Soylent International
blog.soylent.me
blog.soylent.me
It would appear that to get the same nutrients as Soylent I would need to drink 4 bottles of Ensure Complete per day. From the Abbott store they are $41.99 for 16 bottles: a week's supply works out at $73.48. Very close to Soylent pricing.
What makes Soylent better?
It looks more like a meal substitute (liquid nutrition bar) than a food substitute.
" >For how long can I use Ensure?
Ensure products deliver complete and balanced nutrition that is always beneficial. There is no time limit to using Ensure products. In fact, long-term use is encouraged if you’re at a nutritional risk (for example, if you’re an older adult).
>Can Ensure replace a meal?
Yes. Ensure products are complete and balanced, when used in appropriate amounts they can be used to replace meals. "
I believe it is also used in hospitals with a feeding tube for long term sustenance however, I'm not finding a great source for that with a quick google.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/29/3370916/more-navy-medi...
EDIT: But kefs makes a good point; you think you're making food and then you find out it's being used for something that you strongly disagree with. what do you do? Take the money? Or don't sell to certain markets?
Ensure is a food replacement that has a long history of helping people with medical concerns. My great-grandmother lived mostly on this stuff while going through chemo.
So far as I know, Ensure has never been advertised as the magic bullet to replace every food ever.
AFAICT, though, the only "better" about Soylent is that it's, like, disruptive.
Looks like 4 bottles would be 204g total carbs, 80g of it sugar. Not as bad I was expecting, but not great. Soylent claims 200g carbs, but there is no further breakdown. From its positioning I'd guess it is lower, but I can't confirm it yet.
http://www.abbottstore.com/therapeutic-nutrition/jevity+reg/...
Comes in many varieties of being calorie dense, and can work out to almost 50 cents a day at 1200 cal diet.
I'd be interested as well.
AFTER EDIT: I have read the numerous stories submitted here about this YC-affiliated company before, and, yes, I am painfully aware of the company founder's appalling lack of background in nutrition and medicine.
http://blog.soylent.me/post/51007573199/the-biggest-pivot-in...
If he had some powerful degree in nutrition or a medical degree, it would be mentioned in this sentence. It's not. He doesn't.
And he's not experimenting on himself. He's selling a product that he's advertising as a food replacement with all sorts of health benefits.
As far as "it's cool if a few people get sick..." Are you insane?
> As far as "it's cool if a few people get sick..." Are you insane?
They know what they are getting themselves into. I don't have any problem with people who choose to binge drink or the alcohol manufacturers that sell that product. If people know what they are getting themselves into -- and they'd have to go out of their way to not know with this product -- I'm normally OK with the outcome. Especially if the probable worst-case outcome is a few months of suboptimal nutrition followed by a return to a normal diet. Nope, not insane.
My point is merely that I'm fine with people choosing to do risky things as long as the risk involved is obvious. I'd be a little more comfortable with this campaign page if they made slightly less grandiose promises, but for the most part I think the people ordering it will be aware of the shallowness of the testing so far and can decide for themselves if that is a risk they are willing to accept.
They're passing this off as a cure. That's what really irks me. None of the presentation I've seen so far communicates "participate in our experiment!" It's all stuff like "For anyone who struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." That's a health claim they simple can't back up in any reasonable way. And it's a claim that many people are likely to assume is true! Not everyone will dig into the site and see that Rhinehart has a background in engineering, not nutrition, and that these claims haven't actually been backed up at all. You and I might know to do that, but many people won't. Which is why we have food labeling laws in the first place.
Can you show me where "experimental" is used on the crowd-funding page? (https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body)
Whats the value here? This is just another proprietary nutrient slurry. We already have those.
People should have a reasonable expectation that when they buy a product, it will work as expected and as advertised. And they should have recourse if this turns out not to be the case.
> For anyone who struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you.
> Soylent frees you from the time and money spent shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent health,
> By taking years to spoil
> The founders and scores of DIYers have been living on Soylent for months and there is much evidence that is considerably healthier than a typical diet.
There's no mention on the crowd-funding page that this is an experiment.
I tend to agree with you - people can do what they like with their bodies and this product would fit a lot better if it was sold as an experiment, with access to discussion forums and etc.
I notice they now have a disclaimer on that page.
It definitely doesn't look like an experiment. There is no data collection, no controls, no clear or explicit warning that the product is untested.
They're selling it as tested, as safe, as suitable for anyone, and as something that will put you in optimum health. It's sleazy and scummy.
If Soylent delivers and can be capitalized on, this guy saves the world. On an ancient idea, simplest of them all, which everyone said was impossible.
500k in croudfunding for a guy with absolutely no academic education behind the subject which by it's idea is as simple as Soylent is must surely rub the fur of a few the wrong way. "It just can't work!".
Saves the fucking world?
How? People in this world suffer malnutrition because of socio-political and logistical problems. A maybe shelf stable maybe meal-replacement isn't going to solve any problems, because as is kind of a theme in this version of the soylent thread WE ALREADY HAVE THIS.
My point stands, the man came up with something as ancient and as simple as "generic stuff you can just eat and get all you need without preparation or other stuff you need to ever care about", and people go absolutely nuts over it.
It is my belief that the problem is not the product, but the idea. I do not hold any qualified education to argue for or against whether or not something like that is ever possible, but considering the heated debate back and forth, to me it seems as if it's not about Soylent itself or anything, but rather about the whole principal idea.
I enjoy cooking and good food, and put some effort in what I eat and what I don't eat, so I am not even personally interested let alone invested in this. Also the marketing speeches of Soylent fixing everything are outright laughable, but I can't stop wondering the knee jerk reaction against the idea behind Soylent itself even.
Here's the list of WFP food products (https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products) - especially look at the price. I guess they're making full use of charitable status and economies of scale.
Here's Plumpy'Nut, a fortified food product for starving children (http://www.irinnews.org/report/83124/malawi-cheaper-recipe-f...)
EDIT: And even here micronutrient powders are nothing new. See the link to DSM embedded in WFP page above. Here's their corporate page (http://www.dsm.com/corporate/investors.html). They're pretty big.
Note that an important part of Soylent, which is offloaded onto the consumer, is a source of clean water. Much of the world, especially in the target hungry world market, does not have access to clean water. I think people would criticise Soylent for that, so it's something for them to be thinking about.
I have no idea how Soylent is in anyway "disruptive" to that market.
Ignoring the "fixing world hunger" bit, liquid foods are not new. Here's a list:
(http://ensure.com/) Ensure
(https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//) Fortisip
(http://www.complan.com/) Complan
(http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands) Abbott Nutrition Brands
(http://www.medifast1.com/index.jsp) Medifast
(http://www.optifast.com/Pages/index.aspx) Optifast
(http://www.slim-fast.com/products/) Slimfast
Again - I have no idea how Soylent are disruptive.
Selling into other markets is interesting. I hope they've put disclaimers on some of the more outrageous claims, or they may find resistance. For example "For anyone who struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." contains medical claims which are treated very differently in the UK than they are in the US.
I see no evidence that Soylent have done any research at all.
Vegetables steamed in the microwave take less than 5 minutes to prepare. (More on my eating habits: http://blog.tasuki.org/how-i-didnt-stop-eating-food/)
I think eating only Soylent exposes you to a significant risk of missing something vital that we usually get incidentally from regular food.
1. raw/fresh food 2. general fitness every day 3. intermittent fasting once or twice a week
Food has a lasting effect on the body, some of which science is yet to understand, I'll stick with what I can hunt and pick from the wild.
How the hell does it take 15mins to prep scrambled eggs? It should take less than 5 and your cleanup should take all of a minute
1. Put Small/medium saucepan on stove
2. Add 1/2 Tbsp butter
3. Crack 2 eggs into pan (Do no beat beforehand)
4. Put pan on mid-low flame and stir briskly for 2-3mins or until eggs are at a runny-curds texture (soft but "together").
5. Plate
And as jack-r-abbit suggested, I do like to chop some onion/peppers/tomatoes into scrambled eggs. I'll time it and try to get under 10 minutes next time!
(Granted, I've stopped following this story, so my information might be way out of date)
1) You make it an open source project under an open license, OpenSoylent
2) You leave any health claims to be made by the OpenSoylent community. If this is unsatisfactory, you put out a bounty for MetaMed to write an independent report on the OpenSoylent wiki with references.
3) You accept people's patches to OpenSoylent
4) You create a separate, unaffilliated company to provide Soylent(tm), an implementation of OpenSoylent, with zero health claims, in a commercial kitchen, and link back to the OpenSoylent wiki for more information
Whether the above is legal or not, I'm not certain, but A) it's a hell of a lot closer than the present situation, and B) it doesn't offend geeks who apply critical thought to businesses that blog.
I do not wish the project ill will, but I won't be signing on at this time unless things (re: testing) get a lot more transparent.
You know, what ycombinator is all about.
More power to Soylent to monetize this, become a business just like Ensure or Slim Fast (succumbing to all the commercial pressures such products face, like, "Y'know, let's drop pricey molybdenum and just encourage people to have normal food once a day.")
I guess I was way more excited about the project when I thought he was starting a discussion where we can all pool information on self experimentation to help each other generate a cheap, nutritionally complete chemical sludge.
Why soylent has intrigued me since this first started out. The way they are going about everything makes it feel so much like snake oil...
If someone tells you, "hey, the cook spit in your food" -- it doesn't matter if the cook actually did, you're going to be grossed out by the food because you're in an icky state of mind.
So, while I know Soylent is not made out of people, it just makes the product less appetizing than it would otherwise be.
However, maybe this is just a problem for people who dig old scifi.
I have no personal experience nor have I ever heard of this occuring, although I have never heard of someone actually following such a diet either.
Also, I think the difficulty in preparing food part is overblown. Haven't any of these guys heard of Trader Joe's?
[1] Conflict of interest, as they work for a potential competitor in the market. However they come from a medical background, and put patient health first. Surprising exactly how important nutrition is, actually!