I don't understand why Soylent receives the press it does, meal-replacement shakes have been on the market for quite a long time. The entire phenomenon seems to just be a marketing gimmick around some misguided notion of it "replacing food".
The eventual goal is not just as a meal replacement but a full diet replacement that eventually won't need to leverage crops, for areas with no arable land.
Most meal replacement shakes I've seen (not including those used in the medical industry) aren't suitable to replace your entire diet with and are generally very expensive per meal because of this. Most also warn against using the product to replace every meal with.
I think it's very good to have a mainstream product like this that attempts to cover 100% of the suggested daily intake, simply to bring into debate what the daily intake should really consist of? And if we can achieve it in countries that are too far from supply of actual crops.
"a full diet replacement that eventually won't need to leverage crops, for areas with no arable land."
How will they make soylent? there are plenty of foods with 100kcal per/0z. that are shelf stable and natural (and healthy). Shipping in powder X vs other food Y is a false differentiation. Its neither more healthy nor, nor less bulky, nor cheaper to ship.
Lastly, you will need to ship in water which is 4-5x the weight of food per day.
The problem to solve world hunger is to be able to distribute staple crops more efficiently to places which don't have access to existing markets. There's no conceivable way that some highly refined meal-replacement product for the first world can be more economical than access to bulk amounts of grains. Even Soylent as an emergency food is an order of magnitude less economical than the existing solutions for famine relief, which are themselves extremely expensive in bulk.
> Most meal replacement shakes I've seen (not including those used in the medical industry) aren't suitable to replace your entire diet with
We literally do not know that. Similarly, we cannot know that about soylent either. Because we simply do not know enough about human nutrition to be making these kinds of statements yet. The government's "Recommended Daily Intake" system is just a veneer over our relatively primitive understanding of nutrition to help give us some very basic possible guidelines (which are still quite susceptible to being wrong). The unfortunate part is that people take these 'recommendations' to mean that we virtually know all there is to know about nutrition when that is truly far from reality...
I'm confident that we'll get there eventually, but first the quality of nutritional research will have to improve significantly, and it'll be far more work than any one meal-replacement company can hope to realistically invest in. So as much as I am for soylent 'pushing the boundaries' in that area, it's gonna take a lot more than that to get us a full-diet-replacement figured out for sure.
Maybe when it comes to adults, but we do have a good idea for babies. Lots of them eat nothing but formula and do okay (though not as well as on as human milk, let me hasten to add).
There was a case a number of years ago where one of the formula makers didn't add enough chlorides, resulting in cases of chloride deficiency (previously unknown -- salt is everywhere in a normal diet, and is present in human milk).
So... while maybe we can't say that we have a maximally healthy artificial diet, we do have multiple instances of artificial diets that are good enough to survive on.
Is that necessarily a gimmick? Meal replacement shakes may have been around for a while, but they haven't been marketing to me. If Soylent can successfully market to a larger/different demographic than Ensure has been, then aren't they like any other company that introduces a new product into an existing market? Is there anything bad/dishonest about that approach?
Not to mention i've been dying for this type of product for a long time, and have not been aware of a meal replacement shake that is intended for this level of consumption.
People can argue the health implications all they want, but to argue that this isn't anything new.. well, maybe i'm missing something, but it's quite new to me.
Considering that i've been wanting this product for the last 15 years - I'd say at the very least the others (whatever they may be) were a marketing failure.
Do you have a source or proof for these points? Last I checked a serving of Ensure was a good bit cheaper than Soylent.
Shipping with the liquid/water mixed can often be a convenience, and at least Ensure also offers it's product in a powdered form: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-powder
The cost of a serving of Soylent varies based on the amount you've ordered. The cheapest it goes for is ~$3.04 per serving - $255 for a monthly shipment of 28 days worth.
The 'buy online' link from the Ensure page you posted lists their powdered product at $65 per 6 pack of 14oz cans. The serving size is 57g, so there are about 7 servings per can; a serving costs about $1.55.
Each Ensure serving is 250 calories, with 9g protein, 9g fat, 34g carbs (13g sugar, 0g fiber) and between 10 and 60% of all the major vitamins and minerals (most seem to be 25%).
Each non-vegan Soylent serving is 670 calories, with 38g protein, 24g fat, 84g carbs (2g sugar, 9g fiber) and between 33 and 57% of all the major vitamins and minerals (most are 33%). The vegans do their own thing with an oil additive (Soylent ships a fish oil/canola blend) so the published nutritional information is not accurate for vegans.
So without actually doing all the arithmetic, I would say that I would probably need 2.5-ish Ensure servings for every 1 Soylent serving to equalize calories. I would be getting more vitamins out of Ensure, but also more sugar - most of the carbs - and no fiber at all. The price would be close but Ensure would be more expensive.
As I was informed on another Soylent thread, you need to compare Ensure Complete with Soylent. Ensure Complete is a MRE, Ensure (the standard product line) is not.
Thanks, I didn't see that. Upvoted. I also didn't see the 'subscribe and save' link for 10% off; the prices above are not fair to regular Ensure, which is basically at price parity with Soylent.
Ensure Complete is more expensive than Soylent and, while much more complete than regular Ensure, is still arguably less complete than Soylent. I think the only things it has going for it are taste (presumably), availability and an established brand name.
I'm not sure about the carbohydrate concentration part, though. There really is a lot of Maltodextrin in Soylent which is a simple carbohydrate and pretty close to straight glucose.
The fact that Soylent tastes terrible should hardly be a surprise considering that none of the team behind this product has education/experience in food technology (http://www.rosalabs.com/team/). Shouldn't that be a red flag for investors, considering ample availability of experience in such industries?
It's unfortunate that this mantra is repeated again and again whenever the discussion of Soylent is brought up. At minimum, last September they publicly discuss the fact that they are working directly with nutritionist:
They actually haven't. The closest is "booster shakes" which you can use to replace a lunch, here and there. But that's it. None of them say you can stop eating food all together.
I've sat down and done the research and tried to find a single one that would actually say you could use it as a meal replacement, and there aren't any. The only thing really are ones that they keep coma patients alive with, which isn't exactly something a normal every day person could use and stay active. But they would advertise it, just a hint at it, then the fine print says otherwise.
Shakeology and Garden of Life have been making MREs for years now. You've probably not heard of them because they target vegans and are very expensive.
Actually the Soylent community is well aware of the alternatives, still none of them are up to Soylent's nutrition level! But you can see people using those things as bases in their DIY recipes [1]. You will start experience joint pain if you decide to just it Garden of Life [2], among other vitamin deficiencies.
My biggest gripe, which has me real close to complaining to the times about it, is he didn't even talk about any of the other avenues of flavoring the product that the owners advertise themselves. Never once mentioned adding chocolate, or vanilla, or peanut butter. You can add anything you want. It helps, isn't great, but it makes it much better. Also he didn't mention if he left it in the fridge for a few hours to let it settle. Which you're supposed to do in order to let the rice protein mix well. All of which the owners mention, but no actual facts are in the article. It felt like he wanted to complain.
Possibly. At any rate, the loss/gain of Soylent is all about the type of person you are. I don't expect someone who doesn't see the appeal/desire of Soylent, to enjoy drinking it.. Rob didn't intend for that.. it's supposed to be cheap, neutral, and healthy. Nothing more, nothing less.
With that said, i'm super excited for it, and i've been drinking DIY "Soylent" for a few days now, since i'm getting impatient waiting for official soylent, and i couldn't be happier. It's everything i wanted. Once the official stuff gets here, i'll spend even less time preparing, and in theory it will taste better too (mainly less grit).
These are good points for discussion. But the counter-arguments is that they add cost, complexity, and time.
I can readily buy 2000 calories of food that are shelf-stable for under the $9/day price of solent. That are equal in weight (500g), hit a target of 15% protein, are compact in volume... and far more palatable for long durations.
Soylent has going for it that its easy 1-step and always predictable with minimal preperation and packaging. Once I start having to mix or pre-soak, Soylent has no apparent advantage to the system I just highlighted above.
It basically becomes assemblage if not outright cooking. And the need for something like a fridge? Again I think it is capital intensive and sort of against yhe minimalist ethos/usp of soylent.
"The modern man does what he can so that he doesn't have to walk, doesn't have to lift heavy things, doesn't have to sweat, doesn't have to meet others in person, doesn't have to take responsibility, doesn't have to love, doesn't have to hate, doesn't have to care, doesn't have to cook and even doesn't have to eat! So in the end he doesn't have anything! He has no life left as it all has been artificially removed from him so that he could just do nothing, accomplish nothing, think nothing, be nothing and live not and be comfortably nothing. Comfort is death. Life is a struggle. Life is a messy, unsanitary and trigger tripping struggle."
Hey, some people want take the elevator to the gym and work out on a stairmaster...or put their bike on their car to drive to the place where they can ride their bike...away from all the other cars...=D
I like what Chris Dixon had to say on Twitter: "NY Times has a wine critic review Soylent. Reminiscent of the time they had a literary critic review Twitter."
I wouldn't mind a product that can replace food, if it's cheaper, more convenient, provides all necessary nutrition and eliminates the feeling of hunger.
However the biggest issue I have with Soylent is that I cannot trust it. It hasn't been tested long term and it doesn't sound like it's being developed by people who know what they are doing.
Also let's stop pretending it's something new, stuff like Plumpy'nut have existed for a while, used in developing nations for malnutrition treatment. I bet it would be as effective as Soylent as a food replacement for a few months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
> However the biggest issue I have with Soylent is that I cannot trust it. It hasn't been tested long term and it doesn't sound like it's being developed by people who know what they are doing.
Totally valid point, but look at the alternatives for people without the time and money to buy nice ingredients and cook for themselves. I used to eat fast food nearly every day out of convenience and because I didn't know how to eat better. Frozen dinners are no better.
It's not that I think food executives don't know what they are doing. In fact, I believe they are knowingly lowering the nutritional quality of affordable food.
So while they might not have experience in the food industry, at least the soylent folks are focusing on the nutrition of their customers as opposed to pure profit.
Not sure if you can compare fast food to Soylent, because there are many different types of fast food and not all of fast food is bad for you. Fast food can also contain vegetables, live cultures, and various assortment of ingredients which are good for you. Overindulgence of anything is bad, fast food just makes it easier because it's easy to get, generally tastes good and is packed with a ton of calories. If you ate fast food very carefully, then you'd probably be okay.
Furthermore, there probably isn't a simple shortcut to nutrition. If you want to be healthy you need to be involved in what you eat.
I'm sure the driving force for Soylent is profit as well, otherwise they would have done years of testing and scientific studies, before releasing a mix of chemicals as a solution to food. I suspect they'll get sued down the road, there is no way to predict what long term effects this will have when someone decides to use it for years.
Very good point, but soylent actually goes a bit too far on the opposite directions.
It's a nerdy, mechanistic answer to the problem and, because of that, it won't solve it.
It's clearly a strong byproduct of the messed up American way of eating, which is, as you said, the outcome of a long term strategy by the food and distribution industries.
The answer is well priced well balanced and tasty food sold next door to your daily fast food.
So, if soylent would really want to change the way America eats, the should be funding a lobby, hire some philosophers and become a politically active think tank. Now they're just a nerdy company that will not appeal to anyone. Not to obese fast food goers, nor culturally elevated liberal people that are aware of the importance of eating well as a social activity and a pleasure, and can make the terrible connection to the much too famous movie -- soylent green.
"it doesn't sound like it's being developed by people who know what they are doing" and "I bet it would be as effective as Soylent" don't fit well together, you're being hypocritical.
Not really because I mentioned "as a food replacement for a few months.", people have reported that Soylent worked for them for some period of time (weeks or months as I understand). All I am saying is that other products that exist may have the same effect. But Soylent isn't marketed as a short term meal replacement, it's marketed for long term use which I assume means years. You can survive on quite a few things for a short period of time, doesn't mean the product is good for you.
From my prospective Soylent does not taste like anything because it has never been shipped to me after receiving one notice of delay after another. I bought a week supply on Kickstarter nothing ever arrived after what seems to be a close to a year. They have missed multiple delivery time frames. I have since bought some competing products (Phood) while I waited and still wait.
From my prospective Soylent does not taste like anything because it has never been shipped to me after receiving one notice of delay after another. I bought a week supply on Kickstarter nothing ever arrived after what seems to be a close to a year. They have missed multiple delivery time frames. I have since bought some competing products (Phood) while I waited and still wait.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadMost meal replacement shakes I've seen (not including those used in the medical industry) aren't suitable to replace your entire diet with and are generally very expensive per meal because of this. Most also warn against using the product to replace every meal with.
I think it's very good to have a mainstream product like this that attempts to cover 100% of the suggested daily intake, simply to bring into debate what the daily intake should really consist of? And if we can achieve it in countries that are too far from supply of actual crops.
How will they make soylent? there are plenty of foods with 100kcal per/0z. that are shelf stable and natural (and healthy). Shipping in powder X vs other food Y is a false differentiation. Its neither more healthy nor, nor less bulky, nor cheaper to ship.
Lastly, you will need to ship in water which is 4-5x the weight of food per day.
We literally do not know that. Similarly, we cannot know that about soylent either. Because we simply do not know enough about human nutrition to be making these kinds of statements yet. The government's "Recommended Daily Intake" system is just a veneer over our relatively primitive understanding of nutrition to help give us some very basic possible guidelines (which are still quite susceptible to being wrong). The unfortunate part is that people take these 'recommendations' to mean that we virtually know all there is to know about nutrition when that is truly far from reality...
I'm confident that we'll get there eventually, but first the quality of nutritional research will have to improve significantly, and it'll be far more work than any one meal-replacement company can hope to realistically invest in. So as much as I am for soylent 'pushing the boundaries' in that area, it's gonna take a lot more than that to get us a full-diet-replacement figured out for sure.
There was a case a number of years ago where one of the formula makers didn't add enough chlorides, resulting in cases of chloride deficiency (previously unknown -- salt is everywhere in a normal diet, and is present in human milk).
So... while maybe we can't say that we have a maximally healthy artificial diet, we do have multiple instances of artificial diets that are good enough to survive on.
People can argue the health implications all they want, but to argue that this isn't anything new.. well, maybe i'm missing something, but it's quite new to me.
Considering that i've been wanting this product for the last 15 years - I'd say at the very least the others (whatever they may be) were a marketing failure.
They usually ship with the liquid/water mixed in, and the cost/kcal is substantially higher, with the carbohydrate concentrations much, much higher.
Shipping with the liquid/water mixed can often be a convenience, and at least Ensure also offers it's product in a powdered form: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-powder
The 'buy online' link from the Ensure page you posted lists their powdered product at $65 per 6 pack of 14oz cans. The serving size is 57g, so there are about 7 servings per can; a serving costs about $1.55.
Each Ensure serving is 250 calories, with 9g protein, 9g fat, 34g carbs (13g sugar, 0g fiber) and between 10 and 60% of all the major vitamins and minerals (most seem to be 25%).
Each non-vegan Soylent serving is 670 calories, with 38g protein, 24g fat, 84g carbs (2g sugar, 9g fiber) and between 33 and 57% of all the major vitamins and minerals (most are 33%). The vegans do their own thing with an oil additive (Soylent ships a fish oil/canola blend) so the published nutritional information is not accurate for vegans.
So without actually doing all the arithmetic, I would say that I would probably need 2.5-ish Ensure servings for every 1 Soylent serving to equalize calories. I would be getting more vitamins out of Ensure, but also more sugar - most of the carbs - and no fiber at all. The price would be close but Ensure would be more expensive.
http://abbottstore.com/adult-nutrition/ensure-powder-vanilla...
http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0421/5993/t/4/assets/Comple...
Ensure Complete is more expensive than Soylent and, while much more complete than regular Ensure, is still arguably less complete than Soylent. I think the only things it has going for it are taste (presumably), availability and an established brand name.
http://abbottstore.com/adult-nutrition/ensure-complete-milk-...
Pre-existing competing products do not count because they're blatantly terrible.
http://blog.soylent.me/post/61556254347/9-15-weekly-recap
I've sat down and done the research and tried to find a single one that would actually say you could use it as a meal replacement, and there aren't any. The only thing really are ones that they keep coma patients alive with, which isn't exactly something a normal every day person could use and stay active. But they would advertise it, just a hint at it, then the fine print says otherwise.
[1] http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/people-chow-301-tortilla-perfe... [2] http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570
With that said, i'm super excited for it, and i've been drinking DIY "Soylent" for a few days now, since i'm getting impatient waiting for official soylent, and i couldn't be happier. It's everything i wanted. Once the official stuff gets here, i'll spend even less time preparing, and in theory it will taste better too (mainly less grit).
I can readily buy 2000 calories of food that are shelf-stable for under the $9/day price of solent. That are equal in weight (500g), hit a target of 15% protein, are compact in volume... and far more palatable for long durations.
Soylent has going for it that its easy 1-step and always predictable with minimal preperation and packaging. Once I start having to mix or pre-soak, Soylent has no apparent advantage to the system I just highlighted above.
It basically becomes assemblage if not outright cooking. And the need for something like a fridge? Again I think it is capital intensive and sort of against yhe minimalist ethos/usp of soylent.
Do tell, what's your secret?
http://andrewskurka.com/adventures/alaska-yukon-expedition/f...
Also, on general Considerations in Food Items:
http://andrewskurka.com/2010/the-5000-calories-per-day-wilde...
A worked example in more detail (see "Daily Rations"):
http://andrewskurka.com/2012/food-planning-for-multi-day-hik...
It's a widely suggested tip, but it's not as if it's a documented instruction step.
in my opinion, to review any experience other than the one derived from exact use of the instructions is rather dishonest.
I'll be curious at how much Ambronite ends up costing
https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/472159432332148736
Sometimes i think people assume we're going to force Soylent on them o_O
Check the comments section on the recent NYT or Ars Technica articles - it's much of the same.
As for the rest, it's the usual Soylent article being rehashed. If you're looking for a bland, cheap alternative to journalism, this is for you.
However the biggest issue I have with Soylent is that I cannot trust it. It hasn't been tested long term and it doesn't sound like it's being developed by people who know what they are doing.
Also let's stop pretending it's something new, stuff like Plumpy'nut have existed for a while, used in developing nations for malnutrition treatment. I bet it would be as effective as Soylent as a food replacement for a few months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
Totally valid point, but look at the alternatives for people without the time and money to buy nice ingredients and cook for themselves. I used to eat fast food nearly every day out of convenience and because I didn't know how to eat better. Frozen dinners are no better.
It's not that I think food executives don't know what they are doing. In fact, I believe they are knowingly lowering the nutritional quality of affordable food.
So while they might not have experience in the food industry, at least the soylent folks are focusing on the nutrition of their customers as opposed to pure profit.
Furthermore, there probably isn't a simple shortcut to nutrition. If you want to be healthy you need to be involved in what you eat.
I'm sure the driving force for Soylent is profit as well, otherwise they would have done years of testing and scientific studies, before releasing a mix of chemicals as a solution to food. I suspect they'll get sued down the road, there is no way to predict what long term effects this will have when someone decides to use it for years.
The answer is well priced well balanced and tasty food sold next door to your daily fast food. So, if soylent would really want to change the way America eats, the should be funding a lobby, hire some philosophers and become a politically active think tank. Now they're just a nerdy company that will not appeal to anyone. Not to obese fast food goers, nor culturally elevated liberal people that are aware of the importance of eating well as a social activity and a pleasure, and can make the terrible connection to the much too famous movie -- soylent green.