Ketogenic Soylent

What does it tell you about why?

That all looks very weaksauce.

If EY really has an unusual metabolism, it seems to me he (rationally) should be willing to spend considerable time and effort to figure it out.

Ideally, he should go into some university's metabolic ward and spend a week or two there while his personal biochemistry and the way it reacts to stimuli is being carefully looked at.

While that may not be very practical, going Tim Ferriss is considerably easier: get a lot of tests done and keep on repeating them, keep a food diary, keep a log of parameters of interest (sleep, energy, mood, etc.), get a blood glucose meter, get keto strips, run controlled experiments on yourself, etc.

If one does have an unusual metabolism, statistical expectations based on normal people don't apply. That's a big issue.

I cross-checked this against the Wikipedia vitamins and B-vitamins articles, with attention to things listed there that aren't considered essential nutrients but which someone thought were important to mention anyways. Consider adding carnitine and choline.

The two multivitamin capsules should come from different manufacturers, to mitigate the risk that one of their ingredients is missing or degraded.

It is commonly said that a higher ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid is better, but this is in the context of a typical diet which is omega-6 weighted. I have no idea what happens if you go all the way to 4.5:1 omega-3:6 (what you'll be getting from flax as your sole polyunsaturated fat source). Also, while I haven't really researched this, I am suspicious of having a very high total polyunsaturated fat content, independent of the ratio of polyunsaturated subtypes, as you do, and would suggest weighting fat intake more towards palmitic acid (based on the heuristics "eat what you're made of" and "get calories from things that have fewer chemical steps between them and ATP").

Iron is tricky; the RDAs are different for men and women, both deficiency and excess matter, and you might accidentally get a form that isn't bioavailable. Be careful about that!

If you are starting from a healthy weight, then you should see weight loss as a red flag, rather than a benefit. I'd err on the side of too many calories; part of the point of going ketogenic is that they won't be stored. Extensive blood tests are a good idea, both as a safety precaution, and also for us curious people who might want to copy it.

Here are my predictions, by which my Bayesmerit shall eventually be judged:

• The first batch will have something concretely wrong with it, but you'll iterate. (p=.6)
• Willpower will be required to stay on this diet only for a few days, after which it won't be; unless someone identifies something wrong with the macronutrient portion of it, or you're limited to a max quantity instead of ad libitum, in which case willpower will be required indefinitely. (p=.8)
• Once you get a batch with nothing seriously wrong with it, you'll get a very substantial improvement in subjective energy and productivity. (p=.9) The difference will be larger in Eliezer than Brienne. (p=.75) The difference will be dramatically larger than most people expect. (p=.8)
• Eliezer loses weight on this diet (p=.6) and Brienne doesn't. (p=.8)

So what happened?

Resistant starch (such as in oats) is associated with better insulin sensitivity, lower circulating blood glucose, and ultimately lower circulating triglycerides than even a ketosis based low carb diet AFAIK

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/aoac/jaoac/2004/00000087/00000003/art00027

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/3/559.full

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7358712

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/25/1_MeetingAbstracts/587.9?sid=f92de866-73b9-4549-ae7a-ca3417713fb4

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/60/4/544.short

Have you tried it yet?

What's 1 scoop in liters?

I would post this question in a keto specific forum like reddit/r/keto

Carbs: 12g Protein: 54g

Needs more Carbs and Protein. Prediction: this diet is not sustainable and will lead to loss of muscle.

Carbs:

Even when in Ketosis the brain will still needs around 50-75 g of Carbs daily. Either you provide the carbs or you eat more protein than can be converted to carbs(glucose) by the body(gluconeogenesis).

Protein: you need a certain amount of protein to maintain your muscle mass(I think it was 1.5g per kg of muscle but please check) so you need to add this much protein at least. Also consider that part of the protein you consume is converted to glucose automatically, see the book below for details.

Bottom line: to make sure the diet is sustainable I would add a safety margin over the basic carb and protein needs of the body.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ketogenic-Diet-Complete-Practitioner/dp/0967145600

The shake needs more protein. This blog post cites a study that indicates 1.6g/kg being the optimal protein amount for fat loss. Two scoops of whey instead of one would probably be fine.

If Eliezer consumed this for a month and didn't lose any weight, I'd conclude that his maintenance metabolism is, on average, 1866 calories.

I don't know what he's tried to do to lose weight (just signed up here recently and only read the sequences), but any competent nutritionist or coach starts off by collecting data. Height, weight, body fat percentage, waist measurement, etc. these are useful for tracking progress. For making changes, you have to have a baseline diet/metabolic level -- this means a 2-3 week food log (calories, g/protein, g/fat, g/carbs, food type) and morning bodyweight measurements. This information gives you your average metabolic rate. From there, you make small adjustments to get progress going.

When I did the ketogenic diet, I lost weight pretty steadily on 1200 calories a day. I was almost entirely sedentary and went from 200lbs to 170lbs. I didn't know enough at the time to just measure my intake for a while, but after some tweaking, I found that my maintenance intake was around 1500-1700 calories. If I had just ate 1500cal like most calculators and recommendations said, I'd have spun my wheels and made 0 progress.

Cool idea! Some suggestions:

Use ground sprouted flax seed powder instead to avoid phytate bodies potentially binding with the minerals.
I assume you're using flaxseed oil for omega-3 fatty acids? Use krill oil instead.

Cocoa has the same problem, and is hard to replace in terms of taste. Coconut, avocado, hemp (seeds or oil), acai berries, and nutritional yeast might work in some combination, but can all be prohibitively expensive depending on the intended application.

Adjusting the amount of cocoa should lower the amount of fat intake. For optimal retention of muscle mass, 30-35% of the daily caloric intake should come from protein. If you're worried about gluconeogenesis, I understand, and suggest scaling the ingredients such that you can increase the amount of protein once keto-adapted; hemp seeds have a nice 75-25% fat to protein ratio, and is a complete protein source.

Try stevia leaf powder instead of sucralose to avoid potential adverse effects long term. Maybe xylitol or erythritol if stevia is too expensive.

If you're essaying a final go at inducing ketosis, try doing intermittent fasting (IF) concurrently for increased probability of success. To save time, here's a rough sketch of what that would look like:

If the feeding period was from 12-20:00:

• Day -1: Final day of eating solids.
• Day 0: Transition day. Exercise as much as you can without dying or sacrificing form (whichever comes first), prioritising elevated heart rate over all else. If you're measuring, aim for heart rates above 70% of your maximum capacity for oxygen intake (VO2 max); this should be a good metric for how intense an anaerobic exercise was. High intensity interval training is ideal for this.
• Day 1: Consume between 12:00 and 20:00.
• Day 2: Consume between 12:00 and 20:00 - but wait! You ate from 16:00 to 22:00!
• Day 3: Consume between 14:00 and 20:00.
• Day 4: Consume between 12:00 and 20:00.

An alternative is egg yolk. It's a massive kitchen sink multivitamin, and way cheap. Alternatively, cook a whole load of fish soup for weeks at a time?

I sympathize with liquid diets because I do find it easier to stick to such diets. For some reason not chewing some things -- a blanket ban on chewing -- makes it easier to resist little cravings.

What is the experiment?

Has Eliezer tried a ketogenic diet in the past? If so, the result of that seems an important input to predicting the result of this. If not, shouldn't you (also) try giving this to someone who has used ketogenic diets in the past? Experiment with small changes and good controls.

Why creatine?

If Eliezer eats less calories than needed for maintenance, he'll lose weight just like anyone else. It'd be physically impossible not to, unless he can absorb nutrition from the air somehow. Normally, eating a ketogenic diet should make it easier to eat less, so he'd need less willpower. Having to lose weight sucks for anyone (I'm trying to lose weight again myself), because there's no way around it: you have to eat less than you burn. And I gather that Eliezer has worse problems than usual, trying to do that. I remember reading about that, and IIRC is not 'just' a question of willpower. Willpower won't keep you from physically getting weak like a sick kitten, or fainting, or stuff like that. I really hope this stuff works out!

Someone really ought to figure out why it's so easy for some people to maintain a healthy weight, and so difficult for others. My husband eats what he wants, and stays naturally slim. Why can't I do that? I suspect that in my case, I love beer, wine etc. too much. But other people don't drink, or hardly drink, and get even fatter than I, so that can't be the problem for everyone.

BTW, I really wish people wouldn't say things like "fat people should just eat less". There's no 'just' about it, it's frigging hard! And you have to do it your whole life!

That's another thing though - just how hard it is varies. I've had periods where I could lose weight/maintain a good weight without great difficulty; and in other periods, just the thought of trying to do that was too much. And I don't really know why that is, either.

This may be a silly thing to ask, but for low-hanging fruit, has Eliazer ever tried just the vitamin stack from this? Or just taking a whole lot of vitamin B? My own soylent experiment failed because I couldn't make anything that tasted decent, but I also have mysterious low blood sugar (haven't talked to a dietician, but the basic advice like eating protien and avoiding simple sugar isn't enough to make me not get hungry every two hours), and the emergen-c vitamin from my soylent seems to help. (I have not blind tested this yet, so my confidence that it's not a placebo effect isn't too high.)

Eliezer has a very unusual metabolism which should be studied rather than poked at.