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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

> Ample which is similar to Soylent but a bit more health conscious with ingredient choice

What does that mean? How did you make this judgement?

If you go to what they've written up on their website, https://www.amplemeal.com/products/ample, you can see they've taken and written about a lot of care in selecting ingredients.

Off the top of my head, probiotics are a big thing that you don't see in Soylent. Spirulina is included. Omega 3 fatty acids. The emphasis on whole foods rather than nutrients is another thing important to me.

From what they've written it is clear they are taking a significant focus on nutrition, as the expense of, er, expense. This is a trade off I am willing to make.

I don't want to spend my days pouring over the latest nutrition research to see what I should be eating. Before Ample I would spend a lot of time chasing the latest research, yet continually feeling like there were huge things I was missing. It gives me great peace of mind to see that apparently smart people are doing this work in my stead. This is a huge advantage I cannnot overstate.

Looks great. I've been using Huel, the British Soylent knockoff, for 1-2 meals per day (much healthier than the 4oz bag of chips it replaced), and now that I'm moving back to America I'm looking for local alternatives.

Looks good but doesn't list many vitamins or minerals on the label.

The published nutrition panel [1] lists four micros:

Vitamin A 0% (zero percent)

Vitamin C 2%

Calcium 4%

Iron 14%

Since they list no others, one might infer those are not present.

[1] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1096/7494/products/Ample_4...

Hence my comment.

It contains an unnecessary amount of protein if you're only consuming Ample.

Yeah- in comparison to Soylent the Ample guys specifically say not to only eat Ample. Arguably people get less protein than they should.

There is no such thing as protein deficiency in America. If anything Americans get too much.

There's no such thing as poverty in America. If anything Americans should get rid of some stuff.

What does that have to do with protein?

It was a sarcastic retort that your perspective is egocentric extrapolation based upon averages. Akin to looking at the highest GDP/capita and deciding that poverty does not exist.

I still don't get it. How is my comment egocentric?

e·go·cen·tric ˌēɡōˈsentrik/ adjective 1. thinking only of oneself, without regard for the feelings or desires of others; self-centered.

Sorry maybe a poor word choice. By "egocentric extrapolation" I meant applying the statistics on an individual basis, centered around an individual, which is egocentric more in the Greek sense than in common usage.

I recently tried Ample Original and AmpleX, and I like Ample Original quite a bit. The only other product I've tried is from Super Body Fuel, though that one had a pretty different macronutrient profile and required some preparation.

I agree that the focus on nutrition is a huge benefit. In addition, I appreciate the transparency of the company and what seems to be a desire to iterate and improve on their product. Today, they announced a few small tweaks to their formula and released a "change log" (their choice of word) detailing the reasons behind their choices.

Do you personally feel any physically different or have noticed any health improvements upon switching to Ample from Soylent?

Spirulina is far from a good health choice. It got popular because it contains a molecule that's similar to B12, but it turns out that it's not B12. But it does bind to B12 intrinsic factor, which is a problem because intrinsic factor production, not B12 consumption, is frequently the limiting factor in how much of the nutrient you can get into your system.

Or, to put it more succinctly - spirulina : B12 :: CO : O2.

And while I'm laying it on, probiotics isn't really all that impressive, either. Right now the food industry's approach to probiotics is, at best, comparable to the kind of thinking that caused to large swaths of the USA to have problems with kudzu and asian carp.

To be honest, I take my data from examine.com, which does a survey of the literature and backs me up on this (sorry, on mobile so I'm not going to pull out the URL, but google finds it easily). It specifically says spirulina is one of the few "superfoods" that is in fact good for you.

Unless you've done a similar review of the literature and have comparable credentials, I'm probably not going to trust you on this one, unfortunately. It's nothing against you in particular; it's just that literally everyone totes a different set of studies and I can't trust everyone to have done the work necessary to show if they're valid.

Not interested in getting into an Internet argument over credentialism, but I will say that I did some looking at examine.com's treatment on spirulina, and found it to be less than compelling.

It still commits the same fundamental mistake made by any other popular sources that covers supplements: it doesn't really give study quality adequate attention. Instead, it just accepts all published findings as probably being valid. What with the replicability rate for medical research papers being somewhere around 20%, that's an approach that will lead you astray 4 times out of 5.

As a concrete example, the support they give for the first item in the table of results, lipid peroxidation, is three papers with n=37, n=16 and n=9. All of them throw some flags that make me suspect p-hacking may have occurred, with the n=37 one being the most worrisome in that department.

Examine.com absolutely gives study quality, impact factor, etc consideration.

Perhaps your superficial look was the problem.

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