Live data from Hacker News

How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

stackshare.io

91–100 of 237 posts

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#91
post #50

I've recently become a Soylent convert. I originally got it just as a quick breakfast replacement. It's not life changing, but here's what I think of it and why I use it: - It's quick and cheap. About $3 a meal, and I prepare a whole pouch at a time (just make sure to drink it all within 48 hours). Meal prep and clean-up time amortized across 3 meals is something like 20 seconds per meal. Even microwaves taquitos are…

> - a fully prepared container goes bad super fast, even in the fridge. I chalk this up to being full of nutrients, it's kind of like the opposite of McDonald's French Fries -- which will stay in good shape for months, even away from refrigeration.

Just remember that potatoes are supposed to store energy for the plant for months, so they are naturally resistant to rotting. (Cutting them reduce the durability, but frying them and adding salt increase the durability.) If you put the French Fries in a blender with some water, the mix will get rot in a few days.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#92

I notice that the instructions for Soylent stopped mentioning salt problem somewhere between v1.3 and v1.5. How much sodium to eat is very controversial, but if you're eating sodium, you should know that they took the extreme low-sodium position. The current version contains 1640mg of sodium per pouch, which is about half the typical intake. This creates a risk of deficiency, especially when exercising or in hot weat…

Why would this create a risk of deficiency for most people? Excepting exercise - the maximum daily recommended amount is 2,300mg; for people who have problems with sodium (particularly those with high blood pressure), the recommendation is to limit sodium to 1,500mg/day.

The controversy I refer to is over whether the 1500mg-2300mg range is sensible. If you trust the IOM guidelines, that's fine, but my own reading of primary-source research has come up with nothing but null results and my personal experience has been that more is needed.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#93

Oh wow, I missed that Heroku now supports Docker. I've been messing around with Elastic Beanstalk and Kubernetes for Flask deployments and now I'm tempted to see whether Heroku is worth exploring.

It's not. They're introducing a "better" (read: worse) pricing structure, and they have a reputation for deliberately making their platform worse (see also: the switch from intelligent to random load-balancing on dynos).

If anything, migrating away from Heroku to EB, Kubernetes, Cloud66, etc. would be a better strategy.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#94

The value prop that people will save money is kind of funny to me. My diet: Breakfast: Oatmeal, honey, cinnamon $0.20 Lunch: Large Salad(spinach, carrot, tomato, cucumber, mushroom, bell pepper, sometimes almonds) $2.50 Dinner: Steamed Veggies and Seared Tilapia (kale, carrot, tomato, capers, tilapia) $3.50 If people just budged properly they would be fine. That being said, I'm curious to try soylent and have purchas…

That takes time to put together. Even if you come back saying, "It only takes XX minutes to do!" that's still time it takes. Soylent is aimed at people who really don't have that time (or think they don't). People who have multiple jobs.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And that's the problem I see artificially constructed meal replacements running in to--if you do the best you can based on the science available, that still may not be enough." This is an excellent summary. It's not about a "fad" or being "organic" or something like it. Nutrition is a very complicated subject and while science has shone a lot of light on the subject we still don't know a lot . So sticking to the "tr…

When you don't actually know enough to make an honest assessment, then you can't come to an honest conclusion. Calling "whole food" safer is an emotional response not unlike that which make "non-GMO Himalayan sea salt" a thing people buy.

No, we know people do fine on traditionally healthy food. We do not know whether they do fine on Soylent. My guess is that anyone 100% on Soylent will become malnutritioned either very subtly or over a long time frame. Personally, I think that's fine as the body can handle pretty fucked up diets and no one is really going to go 100% Soylent anyway. Like, I'd replace 80% of my diet with Soylent if they shipped to me and I liked the taste, but I understand why someone would be a little skeptical.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#96
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, saturated fat isn't great, but it isn't as terrible as we used to think. Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat#Association_with... To me the problem is the sugar content. It's easily double, even for a large man, and almost triple for a small woman.

The sugar content here does seem higher than ideal, and soylent is about the same. I'm currently experimenting with making a DIY soylent and I've noticed that if you're trying to get all the carbs from whole-grain, real sources you end up getting a lot of fiber (~50g/day even when doing a relatively low amount of carbs like 35% of your daily calories). A lot of people report feeling bloated and painful from too much…

If fiber makes you feel bad it means you are not drinking enough water.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#97

The value prop that people will save money is kind of funny to me. My diet: Breakfast: Oatmeal, honey, cinnamon $0.20 Lunch: Large Salad(spinach, carrot, tomato, cucumber, mushroom, bell pepper, sometimes almonds) $2.50 Dinner: Steamed Veggies and Seared Tilapia (kale, carrot, tomato, capers, tilapia) $3.50 If people just budged properly they would be fine. That being said, I'm curious to try soylent and have purchas…

What's your hourly wage? Don't forget an hour of your time!

Not saying that makes it impractical to cook your own food, but we can't act like the only cost in making dinner is the raw materials.

As an aside, it's pretty difficult to maintain those price levels if you'd like to eat more than oatmeal, spinach salad, and tilapia every day.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#99
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I go above 50% Soylent for my meals, I get ultra-intense dreams -- often about eating meat I wonder if people who do have nightmares would get the same effect. For $5 a day, replace your nightmares with nightmeats!

I've checked around various forums and I've found a number of reports that indicate drinking lots of Soylent can bring on intense dreams - I wonder how much more common it is.

That's weird. Sounds like someone should take a look at it. Anything interfering with neurotransmitters? Too little or too much of something? 50% of your diet is rather low for such an effect. Are the molecules perhaps different than they are supposed to be, in some way? I'm just thinking of Thalidomide and the chirality problem.

Re: How Soylent Ships a Trillion Calories per Month

#100

I notice that the instructions for Soylent stopped mentioning salt problem somewhere between v1.3 and v1.5. How much sodium to eat is very controversial, but if you're eating sodium, you should know that they took the extreme low-sodium position. The current version contains 1640mg of sodium per pouch, which is about half the typical intake. This creates a risk of deficiency, especially when exercising or in hot weat…

Surely it's pretty easy to just add in the extra sodium yourself? 1640 does not sound low to me, that sounds healthy for the average person.
Post reply on HN