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Soylent Month Three

robrhinehart.com

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Re: Soylent Month Three

#151

Post by coolsunglasses »

msutherl wrote: post #109
javert wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would order Soylent right now if I could. So I'm pretty excited to find out about these. I had no idea they existed. FWIW, my diet now is like 95% red meat, with some cheese occasionally added in. What are the downsides of these compared to Soylent? I mean, what's the motivation for Soylent if these already exist?

Dude, get a pack of baby spinach and throw it in with the meat.

And odd choice, since excessive spinach intake can lead to iron deficiencies.

Other green vegetables are better.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#152

Post by threedaymonk »

jaggederest wrote: post #45
DanielStraight wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. To sum up some of the basic issues with his research so far: Sample size is 1. He's still eating, just much less often. Some nutrients are only required in very small amounts, which he may still be getting from his occasional meal. Three months is a very short time frame on which to evaluate a diet. Even something as simple and well-understood as scurvy can take three months to develop. In other words, he cou…

> In other words, he could have forgotten something as basic as Vitamin C and still lived this long. Survived, yes, but he'd have had bleeding gums and a host of other serious issues. Just fwiw. You're right about many nutritional deficiencies, though, for example lack of niacin causes pellagra which takes longer than 3 months to appear.

Some of them take a very long time to appear: the human liver can store up to five years' worth of vitamin B12!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_deficiency

Re: Soylent Month Three

#153

Post by smrtinsert »

DennisP wrote: post #127

A guy on reddit who said he was a medical student (and sounded like he really was) said that the nutrients may be fine, but the digestive system needs solid food. Patients stuck on liquid diets tend not to do well long-term, and they try to get them on solid food as fast as they can. He had a technical explanation I don't remember well enough to repeat. I asked how the Soylent guy would do if he converted the stuff i…

They've done studies yes. In Anatomy & Phys in college they noticed that recovering soldiers recovered mentally far faster from the solid food equivalent of a nutrient shake. In some cases, it was pivotal to survival.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#154

Post by ricardobeat »

Nature has solved this for us long ago. Buy a handful of vegetables, vary them every week; slice them up, cook/grill/stir fry and eat them. Add meat once in a while.

This will take you 20 minutes/day, maybe less if you make food in batches and freeze it, and it's been tested for the past few thousand years with pretty good results.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#155

Post by fian »

corresation wrote: post #114
javert wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would order Soylent right now if I could. So I'm pretty excited to find out about these. I had no idea they existed. FWIW, my diet now is like 95% red meat, with some cheese occasionally added in. What are the downsides of these compared to Soylent? I mean, what's the motivation for Soylent if these already exist?

What are the downsides of these compared to Soylent? I mean, what's the motivation for Soylent if these already exist? I swear that this Soylent thing is all, as some others have opined, a long troll. But yes, there are a number of "meal replacement" drinks, some of them (like Ensure), very widely known and heavily advertised.

I guess the difference is that this guy is making the recipe available so you can tweak it to your requirements.

Ensure or other prepackaged products are a predefined set ratio, which may not be optimal for all consumers.

For example, highly active people will probably require a higher ratio of carbohydrates than less active people. Similarly, some people will be genetically predisposed to have higher/lower uptake of some nutrients/vitamins.

Ultimately, for any one person to succeed with a Soylent style approach, they will need to monitor their blood levels of a range of elements and compounds.

To my mind, developing a rapid, cheap, broad spectrum blood analysis to allow people to monitor their diet (soylent or not) is what should be focused on.

Your mileage and diet may vary...

Re: Soylent Month Three

#156

Post by mrb »

ricardobeat wrote: post #154

Nature has solved this for us long ago. Buy a handful of vegetables, vary them every week; slice them up, cook/grill/stir fry and eat them. Add meat once in a while. This will take you 20 minutes/day, maybe less if you make food in batches and freeze it, and it's been tested for the past few thousand years with pretty good results.

20 minutes/day? 6.7 minutes per meal? I doubt it. Plus you forgot the time to buy groceries, wash dishes, eat (drinking something like soylent is 5x faster than chewing food), etc. The average adult probably spends 45min-1h per day doing something necessary for preparing food. The guy has a point: Soylent does save time:

"I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner. For every meal at home I would then have to clean and dry the dishes. This does not include trips to the grocery store. Now I spend about 5 minutes in the evening preparing for the next day, and every meal takes a few seconds. I love order of magnitude improvements, and I certainly don't miss doing dishes. In fact I could get rid of the kitchen entirely, no fridge sucking down power, no constant cleaning or worrying about pests, and more living space. I just need a water source." Source: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298

Re: Soylent Month Three

#157

Post by bcbrown »

jere wrote: post #47

>We don’t live anything like our ancestors. We don’t work like them, talk like them, think like them, travel like them, or fight like them. Why on earth would we want to eat like them? >After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did . I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. I like the doublethink here. Reductionism works fine except when it doesn't. And surely…

A transistor is a device where the ability for electrons/electron 'holes' to flow across a material boundary depends upon how many electrons are in a nearby area. A transistor is a device which allows an abstraction layer of three variables over a very complicated solid-state reality.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#158

Post by rdouble »

mrb wrote: post #156
ricardobeat wrote: post #154

Nature has solved this for us long ago. Buy a handful of vegetables, vary them every week; slice them up, cook/grill/stir fry and eat them. Add meat once in a while. This will take you 20 minutes/day, maybe less if you make food in batches and freeze it, and it's been tested for the past few thousand years with pretty good results.

20 minutes/day? 6.7 minutes per meal? I doubt it. Plus you forgot the time to buy groceries, wash dishes, eat (drinking something like soylent is 5x faster than chewing food), etc. The average adult probably spends 45min-1h per day doing something necessary for preparing food. The guy has a point: Soylent does save time: "I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat ou…

I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner

It seems strange that it would take him 2 hours to cook a combination of eggs, a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger. These are foods that only take a few minutes to cook. Cooking either eggs or a quesadilla takes less than 1 minute. If cooked longer, they are ruined. One could cook a meal for two containing every one of those items in less than 20 minutes. He must have been taking a long lunch break.

Any claim that this project arose from a need for time savings rings a bit hollow, because he has spent an order of magnitude more time on this than any non-foodie bachelor programmer person has ever spent cooking.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#159

Post by gordaco »

nicothieb wrote: post #148

Am I the only one depressed by this idea ? I mean I have no doubt one can craft a superior meal nutriment wise, but this is the fast track to abandoning cuisine and a huge part of my culture. Spend more time making your dreams come true. Yeah right, more facebook or more tv time !

No, you're not the only one. To me, this is also a fast way of ruining one of the best things about life. If "making your dreams come true" prevents you from enjoying a nice meals (which is not that much time-consuming, anyway), it may be time to reconsider if those dreams are worth it. Don't live just for a future that might not come, keep in mind your daily life.

Re: Soylent Month Three

#160

Post by QuixoticChris »

corresation wrote: post #112
nemo1618 wrote: post #44

Soylent is certainly polarizing on HN, and pretty much everywhere else as well. This will only be resolved once it's widely available and people can confirm/contest Rob's results. Personally, I'm very curious to give it a trial run. It certainly can't be any worse than what I eat now. Rob said it best: >I'm touched so many people are concerned about my intake of possible unknown essential nutrients. No one seemed to…

No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients. This sort of nonsensical dichotomy seems to infect discussions of this. Yesterday I had a Burger KingTM Whopper (it was, after all, Whopper Wednesday). The day before I had a spring-mix salad with added tomatoes, green onions, and cucumber, and a cucumber dressing, in a day that I also had…

I think the point was less that people with healthy, varied diets should all switch to Soylent, and more that a potentially healthy meal replacement diet beats a definitely unhealthy fast food diet, hands down.
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