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> Ever tried to have 100% daily recommended intake of every nutrient? I take soylent (that is, a European fork of it) with some regularity. Mainly out of lazin
by lucb1e 5y ago
> Ever tried to have 100% daily recommended intake of every nutrient?
I take soylent (that is, a European fork of it) with some regularity. Mainly out of laziness, but also I hope that it's good for whatever I might have been deficient in when eating other foods. It doesn't reduce how healthy I try to eat, but with a picky partner and semi-picky self, it probably helps. It's also just convenient. Would recommend. The flavored versions, that is, not the cardboard variant.
In case anyone wants to get started and isn't sure what to try first, some of the variants I tried or know people that tried it:
- Jimmy Joy (previously: Joylent), their Plenny Shake powder: I like all flavors that I tried (that is chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and banana).
- Nano: not a big fan of it, and neither is friend A that gave it to me iirc.
- Huel: friends B and C liked it a lot better than JJ, but the Huel Black (B,C didn't try that one) is absolutely disgusting to me as well as to friend D. I and friends A,D never tried the regular Huel.
Not sure how close each is to the original Soylent, but Joylent as a name probably says enough. If you read their blog, the updates to the powder seem to be about things like "uptake was found not to be great for X so we increased that" and some such. I also liked SoylentLife which iirc was closer to Soylent than Joylent was at the time, but they went out of business.
One interesting data point is that I am much less vitamin D deficient than my girlfriend who doesn't eat any soylent variants (she doesn't like any). We eat many meals together / the same stuff, and if anything she sees more sunlight than I do, so that might say something or nothing. There have also been a lot of people that do Jimmy Joy only (eating nothing else) for months and then have their blood checked and it comes back clean. From what I've been able to find, it's quite fine as a food replacement, but of course you don't have to (and I don't) use it that way. Other brands probably have similar tests done on them but I didn't look into those as I only ever ate them experimentally.
- opportune 5y agoThe issue I have with soylent and some of their competitors is that they get to their RDA amounts by directly adding vitamins and minerals, some of which have low absorption depending on how they are bound - for example zinc and magnesium oxides have poor absorption compared to other zinc and magnesium salts - and which is not substantially better than just taking a multivitamin as far as I can tell.
- lucb1e 5y ago> they get to their RDA amounts by directly adding vitamins and minerals, some of which have low absorption Do read the blogs from these companies. This is taken into account, and updated when new studies come out. From what I know, the reference intake was a starting point and they're definitely reading the research on real uptake from supplements. (Like, even you and I know about uptake issues, and it's these people's jobs to know about it. They're not stupid.) Not sure if you saw, since I've been editing the post a bit, but also people that eat only this for months still have normal blood values, so either they're not measuring what they're deficient on or uptake is good. Last I checked was a while ago, probably they were on Jimmy Joy powder version 1 or maybe 2. > not substantially better than just taking a multivitamin I wasn't arguing that eating healthily can't be done via other ways. Waterluvian was asking about matching the reference intake, this would just be one way to do it. If you already do it with supplements or even just a lot of vegetables, power to you!
- opportune 5y agoOh, I think I started writing my reply before you added that. Will take a look. >Even you and I know about uptake issues, and it's these people's jobs to know about it. They're not stupid. Sure, but their primary goal is to get people to buy their product, not necessarily to be as nutritious as possible. You could apply this same argument to the myriad vitamin and supplement companies which use the cheapest possible mineral salts even if the absorption is trash.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]