71–80 of 372 posts
With the plethora of well known and well researched meal replacement solutions out there, why is Soylent getting so much attention?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the best parts about this whole Soylent debacle is getting to watch well-known people make complete fools of themselves by commenting on things that they clearly know absolutely nothing about, but still feel like they have the right to make authoritative statements on.
Funnily enough, that's the whole pitch for Soylent. "I'm just a smart guy with a fresh pair of eyes who spent a few weekends reading undergrad textbooks and skimming pubmed". Not: "we're a large company with deeply-interested professionals who've made this their life's work, our own multi-million dollar labs and decades of accumulated experience in the development, testing, validation and manufacture of temporary foo…
I just posted this to Tim's Blog: --------------------- It seems probable that soylent is better than much of the manufactured food on the market. It also seems unlikely that soylent is better than quality whole food. I take Nassim Taleb's approach. We don’t know what we don’t know about food. I’d like to address two of Shane’s points. I'm listing the objections Shane raises, then his reply: Shane's first point: Obje…
>That’s not a good reason to not try to innovate. Innovation only really works if you're solving a problem. I don't really see much of a problem with our food/nutrition system as is. Yes, there are parts of the world where people are starving, so maybe there is an application for this there, but if the aim is to test this product out in the Bay Area, I don't really see it going anywhere. I could be wrong, but that's…
I'm not sure how you cannot see a problem. Obesity alone affects 36% of the US adult population!
I am looking forward to the energy boost and increased alertness (and could stand to lose a few pounds). As well as saving 5 or 10 hours a week on food preparation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the benefit of Muscle Milk over the same amount of Cow Milk? Is there some science demonstrating Muscle Milk is better?
I believe muscle milk doesn't contain lactose. So I suppose soy milk might be equivalent to muscle milk.
He didn't stop eating. He stopped chewing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funnily enough, that's the whole pitch for Soylent. "I'm just a smart guy with a fresh pair of eyes who spent a few weekends reading undergrad textbooks and skimming pubmed". Not: "we're a large company with deeply-interested professionals who've made this their life's work, our own multi-million dollar labs and decades of accumulated experience in the development, testing, validation and manufacture of temporary foo…
But can your computertalk run in the cloud? Please advise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may not see a problem, but over 10,000 backers (myself included) do. I'd be happy to go into more detail about why if you would like.
I'm curious. Specifically about what you think Soylent offers that the wide variety of MRPs rhat have been on the market dor decades don't. Is it the concept of literally replacing all of your meals? To me it seems that there are dozens of existing MRPs that beat Soylent on price, flavor, and quality. But I have rarely seen any manufacturer claim that you can replace every meal with their product, and when they do it…
That said, I don't intend to replace all of my meals. Eating is often more for social reasons than it is for nutritive ones, and in some cases I'll still be happy to eat conventional food for that reason. I expect to replace most of my meals, but I don't plan to swear off conventional food entirely. Maybe once or twice a week I'll have lunch or dinner with friends.
I also, on occasion, find cooking to be a good way to de-stress. I get to make something that nobody else will ever care about. (My SO just loves that I made something, so in a sense, I'm fulfilling the soylent's "too lazy to cook" … but my way is tastier.) I get to snack (I regularly sample the (safe!) raw ingredients, the partially cooked meal…). I get time to just think to myself. Eating the same thing every day would be depressing. Mouse said it well:
> Dozer: It's a single cell protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.
> Mouse: It doesn't have everything the body needs.
(I'm also of the mindset that cooking isn't hard. Boiling water can make a lot of things, requires little oversight, and is dead simple. And oh so much tastier. That said, I know someone who would sign up for something like this…)
I'm still reading this, but this paragraph just made me incredibly frustrated: "...The white stuff that was mixed into the tan stuff was floating to the top and congealing together... So I just started just scooping them out... I’m pretty sure the white chunks were the rice protein, and perhaps something else important." You're the first review of Soylent, and you throwing away blobs because ...? It looked icky? This…
He still drank a shake, and at no point does he claim to have reformulated the mix by adding to it, or deliberately attempting to chemically alter it, or switch to different products.
Anyway, human nutrition must be capable of tolerating human error and envionmental hazards. It's not like this is some kind of a high-powered pharmaceutical. If anything, there should be room for that kind of error, because an inability to tolerate mistakes would actually be worse when it comes to food. You really don't want a casual fumble to cascade into some unforgivable and horrific, punishing mistake. You want to have some flexibility for spills, or maybe drinking an extra shake here and there, if you skipped dinner and breakfast one friday night/saturday morning.
If this behavior actually did introduce augmented outcomes, then consider this an important caveat of the product. This means it's sensitive to specific mixing habits, and is prone to user error. This would be an important detail to shake out during trials.
If the powder settles oddly during shipping, or mixes unevenly, and demands thorough mechanized blending, those are important instructions to communicate explicitly. Otherwise, if a bag lasts two weeks, and all the fine particles of vitamin powder settles at the bottom, leaving the fiber at the top, and you don't mix and shake the bag, it might take you a week to reach the bottom of the bag, and you'll inadvertantly be overdosing yourself with fiber one week and vitamins the next, when you try to finish off the bag.