[cal5k]

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.

[legostormtroopr]

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/

[tree_of_item]

Ensure in particular is a bad example. I'm sure it is used in lots of hospitals but it shouldn't be: https://storiesbycarrol.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/food-or-vil...

[rblatz]

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.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> 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?

[ch4s3]

> 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?

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Yes, that's a fair point. I admit I misrepresented the facts.

Here's what the Dietitians Association of Australia[1] recommends:

- A bowl of whole grain cereal with milk, a dollop of yoghurt and sliced fresh fruit. Try adding a sprinkle of nuts for extra crunch!

- A delicious smoothie made from milk, fresh fruit and yoghurt

- A toasted slice of sourdough with some cheese, baked beans or avocado

- Untoasted muesli or rolled oats

- Poached eggs on whole grain toast with tomato, mushrooms or spinach

That seams reasonable to me, except maybe that every one of the recommendations includes grains. Although I don't see why breakfast can't be 100 grams of slow cooked / steamed meat with a bowl of steamed vegetables / a salad.

1. https://daa.asn.au/smart-eating-for-you/smart-eating-fast-fa...

[krakensden]

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.

[squeaky-clean]

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.

[jnwatson]

I thought that too, but I was wrong. Before Soylent and the other meal replacements that came up behind them, there wasn't anything out there.

One 8 oz bottle of Ensure has 220 calories and 33g of carbs, 15g of which is just sugar. You might as well just have a coke and some protein powder.

[cal5k]

Ensure tastes awful. If I had to live on that for a week I'd go bonkers.

[novia]

Milk allergies or veganism?