3 ms·

As far as I can tell, Ensure is just sugary chocolate milk with vitamin pills, ie it has horrible macro-nutrient balance. Its not like these companies do their

As far as I can tell, Ensure is just sugary chocolate milk with vitamin pills, ie it has horrible macro-nutrient balance. Its not like these companies do their own research anyways; its an application of the same nutritional studies everyone else has access too.

greglindahl 10y ago
And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients. While Ensure has more sugar that I'd like, at least it's not totally ignorant.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  >>And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients. Care to elaborate? What exactly do you mean by "what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients"?
  - webscaleizfun 10y ago
    Different food items will have different absorption rates for the nutrients they contain when passing through your stomach, upper & lower intestine. For example, an apple may contain a small amount of iron absorbed at a rate of 20%, while a steak may contain significantly more, with an absorption rate of 80%. These absorption rates can also vary widely from person to person, based on the flora in your gut, the drugs you ingest, your diet, and also certain DNA (eg. most East Asians never developed specific lactose related digestive abilities [1]) and ancestry can significantly alter this too. For example, my grandfather had issues with high iron absorption, thus he would regularly donate blood to get rid of the excess iron in his bloodstream. Neither I nor my immediate family share that issue, but he made dietary choices based in part on avoiding iron rich food (like the iron enriched cookies I used to eat, mmm). TL;DR: Your body & the food you eat are very complex things to understand, and we understand the tiniest sliver about it. Highly processed food likely misses important nutrients you need. 1 - https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statistics https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...
    - mcv 10y ago
      But how much fast food has paid attention to those things? That Soylent is not perfect does not mean it's not better than the likely alternative. Food like this that's specifically tuned to your own metabolism would be fantastic of course, but just getting some healthy stuff into you instead of whatever the vending machine sells, is already an enormous improvement for a lot of people.

greglindahl 10y ago

And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients. While Ensure has more sugar that I'd like, at least it's not totally ignorant.

enraged_camel 10y ago
>>And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients. Care to elaborate? What exactly do you mean by "what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients"?
- webscaleizfun 10y ago
  Different food items will have different absorption rates for the nutrients they contain when passing through your stomach, upper & lower intestine. For example, an apple may contain a small amount of iron absorbed at a rate of 20%, while a steak may contain significantly more, with an absorption rate of 80%. These absorption rates can also vary widely from person to person, based on the flora in your gut, the drugs you ingest, your diet, and also certain DNA (eg. most East Asians never developed specific lactose related digestive abilities [1]) and ancestry can significantly alter this too. For example, my grandfather had issues with high iron absorption, thus he would regularly donate blood to get rid of the excess iron in his bloodstream. Neither I nor my immediate family share that issue, but he made dietary choices based in part on avoiding iron rich food (like the iron enriched cookies I used to eat, mmm). TL;DR: Your body & the food you eat are very complex things to understand, and we understand the tiniest sliver about it. Highly processed food likely misses important nutrients you need. 1 - https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statistics https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...
  - mcv 10y ago
    But how much fast food has paid attention to those things? That Soylent is not perfect does not mean it's not better than the likely alternative. Food like this that's specifically tuned to your own metabolism would be fantastic of course, but just getting some healthy stuff into you instead of whatever the vending machine sells, is already an enormous improvement for a lot of people.