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Comment by tree6014 | Hacker News Reader

I read his blog posts leading up to this and liked the idea. So, I decided to try it myself. After many revisions, I finally figured out a good way of doing it and it ended up being more expensive than just eating regular grilled chicken, sweet potatoes, etc.

He is using Maltodextrin for carbs. It likely contains Glutamic Acid and has a horrible glycemic index. You might as well eat sugar. I don't know what he is using for protein; but, I guarantee it sucks. The correct approach would be to use cross flow microfiltered whey protein because it retains all of the essential amino acids. It's also as expensive as Greenwise/Whole Foods chicken. Cheaper methods tend to lose certain essential amino acids.

Another issue is the absence of toxins. Believe it or not, consuming the toxins contained in whole foods makes us more robust. There is actual research that has analyzed these effects.

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Believe it or not, consuming the toxins contained in whole foods makes us more robust.

This is similar to the phenomenon where children who grow up desperately poor and literally living in dirt have a markedly lower rate of autoimmune diseases than first world kids.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

Wow! You telling me that working as a jumper at a Nuclear Plant might have been good for me? The mind boggles.

It depends on how slowly you got the radiation.

The same dose delivered fast does much more damage than the dose delivered slowly.

At least that's the theory. The NRC works on the principle that the speed doesn't matter - it's just the cumulative that counts.

It's not a settled matter, although the research does seem to point in that direction.

>= ~5 Sv in an acute dose is generally fatal, but a man named Albert Stevens was injected with a small dose of plutonium in a human radiation experiment, and suffered a net dose of 64 Sv over a 21 year period before dying of heart disease. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Stevens

"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" has _some_ truth to it. The body adapts and learns from various harmful things, hence it's less likely to affect you as strongly in the future.

> "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

It might also cripple you instead.

Where are you getting your CFM whey that it is so expensive?

http://www.truenutrition.com/p-1100-whey-protein-isolate-cfm... <-- 11.89/lb

Per gram of protein, this is far cheaper than organic chicken.

http://www.truenutrition.com/p-947-whey-protein-isolate-cold...

If you're willing to try Cold Filtration, you can purchase it for $9.40/lb.

This doesn't include the 5% off coupons that TN has year round. (AND028 is my personal one.)

I was simply looking at products available on bodybuilding.com. You can probably find it cheaper from other sources. You also want to make sure they don't contain Stevia or artificial sweeteners like Acesulfame Potassium. They both can have negative health effects; especially when consumed regularly in large amounts.

To anyone seriously considering doing something like this, you will find that the carbs are challenging to get into a shake.

You can get all the right vitamins and minerals. On that note, don't use calcium carbonate like he does unless you want kidney stones; use calcium citrate.

You can get high quality CFM whey protein assuming you're okay with getting all your protein from whey (grilled chicken is still a better idea for other reasons).

However, the carbs take up a lot of volume. You can use steel cut oats, potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice... (brown rice has arsenic) You will find that it doesn't fit well in the shake. It's easier to eat it as food. My experience so far anyway...

I've been putting oat flower in my shakes recently [0]. Nutrition-label wise it's the same as my steel cut oats, and I've had a tough time finding any solid information on whether or not it digests differently or if it's really meaningfully different at all. (It's easy to find forum posts saying they know what's up, but I haven't found much research or solid medical information. tbh I haven't spent hours searching or anything).

I started doing it because I really hate cooking. I don't even want to boil water for five minutes in the morning to make oatmeal. I don't use it for any kind of super-shake or full meal replacement, but that and some fruit for breakfast seems to work for me pretty well.

Hopefully I'm not unknowingly totally killing myself, heh.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Bobs-Red-Mill-Gluten-22-Ounce/dp/B003L...

Whey protein only works if you don't already have some kind of dietary restriction like lactose intolerance, which I do.

Mind you, I really enjoy eating my food and am not looking for a shortcut to "just get nutrients".

Look into whey protein isolate...it's very low in lactose - less than 1g per 28g serving of the stuff I have...I'm not lactose intolerant though so I'm not sure if even that would be too much (compare to 12g lactose in an 8oz cup of milk).

There is too little lactose in whey protein for it to give any symptoms even to people with the most extreme lactose intolerance (absolutely zero lactase production).

I'm glad someone mentioned the carbs here – it gives me a good excuse to pipe in. Maltodextrin is a ludicrous oversimplification of carb intake. The carb intake in whole foods is ridiculously complex, given the ubiquity of the variety of carbohydrate in all of our foodstuff. Not only do you have to take into account the stuff that we directly metabolise, but all the stuff that the little bacteria that live in our gut like to eat too.

Experiments have been done with mannose to try and recover a genetic disorder where the bio-availability of mannose has been impaired. A kid was fed with mannose in what was assumed to be the right amount of the correct monosaccharide. Turns out he ends up having a toxic reaction to the mannose, even though it goes part-way to curing his particular disease.

I know researchers in this area that don't eat red meat because they're worried about the incorporation of particular sugars into their body that are not natively found in humans. I never really understood why I looked down on biology when I was younger. It's one of the most complex and intriguing problem spaces in the world, and well worth investing your time (on the order of decades) to try and figure something out.

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