Rhinehart’s Soylent mix. Courtesy Soylent.
On May 24, Soylent Corporation, the startup founded by Rob Rhinehart, took to Crowdhoster to raise $100,000 to jump-start its food replacement product. The company raised that much money in three hours and has since more than quadrupled its funding goal.
Soylent is the latest darling in the quantified self movement. Rhinehart says he’s survived almost entirely on the stuff for three months and that doing so has improved almost every facet of his being: whiter teeth, lower weight, better muscle/fat ratio, less dandruff, less fragrant body gas, more clarity, more curiosity, more focus, more energy, etc. Rhinehart told Gawker that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham called it “the pivot of the century.” A handful of anonymous, positive reviews sit on Soylent’s fundraising site.
Rhinehart is confident in the efficacy of his 39 ingredient concoction — even though others are not. “Several academics contacted for this story were so skeptical about Soylent, that they refused even to be interviewed about it,” wrote The Telegraph in early May. Still others insist that Soylent’s product exists already — in the form of medical food fed to everyone from the comatose to hunger-striking prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Despite all the criticism, Soylent is now sitting on $425,000 — which it will use to jump-start its post-food movement. There’s just one problem. While Soylent has open-sourced its ingredient list, and is running tests with a small cadre of volunteers, nobody has bothered to publicly, independently confirm Rhinehart’s health claims. And that’s a long list of health claims. History has a name for products that profess to improve so many disparate aspects of the human condition: snake oil. Which is not to say that Soylent is snake oil. It just sounds too good to be true.
There is, of course, only one way to settle this score, Dear Internet.
And I will be your humble guinea pig.
While some have poked fun at Soylent’s taste and consistency, neither are at the heart of efficiency-obsessed Rhinehart’s master plan. He’s interested in affordable, sustainable super-nutrition. And hey, if Soylent does everything he says it does, I’m interested too (maybe I can mix some sriracha or chocolate sauce into the reportedly bland mixture). So today I start a week of subsisting solely — provided my willpower prevails — on Soylent. I will keep you up to date on
Author: Google News
Full article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/calebmelby/2013/06/03/a-week-without-real-food-watch-me-test-drive-the-soylent-diet/