One thing I don't understand about soylent is how it can be so expensive and yet still so flawed.
First, as a male I am concerned about isoflavones. I've read sources that go either way on how much it actually affects hormone levels, but since I suspect there is a lot more pressure from the agriculture / vegetarian community to make it seem safer than it is than from any other community to not, I lean towards it not being that good for you.
Second, the consistency is absolutely terrible. They don't need to make it too seedy, but leaving some of the nuts and seeds at least somewhat coarse would improve its texture beyond "slime that makes your teeth feel terrible and gross".
As is, it doesn't even make economic sense, because I can feed myself much tastier food than soylent for like $3-6 a day. Like, why would you choose soylent over food such as eggs, chicken, spinach, broccoli, oatmeal, etc?
What I really wish someone would do, is make a milk-based soylent with stuff that is actually good for you like sunflower seeds. That would actually taste good and probably be much better for you.
I think the selling point of soylent is how easy it is to consume. You just drink it and done. Cleaning is as easy as washing your cup.
That's an attractive point if you don't enjoy the ritual of eating, or simply want to spend the time doing something else.
I agree it is too expensive for what it offers, though.
I've never tried Soylent, but I do have the UK equivalent - Huel [1]. This isn't as simple as drinking it, because you need to measure it out, add water and mix it for a minute or two. Then when it comes to cleaning, it isn't just a cup. There is also this grid like piece of plastic that helps to break up chunks of Huel but is hard to clean.
I like the idea; but in reality I'd rather jut have some toast if I want something quick. I know it's not as good for me but food is more than just getting calories and nutrients in. I get pleasure from eating a variety of textures and flavours.
So you're using that plastic cup that comes with the first order? I always thought that cup's just a gimmick that people use when trying it out for the first few times [1], and if they like it, they would start preparing it with a blender.
[1] I still have to try it out. I can't quite get myself to order the smallest pack (a full week's supply) when I don't even know if I like it.
Soyent is also sold in prepared bottles that have a shelf life of a year. There’s also 6 flavors to choose from: original, cacao, nectarine, cafe coffiest, cafe vanilla, and cafe chai.
If you spend just 1 hour per week on purchase and preparation (and you likely spend two or three), you need to add your hourly rate (or the value you assigned to a loat hour of hobby, unless making these meals is your hobby)
It is not easy to account for "time spent doing X", but assigning $0 to eat is most definitely wrong.
If you do the components+time math properly, it is likely soylent and even McDonalds is cheaper. It is only when you add "enjoying food" and "future health" that you may (or may not) win against them.
Soylent is so awful for you. They really capitalized on the ignorance of millenials with regard to proper nutrition.
edit: Shouldn't have trigger responded, but one of my biggest gripes with Soylent is their use of maltodextrin. It's not something you want to be consuming in mass every day. It is good for post-workout nutrition but as a meal you may as well be consuming sugar.
They've addressed this many times. There are different "grades" of maltodextrin with different glycemic indexes. Soylent uses a higher grade with a low glycemic index. Google "low DE maltodextrin." Soylent also uses other low-glycemic carbs such as isomaltulose.
The glycemic index of a carbohydrate is a bad measure of its quality. A better measure is the degree to which it is fermented by bacteria in the intestines. Furthermore, there is research demonstrating that carbohydrates consumed without the phytonutrients that normally accompany them in whole food increase markers of oxidative stress and inflamation.
Soylent might be better than a frozen pizza or fast food, but in the big picture it's still shit compared to real food.
Hm, so for someone who eats frozen pizza and fast food on a daily basis (because of the convenience), would Soylent be a step up from that based on your comment?
I find I have to combine it with a fat/protein like a serving of peanuts to make it not spike me hard. It may not have a high glycemic index, but it is already in liquid form and is thus available for digestion.
Don’t forget that they use a calcium carbonate instead of calcium phosphate. Calcium carbonate has significantly less bioavailability and Soylent still claims to have 100% of your DV.
Regardless of whether you are right or wrong, your comment is just a massive appeal to authority containing no actual information. It contributes nothing but an insult.
I've studied nutrition pretty heavily in the past as it pertained to my bodybuilding.
They could have used so many better ingredients. Maltodextrin is the cheapest and worst complex carb you could have put in it. It's chemically a complex but really your body doesn't react much differently to it than other simple sugars.
I think that's too simplistic of a connecting of dots.
You're conflating with overeating. I don't believe healthy people, that stay within a healthy caloric range, that aren't predisposed to diabetes need to fear that the "rise in blood sugar" from simple carbs is going to lead to diabetes. And I'm not aware of any study that shows that or even could (it'd be incredibly hard to study), correct me if wrong.
Most people eat simple carbs every day and don't get diabetes. Athletes eat a lot of carbs and don't get diabetes.
1.) Carbs are a "hot" fuel, they have been shown to increase markers of oxidative stress and inflammation unless paired with phytonutrients as is typically the case in whole fruits and vegetables. This is because sugars are highly reactive in comparison with fats (particularly fructose).
2.) Highly quality carbs, such as in beans, barley, certain kinds of sweet potatoes, etc, are fermented by by your gut bacteria into short chain fatty acids. Short chain fatty acids have been linked to lower inflammation, improved mood and memory, weight loss, longer life span, the list goes on.
Sources please. 'Inflammation' sets off my pseudo-science detector. And your first point is suggesting carbs are inherently bad 'because inflammation', which I just don't buy.
Even if you're not a diabetic, blood glucose spikes affect your mental performance like a weak stimulant, creating mild mood swings. Also, high amounts of high GI foods stimulate body fat production.
> Also, high amounts of high GI foods stimulate body fat production.
That idea, 'the insulin hypothesis', has not been proven. In fact there is now evidence that claim is false. (Paywalled study [1], summary in this article [2]).
The dozens of people on the Soylent subreddit who got weeks of diarrhea followed by jaundice? Though I think my favorite was the people who were arguing that some level of mold was acceptable if it meant they didn't have to deal with the inconvenience of foil seals.
Both my current and previous company got in Soylent on occasion; the current one has gotten Coffiest a few times, which I haven't tried, while the earlier one got in the bottled Soylent and the short-lived Soylent Bar. I tried the bottled version once--maybe twice?--and had no ill effects, but didn't particularly like it, either. I had no ill effects from the bar, either, and I confess I actually rather liked it. I'd probably order it again, assuming it seemed safe.
But as someone who, well, actually likes eating, I don't see the attraction of using this stuff as anything other than "I don't have enough time to cook or even go to a sit-down restaurant" type meals, the same way I would any other breakfast bar or meal drink. And looking at it that way makes their meal drinks much less appealing to me compared to, say, Ensure. Yes, Ensure has way more sugar, but it has a half-dozen fairly reasonable flavors, none of which are "dilute pancake batter."
I have pretty heavy scarring in my esophagus. This causes me to choke on numerous types of foods very frequently. Soylent is a solution to this problem. Also, it helps balance my diet.
For those who don't know MyMuesli: It's a company which lets you mix your own muesli (from ~350 ingredients) and ship it to you. It's one of Germanys most successful non-VC-funded startups. They started in 2007 with just a website and nowadawys got shops in most major german cities where you can pick up your ordered muesli (useful for customers who avoid the delivery costs) or buy pre-mixed packs. Even though their muesli is anything but cheap they're hugely successful.
I think what OP is really asking is how is this suppose to be used? If this is a simple "let me show you", all right, but the README and the screenshot are confusing, but all right....
But I think people here generally expect a "so this is how you can actually use my program" when you do a shameless plug.
Ugh -- Soylent and now this seems to represent a branch of scientism at its worse.
Our bodies are complicated. Therefore, nutrition science is complicated, and very much a work in progress. Because people eat various things all their lives in an uncontrolled way, and because what you eat can have impacts on you 10, 20, or 50 years down the line, getting reliable nutritional data is extremely expensive and difficult.
There are many interactions that we still don't understand, unknown unknowns where we don't even know what the questions yet. For example, we know now that our gut microbiome has important influence on our metabolism, immune systems, and overall health. And yet little of this research existed 20 years ago because there was no cheap DNA sequencing, and we still don't know today how what we eat influences our internal ecology. We certainly don't know what eating a bunch of Soylent for a couple decades would do to a person's microbiome, because nobody has ever tried it.
A dose of humility and common sense would suggest that radically transforming your diet based on our current reductive knowledge of nutrition is an extremely risky bet.
The much safer bet is eating traditionally: eat foods in combinations and proportions that our ancestors and cultures have actually tried and tweaked over thousands of years of empirical experimentation and co-evolution.
I disagree with your assertion that it is "extremely risky" to apply current nutrition knowledge. Since we don't understand the effects of the "traditional" diet, it's not clear whether it is helping or hurting us. Yes, we have empirical evidence, but as you said it is poorly controlled. So all we can know is that if we eat a "traditional" diet, we will probably live close to the average lifespan and have average health issues as has been observed for traditional diets.
Additionally, there are a wide variety of traditional diets that cover very different foods. Since everything in the body interacts in complicated ways, we cannot even generalize specific foods as being "non-risky" to eat, since the empirical evidence we have only applies to the interactions of each food with the rest of the diet. So it's not clear what would actually constitute a definitive "traditional" diet; the best we could do would be to try and mimic a specific traditional diet as closely as possible, which still doesn't take into account the interactions caused by non-diet aspects of health like amount of exercise.
There is value in that kind of stability, but by incorporating mainstream nutrition research into your diet you can trade increased risk for what is likely to be a better average result. I say likely to be better than average because, as incomplete as nutrition data is, some data is still better than no data. It doesn't make sense to ignore what we know in the moment just because it might be wrong later. As long as you research carefully and stick to the most well studied aspects of nutrition, risk is minimal.
It's also worth pointing out that the normal person's diet today is already a large departure from traditional diets. So even if we assume a "traditional" diet is the goal, it does not follow that that Soylent would be better or worse than the normal person's diet today. It's likely that the human body is adaptable enough to handle whatever you eat.
Just to clarify, I 100% support judicious use of what we know about nutritional science today.
I also happen to think that Soylent is definitely not a wise application of our current knowledge. The sophomoric notion that we already understand nutrition well enough to create a full fledged meal replacement with everything that the body requires is false, misleading, and highly irresponsible.
From their front page:
> Protein, carbohydrates, lipids, and micronutrients: each Soylent product contains a complete blend of everything the body needs to thrive.
The micronutrients claim in particular invites scrutiny -- we definitely don't know yet whether we've succeeded in identifying every micronutrient that the body needs for survival, much less to 'thrive'.
I mean, they actually sickened a whole bunch of people with some algae powder ingredient, not realizing it would be problematic ahead of time. If they can't design a food product that avoids acute illness, why should you have confidence that they have something that is safe and healthy to use long term?
Evolution has only selected for diets that get you to reproduction. Those have very little overlap with what make you live well into your 80s+.
Your appeal to nature holds as much weight as the soylent science when it comes down to it. The only constant in the human diet is change. What our ancestors ate even 500 years ago has very little overlap with what we even consider "traditional food" now.
I think there's an argument that a society which only makes it to reproduction and not much longer wouldn't last very long compared to one which has enough old people to help raise the kids (after all that is one of the theories as to why we even live to 80+ in the first place).
But yea, agreed that the types of foods we're eating have changed and continue to change, and thus far the driver of change is not our design, but rather market forces and consumer demand. I think something like soylent is a step in the right direction, even if it's risky in a way that any new science is risky (consider how we were using X-rays when we first discovered them for trying on shoes, before we knew the harm).
Apparently the ground linseed/flax loses its goodness (major non-fish source of omegas) very quickly after grinding unless refrigerated. So the store bought LSA is no good. You need to grind it yourself and either eat it immediately or keep it in the fridge. Apparently it has a magical smell when ground.
Tasmanian here. I got in the habit of making a similar muesli (okay, they're all similar) but substituting grated raw potato for rolled oats, and tahini + water instead of milk.
The whole purpose of soylent is to allow me to spend 13 hours per day coding on adderall without leaving my room. Healthy or not, I think OP missed the point of ready made, no cleanup food.
So about a half kilogram of oats and raisins with oil and various additives? I guess it's slightly more palatable than Soylent but eating it seems just incredibly grueling.
I think thats the point. He specifies that "excessive chewing activates digestion" or something on the github page. Its designed to be a real jaw grinder.
I cannot comment on the nutritional quality, but the way the ingredients are written down irritated me, e.g. "parsleydried" instead of "dried parsley". It makes it seem more like crafting instructions for Minecraft than a real-world recipe.
I've been eating Soylent twice a day for more than a year as my primary food source. I'm always interested in new variants (especially ones that cut down on cost) - this one seems interesting. Any chance that there's an Amazon shopping cart that someone can add to get all this stuff easily?
Also, I noticed that the Readme links to Rob Rhinehart's page (http://robrhinehart.com). Unfortunately, it looks like it's all been taken down. Anybody know why?
Honest question: Do you not enjoy food? What do you think the benefits are?
I'm asking because I think I would be severely depressed on such a monotone diet. I love cooking and it gives me great joy to eat good food, or new kinds of food, or even the boring lunch restaurant type food if it's done reasonably well.
Lunch is also a nice social event. I'm skipping lunch sometimes (when I'm not that hungry) but I feel like I missing the social aspect then.
As someone who has struggled with weight for the majority of my life, food and hunger is a constant battle. Being able to just drink something to make the hunger go away without being worried about eating too much or making an impulse decision to buy something unhealthy saves a lot of stress, and makes it much easier to control your diet. While I don't know what OPs reasons are for drinking it, there are usually valid reasons behind it that aren't just hating food.
That would be fine, but the amount of time that would take to prepare isn't something I would do in the morning. But being able to get a drink out of the fridge makes it much easier
Scrambled eggs literally take two minutes to make. Very similar to how long it takes to mix up some Soylent.
I suspect your real issue is that like most you wake up to an alarm so you're still mostly asleep during breakfast time. And until it's routine scrambling eggs requires higher cognitive function...
I usually bring the Soylent with me to lunch with my coworkers. It allows me to enjoy the social benefits while still having Soylent.
I do enjoy food (very much!), but find myself feeling tired or sluggish after a traditional breakfast or lunch. Soylent provides consistent energy throughout the day, and makes calorie tracking very easy (400 calories a bottle twice a day @ breakfast and lunch leaves me 1200 calories for dinner).
I use Mealsquares instead of Soylent, but the same idea applies: it doesn't replace all meals (I only have one per day, about 400 kcal worth), but just the ones where I don't have time to make something proper. In that sense, it's strictly an improvement over what I was eating before in that situation, which was usually either going out to eat or raiding my fridge of whatever junk was handy.
If you use Soylent/Mealsquares only to replace "no-time meals", you're doing a lot better. Like you, I don't understand why someone would eat them exclusively;
You know, if you're not trying to live off of soylent, you could just pound a protein shake for a fraction of the cost, and if you get a decent brand like optimum, it tastes better too.
You were downvoted, but this is true, and you can add ground oats for carbs if you wish.
(Can't vouch for that brand, but some of the powdered ones I've tried taste almost 'nice' with milk, not as nice as those supermarket pre-made ones, which are typically lower in protein, higher cal, and more expensive).
I eat a Mediterranean breakfast, but I don't smoke so I just have a coffee ️
And a large glass of water. If I'm really low on energy I'll have a fruit.
I've heard all life that breakfast is the most important meal, but it turns out to be a marketing slogan, and it might actually be good with a long period without high blood sugar.
I don't know how busy you are, but my way of dealing with "no time to prepare breakfast" is to prepare it the previous evening. Of course this only works if you have the time to cook sometime during the day, but if you are making dinner anyway, simply adding more of everything isn't too time-consuming.
I personally view Soylant in the same way I do infant formula. It has changed drastically since it was first introduced as we learn more and more about what is in actual breastmilk and why it matters for development. Similarly there are probably many other components in whole foods that are important that we may not even quantify yet. Not to mention the importance of actualy chewing food so that the enzymes from saliva accompany the meal and assist in breaking down various components.
Imagine what Soylant would have looked like 50 years ago and how much it would have been missing. Now imagine how in 50 years we will learn just as much if not more and look back at our crude attempts in the same vain.
First, as a male I am concerned about isoflavones. I've read sources that go either way on how much it actually affects hormone levels, but since I suspect there is a lot more pressure from the agriculture / vegetarian community to make it seem safer than it is than from any other community to not, I lean towards it not being that good for you.
Second, the consistency is absolutely terrible. They don't need to make it too seedy, but leaving some of the nuts and seeds at least somewhat coarse would improve its texture beyond "slime that makes your teeth feel terrible and gross".
As is, it doesn't even make economic sense, because I can feed myself much tastier food than soylent for like $3-6 a day. Like, why would you choose soylent over food such as eggs, chicken, spinach, broccoli, oatmeal, etc?
What I really wish someone would do, is make a milk-based soylent with stuff that is actually good for you like sunflower seeds. That would actually taste good and probably be much better for you.