"Dont drink Soylent! Buy all these things I'm getting a commission on instead!" This article has absolutely no ethos. It is little more than an advertisement wrapped in logical errors and playing off contrarianism.
You can easily find blogs talking about how anything is terrible. Just offhand, your link recommends multivitamins, but there are many more-credible sources that will tell you that multivitamins are bad for you.
Also outdated, the new version 1.4 of their formula removed more than half of the maltodextrin in favor of lower GI carbohydrates, which was one of the few potentially legitimate complaints.
That article is attacking the current implementation, but I'm looking more at the idea and want to see where it goes. Implementations can be made better.
This article is full of misinformation and unbased speculation. Any of the arguments provided in this article can be refuted with a little bit of research, but if guidance was needed, their "about" section and FAQ are quite in depth [0]. This article also employs a logical fallacy of appealing to nature in just about every paragraph [1], just because it's not found outside in nature doesn't mean it's bad. And vice versa, nature makes bad things too, see arsenic, found naturally in many minerals and is toxic to humans.
Lets start with the the addressing of the fish oils found in soylent. They claim fish oils are good, "but just how high-quality is the fish oil going to be in a mass-produced beverage?", yet they didn't think to check the website where they cite that their fish oils come from algae and even provide information on the shelf-life of soylent based on when the oils in it are likely to be rancid[2]
Moving on to sucralose. The study it cites that was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health has been revised by studies that have been conducted since then and found that the study was "deficient in several critical areas" and that its conclusions "are not consistent with published literature and not supported by the data presented".[3] But hey, why cite that when we could just be scared by old crappy studies. The other wildly inaccurate claim of the article is it addresses the effects of "cooking with sucralose at high temperatures" when that will literally never be relevant while consuming soylent which is recommended to be prepared at room temperature and stored at even lower temperatures. Another case of employing scare tactics instead of a little bit of critical thinking.
As for maltodextrin? The claim in the article hinges around the high blood sugar spike from maltodextrin which is offset by other ingredients in foods, but if that's not enough, they've measured the glycemic index of previous recipes of soylent and they're doing so for Soylent 1.4 (the most recent recipe)[4]. The point is, this isn't some hidden scandal that this author uncovered in the two seconds that they looked at the ingredients list, it's known and tested and accounted for.
The list goes on with every one of the other concerns with appeals to nature here and scare tactic there (including a false and now corrected claim about an ingredient coming from "a beaver's ass. Literally."). In conclusion, I think the source you cited is not a very high quality one and readers should be aware of it.
conjecTech|11 years ago
esrauch|11 years ago
delecti|11 years ago
Also outdated, the new version 1.4 of their formula removed more than half of the maltodextrin in favor of lower GI carbohydrates, which was one of the few potentially legitimate complaints.
towelguy|11 years ago
soylentemployee|11 years ago
Vraxx|11 years ago
Lets start with the the addressing of the fish oils found in soylent. They claim fish oils are good, "but just how high-quality is the fish oil going to be in a mass-produced beverage?", yet they didn't think to check the website where they cite that their fish oils come from algae and even provide information on the shelf-life of soylent based on when the oils in it are likely to be rancid[2]
Moving on to sucralose. The study it cites that was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health has been revised by studies that have been conducted since then and found that the study was "deficient in several critical areas" and that its conclusions "are not consistent with published literature and not supported by the data presented".[3] But hey, why cite that when we could just be scared by old crappy studies. The other wildly inaccurate claim of the article is it addresses the effects of "cooking with sucralose at high temperatures" when that will literally never be relevant while consuming soylent which is recommended to be prepared at room temperature and stored at even lower temperatures. Another case of employing scare tactics instead of a little bit of critical thinking.
As for maltodextrin? The claim in the article hinges around the high blood sugar spike from maltodextrin which is offset by other ingredients in foods, but if that's not enough, they've measured the glycemic index of previous recipes of soylent and they're doing so for Soylent 1.4 (the most recent recipe)[4]. The point is, this isn't some hidden scandal that this author uncovered in the two seconds that they looked at the ingredients list, it's known and tested and accounted for.
The list goes on with every one of the other concerns with appeals to nature here and scare tactic there (including a false and now corrected claim about an ingredient coming from "a beaver's ass. Literally."). In conclusion, I think the source you cited is not a very high quality one and readers should be aware of it.
Edit: Spaced out sources to be more readable.
[0]:https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/sections/200307055-About-Soy...
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
[2]:http://diy.soylent.me/wiki/perishability
[3]:Brusick, D. "Expert Panel Report on a Study of Splenda in Male Rats." Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 2009 Oct;55(1):6-12.
[4]:https://faq.soylent.me/hc/en-us/articles/201273715-Soylent-a...
unknown|11 years ago
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