Rob Rhinehart has replaced all his meals with a nutrient-rich shake he calls ‘Soylent’. Is it dangerous? Or the future of food? Will Storr reports.
Rob Rhinehart
Last Christmas, Rob Rhinehart realised that food doesn’t work. At least, not very well. Its function is to deliver the energy and nutrition that the body requires for fuel, and yet it’s expensive to buy and takes time to prepare. Many in the world can’t afford to eat properly, whilst others eat so badly that they become clogged and obese and then they just die. Eating is a problem, in one way or another, for millions, perhaps billions of humans. So, a few months ago, the 24-year-old computer engineer began his quest to “solve” food.
Over the holiday period back in his native Georgia, Rhinehart saw a family friend, who was in his late seventies, and ill. He had an injury in his left arm and was struggling to feed himself. Rhinehart had known this man when he was healthy. Now, he looked gaunt. “This is absurd,” he thought. “Why am I working on wireless networks? People don’t need better wireless networks. People need better food.” Food, he already knew, wasn’t only a problem for the hungry and the sick.
Rhinehart’s upstart tech business in San Francisco was low in funds; he and his two fellow entrepreneurs were renting a small flat in one of the city’s cheaper boroughs. Rhinehart was sleeping in the closet. The greatest drain on their living costs was grocery shopping. Surely there was a cheaper and more efficient way to fuel the body than food?
It may seem eccentric, even naive, this compulsion to solve all the problems that he comes across, no matter how profound, but Rhinehart is an engineer, and this is how engineers think. The world is filled with puzzles and the parts necessary to solve them. Success in that world is a process of teasing out new and evermore perfect solutions to the various problems that make up a human life. For people like Rhinehart, nostalgia is a bizarre and retrogressive state. The past is simply a less efficient iteration of now. And the present isn’t good enough, either, because there’s nothing in it that can’t be improved or optimised. “I’m not obsessive about it,” he says, “but when something is glaringly inefficient I don’t think there’s any reason to put up with it. Just because we’ve been doing something a certain way for a long time, I don’t think that makes anything sacred.”
Rhinehart's ingredients for his 'Soylent'
Rhinehart’s mission could be seen as an ancient compulsion that’s taken 21st-century form. After all, interesting people have been preaching the benefits of life without food for many years. Indian ascetic Hira Ratan Manek, for example, insists that sunbathing is the key to his ability to exist without nutrition, despite the fact that the makers of the documentary Eat the Sun photographed him apparently enjoying a tasty meal in San Francisco.
An Australian known simply as Jasmuheen, meanwhile, claims to be able to live on no more than 300 calories a day, as her practice of “pranic nourishment” has led to her DNA structurally reorganising itself. She declined an offer to have her blood tested saying that “you cannot view spiritual energy under a microscope”. When documentary-makers from 60 Minutes isolated her under medical supervision, they found that in just two days, she was suffering from acute dehydration, stress and high blood pressure. Others, including Verity Linn, whose body was found in the Scottish Highlands in 1999, have died as a result of similar practices. Amanda Holliday, an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, recently told reporters in the US that she was familiar with cases of people giving up food. “Some feel overwhelmed by all the choices,” she told NPR. “Others feel defeated by having to choose something healthy.”
But Rhinehart appears to be in an altogether different category to the so-called “breatharians”. He is not a man of soupy spirituality who seeks dietary flagellation. He’s a student of science who isn’t trying to eradicate the body’s digestive arts, but to optimise them. As a boy, he devoured books; first science-fiction books, then straightforward science. The first Stephen Hawking book that he properly understood was A Brief History of Time. He was 10.
After graduating from college, he realised that his ownership of excess possessions was creating a problem. He’d look around at all the things that crowded his room and felt a kind of pressure, as if the effort of analysing it all consumed disproportionate mental energy. He solved the problem of having things by giving them all away. As he left home for San Francisco, everything he owned fitted inside a back pack: a laptop, an esoteric piece of electronic equipment he required for his work, and two sets of clothes. About a year ago, he realised he was wasting time and money on laundering his outfits. So rather than washing them every day, he puts them in the freezer, which kills the microorganisms that cause odour.
Even knowing all this about him, Rhinehart’s room-mates still thought his mission to solve food was insane. His first job was research. On websites, in books and in open-access academic journals, he learnt about biology, physiology, nutrition, bioavailability, metabolic mechanisms and all of the different substances that make up a human. He began to view his body as a machine, that required a finite list of fuel requirements to run efficiently. He wrote them all down, then went about finding out where he could buy them, as cheaply as possible.
What he ended up with, in his kitchen, in the middle of January, was a yellow-white potion in a beaker, and the unmistakable gut-swell of fear. “I was very nervous,” he says. “This pretty much went against everything I was taught in chemistry. You don’t drink your experiment.” His greatest concern was death. But, he reasoned, he was young. Even if he ended up in hospital, he’d probably survive. The most likely thing to happen was that it was going to taste disgusting, and he would vomit. He drank it down. It tasted incredible. Sweet, like cake mix, but it had a complexity and substance to it that immediately satisfied his appetite. It was amazing! So amazing that he started jumping up and down in his kitchen. He was so happy! He wanted to go to the gym, he wanted to run around the city. That night, with all his energy burned up, he felt terrible.
Hira Ratan Manek
Rhinehart quickly realised that his shake, which he had decided to call Soylent, had an inherent problem. The very process of digesting solid food slows down energy release. If you give your body all the fuel it needs in a liquid, “it pretty much soaks it up and metabolises it really, really rapidly. That leads to a huge rush of energy. As your body burns it, a chemical is released which goes to your brain and makes you tired because you need to recover. So you crash.” He would slow the process down, he decided, by adding soluble and insoluble fibres.
But the measured release of energy wasn’t his only problem. For the first two days of his experiment, he left out iron. “That was pretty stupid of me,” he notes. He also became curious about the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendations for the body’s ideal quantities of various electrolytes. “How do they know that that’s the optimum amount?” he says. “I thought maybe if you had extra you’d feel better. So I started testing that.”
One at a time, he added extra magnesium, extra potassium, then extra phosphorous. “Every single one of those times,” he says, “I got very, very sick.” The potassium overdose wasn’t too bad. “I just had heart arrhythmia and really high blood pressure and my circulatory system was all out of whack.” The magnesium poisoning, though, was appalling. “I felt like my insides were burning.”
But by the end of week three, he realised he had it. Soylent now contained 39 ingredients: vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fat in the form of olive oil and fish oil, various macronutrients such as amino acids as well as probiotics and antioxidants. His monthly food bill had gone down from nearly $500 to $154 (£323 to £99). The regular blood tests he’d been going for showed, he says, that his health seemed to be improving. After 30 days living on nothing but Soylent, he lost weight, his physique improved, he was able to run for significantly longer at the gym. He even says his drink has cleared up his dandruff, and has improved a skin condition that he’s had since childhood.
During all this, he was regularly updating his blog, Mostly Harmless. In comments, beneath his posts, critics began to emerge. Some, pointing out that Soylent was a foodstuff made from human flesh in the cult film Soylent Green, dismissed his project as a hoax. Others objected to the very idea of reducing the natural glories of human sustenance down to some chemical potion. “People think that the natural way is best, and anything that we create can never be as good as nature,” Rhinehart says. “I think that’s wrong. It’s the opposite. There’s nothing sacred or great about nature. A lot of things in nature are basically trying to kill us.”
Several academics contacted for this story were so sceptical about Soylent, that they refused even to be interviewed about it. Noel Cameron, professor of human biology at the University of Loughborough’s School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, says, “Do I buy that he can stop eating food and start living off Soylent? Not for a minute. One of the reasons why is that the part of the process of masticating and chewing food releases hormones that control your appetite. And if you’re not doing that you’re not controlling your appetite appropriately. Appetite control is essential for controlling things like obesity and anorexia.” As for Rhinehart’s claim to feel satisfied after a “meal” of his potion, Prof Cameron says, “That’s a completely subjective and totally unmeasured statement. He says he can run faster and has lost weight. But it’s just him saying that. There’s no measured, objective data, no third-party information.”
For physiologist and biochemist Dr Nikki Jordan-Mahy of Sheffield Hallam University, the whole project “looks a bit frightening. The absorption of nutrients is complex and regulated by different things in different people, and is dependent on what else you eat it with. So it’s not simply about making a soup and drinking it. Even small reductions in particular elements can result in big changes, for instance in bone density. You can damage your kidneys if you overdose on things like copper. My opinion from reading his blog is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. For me, it all looks a little crazy.”
Some critics say that Rhinehart's Soylent already exists as Complan.
Perhaps the most surprising criticism, from both academics, is that Rhinehart has invented a product that already exists, and has done so for decades. Prof Cameron mentions the product Complan which is specialised for people with reduced appetites. Dr Jordan-Mahy, meanwhile, points to the early shake-based Cambridge Diet.
“Medical food does exist,” Rhinehart concedes, “and one can survive on it. But it’s not customisable, and is even more expensive that traditional food. The Cambridge Diet doesn’t have nearly enough calories for me. I need 2,700 per day. Other products exist to give you calories in a liquid form like Ensure [commercially produced nutrition shake] but that’s expensive, tastes unpleasant, and I don’t consider it very nutritious since most of the calories come from simple sugars like high fructose corn syrup.”
Perhaps more controversially, Rhinehart rejects Prof Cameron’s observation about mastication being essential to control appetite. “Chewing gum does not cause satiety and surely five chocolate milkshakes will,” he says, adding his belief that satiety is more dependent on “mechano-sensors” in the stomach and various hormones. “I am no biologist though,” he admits, “and can’t isolate the placebo effect in a sample size of one.” He does accept, however, that Dr Jordan-Mahy’s concern about the complexities of nutritional absorption is sound. “It’s one of the main reasons I get blood work so frequently.”
The next stage in project Soylent is testing it on other people. Rhinehart’s currently working with six volunteers. Only some of them agree that satiety is achieved. Others – in particular, the women – are struggling.
“Women have pretty different nutritional requirements for men. I’m having to tweak it,” he says. Once this tweaking is complete, Rhinehart plans to raise money on the Kickstarter platform – a popular method of crowd-sourcing investment for entrepreneurial schemes. Next will be a large-scale controlled trial that’s been greenlit by an ethics board. His ultimate plan for Soylent could hardly be more ambitious: if the drink is as cheap, ubiquitous and easy to prepare as instant coffee, he believes it could have a hugely beneficial effect on world health and health care. And, because so many of the ingredients of Soylent can be grown on small-scale farms, he believes it might feed the hungry in developing nations.
Although Rhinehart is ideologically opposed to the patent system, he does plan on trying to make Soylent a business. “I don’t think it’s wrong at all to make money from this sort of thing,” he says. “And people seem a lot more interested in Soylent than they ever were in wireless hardware.”
Last Christmas, Rob Rhinehart realised that food doesn’t work. At least, not very well. Its function is to deliver the energy and nutrition that the body requires for fuel, and yet it’s expensive to buy and takes time to prepare. Many in the world can’t afford to eat properly, whilst others eat so badly that they become clogged and obese and then they just die. Eating is a problem, in one way or another, for millions, perhaps billions of humans. So, a few months ago, the 24-year-old computer engineer began his quest to “solve” food.
Over the holiday period back in his native Georgia, Rhinehart saw a family friend, who was in his late seventies, and ill. He had an injury in his left arm and was struggling to feed himself. Rhinehart had known this man when he was healthy. Now, he looked gaunt. “This is absurd,” he thought. “Why am I working on wireless networks? People don’t need better wireless networks. People need better food.” Food, he already knew, wasn’t only a problem for the hungry and the sick.
Rhinehart’s upstart tech business in San Francisco was low in funds; he and his two fellow entrepreneurs were renting a small flat in one of the city’s cheaper boroughs. Rhinehart was sleeping in the closet. The greatest drain on their living costs was grocery shopping. Surely there was a cheaper and more efficient way to fuel the body than food?
It may seem eccentric, even naive, this compulsion to solve all the problems that he comes across, no matter how profound, but Rhinehart is an engineer, and this is how engineers think. The world is filled with puzzles and the parts necessary to solve them. Success in that world is a process of teasing out new and evermore perfect solutions to the various problems that make up a human life. For people like Rhinehart, nostalgia is a bizarre and retrogressive state. The past is simply a less efficient iteration of now. And the present isn’t good enough, either, because there’s nothing in it that can’t be improved or optimised. “I’m not obsessive about it,” he says, “but when something is glaringly inefficient I don’t think there’s any reason to put up with it. Just because we’ve been doing something a certain way for a long time, I don’t think that makes anything sacred.”
Rhinehart’s mission could be seen as an ancient compulsion that’s taken 21st-century form. After all, interesting people have been preaching the benefits of life without food for many years. Indian ascetic Hira Ratan Manek, for example, insists that sunbathing is the key to his ability to exist without nutrition, despite the fact that the makers of the documentary Eat the Sun photographed him apparently enjoying a tasty meal in San Francisco.
An Australian known simply as Jasmuheen, meanwhile, claims to be able to live on no more than 300 calories a day, as her practice of “pranic nourishment” has led to her DNA structurally reorganising itself. She declined an offer to have her blood tested saying that “you cannot view spiritual energy under a microscope”. When documentary-makers from 60 Minutes isolated her under medical supervision, they found that in just two days, she was suffering from acute dehydration, stress and high blood pressure. Others, including Verity Linn, whose body was found in the Scottish Highlands in 1999, have died as a result of similar practices. Amanda Holliday, an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, recently told reporters in the US that she was familiar with cases of people giving up food. “Some feel overwhelmed by all the choices,” she told NPR. “Others feel defeated by having to choose something healthy.”
But Rhinehart appears to be in an altogether different category to the so-called “breatharians”. He is not a man of soupy spirituality who seeks dietary flagellation. He’s a student of science who isn’t trying to eradicate the body’s digestive arts, but to optimise them. As a boy, he devoured books; first science-fiction books, then straightforward science. The first Stephen Hawking book that he properly understood was A Brief History of Time. He was 10.
After graduating from college, he realised that his ownership of excess possessions was creating a problem. He’d look around at all the things that crowded his room and felt a kind of pressure, as if the effort of analysing it all consumed disproportionate mental energy. He solved the problem of having things by giving them all away. As he left home for San Francisco, everything he owned fitted inside a back pack: a laptop, an esoteric piece of electronic equipment he required for his work, and two sets of clothes. About a year ago, he realised he was wasting time and money on laundering his outfits. So rather than washing them every day, he puts them in the freezer, which kills the microorganisms that cause odour.
Even knowing all this about him, Rhinehart’s room-mates still thought his mission to solve food was insane. His first job was research. On websites, in books and in open-access academic journals, he learnt about biology, physiology, nutrition, bioavailability, metabolic mechanisms and all of the different substances that make up a human. He began to view his body as a machine, that required a finite list of fuel requirements to run efficiently. He wrote them all down, then went about finding out where he could buy them, as cheaply as possible.
What he ended up with, in his kitchen, in the middle of January, was a yellow-white potion in a beaker, and the unmistakable gut-swell of fear. “I was very nervous,” he says. “This pretty much went against everything I was taught in chemistry. You don’t drink your experiment.” His greatest concern was death. But, he reasoned, he was young. Even if he ended up in hospital, he’d probably survive. The most likely thing to happen was that it was going to taste disgusting, and he would vomit. He drank it down. It tasted incredible. Sweet, like cake mix, but it had a complexity and substance to it that immediately satisfied his appetite. It was amazing! So amazing that he started jumping up and down in his kitchen. He was so happy! He wanted to go to the gym, he wanted to run around the city. That night, with all his energy burned up, he felt terrible.
Rhinehart quickly realised that his shake, which he had decided to call Soylent, had an inherent problem. The very process of digesting solid food slows down energy release. If you give your body all the fuel it needs in a liquid, “it pretty much soaks it up and metabolises it really, really rapidly. That leads to a huge rush of energy. As your body burns it, a chemical is released which goes to your brain and makes you tired because you need to recover. So you crash.” He would slow the process down, he decided, by adding soluble and insoluble fibres.
But the measured release of energy wasn’t his only problem. For the first two days of his experiment, he left out iron. “That was pretty stupid of me,” he notes. He also became curious about the Food and Drug Administration’s recommendations for the body’s ideal quantities of various electrolytes. “How do they know that that’s the optimum amount?” he says. “I thought maybe if you had extra you’d feel better. So I started testing that.”
One at a time, he added extra magnesium, extra potassium, then extra phosphorous. “Every single one of those times,” he says, “I got very, very sick.” The potassium overdose wasn’t too bad. “I just had heart arrhythmia and really high blood pressure and my circulatory system was all out of whack.” The magnesium poisoning, though, was appalling. “I felt like my insides were burning.”
But by the end of week three, he realised he had it. Soylent now contained 39 ingredients: vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fat in the form of olive oil and fish oil, various macronutrients such as amino acids as well as probiotics and antioxidants. His monthly food bill had gone down from nearly $500 to $154 (£323 to £99). The regular blood tests he’d been going for showed, he says, that his health seemed to be improving. After 30 days living on nothing but Soylent, he lost weight, his physique improved, he was able to run for significantly longer at the gym. He even says his drink has cleared up his dandruff, and has improved a skin condition that he’s had since childhood.
During all this, he was regularly updating his blog, Mostly Harmless. In comments, beneath his posts, critics began to emerge. Some, pointing out that Soylent was a foodstuff made from human flesh in the cult film Soylent Green, dismissed his project as a hoax. Others objected to the very idea of reducing the natural glories of human sustenance down to some chemical potion. “People think that the natural way is best, and anything that we create can never be as good as nature,” Rhinehart says. “I think that’s wrong. It’s the opposite. There’s nothing sacred or great about nature. A lot of things in nature are basically trying to kill us.”
Several academics contacted for this story were so sceptical about Soylent, that they refused even to be interviewed about it. Noel Cameron, professor of human biology at the University of Loughborough’s School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, says, “Do I buy that he can stop eating food and start living off Soylent? Not for a minute. One of the reasons why is that the part of the process of masticating and chewing food releases hormones that control your appetite. And if you’re not doing that you’re not controlling your appetite appropriately. Appetite control is essential for controlling things like obesity and anorexia.” As for Rhinehart’s claim to feel satisfied after a “meal” of his potion, Prof Cameron says, “That’s a completely subjective and totally unmeasured statement. He says he can run faster and has lost weight. But it’s just him saying that. There’s no measured, objective data, no third-party information.”
For physiologist and biochemist Dr Nikki Jordan-Mahy of Sheffield Hallam University, the whole project “looks a bit frightening. The absorption of nutrients is complex and regulated by different things in different people, and is dependent on what else you eat it with. So it’s not simply about making a soup and drinking it. Even small reductions in particular elements can result in big changes, for instance in bone density. You can damage your kidneys if you overdose on things like copper. My opinion from reading his blog is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. For me, it all looks a little crazy.”
Perhaps the most surprising criticism, from both academics, is that Rhinehart has invented a product that already exists, and has done so for decades. Prof Cameron mentions the product Complan which is specialised for people with reduced appetites. Dr Jordan-Mahy, meanwhile, points to the early shake-based Cambridge Diet.
“Medical food does exist,” Rhinehart concedes, “and one can survive on it. But it’s not customisable, and is even more expensive that traditional food. The Cambridge Diet doesn’t have nearly enough calories for me. I need 2,700 per day. Other products exist to give you calories in a liquid form like Ensure [commercially produced nutrition shake] but that’s expensive, tastes unpleasant, and I don’t consider it very nutritious since most of the calories come from simple sugars like high fructose corn syrup.”
Perhaps more controversially, Rhinehart rejects Prof Cameron’s observation about mastication being essential to control appetite. “Chewing gum does not cause satiety and surely five chocolate milkshakes will,” he says, adding his belief that satiety is more dependent on “mechano-sensors” in the stomach and various hormones. “I am no biologist though,” he admits, “and can’t isolate the placebo effect in a sample size of one.” He does accept, however, that Dr Jordan-Mahy’s concern about the complexities of nutritional absorption is sound. “It’s one of the main reasons I get blood work so frequently.”
The next stage in project Soylent is testing it on other people. Rhinehart’s currently working with six volunteers. Only some of them agree that satiety is achieved. Others – in particular, the women – are struggling.
“Women have pretty different nutritional requirements for men. I’m having to tweak it,” he says. Once this tweaking is complete, Rhinehart plans to raise money on the Kickstarter platform – a popular method of crowd-sourcing investment for entrepreneurial schemes. Next will be a large-scale controlled trial that’s been greenlit by an ethics board. His ultimate plan for Soylent could hardly be more ambitious: if the drink is as cheap, ubiquitous and easy to prepare as instant coffee, he believes it could have a hugely beneficial effect on world health and health care. And, because so many of the ingredients of Soylent can be grown on small-scale farms, he believes it might feed the hungry in developing nations.
Although Rhinehart is ideologically opposed to the patent system, he does plan on trying to make Soylent a business. “I don’t think it’s wrong at all to make money from this sort of thing,” he says. “And people seem a lot more interested in Soylent than they ever were in wireless hardware.”
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