[markerdmann]

After reading the first Soylent post, I felt inspired to try and come up with a recipe for a "nutritionally complete" soup. I used an online tool that calculates the total nutrients for a recipe and came up with this:

3 potatoes 1 onion 500 grams of wild alaskan salmon 1/2 cup of mushrooms 3.5 tbsp of olive oil 30 grams of sunflower seeds 1 tbsp of dried parsley 2 tbsp of ground thyme 50 grams of parmesan cheese 3 cloves of garlic 20 grams of sesame seeds 1 medium oyster (from a can) 1 tbsp of ground mace 1 tsp of cod liver oil

To cook it I just added everything to boiling water in order of cooking time, starting with the potatoes and onions and ending with the salmon.

I tried making it last night and ate it for dinner and breakfast, and it was delicious! I also feel amazing. I guess I should track the effects of the recipe on quantified-mind.com. :-)

I was actually surprised by how hard it was to fit all of the daily nutrient requirements into a recipe with about 2000-2500 calories (while also avoiding nutrient overdoses). It would be great if someone would create a website for "nutritionally complete" recipes, especially recipes that are cheap and easy to make with a good blender or crockpot.

[johnchristopher]

> I was actually surprised by how hard it was to fit all of the daily nutrient requirements into a recipe with about 2000-2500 calories (while also avoiding nutrient overdoses). It would be great if someone would create a website for "nutritionally complete" recipes, especially recipes that are cheap and easy to make with a good blender or crockpot.

I hit the same wall when I overturned my eating habits and tried to fit all my nutrients into my three-meals-a-day habit. I succeeded by tweaking things but then it dawned on me I could spread out all the nutrients on a week. It made recipes composition much easier.

It wasn't some kind of soylent though but "regular" meals.

[markerdmann]

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing as I was making the recipe. That brings up an interesting question: Is it fine to get 200% of your daily requirement for Vitamin A on one day and 0% the second day and let things average out, or will you be healthier if you get a steady stream of your daily requirements throughout the day? Maybe there are some nutrients that are easily stored in the body (like fat-soluble vitamins) and some that aren't?

[akiselev]

I'm not a biologist but many vitamins are water soluble. They may stay in your body long enough but chances are you'll urinate most of the unnecessary vitamins out.

[XorNot]

This is in fact why multi-vitamin pills are a useless generic habit. Vitamins are trace compounds/elements by nature, and your body is very careful to eliminate excesses (since they can catalyze all sorts of side-reactions which can be otherwise harmful).

The classic example is if you take multi-vitamins, you usually have noticeably different colored urine. That's no coincidence.

[vidarh]

>you usually have noticeably different colored urine. That's no coincidence.

Personally the only substance I've noticed cause substantial colour changes is high doses of riboflavin (the infamous neon yellow...).

Several of the vitamin B's are often found in energy drinks and various pre-workout mixes in very high doses as well (e.g. it's not uncommon for pre-workout mixes to trigger niacin-flushes as well as riboflavin-neon color). The motivation seems to be that the potential benefits might be good enough and the risks low enough that it's better to dose high and maximize what is available to the body, even if most ends up being excreted.

Not many other supplements tends to be dosed at such high multiples of RDA's as some of the B-vitamins often does.

[lilsunnybee]

Yeah except you might be deficient in some vitamin, and in that case you're screwing yourself over by not taking a multivitamin that has just 100% of the RDA's. Not everyone can afford to eat a world-class, healthy diet, and obtain all nutrients sans a multivitamin.

[XorNot]

It is medically very difficult to be vitamin deficient. Modern food is fortified in so many ways that its now almost impossible unless you do something like eat exclusively exactly 1 food product. Even then.

It's not about a healthy diet - it's about the fact that vitamins are trace components that your body holds onto what it needs and discards the rest. This is very different to the general nutritional needs of the body (carbohydrates and the like - all the things the Soylent maker is principally concerned with).

Multivitamin pills are an expensive "worried well" type supplement. Very very few people need them. They're not "generally a good idea", and if you can afford them you should be using that money to buy better quality foodstuffs because they certainly won't surrogate for poor nutrition in the major groups that you do need in large quantity.

[illuminate]

People who are forced to eat ramen breakfast, lunch, and dinner are not going to be able to afford multivitamins. Your idea is severely flawed.

[ZeroGravitas]

Your description sounds like a good thing, i.e. it makes it sound like it's not possible to overdose via a vitamin supplement.

You'd have to also declare that it's impossible for people avoid these vitamins in everyday life before they became useless.

However, I though the general advice was to make sure you get your vitamins from your normal diet (as you'll get other benefits too).

[dododo]

vitamin A is not water soluble. a significant excess of vitamin A is not fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_a#Toxicity

[illuminate]

The point is not so much that "megadoses" are healthy, the point is that at BEST they're wasteful.

[DanBC]

Vitamin A & D are fat soluble, so in theory your body can store it. (Some vitamins are toxic in overdose!)

[abecedarius]

Neat experiment. If the cod liver oil's for vitamins, I think cooking will mess that up.

[cheeseprocedure]

It would be really handy to have a table of common raw ingredients, the temperatures at which they become safe to eat (if applicable), and the temperature at which their various nutrients denature.

[jaggederest]

> the temperatures at which they become safe to eat (if applicable)

Most modern food can be eaten raw. Or lightly seared to kill surface bacteria. Modern food safety is pretty neat. It probably won't taste great though.

NB this does not apply to raw processed meat - for example, ground beef/pork/chicken is probably a bad bet. Surface area to volume ratios are key.

[ricardobeat]

Tuna to the rescue. Delicious when seared but raw inside. If it wasn't for the mercury content...

[jaggederest]

Agreed, my two servings a month hardly count :(

[intended]

Probably could add some lemon to cut the flavor I suspect.

No harm in having something that tastes good, and cooking is one of the best hacks there is.

[markerdmann]

Thanks, that's a great tip.

[MrBra]

Could you share the name of the online tool you used? Thanks

[markerdmann]

Sure, it's at:

http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

[klipt]

Google brings up http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp

[saiko-chriskun]

I also came to this realization and quickly built out http://saiko-chriskun.github.com/nutricount. Working on plans to make it into a more complete product with recipes and such :).

[acti0nman]

Nutritionally complete recipes? I think George Mateljan has been trying to do just that. Here's his 7 day healthiest menu plan. http://www.whfoods.com/hwep.php (His site could use do-over)

[kaeluka]

scale this up, freeze it in portion-size bags, repeat with other recipes, have healthy, quick, delicious lunch for weeks.

[DanBC]

Vitamin C is destroyed by heat.

I'm not sure where the iron is?

Is it safe to eat wild alaskan salmon every day?