One thing I don't understand about soylent is how it can be so expensive and yet still so flawed.
First, as a male I am concerned about isoflavones. I've read sources that go either way on how much it actually affects hormone levels, but since I suspect there is a lot more pressure from the agriculture / vegetarian community to make it seem safer than it is than from any other community to not, I lean towards it not being that good for you.
Second, the consistency is absolutely terrible. They don't need to make it too seedy, but leaving some of the nuts and seeds at least somewhat coarse would improve its texture beyond "slime that makes your teeth feel terrible and gross".
As is, it doesn't even make economic sense, because I can feed myself much tastier food than soylent for like $3-6 a day. Like, why would you choose soylent over food such as eggs, chicken, spinach, broccoli, oatmeal, etc?
What I really wish someone would do, is make a milk-based soylent with stuff that is actually good for you like sunflower seeds. That would actually taste good and probably be much better for you.
I think the selling point of soylent is how easy it is to consume. You just drink it and done. Cleaning is as easy as washing your cup.
That's an attractive point if you don't enjoy the ritual of eating, or simply want to spend the time doing something else.
I agree it is too expensive for what it offers, though.
If you spend just 1 hour per week on purchase and preparation (and you likely spend two or three), you need to add your hourly rate (or the value you assigned to a loat hour of hobby, unless making these meals is your hobby)
It is not easy to account for "time spent doing X", but assigning $0 to eat is most definitely wrong.
If you do the components+time math properly, it is likely soylent and even McDonalds is cheaper. It is only when you add "enjoying food" and "future health" that you may (or may not) win against them.
Soylent is so awful for you. They really capitalized on the ignorance of millenials with regard to proper nutrition.
edit: Shouldn't have trigger responded, but one of my biggest gripes with Soylent is their use of maltodextrin. It's not something you want to be consuming in mass every day. It is good for post-workout nutrition but as a meal you may as well be consuming sugar.
Don’t forget that they use a calcium carbonate instead of calcium phosphate. Calcium carbonate has significantly less bioavailability and Soylent still claims to have 100% of your DV.
Regardless of whether you are right or wrong, your comment is just a massive appeal to authority containing no actual information. It contributes nothing but an insult.
For those who don't know MyMuesli: It's a company which lets you mix your own muesli (from ~350 ingredients) and ship it to you. It's one of Germanys most successful non-VC-funded startups. They started in 2007 with just a website and nowadawys got shops in most major german cities where you can pick up your ordered muesli (useful for customers who avoid the delivery costs) or buy pre-mixed packs. Even though their muesli is anything but cheap they're hugely successful.
Ugh -- Soylent and now this seems to represent a branch of scientism at its worse.
Our bodies are complicated. Therefore, nutrition science is complicated, and very much a work in progress. Because people eat various things all their lives in an uncontrolled way, and because what you eat can have impacts on you 10, 20, or 50 years down the line, getting reliable nutritional data is extremely expensive and difficult.
There are many interactions that we still don't understand, unknown unknowns where we don't even know what the questions yet. For example, we know now that our gut microbiome has important influence on our metabolism, immune systems, and overall health. And yet little of this research existed 20 years ago because there was no cheap DNA sequencing, and we still don't know today how what we eat influences our internal ecology. We certainly don't know what eating a bunch of Soylent for a couple decades would do to a person's microbiome, because nobody has ever tried it.
A dose of humility and common sense would suggest that radically transforming your diet based on our current reductive knowledge of nutrition is an extremely risky bet.
The much safer bet is eating traditionally: eat foods in combinations and proportions that our ancestors and cultures have actually tried and tweaked over thousands of years of empirical experimentation and co-evolution.
I disagree with your assertion that it is "extremely risky" to apply current nutrition knowledge. Since we don't understand the effects of the "traditional" diet, it's not clear whether it is helping or hurting us. Yes, we have empirical evidence, but as you said it is poorly controlled. So all we can know is that if we eat a "traditional" diet, we will probably live close to the average lifespan and have average health issues as has been observed for traditional diets.
Additionally, there are a wide variety of traditional diets that cover very different foods. Since everything in the body interacts in complicated ways, we cannot even generalize specific foods as being "non-risky" to eat, since the empirical evidence we have only applies to the interactions of each food with the rest of the diet. So it's not clear what would actually constitute a definitive "traditional" diet; the best we could do would be to try and mimic a specific traditional diet as closely as possible, which still doesn't take into account the interactions caused by non-diet aspects of health like amount of exercise.
There is value in that kind of stability, but by incorporating mainstream nutrition research into your diet you can trade increased risk for what is likely to be a better average result. I say likely to be better than average because, as incomplete as nutrition data is, some data is still better than no data. It doesn't make sense to ignore what we know in the moment just because it might be wrong later. As long as you research carefully and stick to the most well studied aspects of nutrition, risk is minimal.
It's also worth pointing out that the normal person's diet today is already a large departure from traditional diets. So even if we assume a "traditional" diet is the goal, it does not follow that that Soylent would be better or worse than the normal person's diet today. It's likely that the human body is adaptable enough to handle whatever you eat.
Evolution has only selected for diets that get you to reproduction. Those have very little overlap with what make you live well into your 80s+.
Your appeal to nature holds as much weight as the soylent science when it comes down to it. The only constant in the human diet is change. What our ancestors ate even 500 years ago has very little overlap with what we even consider "traditional food" now.
Tasmanian here. I got in the habit of making a similar muesli (okay, they're all similar) but substituting grated raw potato for rolled oats, and tahini + water instead of milk.
The whole purpose of soylent is to allow me to spend 13 hours per day coding on adderall without leaving my room. Healthy or not, I think OP missed the point of ready made, no cleanup food.
So about a half kilogram of oats and raisins with oil and various additives? I guess it's slightly more palatable than Soylent but eating it seems just incredibly grueling.
I cannot comment on the nutritional quality, but the way the ingredients are written down irritated me, e.g. "parsleydried" instead of "dried parsley". It makes it seem more like crafting instructions for Minecraft than a real-world recipe.
I've been eating Soylent twice a day for more than a year as my primary food source. I'm always interested in new variants (especially ones that cut down on cost) - this one seems interesting. Any chance that there's an Amazon shopping cart that someone can add to get all this stuff easily?
Also, I noticed that the Readme links to Rob Rhinehart's page (http://robrhinehart.com). Unfortunately, it looks like it's all been taken down. Anybody know why?
Honest question: Do you not enjoy food? What do you think the benefits are?
I'm asking because I think I would be severely depressed on such a monotone diet. I love cooking and it gives me great joy to eat good food, or new kinds of food, or even the boring lunch restaurant type food if it's done reasonably well.
Lunch is also a nice social event. I'm skipping lunch sometimes (when I'm not that hungry) but I feel like I missing the social aspect then.
I personally view Soylant in the same way I do infant formula. It has changed drastically since it was first introduced as we learn more and more about what is in actual breastmilk and why it matters for development. Similarly there are probably many other components in whole foods that are important that we may not even quantify yet. Not to mention the importance of actualy chewing food so that the enzymes from saliva accompany the meal and assist in breaking down various components.
Imagine what Soylant would have looked like 50 years ago and how much it would have been missing. Now imagine how in 50 years we will learn just as much if not more and look back at our crude attempts in the same vain.
[+] [-] opportune|8 years ago|reply
First, as a male I am concerned about isoflavones. I've read sources that go either way on how much it actually affects hormone levels, but since I suspect there is a lot more pressure from the agriculture / vegetarian community to make it seem safer than it is than from any other community to not, I lean towards it not being that good for you.
Second, the consistency is absolutely terrible. They don't need to make it too seedy, but leaving some of the nuts and seeds at least somewhat coarse would improve its texture beyond "slime that makes your teeth feel terrible and gross".
As is, it doesn't even make economic sense, because I can feed myself much tastier food than soylent for like $3-6 a day. Like, why would you choose soylent over food such as eggs, chicken, spinach, broccoli, oatmeal, etc?
What I really wish someone would do, is make a milk-based soylent with stuff that is actually good for you like sunflower seeds. That would actually taste good and probably be much better for you.
[+] [-] cropsieboss|8 years ago|reply
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524224
Any kind of food demonizing is not good.
[+] [-] fermuch|8 years ago|reply
I agree it is too expensive for what it offers, though.
[+] [-] beagle3|8 years ago|reply
It is not easy to account for "time spent doing X", but assigning $0 to eat is most definitely wrong.
If you do the components+time math properly, it is likely soylent and even McDonalds is cheaper. It is only when you add "enjoying food" and "future health" that you may (or may not) win against them.
[+] [-] eljimmy|8 years ago|reply
edit: Shouldn't have trigger responded, but one of my biggest gripes with Soylent is their use of maltodextrin. It's not something you want to be consuming in mass every day. It is good for post-workout nutrition but as a meal you may as well be consuming sugar.
[+] [-] k_sh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubatuga|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hueving|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtuallynathan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dunedan|8 years ago|reply
For those who don't know MyMuesli: It's a company which lets you mix your own muesli (from ~350 ingredients) and ship it to you. It's one of Germanys most successful non-VC-funded startups. They started in 2007 with just a website and nowadawys got shops in most major german cities where you can pick up your ordered muesli (useful for customers who avoid the delivery costs) or buy pre-mixed packs. Even though their muesli is anything but cheap they're hugely successful.
[+] [-] StavrosK|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] L29Ah|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xc001|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallnamespace|8 years ago|reply
Our bodies are complicated. Therefore, nutrition science is complicated, and very much a work in progress. Because people eat various things all their lives in an uncontrolled way, and because what you eat can have impacts on you 10, 20, or 50 years down the line, getting reliable nutritional data is extremely expensive and difficult.
There are many interactions that we still don't understand, unknown unknowns where we don't even know what the questions yet. For example, we know now that our gut microbiome has important influence on our metabolism, immune systems, and overall health. And yet little of this research existed 20 years ago because there was no cheap DNA sequencing, and we still don't know today how what we eat influences our internal ecology. We certainly don't know what eating a bunch of Soylent for a couple decades would do to a person's microbiome, because nobody has ever tried it.
A dose of humility and common sense would suggest that radically transforming your diet based on our current reductive knowledge of nutrition is an extremely risky bet.
The much safer bet is eating traditionally: eat foods in combinations and proportions that our ancestors and cultures have actually tried and tweaked over thousands of years of empirical experimentation and co-evolution.
[+] [-] affinehat|8 years ago|reply
Additionally, there are a wide variety of traditional diets that cover very different foods. Since everything in the body interacts in complicated ways, we cannot even generalize specific foods as being "non-risky" to eat, since the empirical evidence we have only applies to the interactions of each food with the rest of the diet. So it's not clear what would actually constitute a definitive "traditional" diet; the best we could do would be to try and mimic a specific traditional diet as closely as possible, which still doesn't take into account the interactions caused by non-diet aspects of health like amount of exercise.
There is value in that kind of stability, but by incorporating mainstream nutrition research into your diet you can trade increased risk for what is likely to be a better average result. I say likely to be better than average because, as incomplete as nutrition data is, some data is still better than no data. It doesn't make sense to ignore what we know in the moment just because it might be wrong later. As long as you research carefully and stick to the most well studied aspects of nutrition, risk is minimal.
It's also worth pointing out that the normal person's diet today is already a large departure from traditional diets. So even if we assume a "traditional" diet is the goal, it does not follow that that Soylent would be better or worse than the normal person's diet today. It's likely that the human body is adaptable enough to handle whatever you eat.
[+] [-] hueving|8 years ago|reply
Your appeal to nature holds as much weight as the soylent science when it comes down to it. The only constant in the human diet is change. What our ancestors ate even 500 years ago has very little overlap with what we even consider "traditional food" now.
[+] [-] pointytrees|8 years ago|reply
Seems like some folks have really poor diets by choice, and this couldn't be that much worse. Could it?
[+] [-] boltn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyberferret|8 years ago|reply
* Whole rolled oats
* Pumpkin seeds
* LSA (powdered)
* Sunflower seeds
* Chopped green apple
* Coconut water and Orange Juice 50/50 mix (NOT Milk, Ugh!)
* Mango flavoured thick greek yoghurt
Mmm...
[+] [-] contingencies|8 years ago|reply
LSA is a 3 in 1 solution [...] made of ground linseed, ground sunflower seeds and ground almonds
Seems to be a thing in Australia and New Zealand.
[+] [-] Rotten194|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|8 years ago|reply
Try it!
[+] [-] nnfy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwrk|8 years ago|reply
See the sample here https://dump.bitcheese.net/files/cacobil/muesli-example.html
[+] [-] djur|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majewsky|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterhajas|8 years ago|reply
Also, I noticed that the Readme links to Rob Rhinehart's page (http://robrhinehart.com). Unfortunately, it looks like it's all been taken down. Anybody know why?
[+] [-] kpil|8 years ago|reply
I'm asking because I think I would be severely depressed on such a monotone diet. I love cooking and it gives me great joy to eat good food, or new kinds of food, or even the boring lunch restaurant type food if it's done reasonably well.
Lunch is also a nice social event. I'm skipping lunch sometimes (when I'm not that hungry) but I feel like I missing the social aspect then.
[+] [-] fernly|8 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/6dbw74/rob_rinehar...
[+] [-] pacificresearch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gehwartzen|8 years ago|reply
Imagine what Soylant would have looked like 50 years ago and how much it would have been missing. Now imagine how in 50 years we will learn just as much if not more and look back at our crude attempts in the same vain.
[+] [-] ziedaniel1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VectorLock|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chinjut|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|8 years ago|reply