7 ms·

Freedom from Food

51 points by benbreen 12y ago

atonse 12y ago
As someone who truly enjoys eating (and lovingly assembling each bite and taking my time, the social aspects, etc), I don't think I could fully move over to something like Soylent. But during the weekday, I find thinking about lunch (packing it or deciding which restaurant to go to, etc) to be a real waste of time. In other words, are you guys exploring a formula that would work well for just "Monday to Friday lunches" combined with a regular diet for dinners and weekends?
- IamThePherocity 12y ago
  I entirely expect to have both breakfast and lunch as soylent (like) meals and then enjoy suppers. I end up eating less healthy because I don't have time to make a good lunch every day, it's just not possible. Breakfast is usually skipped. I don't even care if it's disgusting, as long as I'm getting enough nutrients to sustain me.
  - atonse 12y ago
    Same here - It's also a cost thing. Because I'm often too tired/lazy to pack lunch for the next day, I end up eating out. At $10 a meal or more, these add up quickly. I'd be curious to see how that use case pans out health-wise with Soylent.
zwieback 12y ago
To each their own - there may be people who convert to Soylent but I love spending time in the kitchen or at the dinner table and I suspect I'm not the only one. If I think about what I would do with extra spare time it would include a lot of cooking and baking.
DIVx0 12y ago
As someone who also loves food and preparing it, I am also a consumer of Soylent. While it takes away the joy of a well prepared meal it gives that back in time and convenience. I can't help but spend too much time in the kitchen when I'm making something. I go overboard and over do it to a fault. With a food like Soylent I can get in and out in minutes. Eating Soylent does not mean you can't spend time making a great meal when you have the opportunity too. After several weeks on this new food I appreciate my home cooked meal much more than I had in the past. Win-Win as far as I'm concerned.
- nodata 12y ago
  What do you do with your extra time?
  - Nevermark 12y ago
    DIVx0 (yes, that is his/her natural name) is my neighbor and I wondered the same thing so I began a period of systematic surveillance. Basically I just tapped into the NSA's feed so I can't really take any credit for that. DIVx0 spends a lot of time reading about Soylent, posting on /r/Soylent, Facebooking and Twitting his experiences, and otherwise communicating and mentoring other Soylent users or prospects. The conclusion he and all his Soylent colleagues have come to is that they really do save a lot of time. Occasionally DIVx0 stays up till 1:00am or later writing poetry and odes to Soylent. I thought all of this was really ironic until I checked the NSA's archives and found that in fact DIVx0 used to spend about twice that amount of time preparing, eating, and discussing salsa dip.
laxatives 12y ago
"Another study (also in Japan, which seems to lead this obscure field of research) in 2007 found that eating hard-to-chew foods results in a smaller waist size, but not a lower body-mass index overall." Doesn't this contradict the commonly held belief that its not possible to redistribute the fat around your body (ie, you can't gain abs by just doing core workouts and ignoring nutrition) ? Is that belief just broscience garbage?
- anon4 12y ago
  If they're slightly more muscular, that would make up the difference in mass and since muscle has a somewhat different distribution than fat, would explain the slimmer waist.
- lnanek2 12y ago
  With the rats in the same study, the body weight difference was only 6%, while the different amount of white fat tissue in the belly was 22%. So it is pretty clear the body is changing composition (more muscular, less fatty). BMI is worthless in such a case because it penalizes muscle, which is heavier than fat. I know countless very fit friends who have bad BMIs just because they have a lot of heavy muscle. BMI only allows you to be a certain weight at a certain height, it doesn't allow you to carry muscle instead of fat.
- Dewie 12y ago
  People are different when it comes to how their fat is distributed. Men tend to get a potbelly, as opposed to women who tend to become fat in a more distributed way. Considering that, I guess a person could change when it comes to how their fat reserves are stored. Maybe a hormonal change? But this is just a guess. (The other explanations given also seem reasonable.)
jimrandomh 12y ago
I'm a big fan of this as a product category, but less so of Soylent itself. Recently, I've mostly eaten MealSquares, which have the same premise, but (imo) better execution. They're nutritionally better; they're solid, so people don't look at them strangely; they shipped at reasonable speed, unlike Soylent which keeps falling behind; and, because they're dry instead of liquid, they're more portable.
- eropple 12y ago
  Those look really interesting. How do they taste? How about feeling of fullness? (Most breads or other carb-based foods leave me feeling hungry again shortly thereafter, which sucks.)
  - mquander 12y ago
    I eat a couple a week. The taste is hard to characterize -- it's sort of like some pretty rich slightly fruity bread -- but they have dark chocolate which dominates the flavor when you bite into a chocolatey bit (I suggest microwaving a little before eating to melt it.)
    - eropple 12y ago
      Interesting. Might give it a try. Thanks!
fleitz 12y ago
I guess for some people it works, however, for myself the more I devote to enjoying life the better I feel (and perform, though I no longer have the spreadsheets to prove it).
oe 12y ago
Every Soylent article will have a bunch of comments from people who actually like to spend time on preparing and consuming food. Good for you, I guess? There are still a lot of people who would gladly skip some meals and use the time for something more important. What could be more important? It's not really your problem.
TheSisb2 12y ago
I've received my shipment of Soylent. I read many negative and positive reviews. I've been on it for three weeks now and am loving it so far. In fact, I find myself craving it sometimes. It hasn't replace my meals completely, but as someone who has been skipping breakfast for most of my life I now get the nutrition I need in the mornings and my life has considerably improved as a consequence. The concept of Soylent is wonderful. No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, but it should be able to do so, otherwise it wouldn't work as a single meal either. The joy of cooking still exists, you choose whether you want a quick meal or a longer one. I would still never turn down a well cooked meal for Soylent, but I'm happy to know I have some in my cupboard for when I need it.
- dominotw 12y ago
  I just had my first soylent 'meal'. I am planning to use it as my breakfast meal too.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 12y ago
  "No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, but it should be able to do so, otherwise it wouldn't work as a single meal either." I don't think that follows; we don't expect any other single meal we eat to necessarily be able to a complete diet on its own. I can well imagine it to be far easier to make a 1-meal-a-day replacement than an all-food replacement.
  - TheSisb2 12y ago
    Nothing else we regularly eat is an any-meal replacement. They're all imbalanced. So if Soylent wants to be able to replace any meal it should be balanced enough to replace them all. That's what I meant.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > The concept of Soylent is wonderful. No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, That's exactly the claim they made when they were raising funds. Along with the dubious health claims. > "What if you never had to worry about food again?" > "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." > "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health," > "By taking years to spoil" >"there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet." This is fraudulent horseshit and it's kind of surprising they got away with it. The new website avoids making medical claims, but still says that you can live off it entirely.
jrells 12y ago
I'm surprised so many people engage in a Soylent vs cooking debate as if there are two sides and you have to choose one. Recently I was cooking an elaborate dinner, starting early in the afternoon, and I found myself wishing my Soylent shipment had arrived so I could have lunch without interrupting my dinner preparation.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  Yeah, I see no problem with this being a more complete version of a granola bar. Hungry? Got no time? Here's a complete meal you can fit in a glass. Keeps you alert and powered up for now, though no one in their right mind would want to live solely on clif bars.
- herge 12y ago
  I sometimes wonder if the inventor of the shower was shouted down by people explaining how they enjoyed their baths.
mga226 12y ago
With products like this, the concern is always that we "don't know what we don't know" about human nutrition. Our mechanical understanding of how nutrients do what they do is in its infancy, and human metabolism is mind-bogglingly complicated. This is the thinking behind the (pretty good, in my opinion) advice to "eat real food." I've been toying with the idea of developing a "real food soylent" -- an easy-to-prepare-in-bulk stew or chili, with a base of real-food ingredient options that can be interchanged based on season, availability, and taste. The idea would be to develop a real food framework that could (in theory) constitute once's entire diet. I think of this idea as Soylent minus the hubris.
- coolsunglasses 12y ago
  >I've been toying with the idea of developing a "real food soylent" -- an easy-to-prepare-in-bulk stew or chili, with a base of real-food ingredient options that can be interchanged based on season, availability, and taste. The idea would be to develop a real food framework that could (in theory) constitute once's entire diet. I think of this idea as Soylent minus the hubris. This is not only sensible, strength trainers already do this. My favorite is a cabbage+(beef/venison/lamb) curried stew. You could probably just sell this as microwaveable packets, but then it doesn't have the mystique of Soylent :)
  - mga226 12y ago
    Very interesting, and sounds delicious.
- platz 12y ago
  Right - for example, we didn't even know about phtyo-nutrients until recently. Still, if it only replaces the mexican tortilla chips I eat regularly, I'll probably still come out ahead.
  - mga226 12y ago
    Probably, and to take it a step further, people who are already on diets of mostly processed foods could even see improvements from switching to 100% soylent, which I suspect underlies a lot of the "I went soylent and my blood work improved and I've never felt better!" reports.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
niix 12y ago
Interesting idea. I often find eating sort of a task that is required rather than enjoyed. With that said, my wife has helped me really enjoy the process of sitting down with others and enjoying their company whilst eating. In addition, I've been learning how to cook as well and it's helped me really enjoy the entire process of sitting down and having a meal.
fluxist 12y ago
I was so excited to finally get my Soylent and give it a go. I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately by the second day I found it aversively unpalatable, almost sickening to drink. Along with intense gastrointestinal distress (think food poisoning-level liquefaction) I gave up and now its sitting in the box under my desk collecting dust. I wouldn't even put it in a bomb shelter, I think it would decrease my chances of survival.
chipsy 12y ago
I think the biggest immediate benefit of a product like Soylent is that people can pick it up in order to try _eliminating_ other foods. There are numerous symptoms that correlate to a food intolerance, but aren't immediately life threatening and don't manifest with the typical "swell up and get inflamed" allergic reaction. These are the secret enemies of our diet, as they tend to also involve everyday foods that are integral to the food culture of the household, and their removal can't be so easily justified when the symptoms aren't obvious. Individuals attempting an elimination by changing cooking strategy face conflict, misunderstanding, and to a large extent, their own self-defeating habits. A product like Soylent reduces the cost of experimentation, which is a really big deal.
jonzjia 12y ago
There's a solid version called MealSquares: http://www.mealsquares.com/ http://www.mealsquares.com/ Unfortunately all these foods just remind me of NutraLoaf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf Which is used as a form of punishment for inmates.
VLM 12y ago
1) Something always glossed over in the PR is we've been feeding "sick" people nutritionally complete liquids out of a can for decades with no real problem. Baby formula, and old people and cancer patients drinking Ensure and the like. Its really old stuff and heavily studied. What is new, is marketing it to people who are more or less healthy (as healthy as you can be on the standard American diet of junk food, anyway). I've tried left over cans of ensure. Personally not my cup of tea. Like a melted mcdonalds shake, kind of. Also tried baby formula, not impressed, like super heavy cream, sorta. This previous experimentation does not encourage me to try soylent. 2) Like it or not, admit it or not, we're mammals just like livestock or pets. It seems that feeding housepets scientifically designed food, every day, for decades, really does boost their lifespan compared to a diet of mice and bugs in the wilderness. This gets the anti-evolutionary people all found up, the mere suggestion that us people are animals too or that their god didn't create us separately from the animals ... Also if you talk to a livestock rearing farmer about what he feeds his hogs / cows / whatevers to fatten them up for slaughter, and then compare what he fattens his livestock with, to the ingredients on the food aisles at walmart, and then look at how round the shoppers are, I'm just saying you won't be too surprised. You can dislike it all you want, but we are mammals.

51 points by benbreen 12y ago

As someone who truly enjoys eating (and lovingly assembling each bite and taking my time, the social aspects, etc), I don't think I could fully move over to something like Soylent. But during the weekday, I find thinking about lunch (packing it or deciding which restaurant to go to, etc) to be a real waste of time. In other words, are you guys exploring a formula that would work well for just "Monday to Friday lunches" combined with a regular diet for dinners and weekends?

IamThePherocity 12y ago
I entirely expect to have both breakfast and lunch as soylent (like) meals and then enjoy suppers. I end up eating less healthy because I don't have time to make a good lunch every day, it's just not possible. Breakfast is usually skipped. I don't even care if it's disgusting, as long as I'm getting enough nutrients to sustain me.
- atonse 12y ago
  Same here - It's also a cost thing. Because I'm often too tired/lazy to pack lunch for the next day, I end up eating out. At $10 a meal or more, these add up quickly. I'd be curious to see how that use case pans out health-wise with Soylent.

zwieback 12y ago

To each their own - there may be people who convert to Soylent but I love spending time in the kitchen or at the dinner table and I suspect I'm not the only one. If I think about what I would do with extra spare time it would include a lot of cooking and baking.

DIVx0 12y ago

As someone who also loves food and preparing it, I am also a consumer of Soylent. While it takes away the joy of a well prepared meal it gives that back in time and convenience. I can't help but spend too much time in the kitchen when I'm making something. I go overboard and over do it to a fault. With a food like Soylent I can get in and out in minutes. Eating Soylent does not mean you can't spend time making a great meal when you have the opportunity too. After several weeks on this new food I appreciate my home cooked meal much more than I had in the past. Win-Win as far as I'm concerned.

nodata 12y ago
What do you do with your extra time?
- Nevermark 12y ago
  DIVx0 (yes, that is his/her natural name) is my neighbor and I wondered the same thing so I began a period of systematic surveillance. Basically I just tapped into the NSA's feed so I can't really take any credit for that. DIVx0 spends a lot of time reading about Soylent, posting on /r/Soylent, Facebooking and Twitting his experiences, and otherwise communicating and mentoring other Soylent users or prospects. The conclusion he and all his Soylent colleagues have come to is that they really do save a lot of time. Occasionally DIVx0 stays up till 1:00am or later writing poetry and odes to Soylent. I thought all of this was really ironic until I checked the NSA's archives and found that in fact DIVx0 used to spend about twice that amount of time preparing, eating, and discussing salsa dip.

laxatives 12y ago

"Another study (also in Japan, which seems to lead this obscure field of research) in 2007 found that eating hard-to-chew foods results in a smaller waist size, but not a lower body-mass index overall." Doesn't this contradict the commonly held belief that its not possible to redistribute the fat around your body (ie, you can't gain abs by just doing core workouts and ignoring nutrition) ? Is that belief just broscience garbage?

anon4 12y ago
If they're slightly more muscular, that would make up the difference in mass and since muscle has a somewhat different distribution than fat, would explain the slimmer waist.
lnanek2 12y ago
With the rats in the same study, the body weight difference was only 6%, while the different amount of white fat tissue in the belly was 22%. So it is pretty clear the body is changing composition (more muscular, less fatty). BMI is worthless in such a case because it penalizes muscle, which is heavier than fat. I know countless very fit friends who have bad BMIs just because they have a lot of heavy muscle. BMI only allows you to be a certain weight at a certain height, it doesn't allow you to carry muscle instead of fat.
Dewie 12y ago
People are different when it comes to how their fat is distributed. Men tend to get a potbelly, as opposed to women who tend to become fat in a more distributed way. Considering that, I guess a person could change when it comes to how their fat reserves are stored. Maybe a hormonal change? But this is just a guess. (The other explanations given also seem reasonable.)

jimrandomh 12y ago

I'm a big fan of this as a product category, but less so of Soylent itself. Recently, I've mostly eaten MealSquares, which have the same premise, but (imo) better execution. They're nutritionally better; they're solid, so people don't look at them strangely; they shipped at reasonable speed, unlike Soylent which keeps falling behind; and, because they're dry instead of liquid, they're more portable.

eropple 12y ago
Those look really interesting. How do they taste? How about feeling of fullness? (Most breads or other carb-based foods leave me feeling hungry again shortly thereafter, which sucks.)
- mquander 12y ago
  I eat a couple a week. The taste is hard to characterize -- it's sort of like some pretty rich slightly fruity bread -- but they have dark chocolate which dominates the flavor when you bite into a chocolatey bit (I suggest microwaving a little before eating to melt it.)
  - eropple 12y ago
    Interesting. Might give it a try. Thanks!

fleitz 12y ago

I guess for some people it works, however, for myself the more I devote to enjoying life the better I feel (and perform, though I no longer have the spreadsheets to prove it).

oe 12y ago

Every Soylent article will have a bunch of comments from people who actually like to spend time on preparing and consuming food. Good for you, I guess? There are still a lot of people who would gladly skip some meals and use the time for something more important. What could be more important? It's not really your problem.

TheSisb2 12y ago

I've received my shipment of Soylent. I read many negative and positive reviews. I've been on it for three weeks now and am loving it so far. In fact, I find myself craving it sometimes. It hasn't replace my meals completely, but as someone who has been skipping breakfast for most of my life I now get the nutrition I need in the mornings and my life has considerably improved as a consequence. The concept of Soylent is wonderful. No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, but it should be able to do so, otherwise it wouldn't work as a single meal either. The joy of cooking still exists, you choose whether you want a quick meal or a longer one. I would still never turn down a well cooked meal for Soylent, but I'm happy to know I have some in my cupboard for when I need it.

dominotw 12y ago
I just had my first soylent 'meal'. I am planning to use it as my breakfast meal too.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jerf 12y ago
"No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, but it should be able to do so, otherwise it wouldn't work as a single meal either." I don't think that follows; we don't expect any other single meal we eat to necessarily be able to a complete diet on its own. I can well imagine it to be far easier to make a 1-meal-a-day replacement than an all-food replacement.
- TheSisb2 12y ago
  Nothing else we regularly eat is an any-meal replacement. They're all imbalanced. So if Soylent wants to be able to replace any meal it should be balanced enough to replace them all. That's what I meant.
DanBC 12y ago
> The concept of Soylent is wonderful. No one is saying it should completely replace all meals, That's exactly the claim they made when they were raising funds. Along with the dubious health claims. > "What if you never had to worry about food again?" > "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." > "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health," > "By taking years to spoil" >"there is much evidence that it is considerably healthier than a typical diet." This is fraudulent horseshit and it's kind of surprising they got away with it. The new website avoids making medical claims, but still says that you can live off it entirely.

jrells 12y ago

I'm surprised so many people engage in a Soylent vs cooking debate as if there are two sides and you have to choose one. Recently I was cooking an elaborate dinner, starting early in the afternoon, and I found myself wishing my Soylent shipment had arrived so I could have lunch without interrupting my dinner preparation.

devindotcom 12y ago
Yeah, I see no problem with this being a more complete version of a granola bar. Hungry? Got no time? Here's a complete meal you can fit in a glass. Keeps you alert and powered up for now, though no one in their right mind would want to live solely on clif bars.
herge 12y ago
I sometimes wonder if the inventor of the shower was shouted down by people explaining how they enjoyed their baths.

mga226 12y ago

With products like this, the concern is always that we "don't know what we don't know" about human nutrition. Our mechanical understanding of how nutrients do what they do is in its infancy, and human metabolism is mind-bogglingly complicated. This is the thinking behind the (pretty good, in my opinion) advice to "eat real food." I've been toying with the idea of developing a "real food soylent" -- an easy-to-prepare-in-bulk stew or chili, with a base of real-food ingredient options that can be interchanged based on season, availability, and taste. The idea would be to develop a real food framework that could (in theory) constitute once's entire diet. I think of this idea as Soylent minus the hubris.

coolsunglasses 12y ago
>I've been toying with the idea of developing a "real food soylent" -- an easy-to-prepare-in-bulk stew or chili, with a base of real-food ingredient options that can be interchanged based on season, availability, and taste. The idea would be to develop a real food framework that could (in theory) constitute once's entire diet. I think of this idea as Soylent minus the hubris. This is not only sensible, strength trainers already do this. My favorite is a cabbage+(beef/venison/lamb) curried stew. You could probably just sell this as microwaveable packets, but then it doesn't have the mystique of Soylent :)
- mga226 12y ago
  Very interesting, and sounds delicious.
platz 12y ago
Right - for example, we didn't even know about phtyo-nutrients until recently. Still, if it only replaces the mexican tortilla chips I eat regularly, I'll probably still come out ahead.
- mga226 12y ago
  Probably, and to take it a step further, people who are already on diets of mostly processed foods could even see improvements from switching to 100% soylent, which I suspect underlies a lot of the "I went soylent and my blood work improved and I've never felt better!" reports.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

niix 12y ago

Interesting idea. I often find eating sort of a task that is required rather than enjoyed. With that said, my wife has helped me really enjoy the process of sitting down with others and enjoying their company whilst eating. In addition, I've been learning how to cook as well and it's helped me really enjoy the entire process of sitting down and having a meal.

fluxist 12y ago

I was so excited to finally get my Soylent and give it a go. I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately by the second day I found it aversively unpalatable, almost sickening to drink. Along with intense gastrointestinal distress (think food poisoning-level liquefaction) I gave up and now its sitting in the box under my desk collecting dust. I wouldn't even put it in a bomb shelter, I think it would decrease my chances of survival.

chipsy 12y ago

I think the biggest immediate benefit of a product like Soylent is that people can pick it up in order to try _eliminating_ other foods. There are numerous symptoms that correlate to a food intolerance, but aren't immediately life threatening and don't manifest with the typical "swell up and get inflamed" allergic reaction. These are the secret enemies of our diet, as they tend to also involve everyday foods that are integral to the food culture of the household, and their removal can't be so easily justified when the symptoms aren't obvious. Individuals attempting an elimination by changing cooking strategy face conflict, misunderstanding, and to a large extent, their own self-defeating habits. A product like Soylent reduces the cost of experimentation, which is a really big deal.

jonzjia 12y ago

There's a solid version called MealSquares: http://www.mealsquares.com/ http://www.mealsquares.com/ Unfortunately all these foods just remind me of NutraLoaf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutraloaf Which is used as a form of punishment for inmates.

VLM 12y ago

1) Something always glossed over in the PR is we've been feeding "sick" people nutritionally complete liquids out of a can for decades with no real problem. Baby formula, and old people and cancer patients drinking Ensure and the like. Its really old stuff and heavily studied. What is new, is marketing it to people who are more or less healthy (as healthy as you can be on the standard American diet of junk food, anyway). I've tried left over cans of ensure. Personally not my cup of tea. Like a melted mcdonalds shake, kind of. Also tried baby formula, not impressed, like super heavy cream, sorta. This previous experimentation does not encourage me to try soylent. 2) Like it or not, admit it or not, we're mammals just like livestock or pets. It seems that feeding housepets scientifically designed food, every day, for decades, really does boost their lifespan compared to a diet of mice and bugs in the wilderness. This gets the anti-evolutionary people all found up, the mere suggestion that us people are animals too or that their god didn't create us separately from the animals ... Also if you talk to a livestock rearing farmer about what he feeds his hogs / cows / whatevers to fatten them up for slaughter, and then compare what he fattens his livestock with, to the ingredients on the food aisles at walmart, and then look at how round the shoppers are, I'm just saying you won't be too surprised. You can dislike it all you want, but we are mammals.