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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

I doubt you really want just "to not die" from your food.

Your mental health, ability to work, and happiness are all impacted pretty heavily by your diet. Lacking some nutrients can increase depression, lacking others can result in always feeling tired and sluggish, etc.

The reason I'm wary of soylent is not because I doubt that I could live on it (many people have lived for fairly significant durations on basically only soylent), but because I worry it would overall decrease my quality of life. Saving time eating is great, but it's not worth feeling like shit the rest of the time.

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That is a bit of hyperbole, but the sentiment is there.

I'm not looking for a "food replacement" though. I just want something that I can eat for lunch because I often forget to eat anything at all (also with breakfast, but that's more of not wanting to waste the time on making a good breakfast).

Soylent seems like a great choice vs nothing half of the time. It's also better than me just eating rasin bran for the 20th morning in a row.

Breakfast is actually pretty easy to make 1) cheap and 2) easy to prepare.

It takes about 5 minutes to grill an egg or boil one. If you soak oatmeal overnight, it takes about 10 minutes to fully cook. You can make toast or hashbrowns in about that amount of time as well.

My routine is often start heating some food, then go brush my teeth while it's heating, so no time wasted.

Small condiments can add a lot of variety -- buy a tub of yogurt, cream, cheese, salmon slices, sausage, etc., then just mix and match. You won't have to have the same meal twice in a week.

And if cooking is simply too much of a hassle, why not just buy some apples, oranges, or whatever fruit suits your fancy, and just eat it whole? Pretty sure everyone agrees that fruit is healthy, and they're cheap.

But I'm looking for consistency, not variation. I want the same thing every morning, I dont want to have to prepare by going to the store, checking experiation dates and timing usage before stuff goes bad, etc.

It seems funny that people are coming out of the woodwork to tell me alternatives to Soylent like its some kind of toxic waste. I might be horribly wrong, but I'm pretty sure that a soylent shake is going to be nutritionally better for me than an orange in the mornings...

To be clear, I wouldn't suggest that Soylent is some kind of toxic waste (though I think it tastes like shit, personally). It's certainly better than an orange. But I would suggest that there is a human good in being willing and able to do things for yourself that is worth reflecting on and exploring. Like, there's an Aristotelian "are we really attempting to achieve the good?" question that I would put to people who neglect--and this word is chosen very carefully--themselves in lieu of other pursuits.

I don't claim to have any answers on this, mind! And I'm certainly not perfect about any of this (said my waistline, peevishly), but actually thinking about this stuff has made me spend more time taking care of myself. And I actively wonder if attempted solve-everythings like Soylent are not a step backwards for us as people, instead of mere consumers. The stuff you don't want to do with regard to going to the store and so on is so very, very trivial, and yet actually engages you with the ephemera of your world in a way that I would suggest meditating on before discarding.

Is Soylent actually better than an orange though?

For example:

https://discourse.soylent.com/t/phytonutrients-and-all-the-o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistant_starch

http://www.webmd.com/diet/guide/phytonutrients-faq#1

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4287321/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26757793

There are all sorts of compounds in natural foods that science hasn't even begun to analyze in depth, but which humans have been eating and coevolved with for millions of years. What's the effect if you take them all out of your diet completely?

Soylent's strategy, understandably, is to put in all the things that we think we already understand and know we need, but what if that's only 10% of what the body needs long term? How do you quantify the risk from unknown unknowns?

Also, the comparison isn't really between Soylent and oranges alone, but Soylent and a normal balanced diet, of which fruit is one component.

My hunch is that it is, because of the lack of sugar bomb involved in fruit. But as mentioned in the other thread, fruit makes me feel like complete shit.

You did suggest a piece of fruit as a replacement breakfast, though. I agree with you in the large, but I think you left this barn door open a bit. =)

Soylent's glycemic index is comparable to 1-2 servings of fruit:

https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/212769503-Glycemic...

http://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycem...

I too always find it really curious that people find breakfast so time-consuming. My breakfasts are three scrambled eggs and a tablespoon of light cream; I grab whatever I've got handy--sliced mushrooms, cubed ham, whatever--toss it in a skillet, once it's browned and happy I pour in the eggs and it's only a couple minutes from there on high heat. Couple dashes of hot sauce when I dish it onto a plate, and I'm done. It takes ten minutes, cleanup is "toss the plate in the dishwasher and run a paper towel inside the skillet", and I'm not hungry until well after lunch. If I'm going to be really time-crunched I'll hard-boil a few couple eggs the night before in a steamer--fifteen minutes and out. (If I screwed up--well, I'm going to be hungry until I can scrounge up something reasonably healthful, and I will do better next time. Discipline is weird, huh?)

Many people don't really agree that fruit is healthy, though, given how much sugar is in it; I personally avoid it, because I feel like hell when I have it.

YMMV, but usually fruit sugar is ok because you're eating a bunch of fiber at the same, so the impact on blood sugar is smoothed out. Eating fruit after your meal also helps.

It would take me 10 minutes to prepare what you just described, 20 minutes to eat, and at least 20 minutes to clean up.

Some people don't afford to spend one hour for this, especially in the morning, and some people find 20 minutes of mandatory cleanup exhausting; both physically and mentally.

I love to cook and to eat good food. I cook real, elaborate, dinner at least 3-4 times a week. However, I can't affort to spend one hour every day for breakfast. That being said, Soylent is... awful. For me the alternative is not to eat soylent for breakfast, but to skip breakfast.

20 minutes to clean up? Huh. I just wipe down the stove with a rag and wipe down the skillet and I'm done. (If I'm feeling very lazy, I'll use a paper plate and just chuck it, but I'd rather not so in the dishwasher it goes.)

Eating time...well, that's a personal thing. =) I do WFH, so I am more relaxed on that, but I tend to scarf food down, so, eh.

> I just wipe down the stove with a rag.

Well, I can't just do that. See my response to smallnamespace: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12670789

Yesterday I made roast beef for dinner (http://i.imgur.com/b2ZBblD.jpg), and after I finished eating cleanup took 70 minutes (I measure these things), more than the actual hands-on time I spent preparing the food, plus the time I spent eating!

It's just that I am really thorough when it comes to cleanliness in the kitchen.

Oatmeal and milk in a thermos, add some flavored protein powder. Shake. Drink on the way to work. Healthy, tasty, satiating and does not get any easier.

> 5 minutes.

Yeah, 5 minutes of cooking and 20 minutes of cleaning.

Honest question: where's the 20 minutes of cleaning?

I don't use a dishwasher, so every bowl, dish, cup, plate, and utensil I use gets handwashed.

Even so, boiling an egg, making a slice of toast, and then having a piece of fruit costs me <3 minutes of cleanup time: rinsing 1 plate, 1 pot, and a spoon.

To be fair, I do this more or less every day, so I have plenty of practice.

Boiling an egg, sure. Fried eggs or making an omelette? That requires me to wait for the stove to cool enough, then wash it (and the controls too). Plus I most likely won't want to eat a plain egg. I will add some stuff, bacon, onion, etc. That means I will have to clean up the cutting board too. And there's always some stuff like bits of onion that fall off the cutting board to the counter, so I will have to clean up the counter too. Plus, while I eat, I will put the used fork on the table, so I will have to clean the table too.

The 20 minute number is not arbitrary. I deeply care about optimising time spent cooking and eating, and I have measured this stuff for myself. Sure I can make something that takes two minutes to clean, but I want to eat something more satisfying that requires me to fry something. And cleanup after that, takes 20 minutes (more or less) if you are insane about the cleanup standards like I am.

Sounds like you are a lot more fastidious than the average person.

I don't really see any need to clean my stove (or even the controls) more often than 1x / week (I cook daily), and the cutting board always occupies the same space on the counter, so the counter also gets thoroughly wiped once a week. The table gets wiped 1x a day, not after every single meal. Dishes, plates, and utensils just go soak in the sink so I only batch wash everything once a day.

Note that I'm still following all the usual food safety protocols, e.g. separating raw from cooked and washing my hands at appropriate times, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is that it probably does take you 20 minutes to clean after every meal, but that's probably much higher than average, and shouldn't be what keeps the average person from cooking.

> Most people who try soylent feel much better than when they don't drink it. Your uninformed opinion means nothing.

"Most people", huh? How about some scientific studies to this effect instead of green-texter assertions that another poster's hesitance means nothing?

> It's my opinion from having tried it and talking with those who have tried it. I don't need a scientific study to tell me how to form an opinion based on observation. I also don't need people stating their opinion without ever having tried something. They're just spewing bs to stroke their own ego at the expense of honest discussion.

So you've talked to a statistically valid sample of Soylent users to conclude "most people" believe as you do? Interesting. How about you provide that data?

Oh, wait. You haven't talked to a statistically valid sample, you're just doing exactly the same thing you're accusing him of. I get that you might be a fan of Tech-Branded Slim-Fast, but come on. Be better than this.

(And I have tried it. I disagree with you. Oh no! Countering anecdotes with anecdotes!)

Umm, You are replying to a dot...

The author edited away his posts.

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