectly balanced and optimized for your body and lifestyle, meaning it automatically puts you at an optimal weight, makes you feel full, and improves your focus and cognition. Not just easy and healthy. No. Perfectly optimized... Automatically puts you at an optimal weight They've toned down the language since saying this, but I think anyone has good reason to be upset over such claims. Tim Ferriss gave a platform to Soylent on his blog recently, which is one of the best things you can have happen for your product: http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2012/01/11/the-tim-ferriss… Rhinehart wasn't very grateful, simply because Ferriss showed some healthy skepticism. Here's the whole event: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2013/08/20/soylent/ http://robrhinehart.com/?p=874 http://www.flickr.com/photos/timferriss/9684046788/ One of the last things Ferriss says? I don't want you to fail and explicitly stated otherwise in my piece... That mimics the same attitude a lot of us here have. Being skeptical of bogus claims isn't the same thing as dismissing something. Or calling it a toy. That accusation is a dismissal of reasonable skepticism.

There's no science here. This so-called experiment is worthless IMHO. Feeding people all-liquid diets to keep them alive is well known. That's what happens to coma patients and lots of work in creating enteral nutrition products has been done. Given that people's lives depend on this that's a good place to start (take a look at, for example, Jevity [3]). And the people who make that stuff worry about keeping your gastrointestinal system working, the right balance of everything needed to keep a (in this case, sick) person alive, how to keep the product from spoiling, etc. So, he's not creating something new. The other argument against the existing products is price. Here's a quick comparison. He claims that it costs him $155 per month [1]. If he were to live on Jevity 1.5 he'd need to drink 4.2 cans per day at a cost of $57/24 per can (it's sold in packs of 24 cans [2]) or $9.98 per day which is roughly $300 a month. (If he ups the kcal to 2,000 a day from the 1,500 he was on then he'd need to drink 5.6 cans a day which is $400 a month). So, he'd be spending 2 to 2.5 times what he currently is. But he'd be spending it on a product that's been quality controlled and tested. Is there any indication that he can fundamentally change the economics of this type of food? I don't think so. Especially when you factor in all the work that the makers of Jevity etc. are doing at that price point (the QA, the distribution, the packaging). And certainly not enough to meet all his…

20 minutes/day? 6.7 minutes per meal? I doubt it. Plus you forgot the time to buy groceries, wash dishes, eat (drinking something like soylent is 5x faster than chewing food), etc. The average adult probably spends 45min-1h per day doing something necessary for preparing food. The guy has a point: Soylent does save time: "I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner. For every meal at home I would then have to clean and dry the dishes. This does not include trips to the grocery store. Now I spend about 5 minutes in the evening preparing for the next day, and every meal takes a few seconds. I love order of magnitude improvements, and I certainly don't miss doing dishes. In fact I could get rid of the kitchen entirely, no fridge sucking down power, no constant cleaning or worrying about pests, and more living space. I just need a water source." Source: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298

He seems to be very conscious that this is in effect an experiment, that might be risky as well. E.g. from his site ( http://robrhinehart.com/): "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…

Read the claims he's making on his blog and tell me they're not sensationalist. We're expected to believe he's become some sort of a super human because of a 900 calorie liquid synthetic diet that he invented with no formal training what-so-ever. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 Under Results -> Qualitative. And yes, reading is effective learning. I'll put it in perspective though: A biologist who dabbles in comp sci during his free time tells you he's invented a new sorting algorithm. This algorithm performs in O(1) in best, worst, and average case, shattering any proofs to the contrary. Here's the catch though: he's the only one using the sort. Every biologist who knows anything about computer scientist posts: I want to try this! But they can't because he is only using it for himself for now. Now... the biologists on their forums are looking at this and going, 'Wow! He's revolutionized Computer Science!' Sounds legit, though.

I've been eating Soylent twice a day for more than a year as my primary food source. I'm always interested in new variants (especially ones that cut down on cost) - this one seems interesting. Any chance that there's an Amazon shopping cart that someone can add to get all this stuff easily? Also, I noticed that the Readme links to Rob Rhinehart's page (http://robrhinehart.com). Unfortunately, it looks like it's all been taken down. Anybody know why?

Soylent's story was always lackluster. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298 > I researched every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial, and purchased all of them in nearly raw chemical form from a variety of sources. The section on the ingredients ended up being quite long so I’ll save that for a future post. The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid. I call it ‘Soylent’. At the time I didn’t know if it was going to kill me > On day 3 I noticed my heart was racing and my energy level was suddenly dropping ... I check my formula and realize iron is completely absent. I quickly purchase an iron supplement and add it to the mixture the next day. I have to be more careful not to leave anything out.

I assumed it was satire, considering he's written other tongue-in-cheek posts, like http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005.

The founder of Soylent clearly believes he's an expert in many, many fields: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude? I wouldn't call it hybris, though it's closely related. It's a mix of arrogance, over confidence, ignorance, plus more and very prevalent in SV.

It almost looks like an implementation of High Frequency Dating (http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005, HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773841).

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1152 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 Definitely an interesting mindset.

If you look at other posts of the guy, it's more clear that is satire. Hard to say from just that post. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005

Fair confident this is all satire. Read his post on dating. Same vein of humor, but more obviously a joke. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005

Someone already did... in 2013 http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005

I'm sure this will cost me some of that sweet HN karma, but: Sweet; Now my automated dating life will really take off! http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773841

Soylent has a bigger vision. Here's a recent statement of it by its founder, Rob Rhinehart. Start 5 paragraphs in. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1192

Forgetting critical nutrients like iron is definitely disruptive. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298