Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Two Months of Soylent

robrhinehart.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 247 posts

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#211

Post by Retric »

XorNot wrote: post #204
lilsunnybee wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

People do still get scurvy simply by mostly eating cooked foods. It's still rare, but not that uncommon among collage students.

The sad thing is while vitamin deficiency is actually fairly common it's often a slow process and the body can cope fairly well so it's less noticeable.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#212

Post by ilitirit »

LaGrange wrote: post #66
onan_barbarian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also patently wrong; a paleolithic human could not have subsisted on a diet of tubas, as they were not invented until the mid-19th century.

Parent said "modern", not "paleolithic". You are not a paleolithic human, and if you are, welcome, time traveller.

He might not actually be a time traveller.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#213

Post by kscaldef »

randallsquared wrote: post #194
kscaldef wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what your diet looks like such that you have to take care not to consume 4000 kcal a day. When I was cycling 100 miles a week, I found I needed about 3500 kcal / day to sustain myself, and it wasn't easy. On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). Dinners were typically a massive serving of las…

> On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). That's a lot of different things to prepare 3-4 times a morning... but my guess is you meant all those things to be 3 or 4 breakfasts, rather than an example of a normal breakfast. When I'm trying to lose, I do low carb or intermittent fasting, or both. But if I…

Interesting. Honestly, the sheer volume of food you're talking about would be challenging for me to ingest. A _quart_ of chicken lo mein? A _pint_ of peanuts? I'd consider a handful (2-4 tablespoons) of peanuts to be a normal snack.

This is an interesting lesson in the effect of food choices, I suppose. Because, my experience is that as long as I avoid soda and beer, it's really easy to consume <1500kcal a day, also without feeling hungry.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#214

Post by kscaldef »

randallsquared wrote: post #194
kscaldef wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what your diet looks like such that you have to take care not to consume 4000 kcal a day. When I was cycling 100 miles a week, I found I needed about 3500 kcal / day to sustain myself, and it wasn't easy. On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). Dinners were typically a massive serving of las…

> On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). That's a lot of different things to prepare 3-4 times a morning... but my guess is you meant all those things to be 3 or 4 breakfasts, rather than an example of a normal breakfast. When I'm trying to lose, I do low carb or intermittent fasting, or both. But if I…

> That's a lot of different things to prepare 3-4 times a morning... but my guess is you meant all those things to be 3 or 4 breakfasts, rather than an example of a normal breakfast.

No, I really mean that I ate 3-4 times every morning. I was working from home at the time, though, so it made it much easier to prepare multiple breakfasts while stuff was compiling :-)

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#215

Post by kscaldef »

jaggederest wrote: post #132
kscaldef wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious what your diet looks like such that you have to take care not to consume 4000 kcal a day. When I was cycling 100 miles a week, I found I needed about 3500 kcal / day to sustain myself, and it wasn't easy. On a typical day, I ate 3-4 normal breakfasts throughout the morning (a bagel w/ cream cheese, a smoothie, 2 or 3 eggs and toast, maybe a bowl of oatmeal). Dinners were typically a massive serving of las…

Two racks of baby back ribs. Bam, 5k calories, and that's not even all of the food I could eat in one day. Damn I love me some ribs. Or nuts - a cup of peanut butter has 1500 calories. Doughnuts, pastries, cheesecake, pancakes... Hell, a beer. Have 2 beers a day, you've burned through a good 500 calories. Real cream in your coffee, real sugar in your drinks. If you're burning serious calories, you don't get to eat pr…

> Two racks of baby back ribs. Bam, 5k calories, and that's not even all of the food I could eat in one day

I'm not sure how you figure that's 5000 calories. While there's undoubtedly some variation, it would appear that's more in the range of 2-3000 calories.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/nutrition-facts-calories/baby-ba...

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#216

Post by gnaritas »

jongraehl wrote: post #123
gnaritas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To recap, m_d wishes to see a comparison at the same protein+fat+carbs (normal non-junk food) vs. soylent. gnaritas objects. gwern supports m_d. gnaritas has an opportunity to qualify his objection, but chooses not to. (fwiw, I'm also extremely interested in all manner of "are there valuable yet-to-be-identified substances in real food" experiments.)

Bad recap, I didn't object, try again.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#217

Post by jff »

lilsunnybee wrote: post #193
jff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can easily. Rice, olive oil, frozen vegetables, almonds, bananas, oatmeal, cheap bread, salt, sugar, margarine, cheap spices, multivitamin. You can even splurge on canned soups (chunky even) once a day, with real meat in them. If you had to you'd figure it out. Junk foods should not be buyable with food stamps. Though food industry lobbying results in that restriction not being abided by in a lot of cases.

Oh, I used to feed myself on about $5/day. It wasn't fun but I wasn't starving. But life's a lot easier if you just have to mix this powder into some water.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#218

Post by illuminate »

lilsunnybee wrote: post #185
XorNot wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#219

Post by illuminate »

Retric wrote: post #211
XorNot wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People do still get scurvy simply by mostly eating cooked foods. It's still rare, but not that uncommon among collage students. The sad thing is while vitamin deficiency is actually fairly common it's often a slow process and the body can cope fairly well so it's less noticeable.

Vitamin deficiency to the point of ill health effects is not "fairly common".

The persons who claim this are usually trying to push nutraceuticals at the same time.

Re: Two Months of Soylent

#220

Post by illuminate »

dododo wrote: post #163
akiselev wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

vitamin A is not water soluble. a significant excess of vitamin A is not fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_a#Toxicity

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