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Two Months of Soylent

robrhinehart.com

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Re: Two Months of Soylent

#111

Post by sp332 »

samstave wrote: post #110
sp332 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why aren't liquid foods like this being supplied to under-nourished children in the 3rd world already? Probably because it doesn't keep or ship well.

False. My mother just passed of cancer, she was on a feeding tube for 8 months consuming this Abott liquid food. It was shipped in cases just like anything else - cardboard boxes - and delivered via foil-boxes just like the portable milk that you see at any starbucks, though it required no refrigeration. However, this substance was not made for taste buds and it smelled fairly bad. They have different types depending…

As stated in Steko's quote above, that costs ~4x as much as soylent. Note also that the numbers for soylent don't include packaging or shipping. If you made a commercial version with preservatives etc. the price might be comparable.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#112

Post by dylangs1030 »

randallsquared wrote: post #83
Swizec wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't eat sugar sugar anymore, but consume plenty of fruits, so I wouldn't consider myself addicted to sugar. However, I simply could not eat enough calories through the day to fit my lifestyle without eating carbs. I tried, it didn't work. Burning ~400 calories every day before breakfast and adding another ~900 calorie burn at boxing practice every two days ... just nope. I can't even fulfill my caloric goal when…

Since it's relatively easy to eat 4000 kcal a day without trying (in fact, just by not trying to not do so), I can only imagine how much you must be eating. 6000 kcal? 8000?

It's relatively easy to eat 4000 without trying? How many meals do you consume a day and what do they consist of?

When I did weight resistance training in tandem with intense cardio training five days a week it was still difficult to reach my needed caloric content (which hovered more or less around 4000).

I mean, I'm not saying you're lying, but how is it easy for you?

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#113

Post by michaelbuckbee »

allforJesse wrote: post #77
Steko wrote: post #71

Via Wonkblog: For those of us who generally don’t like food, consider it an annoyance, and yearn for a way to avoid eating it, Soylent sounds immensely promising. But is it safe? Surprisingly, the answer from nutrition experts seems to be, “Yeah, probably.” Jay Mirtallo is a professor of pharmacy at Ohio State and the immediate past president of American Society for Parental Enteral Nutrition, which focuses on the sc…

And that's the question that's gone unasked, because we're focusing (understandably) on the health implications first: Could Soylent be scalably produced to feed 10% or more of the world's population? Would the material prices skyrocket in response to demand? Let's set aside the physiological consequences for a moment, what are the potential economic and environmental ramifications of Soylent?

Plumpy'nut [1] is food product specifically designed to be consumed by malnourished children. Given that the cost of it is around $30/mo I would actually guess that the barriers to adoption are political and social in nature and not technical.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpynut

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#114

Post by mamoswined »

geoka9 wrote: post #12

Sorry, but after reading the following (elsewhere on that blog), I'm hard-pressed not to dismiss this as an elaborate troll. "I read a book on Number Theory in one sitting, a Differential Geometry book in a weekend, filling up a notebook in the process."

The whole thing is hilarious. Sorry, but nutrition is not like math or C++, where you can teach it to yourself by googling things and reading textbooks. Has he even read the massive body of research on food replacement in the form of parenteral and enteral nutrition? For those people it's a matter of life or death, since many patients are incapable of eating. They have to do a lot better than he does.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#115

Post by gnaritas »

gwern wrote: post #44
gnaritas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the benefits he has experienced are probably just a result of extremely well-balanced diet That's rather the point of Soylent, to deliver a well balanced diet. > not anything specifically related to Soylent. This statement makes little sense, he merely claimed Soylent was a way to achieve good nutrition, not that it was magic.

> That's rather the point of Soylent, to deliver a well balanced diet. Comparing a well-balanced diet with Soylent is not a waste of time: if nothing else, it's evidence for the debate about whether all the micronutrients and random stuff in 'real' food is subjectively noticeable in the short-term or whether you really can get away with just macronutrients and a few other chemicals.

I don't see how what you said related in any way to what I said. Where did I say anything was a waste of time?

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#116

Post by ChuckMcM »

jff wrote: post #75
ChuckMcM wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The components of Soylent (as listed in an earlier blog post) are chemically stable at room temperature. (caveat the probiotics). (this from looking them up in the 'rubber bible' [1]) I would expect you could spoil them if they got too hot (oxidizing) but other than that doesn't look too bad. Assuming the $150/month calculated, that's still pretty pricey for someone who makes $1-$2 a day in wages. Its not clear to me…

If I could keep myself fully nourished for $5/day ($150/month), I'd be pretty damn happy. We don't even have to talk about the third world to see possible benefits. We're always hearing about how America's poor don't have time to prepare food and are thus "forced" to buy, essentially, McDonald's. Well, you can feed yourself 3 sandwiches off the dollar menu a day on that budget, or for $5/day you can get (theoreticall…

You may or may not be old enough to remember "instant breakfast" [1] but it was a "week 2" meal in my dorm in college, meaning if your stipend/outside income was limited to a bi-weekly paycheck you could "get by" if some of last few meals in week 2 were just instant breakfast. Rice/beans/tortillas were a better choice but had more prep time.

That said, it's an interesting question on the market for food products the broader desirability for a product like Soylent. As a minimalist I'm intrigued, as a foodie I'm appalled :-) But could it put a dent in the McFranchises of the world? Perhaps. Could it, or a similarly engineered product provide the missing nutrition for at risk populations? If so what prevents it? (I'm watching for similar ideas to appear on the market if this gets any more press than it has)

I note however that 'feeding the poor' with a product like this might not get the reception an engineer/scientist might expect. As others have mentioned there are some cultural stereotypes built up around food and meals which are not well supported by an engineered food product that is designed merely to be nutritious.

[1] http://caloriecount.about.com/tag/food/instantbreakfast

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#117

Post by patricklynch »

unix-dude wrote: post #29
bravura wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct that this does smell. I'm also dubious that this fellow will be able to scale up production without people replicating this at home. Related: I'm sure most of us don't care upon the soylent formulation per se as long as we could easily make our own meal-in-a-shake-form. Does anyone have any suggestions/ideas about how to produce something similar?

He lists all the ingredients on his blog, and talks about why he chose each one. He also discusses effects he felt when experimenting with the proportion/amount of certain nutrients. There's no "magic" in this at all. http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424 Thats the link for the ingredients. Blog posts around there discuss some modifications that were made here and there. As for production, I think many things like this can…

If you have a digital scale and some time to read supplement labels, even the measuring/mixing doesn't seem that bad.

The whey protein and olive oil you can get anywhere. The maltodextrin means picking up a giant bag from a brewery supply store once every few months.

I'm coming up with two scoops of protein, eight scoops of carbs, and a third cup of oil, and a bit under half a gallon of water. After that it's just a teaspoon of salt and a few supplements/multi-vitamins and you're set for the day.

He mentioned earlier that it takes about five minutes to prepare the next day's batch, and he doesn't need refrigeration or much in the way of kitchen utensils. That's a fairly tight upper bound on complexity.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#118

Post by MrBra »

markerdmann wrote: post #64

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 cl…

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

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#119

Post by samstave »

sp332 wrote: post #111
samstave wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. My mother just passed of cancer, she was on a feeding tube for 8 months consuming this Abott liquid food. It was shipped in cases just like anything else - cardboard boxes - and delivered via foil-boxes just like the portable milk that you see at any starbucks, though it required no refrigeration. However, this substance was not made for taste buds and it smelled fairly bad. They have different types depending…

As stated in Steko's quote above, that costs ~4x as much as soylent. Note also that the numbers for soylent don't include packaging or shipping. If you made a commercial version with preservatives etc. the price might be comparable.

I am still skeptical of that stement: the medical cost of Abott's product is high. That does not mean the manufacturing cost is high. In fact, as I mentioned, I think the margins are what is extremely high.

The packaging of this is ubiquitous in many many other products (milk, juice, etc) and I am sure is a very very low cost factor.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#120

Post by confluence »

This guy is effectively popularising something that has existed for ages in the medical/weight loss industries: namely medical food/meal replacement drinks. The difference is that he is using them daily, without paying the premium for an off the shelf, tested, and regulated version by doing it himself.

My question for those more experienced in this area is:

What well tested, off the shelf, medically regulated products could I buy today that would allow me to eliminate the consumption of solid food altogether - and of those products, which ones are the best value for money?

I really can't be bothered doing all the leg work required to make my own meal replacement drink (reasons being: the chance of not measuring correctly + work + forgetting nutrients + risk) - I'd like to just grab a product every month or so and just go.

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