Ars Tech did a series where one of their reporters existed on the stuff for a week.
Here’s part 1 of the original series -
And here’s a follow up after a slight change in the formula -
Conclusion: it’s a cheap, convenient, vegan, nutritious, and reasonably tasty method for producing mass quantities of methane gas. It’s also a perfectly good meal replacement. In short, it lives up to it’s claims on the tin.
Personally, I’m in the group that would rather eat this stuff thrice a day than take the time to constantly shop, prep, cook, clean & wash up. Sure I can cook restaurant quality meals. That takes time I’d rather use for other things. Once something like this becomes easily available - and if it’s not Soylent, it’ll be something else - I’ll be all over it.
So, you don’t have any actual evidence. You just think it’s a scam because it resembles the scammy stuff sold at GNC, even though the only claims he makes are uncontroversial and easy to test (it contains X calories, etc.).
That said, I was curious how the costs compare to other nutrition shakes like Ensure. From Walmart I can get a 16-pack of pre-mixed drinks for $19.97. Per kilocalorie, that’s:
$19.97 / (16 cans * 220 kcal/can) = $0.0056/kcal
Or the powder version:
$8.97 / (7 serv * 250 kcal/serv) = $0.0051/kcal
Compare to the 7-day Soylent pack:
$85 / (7 days * (1530+480) kcal/day) = $0.006/kcal
Or the 28-day pack:
$300 / (28 days * (1530+480) kcal/day) = $0.0053/kcal
So the prices are really pretty comparable. I was expecting Soylent to be a savings, but it’s not (buying larger quantities would lower prices a bit, but that’s true in both cases). Given that pre-mixed Ensure is more convenient than the powder, it seems like the better option.
This is a slightly weird example since it’s well-known that Jobs basically killed himself by treating his cancer with bogus therapies such as special diets. It didn’t seem to impact the credibility of Apple at all.
Now we’ve gone from “it could be unhygienic” to “it’s, without a doubt unhygienic”. All I’m seeing is that it’s unregulated, but no evidence about it being unhealthy.
It’s not really that extravagant. Having a survivable diet is something most of us manage by ourselves without a degree. In any case, it either works or it doesn’t, the guy’s background is irrelevant.
You mean he tested it on himself, and altered the formula according to the results? That makes it a scam?
Jevity is a meal replacement used in hospitals. It’s premixed and you can order it from the company, or from Amazon. It was designed by health professionals. There are people who have lived exclusively on Jevity for years.
That’s what a lot of people have against Soylent. It’s not new. It’s not tested. Is it complete? Will it cause serious deficiencies? Why risk your health, when there’s something safe and tested available?
Contains Soy so I and quite a few others are out. its a top 10 food allergen.
iirc Soylent strangely contains no soy. (been a while since I checked the ingredients)
in all honesty I would totally give this a try. I already cook large batches of damn near everything and freeze up leftovers so I don’t have to continuously make food. If I could get by with this even one meal a day it would save a small fortune over the course of a year.
The options narrow if you want it in powder form. Powder increases the prep time but weighs less if you have a water source. Possibly more convenient if you’re backpacking, etc. Ensure is available as a powder but Jevity seems not to be.
Also, while these other options are nutritionally complete, they may not have the optimal balance of protein, etc. for a particular individual.
For cost optimization, Twocal HN seems like the best so far at only $0.0032/kcal.
Yeah. It’s surprising that this is so difficult for some to understand.
Pick some random non-food thing that you like. Maybe sex. Maybe going for a walk. Maybe reading the SDMB. Whatever.
Someone curses you, and now you have to do that thing three times a day, every day. If you miss even one, you’ll start to weaken, and it alters your mood. If you miss too many in a row, you die. The curse doesn’t care about your circumstances, so you have to arrange your entire life around always being able to do that thing on schedule.
Isn’t that pretty much the quintessentially worst curse ever? Or the ironic punishment you get in the Nth circle of hell? Whatever pleasure you might have gotten from it is gone.
That’s a good comparison. I like beer and coffee and wine and soda and other drinks. But most of the time I just want something simple and neutral, and water is optimal for that. I can subsist on water for my liquid intake indefinitely, or occasionally treat myself with something else.
It is cause for concern because I want a “Bachelor Chow” product that does not cause health issues, and his testing method of “I seem okay so far” seems inadequate for catching such design flaws. Not all forms of malnutrition cause symptoms as quickly or as overtly as others, so having independent verification that the new version of Soylent gets it right would be reassuring.
I thought Jevity was the gunk they use for feeding tubes? Do people really drink the stuff directly? What’s it taste like?
Certainly, it’s reasonable to ask about the nutritional values and food safety issues of Solyent. However, these are concerns with answers. Here, for example, is their nutritional information and food label -
Soylent also has a DIY section where people can trade recipes for different blends, some of them geared for different nutritional needs, such as body building, and some of them starting from scratch with no Soylent at all. http://diy.soylent.me/
It’s a product that’s still under development. I can’t wait to see where it goes - especially with the coming advent of food-based 3d printers.
Personally, I don’t get the vitriol either. If I had to describe my reaction to it, it would be mostly a combination of bemusement combined with a fair amount of pity. I mean, it doesn’t piss me off, or offend me in the least that some people would want to eat this stuff.
I am somewhat baffled as to exactly why this sounds like such an awesome idea, and do feel somewhat sorry for someone whose attitude toward food and meals is so hostile/negative that they’d rather drink bland shakes 3 times a day instead of eating meals with friends and family.
I understand the being really busy and not wanting to stop to go get food; that’s what the various forms of takeout/delivery are for, and if that’s too much, there are things like Balance bars and canned soup that can bridge that gap without the need for a specific product.
I get the impression that a big part of Soylent is centered around personality flaws like aversion to making choices and trying new things. That I don’t get either, and again, have that pity working for those poor souls. To me, culinary novelty is one of the true joys in life, and a way to get a little more visceral experience of what another culture is like, even if it’s just eating some tamales or having a currywurst. It doesn’t offend me though if someone else wants to guzzle Soylent for 2000 calories a day indefinitely. His business, his “wrathful gas” as the article’s author once said in another Soylent article.
We are all different. Some people likes to travel, others don’t feel anything about vintage clothing. Some people likes exercising, others don’t like stand-up comedy. Some people loves architecture, others refuse to carry a cellphone. I don’t need everybody to be the same.
When one in three Americans is obese, the appeal in making it as cheap and easy as possible to keep yourself fed without setting yourself up for horrible diseases should be obvious. Even if you don’t eat it all the time, such a product would help to dilute the effects of any meals that are not so well balanced.
I don’t need everyone to be the same either, but that doesn’t mean that I find everyone’s differences, especially differences of opinion, to have the same merit.
I’m not advocating that we force-feed picky eaters strange foods, or that we don’t allow bland food eaters to eat the same dish more than twice in a month, but I am saying that I don’t find the attitudes toward food that the Soylent guy espouses to be particularly admirable ones.
I kind of wonder if a lot of these tech nerds see everything in life like a computer- something to be coded, tweaked, and hacked. A lot of their ideas and innovations seem to revolve around taking the human element out of things.
How awesome would it be to live on soylent? Think of all that time you save not having to even chew or taste your food? Because people spend a TON of time buying, preparing, and eating food amirite? Like hours and hours that could be spent coding or playing Minecraft or something. Plus let’s not forget the social aspect of meals; no longer will you be forced to interact with people and make conversation, decide what you want, or even have to leave the house.
Frankly I would think nerdy engineer programmer types would LOVE to cook. Cooking is a form of experimentation, tinkering, design involving chemicals, fire and gadgets. You can follow recipes to the letter or improve upon existing ones.
Differences of opinion? Of course not. Differences in TASTE, however? Thinking that trying to rate taste is a logical idea is an opinion with very little merit.