Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wahsd 4608 days ago
Soylent lulz as if that hasn't been done and done again. It's just snake oil under different name.
1 comments
aianus 4608 days ago
Please point me to an existing product I can buy today.

I've never looked forward to a product launch as much as this.

link
DanBC 4608 days ago
Ensure (http://ensure.com/)

Fortisip (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)

link
aianus 4608 days ago
Which Ensure is formulated to replace food entirely? As far as I can tell, if I drank enough ensure to get 2400 calories, the other nutrients would be out of wack. As in, a given portion does not have the same DV% of each nutrient.

I'd never heard of Fortisip but from what I can tell it and ensure are both considerably more expensive than regular food, and actually more expensive than eating out.

link
DanBC 4608 days ago
I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to give you potentially dangerous advice for you to fuck about with while experimenting on your nutritional intake.

Recommended daily calories are 2000 for adults.

One week of soylent is $65. 48 bottles of Ensure Plus is about $80. 6 bottles of Ensure Plus would be 2100 calories.

link
aianus 4608 days ago
To be fair, $65 is the pre-order price and includes a shaker bottle (worth $10) and free shipping.

Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150%.

I don't think Ensure Plus is a substitute good for Soylent. It's a supplement not a food replacement and it's formulated and priced as such.

link
dragonwriter 4608 days ago
> Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150%

Most nutrients with recommended amounts are healthy at higher than recommended amounts within fairly wide bounds, but the usually-listed recommended amount for Sodium is much higher than is minimally necessary, and is actually the upper limit recommended for about half the US population. So, actually, I'm not surprised that something intended as a broadly-usable food replacement would go over on most nutrients and under on Sodium.

http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssodium/

Nutrition isn't one-size-fits-all.

link
DanBC 4608 days ago
> It's a supplement not a food replacement

You are wrong.

(http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/ensure-plus-retai...)

> For interim sole-source nutrition.

edit: removed unnecessarily grumpy sentence.

link
MDS100 4608 days ago
They are not marketed this way, because the producers are not insane and/or incompetent. Soylent is more expensive than eating food.
link
aianus 4608 days ago
Not if you take into account the time and effort of cooking/cleaning/shopping.

Soylent is prepared food. It's a substitute for cheap restaurants like Taco Bell or Subway, not cooking rice and beans at home.

link
gotrecruit 4604 days ago
EAS Myoplex? There are a myriad of other Meal Replacement Powders on the market that has been around for decades, some of them designed to completely replace meals with specific ratios such as 40/40/20 (protein, carbs, fat) or more commonly, low-carb versions. Seriously, go to bodybuilding.com and look under the meal replacement category and you'll find a bunch of products that has figured this shit out decades before soylent.
link
rusabd 4608 days ago
fatty fish or fatty meat
link