Soylent made such a big deal of being a "tech company", and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute.
What they didn't have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about "sending samples out" to external labs. It's not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are production line testing machines for biological contamination and for elemental analysis. About 80% of food plants have in-house testing facilities. What's Soylent got?
I guess one great thing about Soylent threads is bringing all the urban myths around nutrition out into the open. People in this thread believe everything from "people on liquid diets don't poop!" to "if you put some berries in a blender and drink it, you're getting entirely different nutrition from eating the berries raw!" That second one is a bit of a strawman, but it shows how absurd claims that crushing or grinding foods ruins the nutrition sound.
But the main one I want to call out is "Ensure is well-researched", which seems to have reached self-perpetuating status. Go ahead, type terms related to Ensure into PubMed or Google Scholar. I would cite a particular one if any of them turned up anything. The most prominent independent examination of Ensure's nutritional value (that I've found) came when Abbott was forced to settle with the FTC in the late 90s for falsely advertising Ensure as doctor-recommended and useful to drink with an already healthy diet.[0] If you're not interested in reading it, the FTC's main complaints were over false claims about doctor recommendations and the fact that Ensure's advertising compared a single can to a multivitamin.
Soylent’s product itself has zero novelty in it. Meal Replacement Powders (MRPs) have been around for decades and are popular among the bodybuilding crowd. The only “innovation” Soylent has brought to the table was being the first company to market MRPs to geeks and hipsters -- and that's it. Personally, I've never tried their product because the ingredients they use seemed average/fudged at best (and I tend to avoid brands that pop out of nowhere with a lot of hype). Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself.
I bought a box of Soylent bars to use as occasional between-meal backups, since I sometimes miss a meal while traveling or because I forget to eat lunch.
Over the course of a few weeks I ate two or three bars and was fine. Then one day I missed lunch, ate a bar, and about four hours later started feeling nauseous and experienced the worst diarrhea of my life.
Let's just say I'm glad it hit me when I was at home, within tightly clenched shuffling distance of a good sturdy toilet.
By the next morning I felt fine.
I have no known food allergies or sensitivities. On no occasion did I eat more than one bar in a single day, and I don't think I ever even ate bars on two consecutive days.
I do remember thinking, while eating that last bar, that it didn't taste quite as good as I remembered the other bars tasting. It seems possible that the bars contained inconsistent amounts of an ingredient and the last one just happened to have a larger amount of whatever did me in.
I sure would like to know what it was so I can avoid it in the future.
Not putting solid food into your system for long periods of time (months, years) will destroy your ability to digest solid food when you start refeeding. I've seen people in eating disorder facilities who have lived on diets of liquid food (historically Ensure, basically the same thing) who have not defecated for months, and when they start eating again suffer for weeks and weeks from horrendous constipation, often requiring further hospitalization. This has happened to me.
Your ability to digest basically shuts down, your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you.
Not eating solid food is not good for you. Don't do it.
I don't advocate for or against liquid diets necessarily - and I realize this is overtly a throwaway account - but this sounds pretty pseudo-sciency to me, anecdote notwithstanding.
Having entirely lived on Soylent for a full year and having went back to solid foods with no weaning period and no ill effects, I doubt the veracity of your unsubstantiated claims.
Not to mention, a major part of digestion begins in the mouth. Saliva breaks food down and prepares it to be broken down in the stomach, so that it can be assimilated in the intestines.
When you consume liquid calories, you miss out on this important part of the digestive process (and subsequently lose out on absorbing a portion of the nutrients), unless you are "simulate chewing" or leave the liquids in your mouth long enough for the salivary enzymes to "get to work."
Granted, this doesn't mean you can't survive off of liquid calories, but digestive issues are bound to happen. Nutrient-dense, whole foods should always be the first option.
Ensure is not intended to be used as a complete nutrition source, so it's not surprising that subsisting on it for long periods would cause problems. For long term use a nutritionally complete formula should be used such as Jevity or Twocal (made by the same company that makes Ensure).
I get 100% of my daily calorie intake Mon-Fri from powdered food (not Soylent, but a different brand). I shit fat bricks, two to three times a day. No diarrhea, no bleeding, no constipation, nothing.
It's all about proper macronutrient intake and exercise. People on Ensure probably had drastically reduced daily calorie intakes.
Edit:
> your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you
If you think there are ANY solids in your intestines, you better read on anatomy and human biology.
The founder may have thought for a while that maybe he could get away with just Soylent for extended periods of time, but I don't think very many people actually tried using it to the exclusion of all other food.
I lived on liquid food for about a month after a surgery and when I started eating solid foods again my stomach was actually handling it better than it ever had.
I'm not advocating eating liquid foods for months, I thought it was hard as I was hungry all the time in the first week or so. But doctors tell patients that go through some surgeries to eat liquid foods for at least a month before the surgery. How can it be bad? It's not that the bowel movement stops like you are suggesting.
Like others have said, please submit some kind of referral if you're going to make such a statement.
Doesn't Soylent contain extra fibers specifically for this purpose? I don't use it, but I recall Reinhart blogging that he added fiber because he was worried about this exact issue.
I've been drinking only protein shakes for breakfast for years, and recently the Coffiest product from Soylent. My poops are coming out just fine (of course I'm having regular solid food for lunch and dinner, and for all my meals on the weekend).
Just a quick counterargument from a regular Soylent consumer: I drink a coffiest for breakfast every morning and drink two liquid Soylents on days when I don't have time for a nice lunch or dinner. It's convenient, healthy and tastes good. I've never had any intestinal troubles. I use it as a meal replacement, not a complete food replacement.
It sucks that they included this ingredient in their powder and bars that has caused people problems. But HN folks should know that doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way. Food is obviously a much more sensitive and important application than most mobile apps.
But I expect Soylent to figure out what went wrong, correct it, and keep iterating and improving.
The latest version of Soylent powder is the best-tasting version to date and I get no uneasy feeling from it. The original powder versions I could more easily believe gastro issues, so I'm surprised this is cropping up now rather than before, but I guess it could be ingredient/allergy-specific.
I tend to eat 3000 calories to maintain my weight so Soylent is great for my busy schedule. I'm still eating 1500-2000 calories of regular food per day, which is certainly enough. I don't get why people keep harping on the all-or-nothing idea behind Soylent. Most people advocate this as part of a balanced diet.
Even if Soylent isn't perfect, I'd rather down something the FDA considers a food than an excess of weight gainers/protein bars/protein powder supplements filled with ingredients I don't want. That being said, I could throw oats, protein powder, peanut butter, milk, and a banana in a blender.. but that's not necessarily something I want to do consistently.
I also consider Soylent a bang for the buck when looking at things at price per 100 calories. Soylent 2.0 is far tastier, but I find it annoying that you have to get a ton of heavy bottles shipped to you and it's more expensive.
I had hemorrhoids that would flair up from soy/almond milk or large quantities of corn chips. However, I never had blood loss and it was mostly gone by the time I tried Soylent.
After having one drink made with powder version 1.2 or 1.3, I lost about a liter of blood and couldn't move or work on anything that week. Had to switch to yogurt for a month to eat normally again. I think it has to do with jagged precipitates that remain after going through the large intestine.
I love the idea of the product, but unnatural food like this has potential to cause unforeseen side effects.
> Soylent said there shouldn’t be any issues with its premade drinks, which cost slightly more than just the powder.
Interesting. I tried the premade drinks (Soylent 2.0) a couple of months ago and within an hour had stomach cramps and was forced to retreat to the bathroom.
Unlike a software bug it's mentally very hard to forgive -- I love the idea of Soylent but doubt I will ever try it again, in any form.
Serious question: why is it so hard for them to find the root cause of these issues? There are a limited number of ingredients, all of which are surely well documented and tested.
> Serious question: why is it so hard for them to find the root cause of these issues?
Biology is hard. Humans are really, really variable. Look through the comments on this page - you'll find people who couldn't keep down one bottle, or who love the bottles but can't stand the powder, or who have had zero issues, or who find the entire idea disgusting.
And these reactions may also change over time. Medical science can only really draw firm results from large-scale tests involving highly-controlled groups - and even if Soylent were able to run those kinds of tests and optimized for the most universal solution, the end result would probably still disagree with someone.
I've gone through a few cases of the premade drinks. My first bottle or two did the same to me but never since. Pretty sure it was the high amount of fat (~50% of calories) coupled with an empty stomach. I keep them at my desk and in my car for occasional usage.
> There are a limited number of ingredients, all of which are surely well documented and tested.
There isn't really any bright line between edible and poisonous. E.g. if you buy a bunch of field guides, the exact same plants and mushrooms will be listed as edible in some books and poisonous in others. There are lots of species that are widely considered poisonous, but many people eat them anyway without any ill effects. And others that are widely considered edible that people get very sick from eating.
Some of the best advice I got from a well-known mycologist is when in doubt about whether something is edible, set up a TV in the bathroom first.
I didn't have any of that issue with the one case I purchased to try a few months ago. Rather, it was just so weird tasting I had to mix the last 6 with chocolate milk to be able to choke them down. They just don't taste good, and I didn't feel full after drinking them. There's something mental about eating food for me where part of getting to feeling full is the effort it takes (manipulating with utensils, chewing) to consume it.
There is also the question of bioavailability, which applies to drug as well as vitamin intake.
Just because Soylent claims to give you all of these vitamins at once, that does not mean your body is actually adsorbing them all at once. You need a varied diet. You can't just eat one thing.
Soylent also uses the cheapest vitamers available. While the jury is still out on the difference between some of these compounds and their natural (read: biochemically native) analogues, it's cause for consideration, and possibly concern. The choice of dl-alpha-tocopherol acetate as a vitamin E seems particularly concerning to me -- there's a discussion thread on that here: https://discourse.soylent.com/t/why-does-soylent-not-contain...
While a lot of questionable notions about nutrition circulate in the tech community, this concern doesn't seem without grounds.
Is it possible they are getting reports based on allergies? I once (cringe) alerted a local bakery to their tainted ingredients that were causing illness, only to discover years later that it was a food intolerance issue on my side. And--same symptoms as reported in this LA Times article.
I've also heard that if you eat a lot of something, you can develop an intolerance to it, but am not sure if that's really true, or under what circumstances.
Fun fact: Do you know how vitamins got their name?
When the first scientists to study food tried reducing it to its basic components, they concluded that it contained: carbohydrates, fats, protein and minerals.
Then, based on this knowledge, they started to feed animals a mixture of these four macronutrients, but they wasted away.
Afterwards they began to discover the 'vitamins', so named because they were vital for life.
Today we know even more, and have discovered that we don't just eat to feed ourselves, but to feed our microbiome.
I can't imagine though that we've discovered everything that is necessary in food for humans to thrive, and we may never do so.
A well cooked meal and wine - my greatest joys in life. Simple, romantic and fulfilling. Add butter. Add cream. A beautiful pan sauce from a well timed reduction. A cool glass of white wine in the hot kitchen as all the flavors come together. The scent of fresh cut shallots still lingering as the garlic in the pan sweats.
I don't judge anyone for making food and drink a footnote in their life. I enjoy cooking as much as eating but I don't expect anyone else to enjoy either of those, much less both. But I must admit, I sure don't understand the sacrifices of taste, scent, sight, texture and accomplishment for productivity or convenience.
Perhaps this is a reduction of the "Chicken McNugget"?
I unfortunately gave up Soylent when it was found to contain high levels of carcinogenic heavy metals. I believe they found it had 10-25x the minimum amount to be considered carcinogenic for arsenic, cadmium, and lead.
It's a good idea to make a product that could reduce meat consumption and food waste while helping the environment but maybe this isn't the best way? Maybe helping people and corporations better manage and track food would be a better alternative. Also all the new types of meat alternatives like new veggie burgers, such as those from beyond meat etc are looking really promising and we should support those efforts globally.
Is anyone really surprised that this is happening? Nutrition is hard. Nutritionists don't get it. Would you trust a nutritionist by trade to program your pacemaker? If not, then why do you trust an engineer to formulate your food?
Ensure and related products in this space have a lot of research behind them, which Soylent appears to have completely ignored. However, this particular problem appears to be a basic processed food production screwup.
I don't understand why they felt the need to pull the product. Lots of foods don't sit well with certain people, for whatever reason. If it makes you sick then don't eat it. As long as it contains food grade ingredients that are non-toxic then it's not on them.
If my pace maker was running better after the nutritionist tinkered, and continued to do so except for some completely unrelated issue, I'd let that nutritionist figure out the completely unrelated issue and get back to making my pace maker work smoothly, as he/she had been doing for years.
> “Our tests all came back negative for food pathogens, toxins or outside contamination,” the company wrote.
If that's true, then it could be part of the formulation that causes a small percentage of people to get sick. Maybe it's akin to how cilantro causes some people to have a very alkaline taste when they eat it.
There are lots of foods that you can develop a sensitivity to if you eat them more than a couple times per week. So it might not even be a permanent intolerance, but rather something that's more transient.
E.g. supposedly if you eat wine cap mushrooms more than twice in a week then you'll be throwing up everywhere, but then you'll be fine again to eat them a week later.
I personally avoid "new" food and "meal replacements" in general, because they look like garbage in a bar/mix sold by a profit-seeking company with their own best interests at heart. The only difference between Soylent and Coca Cola or other junk food is that Soylent promises time/convenience, Coca Cola promises happiness, and most other junk food relies on appealing to its taste or popularity.
I'd be happy to be wrong if it turns out Soylent is the first manufactured food that ends up beating nature, but I would never bet my health on it.
I'm a big fan of Michael Pollan's manifesto: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. The idea being that processed foods cannot hope to match the nutritional profile found in whole foods, particularly plants. This soylent stuff is about as processed as food comes, so I'm inclined to be very skeptical of it's healthfulness.
This whole comment reads as an extreme offender of the naturalist fallacy. Being "from nature" doesn't give something a special health aura. Food is food, regardless of the source.
This is particularly ironic as Soylent, like many "processed foods", actually comes from plant products.
…you'd rather eat random shit out of the ground that has been found to not kill you, than to eat something based on studying humans and their nutritional needs?
I mean, I can't say I like soylent much but you're just stupid if that's the argument against it.
Have gone through a few cases of Soylent 2.0 with no issues. I use to drink a few a week as a sporadic meal replacement. Now, I mix my own variation with casein protein and trehalose.
Intestinal flora tweak?
When I switched to a modified ketogenic diet, it took a few days to adjust. I now start the morning with coffee mixed with butter and caprylic acid (refined MCT oil).
Advice was: ease into it; too much, too soon, can lead to disaster pants.
I understand why people get Soylent, but I'm also wondering why people choose to trust a company to provide the powder for them instead of making it themselves.
Not only would that save you quite a bit of money (Soylent is a pretty poor value proposition if you need to consume more than 2000 calories), but you would then personally control the freshness of the ingredients.
There are so many recipes at diy.soylent.com/recipes and many of them are made from ingredients that combat the main problem of buying food at the supermarket - spoilage and waste, by letting you pre-mix months worth of food that doesn't go bad. And with the money saved compared to actual Soylent you can supplement with whatever fresh foods from time to time.
It's not like the nutritional profile of Soylent is hard to achieve - all you have to do is solve a system of equations for the necessary macros and vitamins.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
What they didn't have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about "sending samples out" to external labs. It's not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are production line testing machines for biological contamination and for elemental analysis. About 80% of food plants have in-house testing facilities. What's Soylent got?
[+] [-] resfirestar|9 years ago|reply
But the main one I want to call out is "Ensure is well-researched", which seems to have reached self-perpetuating status. Go ahead, type terms related to Ensure into PubMed or Google Scholar. I would cite a particular one if any of them turned up anything. The most prominent independent examination of Ensure's nutritional value (that I've found) came when Abbott was forced to settle with the FTC in the late 90s for falsely advertising Ensure as doctor-recommended and useful to drink with an already healthy diet.[0] If you're not interested in reading it, the FTC's main complaints were over false claims about doctor recommendations and the fact that Ensure's advertising compared a single can to a multivitamin.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/1997...
[+] [-] rl12345|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgrove|9 years ago|reply
Over the course of a few weeks I ate two or three bars and was fine. Then one day I missed lunch, ate a bar, and about four hours later started feeling nauseous and experienced the worst diarrhea of my life.
Let's just say I'm glad it hit me when I was at home, within tightly clenched shuffling distance of a good sturdy toilet.
By the next morning I felt fine.
I have no known food allergies or sensitivities. On no occasion did I eat more than one bar in a single day, and I don't think I ever even ate bars on two consecutive days.
I do remember thinking, while eating that last bar, that it didn't taste quite as good as I remembered the other bars tasting. It seems possible that the bars contained inconsistent amounts of an ingredient and the last one just happened to have a larger amount of whatever did me in.
I sure would like to know what it was so I can avoid it in the future.
[+] [-] throwaway898908|9 years ago|reply
Your ability to digest basically shuts down, your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you.
Not eating solid food is not good for you. Don't do it.
[+] [-] nkozyra|9 years ago|reply
At bare minimum, include some citation here.
[+] [-] timdorr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaworrom|9 years ago|reply
When you consume liquid calories, you miss out on this important part of the digestive process (and subsequently lose out on absorbing a portion of the nutrients), unless you are "simulate chewing" or leave the liquids in your mouth long enough for the salivary enzymes to "get to work."
Granted, this doesn't mean you can't survive off of liquid calories, but digestive issues are bound to happen. Nutrient-dense, whole foods should always be the first option.
[+] [-] magila|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glastra|9 years ago|reply
It's all about proper macronutrient intake and exercise. People on Ensure probably had drastically reduced daily calorie intakes.
Edit:
> your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you
If you think there are ANY solids in your intestines, you better read on anatomy and human biology.
[+] [-] fusiongyro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staticelf|9 years ago|reply
I'm not advocating eating liquid foods for months, I thought it was hard as I was hungry all the time in the first week or so. But doctors tell patients that go through some surgeries to eat liquid foods for at least a month before the surgery. How can it be bad? It's not that the bowel movement stops like you are suggesting.
Like others have said, please submit some kind of referral if you're going to make such a statement.
[+] [-] mcv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramyasree|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ramyasree|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ramyasree|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jdavis703|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dankohn1|9 years ago|reply
It sucks that they included this ingredient in their powder and bars that has caused people problems. But HN folks should know that doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way. Food is obviously a much more sensitive and important application than most mobile apps.
But I expect Soylent to figure out what went wrong, correct it, and keep iterating and improving.
[+] [-] jonathanjaeger|9 years ago|reply
I tend to eat 3000 calories to maintain my weight so Soylent is great for my busy schedule. I'm still eating 1500-2000 calories of regular food per day, which is certainly enough. I don't get why people keep harping on the all-or-nothing idea behind Soylent. Most people advocate this as part of a balanced diet.
Even if Soylent isn't perfect, I'd rather down something the FDA considers a food than an excess of weight gainers/protein bars/protein powder supplements filled with ingredients I don't want. That being said, I could throw oats, protein powder, peanut butter, milk, and a banana in a blender.. but that's not necessarily something I want to do consistently.
I also consider Soylent a bang for the buck when looking at things at price per 100 calories. Soylent 2.0 is far tastier, but I find it annoying that you have to get a ton of heavy bottles shipped to you and it's more expensive.
[+] [-] throwaway101416|9 years ago|reply
After having one drink made with powder version 1.2 or 1.3, I lost about a liter of blood and couldn't move or work on anything that week. Had to switch to yogurt for a month to eat normally again. I think it has to do with jagged precipitates that remain after going through the large intestine.
I love the idea of the product, but unnatural food like this has potential to cause unforeseen side effects.
[+] [-] ag56|9 years ago|reply
Interesting. I tried the premade drinks (Soylent 2.0) a couple of months ago and within an hour had stomach cramps and was forced to retreat to the bathroom.
Unlike a software bug it's mentally very hard to forgive -- I love the idea of Soylent but doubt I will ever try it again, in any form.
Serious question: why is it so hard for them to find the root cause of these issues? There are a limited number of ingredients, all of which are surely well documented and tested.
[+] [-] ekimekim|9 years ago|reply
Biology is hard. Humans are really, really variable. Look through the comments on this page - you'll find people who couldn't keep down one bottle, or who love the bottles but can't stand the powder, or who have had zero issues, or who find the entire idea disgusting.
And these reactions may also change over time. Medical science can only really draw firm results from large-scale tests involving highly-controlled groups - and even if Soylent were able to run those kinds of tests and optimized for the most universal solution, the end result would probably still disagree with someone.
[+] [-] dahdum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|9 years ago|reply
There isn't really any bright line between edible and poisonous. E.g. if you buy a bunch of field guides, the exact same plants and mushrooms will be listed as edible in some books and poisonous in others. There are lots of species that are widely considered poisonous, but many people eat them anyway without any ill effects. And others that are widely considered edible that people get very sick from eating.
Some of the best advice I got from a well-known mycologist is when in doubt about whether something is edible, set up a TV in the bathroom first.
[+] [-] RankingMember|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphanumeric0|9 years ago|reply
Just because Soylent claims to give you all of these vitamins at once, that does not mean your body is actually adsorbing them all at once. You need a varied diet. You can't just eat one thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability#Factors_influe...
[+] [-] bertiewhykovich|9 years ago|reply
While a lot of questionable notions about nutrition circulate in the tech community, this concern doesn't seem without grounds.
[+] [-] dimino|9 years ago|reply
You realize what you're saying is completely unrelated to the actual article, right?
[+] [-] kazagistar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|9 years ago|reply
I've also heard that if you eat a lot of something, you can develop an intolerance to it, but am not sure if that's really true, or under what circumstances.
[+] [-] gerbilly|9 years ago|reply
When the first scientists to study food tried reducing it to its basic components, they concluded that it contained: carbohydrates, fats, protein and minerals.
Then, based on this knowledge, they started to feed animals a mixture of these four macronutrients, but they wasted away.
Afterwards they began to discover the 'vitamins', so named because they were vital for life.
Today we know even more, and have discovered that we don't just eat to feed ourselves, but to feed our microbiome.
I can't imagine though that we've discovered everything that is necessary in food for humans to thrive, and we may never do so.
[+] [-] agentgt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo44x|9 years ago|reply
I don't judge anyone for making food and drink a footnote in their life. I enjoy cooking as much as eating but I don't expect anyone else to enjoy either of those, much less both. But I must admit, I sure don't understand the sacrifices of taste, scent, sight, texture and accomplishment for productivity or convenience.
Perhaps this is a reduction of the "Chicken McNugget"?
[+] [-] blondie9x|9 years ago|reply
It's a good idea to make a product that could reduce meat consumption and food waste while helping the environment but maybe this isn't the best way? Maybe helping people and corporations better manage and track food would be a better alternative. Also all the new types of meat alternatives like new veggie burgers, such as those from beyond meat etc are looking really promising and we should support those efforts globally.
[+] [-] IgorPartola|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greglindahl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordHumungous|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] htns|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimino|9 years ago|reply
If my pace maker was running better after the nutritionist tinkered, and continued to do so except for some completely unrelated issue, I'd let that nutritionist figure out the completely unrelated issue and get back to making my pace maker work smoothly, as he/she had been doing for years.
[+] [-] yladiz|9 years ago|reply
If that's true, then it could be part of the formulation that causes a small percentage of people to get sick. Maybe it's akin to how cilantro causes some people to have a very alkaline taste when they eat it.
[+] [-] Alex3917|9 years ago|reply
E.g. supposedly if you eat wine cap mushrooms more than twice in a week then you'll be throwing up everywhere, but then you'll be fine again to eat them a week later.
[+] [-] joshschreuder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericdykstra|9 years ago|reply
I'd be happy to be wrong if it turns out Soylent is the first manufactured food that ends up beating nature, but I would never bet my health on it.
[+] [-] LordHumungous|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Meegul|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SquareWheel|9 years ago|reply
This is particularly ironic as Soylent, like many "processed foods", actually comes from plant products.
[+] [-] PeCaN|9 years ago|reply
I mean, I can't say I like soylent much but you're just stupid if that's the argument against it.
[+] [-] musesum|9 years ago|reply
Intestinal flora tweak?
When I switched to a modified ketogenic diet, it took a few days to adjust. I now start the morning with coffee mixed with butter and caprylic acid (refined MCT oil).
Advice was: ease into it; too much, too soon, can lead to disaster pants.
[EDIT] switched order
[+] [-] antisthenes|9 years ago|reply
Not only would that save you quite a bit of money (Soylent is a pretty poor value proposition if you need to consume more than 2000 calories), but you would then personally control the freshness of the ingredients.
There are so many recipes at diy.soylent.com/recipes and many of them are made from ingredients that combat the main problem of buying food at the supermarket - spoilage and waste, by letting you pre-mix months worth of food that doesn't go bad. And with the money saved compared to actual Soylent you can supplement with whatever fresh foods from time to time.
It's not like the nutritional profile of Soylent is hard to achieve - all you have to do is solve a system of equations for the necessary macros and vitamins.