[toasterlovin]

Honestly, what the other poster said: whole milk.

2400 calories per gallon, well balanced between protein, fat, and carbs (you might say that it is ideally formulated to feed large mammals :P). The best part is that it is readily available every where and super cheap (< $3 per gallon).

[nikatwork]

65%-90% of humans are lactose intolerant[0], and lactaid pills aren't always effective.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...

[toasterlovin]

I'm guessing that ratio is probably different for people on HN, since, as fluent English speakers, they're more likely to be descended from Europeans.

[vidarh]

It is, but it's still significant. 13% for whites in the US but rising to near 90% for some ethnic groups.

Europe varies greatly, with by far the highest level of tolerance in Northern Europe (I'm Norwegian, and I didn't even know about lactose intolerance until I was in the 20's - it just wasn't something that became a subject until we were exposed to more immigrants as while it existed in Norway before that it was <5%), with lactose intolerance increasing to well above 20% in many other European countris.

In any case the advice to down vast quantities as milk isn't universally applicable anywhere.

[TheCoelacanth]

I would be very surprised if HN didn't also a large number of people of Asian descent who are much less likely to tolerate lactose.

[Frondo]

That is not a careful reading of the statistics given.

The full quote:

"Approximately 65 percent of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy. Lactose intolerance in adulthood is most prevalent in people of East Asian descent, affecting more than 90 percent of adults in some of these communities. Lactose intolerance is also very common in people of West African, Arab, Jewish, Greek, and Italian descent."

[dragonwriter]

Lactose free milk (ehich is different than taking lactase pigs with milk) is a readily available thing.

[semi-extrinsic]

Even better: custard. Straight from the box.

[botexpert]

I've dropped the idea that IGF response is something I need in my life. Milk is ideally formulated to feed babies that need to grow into gigantic beasts.

It is also a very inferior product made with zero genetic engineering. Just silly crossbreeding until the cow has big enough milk gains.

Don't see how it's, from a nutritional or health perspective, superior to Soylent.

Milk is also super cheap because it's heavily subsidized through taxes. I'm not saving idiot entrepreneurs by buying their unsustainable products.

[toasterlovin]

So you prefer a diet engineered by humans (who, with our rather limited understanding of nutrition, can't even decide on whether carbs are a good thing) to a diet engineered and field tested by evolution over millions of years? Not the bet I would make, but to each their own, I guess.

Several other points:

1. The OP was remarking that they had a hard time maintaining weight. Anybody who has done GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) can tell you that large quantities of milk will head off the possibility of weight loss.

2. Is there any reason to believe that the agricultural inputs to something like Soylent aren't just as heavily subsidized as you claim milk to be?

[botexpert]

Never said I consider a Soylent only diet proper. I have no opinion on that.

Milk is in our diet for several thousand years, not millions.

1. There's also a lot of people who ate balanced meals and kept weight. Drinking that much milk has some unwanted stuff in it - like IGF-I - which can cause cancer in those huge amounts.

2. Maybe soy, but that's a side-effect of the dairy that uses it not for the sake of human consumption. But it's highly likely the soy used is the one for human consumption, which would remove the necessary subsidies.

[zodiac]

Why not shouldn't instead of whole milk?