Soylent Acquired by Starco Brands
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is a strange SPAC onto the OTC markets? Starco's biggest products (also acquisitions) are canned whip cream with vodka in it and a deodorant endorsed by Kobe Bryant. They have a $44m market cap.
Noting they raised $133m in capital.
Makes sense to finally finish selling out. They let down their core audience a long time ago.
It used to be a powder, exclusively.
Those were the days.
The problem from what I read is that the powder market is just too small and there isn’t much more space to expand.
They apparently still sell both the bottled version and the powder version.
(I stopped giving a damn when I got married. Cooking for 3 people is a different story than cooking for 1.)
Based upon the community that developed around recreating the earlier formulas with a recipe and product lists, I’d say for the worse.
Based upon individual accounts of those I know, largely worse.
Some might like the changes.
It is far easier to buy the liquid form than the powder, so that says plenty as well.
I always figured it was this high potassium content that caused heart problems for some. Gave up on the concept after realising this and the heart issue never going away.
I tried Soylent before but I felt hungry pretty much immediately afterward.
A couple years back I tried out Huel, but I didn't quite get used to the flavoring. I find Queal's to be much less artificial-feeling and subtler. But it's probably all subjective.
- [0] https://queal.com/
Does any other meal replacement product have a published Glycemic Index number?
A couple of years ago I tried Huel Black and loved it. It’s way more satiating, healthier, and I actually enjoyed the taste. Unlike Soylent, it actually feels like food. I look forward to having it for breakfast each day.
My favorite flavors are Coffee Carmel and Chocolate. I highly recommend Huel Black over the regular Huel. Steer clear of the Cinnamon Roll flavor.
Instead of my usual mealtimes of 8am, 1pm, 6pm I drink Solent at 8am, 12pm and 4:30pm; then I don't feel hungry throughout the day.
However it has huge cons compared to Soylent: it tastes a little bad (as opposed to Soylent, which can be described as mostly inoffensive) and has the mouthfeel and texture of watery sand. Also, it's not intended to be your only food source.
It's been fine; I have had a couple of bad batches (too salty / bitter), but they replaced them. Switching from Soylent's ready-made drinks to Huel's mix-with-water powder was a small adjustment, but Huel's shaker bottle makes it easy. Soylent was fine unflavored for me (I'd describe it as "cheerio milk"), but with Huel their "original" flavor wasn't doing it for me so I've been ordering the chocolate. It's 1g of sugar, which doesn't bother me.
I'm just using it for a daily breakfast shake. I've never been that hungry in the mornings so can't comment on if you'll feel sated by it, but it works for me as a way to get some easy nutrition.
I don't get how they are different from ensure outside of the marketing
https://www.consumerreports.org/healthy-eating/do-seed-oils-...
Anecdotally, a family member gets headaches from consuming uncooked sunflower oil but olive oil and other fats are fine. I noticed this years before the anti seed oil memes.
Virgin olive oil (not the mafia fake crap) is really great, as is beef tallow.
In fact, even in though my family has owned olive tree farms for centuries we still make sure to buy "modern oil" (as it is called in moroccan) for cooking even if fresh, pure olive oil is available in literal tons. I've heard that it is mostly a persistent myth, and olive oil is perfectly safe for cooking (even at high temps), but my mom would still never let me cook or fry anything with olive oil :). Interesting contrast!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092422442...
This depends on the shape. Saturated fats are long and stack on top of each other, making them solid easily. Monounsaturated/polyunsaturated just talks about the amount of double carbon-carbon bonds. So a carbon would attach twice to another carbon rather than having a hydrogen. These fats are crinkly shaped and have bends in them because of the double bonds. Trans fats change the orientation of hydrogen so that they're straight rather than crinkly and subsequently solid at room temperature rather than liquid.
I don't know the exact mechanism of why trans fats are bad, but it probably has something to do with them not normally being found in nature and them being straight, possibly making the body think it is a saturated fat. Just small structural changes have a big change in effect. Thalidomide, for example, was dangerous because its isomer inhibited blood vessel growth.
Now consider the diet of modern seed oils, where the majority of it is monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat. The industrialization that allows for humans to collect a bunch of tiny seeds and squeeze all the oil out of them has existed for only a few hundred years at most. Crisco was made out of cottonseed oil, which (1) has a ton of trans fats from the hydrogenation process, (2) naturally has gossypol, a compound in that causes male infertility. Plants have a lot of compounds for natural defense. Nobody eats raw cassava because it has cyanide compounds. Only through methods such as fermentation (think cow + lumen), sun bleaching, heating, boiling, grinding, selective breeding etc. can many plant components be converted into nutrition. Egg white also has a lot of natural defense compounds/proteins, which is why egg yolk is less reactive than egg white for those with autoimmune issues.
Since unsaturated fats have double carbon-carbon bonds, it's easier for them to react with things at high temperatures. Since trans fats are now banned, vegetable oil is fully hydrogenated and interesterified. It's possible that fully hydrogenated vegetable oil isn't bad for people, but it's a comparatively new process and I wouldn't want to be the one testing it out. It's possible these processes also introduce unknown toxic substances.
In the past, people used lard, butter, tallow, or in tropical regions coconut/palm. I highly doubt something so historically used is as dangerous as something that's been created in the past hundred years, but the diet of pigs and cows are now also changed to a primarily grain fed diet, which may change their fat composition.
If you look at a lot of nutrition science, the original studies are bullshit. Not untrue, but just that they're wildly distorted. I don't consider a rat eating a processed diet and subsequently isolating a compound, then calling it a vitamin or an essential fatty acid, is in any way generalizable to humans. Now people tend to propagate things like "this has a lot of omegas," etc. without understanding the historical basis of it.
Note that there are nutritional deficiencies such as beri-beri, mangelwurzel, pellagra, B12 deficiency, that are true and real. I'm not denying the existence of vitamins. But they should not be a concern to anyone eating a diverse diet. People should avoid vitamin supplements and (1) eat enough, (2) eat with diversity, and these nutritional deficiency diseases should only be a second thought.
My current thoughts on good health practices are as follows:
- eat enough
- don't eat raw food or plants
- avoid seed oils
- avoid overly processed salted or smoked meats/vegetables
- exercise
- get enough sunlight
- don't eat liver (Tends to be the biggest accumulator of toxins in the body. Why would you eat something meant to filter out toxins? Risk of hypervitaminosis A over a long period too. Limit preformed vitamin A, such as skim milk in the USA. I don't think it's a good additive based on my research. I'm not particularly concerned about water soluble B vitamin additions, water, iodized salt, etc. but may do some more research into it later)
- don't take drugs whether they be statins, birth control, painkillers, anti-allergy, etc.
- cooking in safe pots/pans (not sure what yet, still doing research) (copper + acid = copper leaches out, non-stick degrades at high temperatures, aluminum I've heard is dangerous)
- avoid breathing in car exhaust (it's hard, but I've suspected the air quality in cities even in developed countries is much lower than people believe it is)
I might've forgotten a few here or there. A lot of pesticides accumulate in things such as eggs and milk (noted from Silent Spring). But they're probably fine in limited quantity.
The crux is that seed oils are not dangerous in small amounts, evidenced by people eating it just fine. Rather, they may be cumulative and its effects show up much later in life, so it's hard to pinpoint cause and effect.
I strongly believe that cancer, autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome, and other modern diseases have a definite cause and are not just "genetic" as some say, which is a hand-wavey way of minimizing culpability and lets people do nothing about it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/Fa...
(/s, but lightly paraphrasing a nasty conversation i had with seed oil disrespecters)
Needless to say it took forever and they never delivered the Stainless steel mug with Soylent on it. That was all I wanted I thought it was a good joke. They proved their shadiness immediately to me.
Why not just eat food?
I lived for a month in Amsterdam in 2017 and didn't have the money to rent / book an apt with a kitchen so I stayed in hostels. The problem then became food cost, a meal in amsterdam was around 15-20$ so 3 meals a day would be around 70-80$ which was too much for me so I went with JimmyJoy which is a dutch competitor and that reduced my costs to around 6$ per day. Now it wasn't perfect, I had a LOT of gas which I managed to reduce by making the shake with mint tea but the freedom and cheapness of it made me very happy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food
I still find it unfathomable, that we as human beings, supposedly the smartest creatures on earth cannot figure out what to put in our mouths.
Fathom this: some people make money, and lots of it, by confusing us about what to put in our mouths.
For fast food, the Cheesy Bean and Rice burrito is still on the dollar menu at Taco Bell. 420 calories for $1, and a fairly complete lacto-vegetarian protein source. Buy one of those and a Fiesta Veggie Burrito ($2 for 570 calories) and you've got some vegetables too at almost $1000 calories. Make either of them Fresco and you replace the dairy with diced tomatoes, losing about 110 calories for the CBRB, and 145 calories for the FVB. Fresco only one and you still have greater than 800 calories. Maybe this isn't possible in Europe?
Meal replacement shakes like Jimmy Joy / Huel / Soylent do have a lot more nutrition than just plain rice + some veggies / condiments
I'm no nutrition scientist but those Taco Bell items you pointed out don't seem like nutritionally complete meals you could eat all day. I did eat Jimmy Joy all day for a month or so and I did feel healthy but to each his own. Also didn't require me to drive 3 times a day to a Taco bell wasting time in the process, waiting in line etc.
The point isn't that you should replace all food with meal replacement shakes. You could use them while traveling to not eat out as much. You could use some for emergencies when you didn't have time to cook or ran out of groceries. You could use it at work if you have a hellish work env and an abusive boss that doesn't even grant you 30 minutes for a lunch break. Last one is a true story a bank teller told me. Granted you should quit a job like that but if for whatever reason you need to stay a while longer it's better to have a shake ready than not eat at all.
This is about the only reason I put up with travelling, eating food in different places
> You could use some for emergencies when you didn't have time to cook or ran out of groceries.
You need to plan better.
> You could use it at work if you have a hellish work env and an abusive boss that doesn't even grant you 30 minutes for a lunch break.
Fuck 'em. Take a lunch break. Your health is more important than their clock. What are they going to do, get their own hands dirty doing your job?
I would have never stayed for a month in Amsterdam if it cost me more than it did which was about 1000$. Some people have a tight budget
> You need to plan better.
Some people are young and don't have that ability yet. Or are like me, I don't care that much about food, I'd rather do something more interesting than spend 1h cooking something. I just don't care that much about how food tastes if it costs me time or money.
> Fuck 'em. Take a lunch break. Your health is more important than their clock. What are they going to do, get their own hands dirty doing your job?
Check your privilege lol. Some people live paycheck to paycheck, judging them for not having the strength to stand up to their boss isn't right imo.
Plenty of people eat once or twice a day. Some even give it a fancy name like intermittent fasting.
The time savings compared to normal food preparation and consumption are insane, if you compare it to ordering lunch to your homeoffice it usually ends up much cheaper and ultimately it's probably much healthier than the average persons diet.
It absolutely makes sense in many situations.
> The time savings compared to normal food preparation and consumption are insane
Read both of these together, slowly.
Has the penny dropped yet?
Nutrients, minerals, fibre, and protein are there but how do they interact and how does your body respond to a slurry of it.
As for reasons why they include powdered foods in their diet, it is often as a tool for losing weight (replacing other meals), or for bulking up (in addition to other meals), or as a lifestyle or economic choice (easy & cheap weekday breakfasts).
If you believe a significant proportion of powdered food fans eat only this stuff, you are unwittingly participating in someone’s marketing ploy.
But not for myself, for myself is just a chore. I will gladly spend 1-3 hours in the kitchen with prep, cooking time, setting up plates and so on for loved ones or guests. For my day-to-day? I'd much rather just pop a portion of Jake Food (my favourite powdered food after trying a few different brands), shake it and drink it knowing that it's vegan and has been designed to contain most of the micronutrients and protein I need.
I used to cook all the time for myself, accruing the time of prep, cooking, and cleaning; on top of that forcing myself to eat something for days in a row that I didn't really feel like I wanted to but had to so it wouldn't spoil, I prefer to have a practical way to get the nutrition to survive.
Cooking nice food can be saved for when I can enjoy it properly. I love having my lunch hour free for myself to do what I feel like.
I see the benefit of it as a convenient breakfast or lunch. I like food too much to replace all my meals with it.
Decide what to eat
Purchase the food
Prepare the food
eat the food
Clean up
All that combined with a habit of sleeping through every available moment before rushing off to the train in the morning meant that I was often skipping breakfast or eating something silly like a handful of crackers while trying to run. Taking all of those steps out of my morning was worth it for me. In that way, it's pretty similar to fast food, but it's much easier than actually swinging by Dunks.
I think it also helps as a way of conceptualizing food and convincing yourself viscerally that you won't starve if you control your portions.
Finally, I can be a picky eater sometimes and having it as an option means I'm never faced with having to starve or compromise on food choices.