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by ohWhatever 4679 days ago
Yeah, but so what? I mean, consider how much that honestly could have amounted to. 100 calories, distributed across 10 grams of nutrients per shake?

He still drank a shake, and at no point does he claim to have reformulated the mix by adding to it, or deliberately attempting to chemically alter it, or switch to different products.

Anyway, human nutrition must be capable of tolerating human error and envionmental hazards. It's not like this is some kind of a high-powered pharmaceutical. If anything, there should be room for that kind of error, because an inability to tolerate mistakes would actually be worse when it comes to food. You really don't want a casual fumble to cascade into some unforgivable and horrific, punishing mistake. You want to have some flexibility for spills, or maybe drinking an extra shake here and there, if you skipped dinner and breakfast one friday night/saturday morning.

If this behavior actually did introduce augmented outcomes, then consider this an important caveat of the product. This means it's sensitive to specific mixing habits, and is prone to user error. This would be an important detail to shake out during trials.

If the powder settles oddly during shipping, or mixes unevenly, and demands thorough mechanized blending, those are important instructions to communicate explicitly. Otherwise, if a bag lasts two weeks, and all the fine particles of vitamin powder settles at the bottom, leaving the fiber at the top, and you don't mix and shake the bag, it might take you a week to reach the bottom of the bag, and you'll inadvertantly be overdosing yourself with fiber one week and vitamins the next, when you try to finish off the bag.

2 comments

The loss of those blobs may have been more than just calories. The blobs, of a composition such that they accumulate at the top in this way, may have been /all of/ some particular nutrients in the mix.

I'm just speculating, but when consuming Soylent I would assume that one needs to eat all of it (or rather, all of the dose, if that's the right term).

Considering he says he started getting vertigo, we're talking a little more than 100 calories here. Meal/Protein powders don't need to be run through a blender, but a shaker cup definitely helps disperse the powder.

My only beef with the paragraph was that he's reviewing a food source, the first review by a non-member of the team. If he'd done this for a publication, you can be sure his editor would be chewing him out for such an action.

Real life consumption, sure, I've spilled plenty of dollars worth of protein powder. I, also, wasn't the first one reviewing it and/or testing its claims.