Muesli – An alternative approach to Soylent
github.com
github.com
First, as a male I am concerned about isoflavones. I've read sources that go either way on how much it actually affects hormone levels, but since I suspect there is a lot more pressure from the agriculture / vegetarian community to make it seem safer than it is than from any other community to not, I lean towards it not being that good for you.
Second, the consistency is absolutely terrible. They don't need to make it too seedy, but leaving some of the nuts and seeds at least somewhat coarse would improve its texture beyond "slime that makes your teeth feel terrible and gross".
As is, it doesn't even make economic sense, because I can feed myself much tastier food than soylent for like $3-6 a day. Like, why would you choose soylent over food such as eggs, chicken, spinach, broccoli, oatmeal, etc?
What I really wish someone would do, is make a milk-based soylent with stuff that is actually good for you like sunflower seeds. That would actually taste good and probably be much better for you.
I agree it is too expensive for what it offers, though.
I like the idea; but in reality I'd rather jut have some toast if I want something quick. I know it's not as good for me but food is more than just getting calories and nutrients in. I get pleasure from eating a variety of textures and flavours.
It works for me though, I wake up at 6:40, get a shower, iron some clothes, drink some Huel and am out the door at 7:20 to get the tube to go to work.
Other meals during the day are "normal", but it ticks the box for breakfast for me (quick to consume, fits in with my routine etc)
[1] I still have to try it out. I can't quite get myself to order the smallest pack (a full week's supply) when I don't even know if I like it.
Ensure comes in more flavours, btw.:
Banana, Chocolate, Coffee, Fruits of the Forest, Neutral, Orange, Peach, Raspberry, Strawberry, Vanilla
And the Ensure juice style drinks.
It is not easy to account for "time spent doing X", but assigning $0 to eat is most definitely wrong.
If you do the components+time math properly, it is likely soylent and even McDonalds is cheaper. It is only when you add "enjoying food" and "future health" that you may (or may not) win against them.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524224
Any kind of food demonizing is not good.
edit: Shouldn't have trigger responded, but one of my biggest gripes with Soylent is their use of maltodextrin. It's not something you want to be consuming in mass every day. It is good for post-workout nutrition but as a meal you may as well be consuming sugar.
Both my current and previous company got in Soylent on occasion; the current one has gotten Coffiest a few times, which I haven't tried, while the earlier one got in the bottled Soylent and the short-lived Soylent Bar. I tried the bottled version once--maybe twice?--and had no ill effects, but didn't particularly like it, either. I had no ill effects from the bar, either, and I confess I actually rather liked it. I'd probably order it again, assuming it seemed safe.
But as someone who, well, actually likes eating, I don't see the attraction of using this stuff as anything other than "I don't have enough time to cook or even go to a sit-down restaurant" type meals, the same way I would any other breakfast bar or meal drink. And looking at it that way makes their meal drinks much less appealing to me compared to, say, Ensure. Yes, Ensure has way more sugar, but it has a half-dozen fairly reasonable flavors, none of which are "dilute pancake batter."
Believe what you want, I guess.
They could have used so many better ingredients. Maltodextrin is the cheapest and worst complex carb you could have put in it. It's chemically a complex but really your body doesn't react much differently to it than other simple sugars.
That idea, 'the insulin hypothesis', has not been proven. In fact there is now evidence that claim is false. (Paywalled study [1], summary in this article [2]).
[1] http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v71/n3/full/ejcn2016260a.... [2] https://www.vox.com/2016/7/6/12105660/do-low-carb-diets-work
Disclaimer: Not an expert, but here is a reference: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/c...
You're conflating with overeating. I don't believe healthy people, that stay within a healthy caloric range, that aren't predisposed to diabetes need to fear that the "rise in blood sugar" from simple carbs is going to lead to diabetes. And I'm not aware of any study that shows that or even could (it'd be incredibly hard to study), correct me if wrong.
Most people eat simple carbs every day and don't get diabetes. Athletes eat a lot of carbs and don't get diabetes.
2.) Highly quality carbs, such as in beans, barley, certain kinds of sweet potatoes, etc, are fermented by by your gut bacteria into short chain fatty acids. Short chain fatty acids have been linked to lower inflammation, improved mood and memory, weight loss, longer life span, the list goes on.
It will also help if you understand the chemistry of carbohydrates vs fats. Carbohydrates are inherently unstable and are much more likely to undergo spontaneous reactions than fats. This is because sugars are fringed with electrophyllic hydroxyl groups that will take part in dehydration reactions under physiological conditions. The result of this is advanced glycation end (AGE) products. The phytonutrients from plants seem to stabilize carbohydrates, which is probably part the reason the plant made them in the first place.
Carbohydrates aren't so much you body's preferred fuel, rather your body uses them first because letting them float around in circulation is harmful. This is particularly true of fructose, which the liver works very hard to prevent from entering general circulation.
> "In conclusion, macronutrient composition of the diet may differentially alter the postprandial pro-oxidative milieu, with high-carbohydrate meals potentially leading to greater oxidative stress response. However, both meals increased circulating IL6, regardless of the type of nutrient consumed."
I don't see how that translates into a sentence like your:
"Carbohydrates aren't so much you body's preferred fuel".
If you can connect the dots clearly I'd love to see it, but the impression I get is people like yourself and the 'inflammation' crowd are taking these very specific studies and totally distorting their meaning to make broader truths.
I tried to connect the dots a bit with some of the biochemistry of why carbohydrates need to be cleared quickly, it can't simplified much past that. What it comes down to is that oxygen atoms make molecules more chemically reactive than other common elements like carbon and nitrogen. This causes "unintended" reactions, which produce molecules the body doesn't know how to handle. These molecules can directly trigger an immune response, or they can be incorporated into other molecules which causes them to malfunction in various ways. Both cases are bad.
It isn't necessarily the inflammation itself that is bad. Rather, it is a sign that something is going wrong with your body. Usually when inflammation is high, either you have something foreign in your body, or your cells are killing themselves for some reason, and immune cells are being activated to "clean up" the debris.
Soylent might be better than a frozen pizza or fast food, but in the big picture it's still shit compared to real food.
Of anything I've tried that is a "meal", nothing has spiked my blood sugar as much as a bottle of Soylent.
I really wanted to use Soylent but when my BS spiked to 350 after multiple 2h post meal tests, on multiple days, I just had to give up on the idea.
To give you an example, my BS will hit about 200 2h after a big bowl of Oatmeal and then settle back to 130-150 range.
If I eat just vegetables for a week, for example, my BS will move to the 90-120 range.
My only concern about Soylent is if I should be ingesting this much soy as a male of European descent.
Afraid it's going to make you impotent?
For those who don't know MyMuesli: It's a company which lets you mix your own muesli (from ~350 ingredients) and ship it to you. It's one of Germanys most successful non-VC-funded startups. They started in 2007 with just a website and nowadawys got shops in most major german cities where you can pick up your ordered muesli (useful for customers who avoid the delivery costs) or buy pre-mixed packs. Even though their muesli is anything but cheap they're hugely successful.
UGH. Sorry, but this came across kind of strong.
I think what OP is really asking is how is this suppose to be used? If this is a simple "let me show you", all right, but the README and the screenshot are confusing, but all right....
But I think people here generally expect a "so this is how you can actually use my program" when you do a shameless plug.
Our bodies are complicated. Therefore, nutrition science is complicated, and very much a work in progress. Because people eat various things all their lives in an uncontrolled way, and because what you eat can have impacts on you 10, 20, or 50 years down the line, getting reliable nutritional data is extremely expensive and difficult.
There are many interactions that we still don't understand, unknown unknowns where we don't even know what the questions yet. For example, we know now that our gut microbiome has important influence on our metabolism, immune systems, and overall health. And yet little of this research existed 20 years ago because there was no cheap DNA sequencing, and we still don't know today how what we eat influences our internal ecology. We certainly don't know what eating a bunch of Soylent for a couple decades would do to a person's microbiome, because nobody has ever tried it.
A dose of humility and common sense would suggest that radically transforming your diet based on our current reductive knowledge of nutrition is an extremely risky bet.
The much safer bet is eating traditionally: eat foods in combinations and proportions that our ancestors and cultures have actually tried and tweaked over thousands of years of empirical experimentation and co-evolution.
Additionally, there are a wide variety of traditional diets that cover very different foods. Since everything in the body interacts in complicated ways, we cannot even generalize specific foods as being "non-risky" to eat, since the empirical evidence we have only applies to the interactions of each food with the rest of the diet. So it's not clear what would actually constitute a definitive "traditional" diet; the best we could do would be to try and mimic a specific traditional diet as closely as possible, which still doesn't take into account the interactions caused by non-diet aspects of health like amount of exercise.
There is value in that kind of stability, but by incorporating mainstream nutrition research into your diet you can trade increased risk for what is likely to be a better average result. I say likely to be better than average because, as incomplete as nutrition data is, some data is still better than no data. It doesn't make sense to ignore what we know in the moment just because it might be wrong later. As long as you research carefully and stick to the most well studied aspects of nutrition, risk is minimal.
It's also worth pointing out that the normal person's diet today is already a large departure from traditional diets. So even if we assume a "traditional" diet is the goal, it does not follow that that Soylent would be better or worse than the normal person's diet today. It's likely that the human body is adaptable enough to handle whatever you eat.
I also happen to think that Soylent is definitely not a wise application of our current knowledge. The sophomoric notion that we already understand nutrition well enough to create a full fledged meal replacement with everything that the body requires is false, misleading, and highly irresponsible.
From their front page:
> Protein, carbohydrates, lipids, and micronutrients: each Soylent product contains a complete blend of everything the body needs to thrive.
The micronutrients claim in particular invites scrutiny -- we definitely don't know yet whether we've succeeded in identifying every micronutrient that the body needs for survival, much less to 'thrive'.
I mean, they actually sickened a whole bunch of people with some algae powder ingredient, not realizing it would be problematic ahead of time. If they can't design a food product that avoids acute illness, why should you have confidence that they have something that is safe and healthy to use long term?
Seems like some folks have really poor diets by choice, and this couldn't be that much worse. Could it?
Your appeal to nature holds as much weight as the soylent science when it comes down to it. The only constant in the human diet is change. What our ancestors ate even 500 years ago has very little overlap with what we even consider "traditional food" now.
But yea, agreed that the types of foods we're eating have changed and continue to change, and thus far the driver of change is not our design, but rather market forces and consumer demand. I think something like soylent is a step in the right direction, even if it's risky in a way that any new science is risky (consider how we were using X-rays when we first discovered them for trying on shoes, before we knew the harm).
* Whole rolled oats
* Pumpkin seeds
* LSA (powdered)
* Sunflower seeds
* Chopped green apple
* Coconut water and Orange Juice 50/50 mix (NOT Milk, Ugh!)
* Mango flavoured thick greek yoghurt
Mmm...
Try it!
LSA is a 3 in 1 solution [...] made of ground linseed, ground sunflower seeds and ground almonds
Seems to be a thing in Australia and New Zealand.
You can use your kitchen grade flaxseed oil for painting, putting your art supplies linseed oil on your quark is more questionable.
I guess it is one of those oils like Coconut oil, where you can ingest it or use it for a myriad of lubricating and protective purposes.
See the sample here https://dump.bitcheese.net/files/cacobil/muesli-example.html
Also, I noticed that the Readme links to Rob Rhinehart's page (http://robrhinehart.com). Unfortunately, it looks like it's all been taken down. Anybody know why?
I'm asking because I think I would be severely depressed on such a monotone diet. I love cooking and it gives me great joy to eat good food, or new kinds of food, or even the boring lunch restaurant type food if it's done reasonably well.
Lunch is also a nice social event. I'm skipping lunch sometimes (when I'm not that hungry) but I feel like I missing the social aspect then.
I suspect your real issue is that like most you wake up to an alarm so you're still mostly asleep during breakfast time. And until it's routine scrambling eggs requires higher cognitive function...
If you use Soylent/Mealsquares only to replace "no-time meals", you're doing a lot better. Like you, I don't understand why someone would eat them exclusively;
(Can't vouch for that brand, but some of the powdered ones I've tried taste almost 'nice' with milk, not as nice as those supermarket pre-made ones, which are typically lower in protein, higher cal, and more expensive).
If I have the chance to eat a real meal I take it, but there are also times where I literally can't.
Idk why it is suddenly in vogue to shit on people for being busy.
Maybe because the HN crowd is getting older or more burned out, and their values are changing?
And a large glass of water. If I'm really low on energy I'll have a fruit.
I've heard all life that breakfast is the most important meal, but it turns out to be a marketing slogan, and it might actually be good with a long period without high blood sugar.
I do enjoy food (very much!), but find myself feeling tired or sluggish after a traditional breakfast or lunch. Soylent provides consistent energy throughout the day, and makes calorie tracking very easy (400 calories a bottle twice a day @ breakfast and lunch leaves me 1200 calories for dinner).
https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/6dbw74/rob_rinehar...
Imagine what Soylant would have looked like 50 years ago and how much it would have been missing. Now imagine how in 50 years we will learn just as much if not more and look back at our crude attempts in the same vain.