Soylent: No Food For 30 Days 440
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Senior Editor of Motherboard Brian Merchant went an entire month without eating regular food. Instead, the journalist whisked up a concoction called soylent, an efficient take on the future of nourishment and nutrition. Merchant says: 'It was my second day on Soylent and my stomach felt like a coil of knotty old rope, slowly tightening. I wasn't hungry, but something was off. I was tired, light-headed, low-energy, but my heart was racing. My eyes glazed over as I stared out the window of our rental SUV as we drove over the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge to Oakland. Some of this was nerves, sure. I had twenty-eight days left of my month-long all-Soylent diet—I was attempting to live on the full food replacement longer than anyone besides its inventor—and I felt woozy already. ... By the third week of Soylent, not eating food seemed normal. I saw a doctor, who said I was healthy; I was still losing weight, but nothing serious. Yet, given that a daily mixture of Soylent contains 2,400 calories, both Rob and Dr. Engel thought it was odd that I’d shed so much. Dr. Engel said that given my weight, height, and body mass, I should only require about 1,800 calories a day. I could still be adjusting to the new diet, or I could have such a hyperactive metabolism that before Soylent, I was tearing through hundreds of extra calories per day and staying trim.'"
Brian Merchant (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Brian Merchant (Score:5, Funny)
"Soylent... the great taste of friends!"
Re:Brian Merchant (Score:4, Funny)
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A real people person ;)
Maybe the guy lost weight because the Soylent green was made from the skinny people.
You know what they say, you are what you eat.
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Or... (Score:3)
Re:Or... (Score:5, Informative)
The blood work tells you pretty well what is and isn't supposed to be in your body (if a given nutrient isn't carried in your blood serum, then nothing gets it)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Reference_ranges_for_blood_tests_-_by_mass.svg [wikimedia.org]
The only problem his had was being D deficient. I think D is one of the most expensive ones to test for (I heard it costs around $500) so I think if they included that in his blood work panel then they were probably very comprehensive in their testing.
With that being the case, it probably is that this isn't (fully) healthy for you in that it doesn't satisfy your D requirements, but that is actually easy to address.
There exists the possibility that this wouldn't satisfy every persons metabolic requirements as well (for example, some people need different amounts of electrolytes such as potassium and sodium than other people, which genetics are known to play a heavy role in) so if/when they do clinical tests they should also isolate based on race and do the same regular blood work throughout the trials.
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Dietary sources of D are almost always insufficient unless you live on only seafood. Sunlight is pretty much the only viable way to get enough D. Probably not diet related.
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His D levels were pretty low from what I noticed on the blood chart that they showed on the video (they were hand written, which was kind of odd) so I am a bit doubtful that it is a sunlight issue (I paused it and frame stepped as it quickly panned over it.) Lack of sunlight alone isn't generally enough to cause that to such a degree. It may explain his depressive symptoms though.
I'd say it's possible that his kidneys aren't doing everything correctly as they have direct influence of the D levels in your bl
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They're hard to understand because there isn't a direct one-one relationship between intake and serum levels, and different substances have complex interactions that can take years of experience to properly understand. As a simple example, if you're low on sodium - take salt, right? Well if you eat table salt or inject sodium chloride your sodium will go up, but so will your chloride, which causes acidosis
Daniel Tosh was right (Score:4, Funny)
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You can win a million dollars for surviving on a place where people already live!
Nevermind the camera crew that follows them around everywhere.
I think that's on par with wilderness camping in your mom's basement.
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Real men camps in their mom's garden!
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Only if the camera crew and the cast have the same accommodations. Otherwise, by that same logic, the living conditions of the wild animals featured in National Geographic must be "on par with wilderness camping in your mom's basement".
That analogy only works if the crew is actually filming at the local zoo.
Survivor is just a Popularity-Contest style game show set in an outdoor environment, none of them are actually "surviving".
Quite the opposite, in fact. They all survive - none of them actually fail to do so. Regardless of how much the actual death of contestants might increase ratings, the lawyers would never let the marketing team have their way on that one.
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In poor countries, only the rich can afford to get fat.
In rich countries, only the rich can afford to stay thin.
Re:Daniel Tosh was right (Score:4, Funny)
In poor countries, only the rich can afford to get fat.
In rich countries, only the rich can afford to stay thin.
Feed the homeless to the hungry, it's for the national security of the children.
Re:Daniel Tosh was right (Score:5, Insightful)
"In rich countries, only the rich can afford to stay thin."
Bullshit. You can eat a healthy diet and control calories cheaply. I shop at Walmart and local grocery stores (all that's available where I live), and since I quit all soda, all refined starches, all sweets, all juices (if I want juice I eat fruit) my grocery bill has dropped considerably. I eat about 1300 calories/day, including meat, fruit, fish and veggies. I no longer eat out, at all. No need, and because I don't eat vending machine food that's more money saved and less shit ingested.
I dropped over 50lbs since July and feel great.
The Americans who CHOOSE to stop being fatasses have an option. It's called PUT DOWN THE FUCKING FORK. Used exercise bikes are dirt cheap on Craigslist (expect a flood after every holiday season) and make for convenient cardio at home.
If I can do it so can anyone else because I'm not special.
Re: Daniel Tosh was right (Score:5, Funny)
So... Not only are you losing weight, you're saving money. If you keep this up ... You'll be thin and rich?
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In many countries poor people not only eat healthier food but also tastier than most people here. It's amazing what you can make with a little bit of rice or pasta and some vegetables and spices for virtually no money if you know how to prepare it. In the US poor people will eat garbage fast food daily in their comfy sofa in front of a big screen TV and complain that they are fat because they are poor.
Re:Daniel Tosh was right (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh stop fooling yourself. Other countries don't hate you because you're rich or even wasteful. They hate you because Your Government Interferes With Their Country. Period.
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They also complain when we dont.
Who was eating all those excess calories? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the Gut bacteria [slashdot.org] found the soylent concoction particularly tasty and were eating more of it than the human, hence the weight loss.
Re:Who was eating all those excess calories? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or more likely he was just dumping them out the other end because, for whatever reason, he couldn't absorb them.
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Well, that is the fate of gut bacteria, is it not? Seems they are "born" late in life.
Re:Who was eating all those excess calories? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who was eating all those excess calories? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't care, sugar tastes better.
Subtracting fiber (Score:3)
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Re:Who was eating all those excess calories? (Score:5, Insightful)
He probably went from an unregulated diet (random food when hungry, different foods each day, plus various snacks as desired, etc) to the highly-regulated soylent concoction (2,400 calories with no variation). It's surprising how much we eat if we add in all the little things that we don't really think about, like extra drinks or whatever.
It's also possible his body simply became more efficient with handling the same number and type of calories each day, rather than store the excess due to normal daily variations in consumption.
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>found the soylent concoction particularly tasty
Or found it particularly not tasty and upped the FIAF instead: http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/12/fiaf-whos-fat-is-it-anyway.html [blogspot.com]
Re:Who was eating all those excess calories? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the calories were not absorbed. He did say that "my stomach felt like a coil of knotty old rope, slowly tightening". His digestive system wasn't very happy and was likely dumping calories and nutrients out the other end without processing.
People's ability to digest food and absorb it's nutrients is highly variable even without considering major digestive disorders like lactose intolerance and Celiac Disease. Even if it worked for the inventor, that doesn't mean it will work for you.
Re:Who was eating all those excess calories? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much covered by the first respondent [slashdot.org].
I had a friend in College from Australia. He found he always had digestive problems returning home for a visit after every semester. A semester was just long enough for his native flora to die off, and it took a day or three of cramps and trots (a bad case of the "dampass" as he called it) to get his gut primed again.
So he got these pills from his doctor, who got them from the military, and would take them on the flight home. They were nothing more than "seed stock" for his gut. This was back in the 60s and apparently Australian Diet of that era was just enough different from American fare that some people had trouble adjusting.
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Every order of Soylent comes with a FREE TAPEWORM!
calories (Score:3)
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OR... his body is having a hell of a time processing it, it's going through him like Metamucil, and he's losing muscle mass.
Nope! (Score:4, Informative)
Dude is over six feet tall. There's no way his maintenance calories was only 1800, 2400 sounds right. For example, if he's a mildly active 170 pounder, this calculator says he should eat 2560 calories a day to break even [bmi-calculator.net]. Sure maybe I'm guess wrong or he's not active or what have you, but 1800 isn't even in the realm of possibility.
Surely, it's that eating measured amounts of a controlled substance forced him to measure his calories accurately...study after study show that people wildly mis-represent how many calories they consume.
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That calculator is based on someone swinging a hammer, not sitting on ass as most of us do
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Calculator puts "light exercise" at "light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week." He's a journalist in his 20s and looks like a total hipster, he probably rides a fixie to the vinyl shop or what have you.
You do not only feed yourself (Score:5, Informative)
When you eat, you are not only feeding yourself. There is an entire ecosystem of bacteria that you are feeding.
All that stuff that is NOT calories, can becomes calories, vitamins, and various other things, depending on your gut bacteria. That is one of the reasons to eat fiber, vegetables, and similar stuff. Gut bacteria is the reason why eating too much meat causes heart disease. Etc. etc.
If you do not feed your gut bacteria, there may be consequences that neither you nor your doctor can understand. And these consequences could be long term and maybe not even easily reversible.
As a summary and FYI, our shit is 50% bacteria (mostly e. coli.) by mass. That bacteria is more critical to our health than almost anything else. And that is why we still eat - to feed that bacteria. Otherwise, we could just live with intravenous system without the need for stomachs and related, messy plumbing.
Marketing Scam (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Marketing Scam (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Marketing Scam (Score:4)
Seriously, there've been a hundred articles about this just in the past month. Read one.
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You can essentially get this sort of substance from some medical suppliers. It's what they use to keep alive people in comas and other situations where normal food can't be used. I suspect something like it is used in "force feedings" as well. You don't need a 25 year old wannabe nutritionist to get this.
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Fat, Sick and nearly dead - already done (Score:2)
Some Australian guy already did this, and the movie is on Netflix.
Other meal-replacements? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see how "soylent" is superior to any of the other meal-replacements we've had for the past half-century. In fact, with all the problems people have had adjusting to the soylent diet, it sounds like the old ones were vastly superior.
I've known people who have survived entirely off of items like reliable old Nutrament [amazon.com], after surgical procedures made it too difficult for them to eat *any* solid foods for weeks... I've seen nurses preparing some generic forms of Carnation Instant Breakfast (powder), as meals for their feeble patients. And I've seen kids eating nothing but lots of chocolate milk for days at a time. With none of those do you need to FORCE yourself to consume them, nor do you get gastrointestinal distress after a couple days of use, and you certainly don't waste 1/3rd of the calories you consume.
Of course 30-days is really going to be too short of a time-frame to determine the long-term suitability of any meal-replacement. A little bit of up-front weight-loss sounds like a good thing for a few days, but *months* of losing weight would be a clear sign of a major show-stopping problem with the concoction. The same goes for the nutritional balance, as 30 days without fruits and vegetables won't show obvious medical signs, but would be obvious after months as your whole body turns strange colors...
It seems the only thing Soylent has going for it, is clever marketing and extreme claims, with a name that grabs reporter's attention.
I'm not overly fussy about hygiene, but... (Score:2)
This isn't new (Score:2, Informative)
The thing that bugs me the most about this product is that the press is acting like it's something new and unique.
It's not. This sort of thing has been around at least 50 years or so.
Back in the late1950s/early 1960's, scientists from NASA didn't know for sure if man could even swallow in zero-gee. So they concocted a liquid meal that could be pumped into the astronaut's stomach via a gastronasal tube. Now the astronauts didn't want to be fed by a plastic tube going up their nose and into the stomach. And a
Ahem (Score:5, Funny)
lol, that explains a lot
How is this different from a feeding tube? (Score:2)
Some people have to live a specially-prepared supplement through a tube, sometimes for years. How is this any different?
Cheeseburger in paradise! (Score:2)
But at night I'd had these wonderful dreams
Some kind of sensuous treat
Not zucchini, fettucini or Bulgar wheat
But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat!
Jevity 1.5 -- no solid food for 18 months. (Score:4, Informative)
Due to a medical condition I've been living on a liquid food, Jevity 1.5 for over a year and a half. I take in about 1700 calories a day through a tube into my stomach, have maintained a steady 145 for the whole time.
Not having food or drink was very hard at first, a form of torture almost. Be gradually I accepted it. I still spend a good bit of time watching cooking videos. Used to watch the Food Channel for hours a day, something I NEVER did before all food was denied to me.
There are actually some benefits here. My entire food shopping, preparation, intake, and clean up takes about 1/2 hour per day. So I have more time for other things, including watching cooking videos.
Vice investigates Soylent, finds rats and mold (Score:2)
http://pandodaily.com/2013/11/12/vice-investigates-soylent-finds-rats-and-mold/ [pandodaily.com]
It's being sold as a supplement so they don't have to prepare it in a facility that meets FDA rules for food preparation.
This is a typical food fad fraud organization.
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Isn't this ketosis? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure the product keeps him from starving to death; I'm just not seeing how his doctor saw the fat loss and other things as such a mystery. Is there something I'm missing here?
Already available (Score:2)
If you want an all-in-one food, it's available. Most drug stores stock "liquid nutrition" drinks which offer a balanced diet. In Japan, such products are popular. Calorie Mate [amazon.com], from Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. "Handy solid type Balance protective foods which gives your lips. Each 100-kcal serving contains Protein, Lipid, Carbohydrate, 6 different types of minerals, 11 different vitamins, Contains dietary fiber." Popular with Japanese salarymen who eat lunch at their desks.
Why all the negativity? (Score:4, Insightful)
I love food, and I love sharing meals with friends. But many of my meals are purely functional. It would be awesome if there was a meal replacement for those purely functional meals. I hate everything currently on the market that I've tried, it's all too sweet and usually has a strange aftertaste (presumably because of artificial sweeteners or flavors.) If I could replace about 50% of my meals with something like Soylent and still be healthy, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I have no idea if Soylent is a viable meal replacement, nor if it's any better than what's already on the market. But I hope it is.
Hate to be pedantic, but how is this "not food?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Do the ingredients here have non-food plant or animal sources? Are they actually made of completely synthetic chemicals? If not, then how is this considered *not food* as opposed to *extremely processed,* food fortified with synthetic vitamins, with most food-like characteristics stripped from it? I don't get it.
Minor observations- (Score:3)
The need for carbohydrates has never been established. True, the body needs fuel, but the body can burn fats and protein. The brain is actually designed to run more efficiently on ketones than sugars. People have lived healthily for years on meat-only and mostly meat diets. However, if you don't take in carbs you pretty much need fats and oils for fuel.
I'm more worried about the soy content than anything else; There seems to be strong evidence that lots of soy is antagonistic to testosterone balances.
As for vegetarianism: http://www.amazon.com/The-Vegetarian-Myth-Justice-Sustainability/dp/1604860804 [amazon.com] . This is a great basis for lively discussion from a former vegan.
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>That might be because the whole calorie counting thing is pure BS.
This.
The absence of causality in the CI-CO = dW has been well established for centuries. It was lost briefly in a period between the 1970s and mid 2000s, but I think we're back on track mostly, provided that you don't listen to doctors.
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"provided that you don't listen to doctors."
Ugh, doctors. I saw an acquaintance post that a doctor lowered his calorie intake from 1600 to 1200 to reach a BMI of 30, what ever that means. He is trying to lose weight and had dropped a significant amount, over 100 lbs already. To me both the BMI and calorie counting is BS. How a trained medical professional can use both is baffling unless (s)he is a dinosaur stuck in their old ways.
Re:Calories (Score:4, Interesting)
BMI was intended as a look at an overall population, however it's generally a good representation of people without really unique body types or lots of muscle.
If your friends had 100 pounds to lose, bringing up BMI worked well for him. BMI is a way of showing that he's what most people would consider obese. You wouldn't use it to decide whether to lose 5 pounds or not, but sure it's accurate to within 100 pounds.
Counting calories is a very effective way to lose/gain weight. Sure you don't know *exactly* how many your body is burning, but if you don't lose or gain weight at 3000 calories, and maintain the same lifestyle, you can be sure that you will lose about a pound a week at 2500 calories, or gain a pound a week at 3500 calories/day. Sure not everybody wants to or has to do that, but it works.
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But a little rudimentary unit analysis [wikipedia.org] suggests that it's bullshit. It's not a dimensionless constant, it's M / L^2. It doesn't even make sense - L^2? Are we paper people? Extruded prisms of constant width?
What's the argument for the factor? What are the physical constants it depends on? What are the other Pi numbers in the system?
Finally, does it even correlate well with anything, meaningfully?
BMI * gravity = pressure (Score:4, Informative)
It's not a dimensionless constant, it's M / L^2.
Once you multiply the mass by gravity to get weight, you end up with F / L^2, or pressure units. Assuming the length and width of your feet are proportional to the rest of your body, BMI is proportional to the pressure between the ground and your feet. (Unless, of course, you have no feet [youtube.com].)
Re:BMI * gravity = pressure (Score:5, Informative)
Once you multiply the mass by gravity to get weight, you end up with F / L^2, or pressure units. Assuming the length and width of your feet are proportional to the rest of your body, BMI is proportional to the pressure between the ground and your feet.
Absolutely right. Which means BMI might be a good measure of potential for diseases and disorders highly correlated with excess downward "pressure" within the body -- joint problems in the legs, back problems, foot issues, perhaps some circulation issues, etc.
But it's not used for that generally: instead, it's compared to how much bodyfat one has to determine things like "obesity." Except obesity is usually correlated with a three-dimensional addition of fat onto the body frame, not a two-dimensional one. That leads to the obvious conclusion that the formula will overestimate adiposity (fatness) for tall people, while underestimating it for short people.
My theory has been that the ONLY reason this formula ever got any attention at all is because that very defect makes it applicable for both average men and average women. Women naturally tend to have slightly higher bodyfat than men, and they also are shorter on average. That means that the formula will give similar results in predicting adiposity for women and men of average height. But it will be TERRIBLE for predicting it correctly for men who are short and as tall as the average woman, or women who are as tall or taller than the average man.
All of this does come from basic unit analysis.
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But a little rudimentary unit analysis [wikipedia.org] suggests that it's bullshit.
Unit analysis on miles per gallon works out to an area (inverse area, actually), but that doesn't mean its a bullshit figure.
Re:Calories (Score:4, Informative)
Unit analysis on miles per gallon works out to an area (inverse area, actually), but that doesn't mean its a bullshit figure.
That's because MPG is still related to a physical metric. You can see this better if you think of gallons per mile, whose units are (as you note) an area. Yes -- it would actually be an area precisely equivalent to a cross section of a long thin tube of gasoline stretched out to cover the distance your car goes on that amount of gas. MPG is just the reciprocal of that area. Just because you can't figure out how the units are physically meaningful doesn't mean that they don't actually have a physical representation or correlation to the measurement.
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BMI was intended as a look at an overall population, however it's generally a good representation of people without really unique body types or lots of muscle.
Where "unique body types" make up a quarter of the population. That's how often the BMI scale miscategorizes people as over or underweight, compared to body fat percentage.
It was a halfway useful number when it was invented a century and a half ago, but the flaw in the scaling factor becomes more and more evident the taller you go, and what was exceptionally tall a century ago is the average now.
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Counting calories is a very effective way to lose/gain weight. Sure you don't know *exactly* how many your body is burning, but if you don't lose or gain weight at 3000 calories, and maintain the same lifestyle, you can be sure that you will lose about a pound a week at 2500 calories, or gain a pound a week at 3500 calories/day. Sure not everybody wants to or has to do that, but it works.
When you restrict calories in, the first thing that happens is your body lowers it's energy expenditure by making you tired and lowering non-essential processes in the body. Then it will catabolise muscle, because muscle is more expensive metabolically than fat. Only then will it start to lower fat. You will get to your target weight, but you will have less muscle mass (unhealthy in itself) burning less energy and a body which thinks it's in a state of famine and will drive you to binge eat to increase f
Re:Calories (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pure PHYSICS that if you need a certain number of calories, and if you do not consume enough, you will lose weight.
There are several edge cases, things like fiber that your body can't digest (or lactose if you're in the unlucky few). And there are some that some that will suppress your appetite, versus those that stimulate it. But those DON'T MATTER at allon a strictly calorie controlled diet... that's only affects your un-monitored calorie consumption, or possibly your will-power at sticking to the stringent diet.
Absolutely ZERO doctors or scientists will claim you can maintain a healthy weight without consuming the number of calories the math says you need. If there was ANY WAY to do that, the US Military would be paying HUGE amounts of money to get the secret formula that lets them transport half as much food, halfway across the planet (through war-zones) to feed all those hungry soldiers.
The reverse isn't so strictly true, but honestly, there aren't THAT many examples of foods that don't properly digest (like fiber), or that stimulate your metabolism (like caffeine), and they neither cause HUGE effects, nor can they go unnoticed by the person who constantly running to the toilet, and/or who's sweating through winter and can't get to sleep.
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>> The absence of causality in the CI-CO = dW has been well established for centuries
>
>It's pure PHYSICS that if you need a certain number of calories, and if you do not consume enough, you will lose weight.
That's what I said... CI-CO = dW
But CI-CO => dW is obviously wrong because it doesn't work.
and CI-CO = dW is obviously wrong because a change in weight can't force you to do anything.
Please keep up.
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It's pure PHYSICS that if you need a certain number of calories, and if you do not consume enough, you will lose weight.
No it isn't. Calories aren't mass.
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1) Not all the calories are the same - try pumping diesel into a petrol car or vice versa, same calories very different effects. Compare long term effects of different ethanol-petrol ratios on your car. Human metabolism is even more complicated than a car's engine. Compare consuming 2000 calories of sugar water with consuming 2000 calories of protein mix.
2) most conveniently forget to measure the _excreted_ calories - for example, how much you shit out. Even
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1) Car engines are extremely strict devices. Talk about turbines, stirling engines, or many others, and there's no problem changing fuels. Your body, similarly, is more than adaptive enough to digest extremely diverse foods, effectively. Steak and lettuce are about as far apart as you can get.
2) I absolutely *did* address exactly this "output" silliness. Read my previous post again, more carefully.
3) I also addressed this, and it's not relevant to this topic at all. In the more general case, I can say
Re:Calories (Score:4, Interesting)
" It is only physics in universes where the human body cannot reduce it's work load to use less energy."
Nope. Your body's "at rest" metabolism absolutely dominates. Even a high activity level only BARELY changes the number of calories you need. It takes something on the order of running marathons to significantly change your metabolism. The level of deviation from base metabolism is positively tiny, across a wide range of physical activity levels.
" In fact, you are fooling yourself if you think that different people's bodies don't behave differently with regard to what gets burned vs. what gets stored with the calories they do digest"
This is utter nonsense. There are a few variations, in the form of lactose intolerance and the like, but those are ridiculously obvious. The differences in burning calories versus storing them as fat are not between "people" but between body types. A morbidly obese person who stays on a diet will eventually get the same metabolism and behavior as the skinniest person. If there were these huge differences, they would have shown-up in the endless diestary studies that have been performed. Instead, EVERYONE'S bodies behaveexactly the same to identical diets (eventually). And as I said repeatedly, if you aren't getting enough calories, it is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE for your body to deposit excess fat. You can't build a house out of one sheet of plywood, no matter how much some crazy "diet expoert" has said so, peddeling snakeoilthat's so much more appealing than the boring a difficult calorie constricted diets, that you'll keep coming back, even as you see no lasting results.
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And as I said repeatedly, if you aren't getting enough calories, it is UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE for your body to deposit excess fat.
Nobody ever gets that few calories. If they did, there are all sorts of other health problems the person would be facing. So, you are repeating a hypothetical situation that never happens. Not with trim people. Not with fat people. Not with people who have made fitness the primary focus in their lives. About the only place that you might find this is in third world countries where people are literally starving to death.
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Nope. Your body's "at rest" metabolism absolutely dominates. Even a high activity level only BARELY changes the number of calories you need. It takes something on the order of running marathons to significantly change your metabolism. The level of deviation from base metabolism is positively tiny, across a wide range of physical activity levels.
I know I'm late to the game replying to your post, but is this true? This seems like the exact opposite of what I hear and read a lot. The concept of doing strength training for example, because "muscle burns more calories than fat". In other words, by building muscle you are increasing your RMR. Which is basically completely different than what you said.
Or am I missing something? This is an honest question...I, like many USians, am trying to lose weight.
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The difference between the "at rest" metabolism and "currently exercising" metabolism for the same person is small, but the difference between the "at rest" metaboli
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What utter nonsense.
At the end of the day, you eat more than you burn = you gain weight; you burn more than you eat, you lose weight.
Do we all burn calories equally? Not really -- our levels of activity, our genetic makeup, our body composition, and many other variables play a role in determining this.
When I'm active, I can eat ~3500-4000 calories a day and I still stay in great shape. When I've fallen off the wagon, I will gain weight at ~2500 calories because I just turn into a lazy mash that couch surfs.
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Re: Calories (Score:2, Flamebait)
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No it isn't.
FFS. We seem to have this discussion weekly on Slashdot.
A little review of the literature: http://www.ketotic.org/2013/09/the-ketogenic-diet-reverses-indicators.html [ketotic.org]
Re: Calories (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to go all ad-hominem but could you find a source supporting the Ketogenic diet that isn't called ketotic.org?
It might be a great resource, and their literature review might be unbiased and very high quality. But they could also be a pair of diet evangelists outside of their field of expertise who are cherry picking and misrepresenting studies (intentionally or not).
They could be completely accurate and reliable, but they've also got all the hallmarks of YAIC (Yet Another Internet Crank).
Re: (Score:3)
Sigh ... low carb is nonsense, it is a NAME.
You have to understand what that NAME means.
It does not mean low carb per se, it means: low sugar combined with low fat! If you eat carbs that can easy be converted into sugar *plus* a lot of fat, the fat is not digested but stored in your fat cells. That is a simple matter of insulin level in your blood.
So this: That's why fat Westerners (like myself) do well on low carb high fat diets, whereas low sugar societies (like the Japanese) stay skinny despite having l
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It does not mean low carb per se, it means: low sugar combined with low fat!
That right there is absolutely key. Complex carbohydrates and small amounts of sugar consumed with lots of fiber are perfectly healthy. Starchy low-fiber foods are almost as bad as sugar (they're broken down into sugar very rapidly by the digestive system) for you, and sugar is outright terrible if it isn't properly moderated.
If you eat carbs that can easy be converted into sugar *plus* a lot of fat, the fat is not digested but stored in your fat cells.
It's worse than that. If your insulin levels spike high enough your fat cells will happily draw in sugar and make it into fat for long-term storage. Eat all sugar all the time and you'
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>3 eggs + bacon is like 400-500 calories? That's a large glass of orange juice.
Well technically, orange juice is a bunch of fuctose and some fiber (if it's unfiltered) to help your gut bacteria make you fat.
3 eggs + bacon is food.
Re:It's People. (Score:4, Funny)
Soylent Green is people.
This looks like Soylent Beige.
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Soylent Beige is beige people.
Re:It's People. (Score:5, Funny)
Not liking the 100% liquid diet ... (Score:3)
Dont get me wrong. I practically live on home made juices. But for the life of me, I need solids. So many people are in the same boat with these new wonder diets that are out there, detox or whatever. Many eventually drop the wonder diet because of IBS. I see this no different, sure treat it as a partial suppliment. Like I said cant get enough juice but atleat 1 solid per day ... otherwise the stomach gets lazy because it doesnt need to break anything down, from there it only goes down hill.
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As I recall there's not even any insoluable fiber in the stuff. Pass.
Re:Macro Nutrients... (Score:4, Informative)
I was wondering about that - doesn't lack of fibre lead to an increase in colon cancers?
I don't think the "inventor" has given enough thought to the complex dance of gut flora (good and bad), macro and micro-nutrients, and the sheer diversity of humans. One size does NOT fit all. For example, if you're somewhat prone to colon cancer (genetically), a healthy diet of conventional food with lots of fibre may be all that's keeping that cancer from developing.
What about the decrease in effort for the digestive system to process "soylent". Wouldn't your digestive tract eventually weaken and degrade from not having enough work to do?
At least he doesn't advocate giving up conventional food completely.
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At least this person took the time to document their experience. It's c
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Yes, but those are intended to replace one meal a day, not be your sole source of nutrition. They're nowhere near complete. That's what this tries to be, like current medical foods, but cheaper.
Thanks to NASA (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly -- NASA created the first complete liquid diet (called Vivonex 100) way back in the late 1950s for astronauts. It became a core treatment for infants &kids in a dangerous "failure to thrive" state due to malabsorption or malnutrition (often due to GI defects) and prodded companies to start producing commercial nutrition-replacement beverages. IMHO it's a good example of how NASA's research has helped everyday regular people and even (as in my case)saved lives.