Michael Pollan

Soylent and Juicero

Rather surprised that nobody, as yet, has made a connection between Soylent and Juicero.

* 1st: Juicing & Nutrition
- There’s very little evidence that liquid food / juicing has any benefits for most adults. Most nutritionists worth their salt will advise against juicing. Juicero (and other juice makers) take perfectly good,healthy, nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables and make them less healthy. Ditto for Soylent. Crushing natural foods (vegetables, fruits, any other in their natural form) together to seek out their nutrients, and reconstituting them in powder/liquid form is, by any other fancy name, a juice. “The skin on an apple, the seeds in raspberries and the membranes that hold orange segments together — they are all good for you. That is where most of the fiber, as well as many of the antioxidants, phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals are hiding. Fiber is good for your gut; it fills you up and slows the absorption of the sugars you eat, resulting in smaller spikes in insulin. When your body can no longer keep up with your need for insulin, Type 2 diabetes can develop.” [1]

- I wonder if people who see the benefits of Soylent/juicing have read Michael Pollan or Marion Nestle. See [1], [2], [3]

* 2nd: Silicon Valley and investments
Both Soylent and Juicero are funded by marquee investors. Here’s a brief list for Juicero (Total $118M raised) [4]
GV (nee Google Ventures)
KPCB
Abstract
Campbell Soup
Thrive Capital

Here’s for Soylent (Total…

You might want to look into "The Lifestyle Cure" which has a fairly high cure rate for depression using a combination of omega-3s, sunlight & vitamin D, exercise, social interactions, mental habits to avoid negative ruminations, and improved sleep: https://tlc.ku.edu/

From the author: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"

Dr. Ilardi has written a self-help book based on the elements of TLC, "The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs".

The book has an example of a guy who suffered depression for about forty years and within a few weeks moved beyond depression following this approach (much to his own surprise).

In another comment to this topic I mention this book and various other resources: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/134266.Out_of_the_Nightmare
""Out of the Nightmare" presents a no-fault theory about depression and suicide. It argues that we should not blame the victim, the family, the caregivers, or society in general. It provides a detailed analysis of each of the barriers that stand between suicidal pain and recovery, and provides those who suffer from depression with hundreds of resources to find their way out of the nightmare. Recovery from depression is decomposed into recovery from envy, shame, self-pity, grandiosity, fear, stigma, prejudice, and the vicious circles of suicidal pain. The book helps sufferers…

The insight is that you are afraid of the something which is vital to you, is also incomprehensible.

This isn't a particularly deep insight, lots of people are, but one of the interesting things about Soylent is that if you eat a 'normal' diet (which is to say one recommended as a 'healthy diet' by the FDA) you ingest all of the same chemicals in much the same ratios.

If you were pathologically afraid of the unknown (and some folks are) then you would first sterilize some soil, then put it into a garden with an isolation layer and drainage system, then populate it with a soil biome that you had previously done DNA analysis on to insure you understood which bacteria and fungi were present, and then you would water only with distilled water, plants that you had also sequenced which allowed you to ascertain the lack of tampering with their genome, and fertilizer from fish or chicken for which you controlled all of their consumption.

You wouldn't really do that, because you've grown up and seen people all around you eating stuff. And long before you could reason about these things you got hungry, ate, and got full, and it hasn't hurt you to do so and you continued on your path.

The current things you "trust your health" to have, especially if you buy any packaged food, been engineered in ways that are way more extreme than what has happened to Soylent in order to make you buy more of them. The book "In Defense of Food" [1] by Michael Pollan goes into great detail about the…

There's tons of evidence available online, but a big problem is a lack of agreement on what constitutes "credible evidence". There is a fairly significant amount of clinical evidence available (despite it being effectively banned from study for decades), but the vast majority of evidence available is anecdotal reports from users. It should be noted that while it's true that this class of evidence lacks a "proper" (standards double blind placebo-controlled, etc) approach, it does not logically follow that it is therefore incorrect.

As for where to point skeptical-minded people, I agree with others that Sam Harris is one of the better resources.

Here is an article on his recent 5g "heroic dose" mushroom trip:

https://thethirdwave.co/neuroscientist-sam-harris-reports-on-his-heroic-dose-of-mushrooms/

> “There’s no denying that there were parts of the experience that felt like an encounter with something other than my own mind,” Harris says, something that guided him “across the landscape of mind.” Many trippers, Harris notes, interpret this something as god or a universal consciousness. Harris suspends judgment. “My day job is not to be fooled by spurious ideas passed down from our ignorant ancestors, so I’m very slow to make claims about what I think is going on here,” he says. “I’m just reporting the character of the experience.” In the end, Harris says, “I thought of this as the mushroom itself.”

> Thus Harris captures the magic and intrigue of psychedelics: the…

The fine article mentions Michael Pollan, whose book Cooked [0] was recently given to me. The chapter on the history of wheat is great.

Pollan says that humans have been trying to make their bread whiter as long as we've been making bread. But we didn't get really good at it until the roller mill was invented in the mid-1800's. In the olden days every community had a flour mill, because milled flour only lasted 2 weeks before it became stale. At first the white flour was a modern miracle: perfectly airy/fluffy bread, flour able to be stored, transported and shipped long distances, etc. Then degenerative diseases started appearing.

Fortification started around 1940's / 1950's, after the Army noticed the recruits for WWII weren't nearly as healthy as in decades past. The joke of fortification is that they only replace some of what was removed by turning wheat into white flour.

Haven't finished the article yet, but it's great.

Besides the widespread fortification and consumption of white flour, what other science-mistakes have become endemic?

edit: [0] https://michaelpollan.com/books/cooked/

No. It hasn't always been this way.

Interest in psychedelics (on HN and on many other forums, media outlets, and society in general) was rekindled at the start of the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance, when very positive results of new research in psychedelics was announced.

Michael Pollan's "Trip Treatment" article[1] was one of the first to make mainstream readers aware this was going on.

After that the floodgates opened as more and more positive research results were announced.

HN, like many other news aggregators, discussion forums, and social media outlets followed this trend, and psychedelic users started coming out of the closet... leading to more interest and more coverage.

Then microdosing psychedelics started to become trendy, and it seems a lot of people in tech got in to that as well.

So now it seems we have a situation where quite a few people on HN are interested in this subject. But, no, it wasn't always like this, and HN used to be much more narrowly focused on tech and startups than it is now.

[1] - https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-trip-treatment/