HOW I STOPPED CHEWING FOOD
Teeth are the millstones of the human body. You don’t grow new teeth, they don’t last forever. We’re all deeply dependent on having teeth, on chewing our food. If we could avoid spending money on new teeth and time on chewing, we could save millions, even billions.
I hypothesized that the body doesn’t need to chew food, merely the chemicals and elements it contains. So, I resolved to embark on an experiment. What if I only drank the ingredients the body uses for energy? Would I be healthier or do we need to chew our food?
I didn’t chew a bite of food for 30 days, and it’s changed my life?
BEFORE I STOPPED CHEWING FOOD
I’ve always loved baby food, food you can eat without teeth, a complete source of nutrition, easy to prepare and delicious. Back in 2012 I figured, why not make an adult version with the ingredients and nutrient composition science says is best for us?
I designed an adult baby food containing 50% of energy from fats and 25% from protein and 25% from carbohydrates as evidence is mounting that getting your energy from unsaturated fats is healthier than getting it from carbohydrates [1]. I’ve since learned that high fat although better than high carbs, a diet with ⅓ of energy from fat, protein and carbohydrates could in fact be the optimal ratio [2] — elegant and intuitively sensical. For good measure I added significant amounts of the highest hype-to-value greens, namely broccoli and spinach.
ENTER FOOD CUBES (TM)
Eating Food Cubes(tm) allowed me to keep track of the exact composition of my meal, down to the amino and fatty acid composition and total caloric intake, allowing me to control my weight gain or loss. I also maximized unsaturated fats based on the informed guess that they’re better for you than saturated ones [3][4] , and used canola oil which has a 2:1 Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio.
It was easy to make, cook whatever needs cooking and blend it in a food processor, freeze in large, square ice cube trays. Microwave to prepare. Cost per day was $5.76 or $178 a month for an adult male needing 2500 calories.
Sadly, it still required chewing, it could have been the recipe, but I got sick of in 3 days and gave up on it.
HOW I STOPPED EATING FOOD
I forgot about nutrition until I read “How I Stopped Eating Food” [5], Rob Rhinehart’s dramatic exposition on switching from a regular diet to one composed strictly of the chemicals our body needs for only $50/month! (actually $154.82/month). This struck me as a superior solution to Food Cubes(tm) as there was no chewing involved, unaware of meal replacements commonly used in enteral feeding [6], this felt revolutionary.
I eagerly ran down the stairs and ordered all the ingredients, a few days later I mixed them together into a beige liquid and felt like shit for a few hours as all the maltodextrin created an osmotic gradient pulling the blood out of both my hands and feet, I almost threw up. Maltodextrin has a GI of 105 [7] and it makes no sense to use as the main energy source in a food replacement product. I had to look elsewhere to run 700% longer like Rob did.
THE EXPERIMENT — JOYLENT
I went back to the drawing board, designing a drinkable food replacement composed of natural foodstuffs, after 5 revisions, I tepidly put the concoction to my lips. It tasted like a raspberry smoothie.
I had created a complete nutrition solution (smoothie) that tasted good and could be your sole source of food for less than $6 per day. Compared to Soylent, Joylent had:
Lower GI: Through the technology of being made out of food.
Lower cost: Food is cheaper than purified chemicals.
Taste: Raspberries.
Higher quality protein: Whey protein isolate > Rice protein.
More nutrients: Such as Creatine and Nitrates.
Flexibility: Foodstuffs can be used for other foods.
Open sourced recipe: links to where I got all the stuff.
Optimal amounts or ratios of certain nutrients: beyond the FDA RDA.
THE RESULTS
QUALITATIVE
My hair stayed as shiny as ever, differential geometry mathematical notation remained equally beautiful. I was in good health before, and I was in good health after. I had eaten very effective meals and was feeling fine. I never had any problems, nor noticed any side effects. Drinking smoothies for all meals is not bad at all. My roommate thought I was crazy, but she was primarily eating popsicles so I didn’t take her opinion too seriously.
QUANTITATIVE — BLOOD
I used Directlabs’ $45 Cardioplus panel which measures kidney and liver function, lipid balance, minerals, electrolytes, blood glucose and uric acid levels. All relevant metrics for this kind of experiment. After 1 month and 7 days I redid my fasting blood work, these are the results:
I was happy to see serum glucose, uric acid as I have a genetic predisposition to gout and one study indicates > 1 gram vitamin C per day can reduce the risk [11]. Iron and cholesterol went down, and my LDL/HDL ratio improved slightly, although with a decrease in total HDL Cholesterol — not sure if good.
Worrisome was the increase in AST and ALT, the serum levels of two enzymes that transfer amino acids between molecules and is released into the bloodstream when tissues are damaged, ALT is almost exclusively found in the liver. Now this doesn’t necessarily imply liver damage, it could be from medication I started using after the first blood work, but it would be something I’d look more closely into.
QUANTITATIVE — WEIGHT
I’m 6’3” and athletic built, starting the experiment at 183.5 lbs 3/22/2013 and ending at 189.4 lbs 5/8/2013, 6 lbs in 47 days, or 3.78 lbs per month. A solid and healthy weight gain, in line with what the spreadsheet calculated.
QUANTITATIVE — DNA SEQUENCING
I did a $100 snip test by 23andme before starting the experiment, in the golden days of SNP testing (before the FDA shut down their disease risk analysis app). SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms, are one letter/nucleotide variations at certain spots in your genome. A person who has a “C” or Cytosine at a particular spot, might be more sensitive to bitter tastes than a person with a “G” or Guanine in that spot.
The take home action item for me was that I had a 60% increased risk of Gout, which lead me to a study demonstrating that Vitamin C supplementation above 1500 mg/day reduced that risk down to normal levels. I added 6 g of Vitamin C to the formula and my uric acid went down 15% in less than 2 months.
SOYLENT IS MADE OUT OF HYPE
Is “Soylent made out of hype” [15]? Yes: At best it’s a cheap meal replacement shake, at worst it’s not a complete nutrient that could cause liver damage and increase risk of diabetes over time. Apart from naively confounding caloric restriction with health improvements from dietary composition, miscalculating cost and implying that drinking large amount of pure sugar could be good for diabetics, the claim that Soylent could help the poor at best seems like naivete, and at worst a calculated, evil way of hyping your product.
Rob underwent severe caloric restriction and lost 13 lb per month; probably the reason why he felt like “a 6 million dollar man”, an effect that later subsided according to himself.
FIX WORLD HUNGER?
Rice and lentils are about $0.5 per lb in the US when bought in 25 lb bags, and make up a complete protein and energy source. Add minerals, water, vegetable oil and a multi vitamin and you can feed a person for about $2/day in the US, covering the FDA recommended daily intakes. 40% of the world’s population is below the $2.5/day poverty line [12]. Of course, prices tend to be lower in poorer areas, in China, a lb of rice is about 25 cents [13], half of the US cost. The claim that a purified chemical mix can beat regular foodstuffs for price is ridiculous. Rice protein powder bought in bulk costs $7.59 per lb [14] and consists of 80% protein. Rice is $0.5 per lb and consists of 8% protein, plus a bunch of carbohydrates and other nutrients. So even for the protein alone, rice is about 35% cheaper than rice protein powder.
SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT?
Purifying animal or even plant protein takes extra energy, and can’t be an environmentally friendly process compared to growing rice out of the ground or feeding the plants to animals. Heating food takes energy, but has the benefit of sanitizing it.
In July 2014, after receiving $1.5 million in crowdfunding and the same amount of VC investment [8]. Soylent was selling for $300 for 28 packets, each packet has 2010 calories,for an adult 185 lb “low active” male that’s 18.76 days worth and $16/day. Not $2 which stands uncorrected in his original article. I got my hands on a production version, I noticed they’d added oat flour and kept most of the maltodextrin. I tried it and it tasted bad and made me feel likewise. What do other people say about Soylent 1.0? Gas, headaches and bad taste seems to be the most common complaints [9].
IS JOYLENT A BETTER ALTERNATIVE?
I think so, but to make a worthwhile consumer product you’d need to:
- Make a dry version of the high-fat formula with a solid shelf life by e.g. freeze drying it. Liquid fats can be easily be combined with, paradoxically, tapioca maltodextrin to form a dry fatty powder [16].
- Effective production at scale to get cost/unit down.
- Clinical trials on biomarkers of health to inform ingredient composition, e.g. optimizing for slow carb release creating a low GI formula.
I’m not going to do it, but I hope someone else will, maybe the Soylent guys will eventually get it right.
References
1. Kris Gunnars. “23 Studies on Low-Carb and Low-Fat Diets — Time to Retire …” 2013. 14 Jul. 2014
2. “Best diet: One-third protein, carbs, fat — UPI.com.” 2011. 14 Jul. 2014
3. Mozaffarian, Dariush, Renata Micha, and Sarah Wallace. “Effects on coronary heart disease of increasing polyunsaturated fat in place of saturated fat: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.” PLoS medicine 7.3 (2010): e1000252.
4. Risérus, Ulf, Walter C Willett, and Frank B Hu. “Dietary fats and prevention of type 2 diabetes.” Progress in lipid research 48.1 (2009): 44–51
5. “How I Stopped Eating Food : Mostly Harmless.” 2013. 14 Jul. 2014
6. “Product list — Nutrison — Tube Nutrition & Medical Devices …” Jul. 2014
7. Barclay, Alan W, Jennie C Brand-Miller, and Thomas MS Wolever. “Glycemic index, glycemic load, and glycemic response are not the same.” Diabetes Care 28.7 (2005): 1839–1840.
8. “Soylent : Soylent Funding Announcement.” 2013. 14 Jul. 2014
9. "Let’s be honest: Soylent 1.0 has problems for many people …” 2014. 14 Jul. 2014
10. Joy, Jordan M et al. “The effects of 8 weeks of whey or rice protein supplementation on body composition and exercise performance.” Nutr J 12 (2013): 86.
11. Juraschek, Stephen P, Edgar R Miller, and Allan C Gelber. “Effect of oral vitamin C supplementation on serum uric acid: A meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials.” Arthritis care & research 63.9 (2011): 1295–1306.
12. “Poverty Facts and Stats — Global Issues.” 2008. 14 Jul. 2014
13. “China Increases 2014 Paddy Rice Support Price by … — Oryza.” 2014. 14 Jul. 2014
14. “True Nutrition | Rice Protein Concentrate — non-GMO (1lb).” 14 Jul. 2014
15. “Soylent is made from hype — Examine.com Blog.” 2013. 14 Jul. 2014
16. “Olive Oil Powder | Molecular Recipes.” 2011. 14 Jul. 2014
