Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks
I'm all for people having the freedom to eat whatever they want and I really like the quantified self aspect of seeing how diet affects how they feel and metrics of health, but I have to say the author grossly does not understand the medical tests he had done and misinterprets the data. I'm not going to comment on the drink, but rather on his misunderstanding of medicine.<p>First, EGFR is not "Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor", rather is it estimated glomerular filtration rate, which is a metric of kidney function and is derived entirely from age, sex, and Cr.<p>Second, all his labs are normal, well within the range of normal and stay normal after two weeks. There is normal daily fluctuation (for example, my Cr will probably go from 1 to 1.2 just by not drinking water for a day) which the labs show. All the changes he mention in his metabolic panel does not even register to me as changes and most likely would happen had he ate a regular diet.<p>Third, the body is a powerfully homeostatic system, even had he not ate for two weeks, most of the labs he got would stay the same. Recently, on HN there was the article of the guy who didn't eat for a year - his BMP would have been similar. The only potentially reasonable medical test to get would have been the lipid panel, which stayed grossly the same.<p>Finally, a DEXA scan is really silly in this scenario. It's for old ladies and others at risk for osteoporosis. Your bones are a large of reservoir that it wouldn't put a dent on your Ca levels even if you had no Ca for two weeks, and even if it did, it would not show up as a meaningful change on a DEXA scan.