Soylent

[Flack]

There's this new foodstuff, called Soylent. It's not made of people; rather, it's a combination of all the nutrients a person needs to live off of. The recipe is open source -- you can either follow their recipe or order their premixed bag of powder. Off the shelf, Soylent runs around $3/day. Make it yourself and it's about half that.

The first three questions that come up: aren't there already things out there like this, is it safe, and why would anyone want to do this.

In regards to the first one, sure, there are things like Ensure and Slim Fast, but those are designed to be meal replacements and diet supplements, not a person's entire caloric intake. Also, apparently 2,000 calories worth of Ensure is also around 120g of sugar.

The second is, is it safe? In theory, yes. The ingredients are all FDA approved, so in theory, so is Soylent. There are no long term studies as to how people react to a long term Soylent diet because, commercially, it's only been available for a month. Some people have gone for a week or two or even a month on it so far and none of them are dead. I realize this is not the same as a long term scientific study, but the people who did it for a week and switched back to normal food did not encounter any problems.

The third question, "why," is more difficult to explain. First, it's cheap. Second, it's great for people who have trouble making healthy food choices. Soylent limits daily intake and requires no decision making from the consumer. (Gulp, done, move on.) Personally I am considering the time-saving aspects of it. I spend somewhere between 1-2 hours out of my day eating. With Soylent, I can pour a glass, drink, and get back to work.

It won't always work. Sometimes at work we go out for lunch, and sometimes as a family we go out for dinner, but lots of times we don't. Lots of times it's pasta night, or sandwich night, or leftover/fend-for-yourself night. Sure, I could spend a few minutes a whip something up... or I could drink a glass of Soylent and get back to what I was doing.

Sunday night I mixed up my first batch of Soylent and had it as my only source of food on Monday. I put it in a big plastic container and took it to work with me. I didn't divide the three meals equally but rather drank a little for breakfast, more for lunch, and more for dinner. A "full serving" of Soylent is 5oz and around 500 calories. Split it up however you like, I suppose. There are also a regiment of vitamins one should take with it.

For what it's worth, it tastes like egg nog to me -- maybe a little oilier and grittier, but the consistency is similar to pancake batter. I didn't find it offensive. Here's a detail I'm sure TDarcos will find interesting: Tuesday, I shit my brains out. Some combination of the oil mixed with switching to a liquid diet did my tummy in.

Will I consume Soylent on a long term basis? I'm not sure yet. Socially, it's weird to me. I don't like the attention doing something against the norm draws. At home though, or for breakfast, or meals that just don't matter, it's starting to sound like a sane solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food_substitute)

[pinback]

Where did you find it? I don't mean the concept/idea, the actual product that you put in your face?

[Flack]

It's not in stores (yet) -- you have to order it online.

http://www.soylent.me (click on "purchase")

Here's the example recipe:

http://diy.soylent.me/wiki/example-recipe

There are also a ton of different tweaked recipes on the view recipe link. Here's one called liquid cake.

http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/liquid-cake-v12

[Garth's Equipment Shop]

Sweet thanks Flack, something new for my Bug-Out-Bag!

[Flack]

This guy just wrapped up his first month of living on Soylent.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/17/58932 ... ourishment

[Tdarcos]

There's this new foodstuff, called Soylent. It's not made of people; rather, it's a combination of all the nutrients a person needs to live off of.

It has been shown that what you need are the complex carbohydrates your body cannot make from what it eats, and that is beans and rice. My understanding is that you could live indefinitely on beans and rice plus some vitamins.

I'll note that beans and rice tend to be the primary food source for a lot of people in the Asian sphere (China, Japan, the Koreas) and these people routinely live into their 80s and beyond because they lack one essential item in their diet that tends to be deadly for Westerners: Red meat.

But when these people get wealthier and come up to Western standards of living, their levels of coronary disease, heart attacks, and all the other problems our overly rich and insufficiently nutritious diets cause us, rise up to equivalent levels of cancers, strokes, heart problems and death at young ages.

Given the type of diet people have in Western Civilization, to make this stuff palatable it's got to have some form of sweeteners and such. I make a smoothie every day with my Nutribullet, where I have Romaine Lettuce, Brocoli, Cucumber, plus strawberries and blueberres, and a banana to add sweetness.

So I suspect it's some form of vegetable material combined possibly with a banana to make it smooth, creamy and taste better.

[Flack]

There's no secret as to what it is. The recipe is on the website. A lot of other people have tweaked the recipe for their own needs/palettes and have posted their recipes as well.

[pinback]

I make a smoothie every day with my Nutribullet

Stop euphemizing your penis.

[Garth's Equipment Shop]

It has been shown that what you need are the complex carbohydrates your body cannot make from what it eats, and that is beans and rice. My understanding is that you could live indefinitely on beans and rice plus some vitamins.

I'll note that beans and rice tend to be the primary food source for a lot of people in the Asian sphere (China, Japan, the Koreas) and these people routinely live into their 80s and beyond because they lack one essential item in their diet that tends to be deadly for Westerners: Red meat.

What a load of anti-Western non-sense. Stop reading residual 60's counter culture propaganda. Heres a crash course on red meat myths for ya.

http://authoritynutrition.com/8-ridicul ... nd-health/

And here is why the '7 countries study' that your data about heart disease is based on (whether you knew it or not) is a fallacy.

http://authoritynutrition.com/modern-nu ... d-science/

In a nutshell the idea behind the 7 countries study was that we could learn more about the relationship between diet and heart disease by comparing different countries diets and frequency of heart disease. The above link is to an article that pokes holes in the conclusion the researchers came to by showing how they used the most common trick in the book. Selective data or in other words omission of any data that did not fit the conclusion they were looking for. Oldest Jedi mind trick in the book... "this is not the data you are looking for..."

[youtube][/youtube]

For example Eskimos. They get zero rice, beans, or grains, or even vegetables of any kind. They live longer than anyone and though they live on a lot of fish they also consume more fat (blubber) than anyone on earth. Thats from my own reading elsewhere and isn't on that site I linked to here.

But when these people get wealthier and come up to Western standards of living, their levels of coronary disease, heart attacks, and all the other problems our overly rich and insufficiently nutritious diets cause us, rise up to equivalent levels of cancers, strokes, heart problems and death at young ages.

I think you'll find that affluence does not correlate to incidence of heart disease but in fact the opposite is true, at least in America. The poorer we are the less choice we have as to what we can eat. We eat whatever is cheapest, and thus the less we can afford expensive healthy diets the more junk food, processed and artificially preserved, genetically modified, high sodium, high fructose, high cholestorol, high glutton, etc. foods we are forced to consume to survive.

The highly affluent can afford to have dietitions, health trainers, cooks, etc. or can afford to do all their grocery shopping at health food stores or in the healthiest sections of the grocery stores. America definitely has a lot of problems with the mass produced foods it stocks it's own super markets with and fast food restaurants but red meat isn't the scape goat your looking for. Mass produced breads and grains of every kind is far worse for us than red meat ever was.

http://authoritynutrition.com/why-is-bread-bad-for-you/

And another thing. They don't have to come to America to eat deadly foods. Theres a McDonalds in every country on the planet now.

[Garth's Equipment Shop]

The video clip from Heathers was set to start at 39 seconds where the creepy new age minister of the funeral says the word Eskimo that was underlined in the dead Heather's copy of Moby Dick which he explains is full of mystery and symbolic meaning.

[Garth's Equipment Shop]

Oops my mistake. I was mixing up that minister guy's roles when I called him a new age minister. In Heathers he was playing a Catholic type priest. He played a weird new age type in Beetlejuice I think.