Well here's an example - I'm having jaw surgery tomorrow and will be on a liquid diet for a week. I stocked my fridge up with Soylent so that I'd have something decent-tasting and relatively nutritious to drink while I'm feeling like garbage.
I also will make shakes, but sometimes soylent is just easier.
Why not buy a commercially made meal replacement product that has been on the market for decades and is endorsed by nursing and medical professions and is used in hospitals?
Its not like no one had ever done meal-replacement foods before Soylent came along. Its not new, its not cheaper, its not as well regulated, its not as flavorful.
Seriously, why would you buy Soylent (which has had numerous beta 'failures') over a something like Ensure/
Everyone is all about trusting science and medical professionals right up until it comes to dietitians... Then suddenly random bloggers and cherry picked studies come flying out of the wood work, much like the anti-vaccine crowd.
And I say this with the belief that Americans eat too many carbs, and a higher fat/lower carb diet would be better for people. I just don’t understand this disconnect.
> Everyone is all about trusting science and medical professionals
To counter this, I'v been reading a lot lately about how science has a publish-or-perish problem / unreproducible results problem / influence by industry problem.
And the medical profession / pharmaceutical industry is complicit in the opium epidemic. Many of the medical drugs, doctors use, outside of infectious disease control, don't actually work in the sense that you take them for a period of time and are cured.
It is the fault of government department dietitians, and their political overlords, that we are in this obesity / diabetes / heart disease mess.
Given the traditional dietary advice of "eat less fat, start your day will a bowl full of sugar and milk" is wrong, is it any wonder people are making so much noise?
> And the medical profession / pharmaceutical industry is complicit in the opium epidemic.
You're painting with a very broad brush here. Many pharmaceutical companies product no opiates at all. Furthermore, most doctors won't prescribe them at all, especially after the DEA crackdown. Even if you get seriously hurt, you might have a tough time finding a pain management specialist, unless you live in one of a handful of geographic locations.
> don't actually work in the sense that you take them for a period of time and are cured.
That's kind of a ridiculous standard. For example, take HIV, antiretroviral medications don't cure AIDS, but if you take them, you'll die of old age or heart disease instead of AIDS, and you live an extra 20-30 years. That's pretty incredible. Or look at medication for seizures, they don't cure the heretofore unknown cause of seizures, but do prevent them nonetheless. Would you rather take meds and have no seizures or avoid a medication that doesn't actually cure you and die because you fell down the stairs during a seizure?
> Given the traditional dietary advice of "eat less fat, start your day will a bowl full of sugar and milk" is wrong
It's also not traditional dietary advice; at least living in the US my whole life, I've only seen it as “advice” in advertisements from people selling the sugary products in question.
Nutrition science has an ugly history of wrongness and capture by industry. I am also extremely wary of psychology, which puttered along doing bad work for decades before the current replication crisis. We could all have a foodfight about Economics for fifty years.
There is a bunch of foundational stuff in science that is great, but like any human endeavour, there is also plenty of garbage and nonsense.
Ensure is extremely sweet. Living off Ensure, you'd either have to get the zero carb version, or you'll have 2x the sugars of Soylent. It's also just disgusting to drink more than 3 of something so sugary before needing something else. The original Soylent flavor I can have for weeks before feeling like I need a change.
If a cheaper competitor emerges that doesn't taste like a milk shake, I'd switch to that. But so far no one has offered a reasonable alternative.
> I'm having problems understanding why would anyone want to consume something like that.
Nothing of what Soylent Green does is new, companies like Fresenius, Nestle, Abbot and whatnot have been manufacturing balanced liquid nutrition for medical needs for decades.
I'm far more surprised these established players in the enteral nutrition market haven't started their own push for something like this, trying to sell their medical products as convenience lifestyle products. I guess they wouldn't want to cannibalize their own profits from the medical sales by offering a more affordable non-medical lifestyle alternative.
As somebody who works with this kind of stuff, parenteral and enteral nutrition, I think there's a real market here. But I'd vastly prefer offerings from established companies, rather than some random guys buying bulk ingredients on Amazon and mixing them up in moldy warehouses.
Do you have any examples of products that are meant to be a meal replacement, and that contain all necessary nutrients?
> random guys buying bulk ingredients on Amazon and mixing them up in moldy warehouses
Is this based on something, because I highly doubt they are sourcing ingredients from amazon, this is needlessly inflammatory. And moldy warehouses, do you really have so little to say about Soylent you have to make things up?
Soylent has had multiple, well publicized problems with mold and at least one instance of journalists finding rats running around the factory floor.
https://www.google.com/search?q=soylent+moldy
There was one journalist that found rats in the kitchen, during the beta phase of soylent. Presumably when they hit production they used standard manufacturing techniques.
The mold is unfortunate, but only with Soylent 2.0, the pre-made bottles. As soon as they found out they issued a recall, like any responsible company.
> Do you have any examples of products that are meant to be a meal replacement, and that contain all necessary nutrients?
The tube feeds [0] are pretty much exactly that. Those Fresenius ones are not flavored but other manufacturers, like HiPP/Abbot, even have flavored tube feed, as some tube patients like having the flavor come up when they have to burp.
A step closer are the "nutritional supplements", which is a weird name for it in German we call it "Trinknahrung" which literally translates to "liquid nutrition".
These are usually flavored and come in a variety of forms, like powder or even puddings.
I've "eaten" the stuff sometimes for diet or after tooth operations, it's pretty okayish when cold, like a milkshake. The biggest issue is that you have to be really careful about how fast you drink it until your digestive system adapted to the high-calorie contents, as drinking too much too fast will also make it come out too fast, so to speak.
Pharmacies, Amazon, even eBay.
Afaik Fresubin 2Kcal DRINK is the highest calorie Trinknahrung from Fresenius. Amazon.com doesn't offer that many, what's there is quite expensive [0]. Never realized this stuff is so rare outside Germany, until now.
In contrast, Amazon.de has a wide selection of different high caloric Trinknahrung, the Fresenius stuff even has Prime delivery [1].
It looks like you are not meant to live off of Fresubin. Just 2 bottles, or 800 calories is certainly not enough.
> 2 x 200ml bottles per day will provide 40g protein, 800kcal and meets the average adult recommended daily requirements for vitamins and trace-elements# (DOH 1991).
You would need to drink 5 bottles to meet average calorie requirements. I don't know if there are health risks to consuming 2.5x above the daily requirements, but it was clearly not designed to be a total meal replacement.
I thought it was a bit sketchy you linked to an article about an article, instead of the directly linking to the article itself.
> A few of the packets were infested with mold, but that didn't bother me; I was a beta tester after all, and the packaging hadn't been finalized yet. It'd gotten punctured en route somehow, and moisture had got in—which did highlight its vulnerability to mold, an important point given that Rob touts its non-spoiling benefits as a solution to sending nutritious food to far-flung places.
So, while they were developing their product, in beta stage a few packets got moldy? That's what beta is for! Finding these issues, then resolving them.
Kinda funny reading the original article clears all this up, unlike the propaganda piece you posted.
One, real convenience: a bottle in the fridge versus choosing, ordering, waiting, tipping. Two, takeaway WHAT? The common carry-out foods are not models of balanced nutrition. Often people who talk about Soylent say it saves them from a frequent round of pizza, hot wings, pre-made sandwiches, burger'n'fries.
Are you the type of being that thinks food is too complicated and time-consuming to deal with, and would rather crush a couple of caffeine pills into a bland nutrient slurry, to be poured into your intake port a few times a day? If not, then this is probably not for you.
I have various sensory disorders, so being able to drink a glass of chocolate milk when I couldn’t otherwise eat normal food has been a godsend for not randomly missing meals as often. It’s not a substitute for social food, but if/when you eat alone, it’s certainly a viable choice.
(I can’t drink most diet and protein shakes because they’re so aggressively sweetened that they set off the sensory issues.)
FWIW if you were trying it when they were putting algal products in (1.6? 1.7?) I had similar issues, but they weren't there before the algal stuff, and went away when the algal products were removed.
I've always thought of it as a minimally perishable thing you could toss in your go-bag, to pull out when no time for a real meal -- saves you money when the alternative would otherwise be expensive restaurant food
They are popular amongst people that don’t know of other options. Meal replacements have been around since forever. Every grocery store out there carries Slimfast, for example. Abbott and Labrada Labs, amongst many others, also make them.
IMO Soylent tastes gross, too. Kind of like soggy cereal.
Slimfast (and many of the alternatives) are diet tools, I drink Soylent for the opposite reason, so I get calories.
As someone that doesn't really take pleasure in eating on my own, cooking, cleaning, and even eating is a chore that I'll skip if I'm busy or stressed.
Soylent lets me easily grab something that won't have too strong of a taste and isn't as bad for me as skipping a meal, or eating half a bag of goldfish.
There are “mass gainers” (basically diet drinks with more carbs and protein) that accomplish the same thing and are more cost efficient if you’re looking for alternatives. Lean Body is one.
I did a detailed comparison of Soylent and its clones to Ensure here[0].
There are striking differences in the macronutrient ratios and in the prices. Soylent (Huel, etc) are much closer to the USDA recommended macro ratios, and have much less sugar. Only Ensure Original is less expensive than Soylent, all the other Ensure products (there are several) are much more expensive per calorie.
> Soylent (Huel, etc) are much closer to the USDA recommended macro ratios
No, by your numbers, Ensure (pretty much all of the various versions) are closer than any others the center of the USDA ranges.
> Only Ensure Original is less expensive than Soylent
Your own analysis shows all of the Ensure products except High Protein as less expensive than Soylent 2.0, and only Ensure Plus (not Original) is cheaper than Soylent 1.8.
Pretty much. If Soylent were marketed as a sometimes meal replacement for when you’re too busy to eat a proper meal as an alternative to grabbing fast food or a bag of potato chips it would be utterly unobjectionable. Instead it plays like a parody of all things SV.
Frankly, I've always wondered why in the hell they'd name it after Soylent Green. Sometimes it seems like we've arrived at maximum saturation of irony in North America.
I also will make shakes, but sometimes soylent is just easier.