In Busy Silicon Valley, Protein Powder Is in Demand | Hacker News Reader

In Busy Silicon Valley, Protein Powder Is in Demand

nytimes.com

75 pointscredo80 comments

I'm pretty obese at 275lbs, and binging on food is my drug of choice. Soylent has been invaluable in my addiction management. Because food is something you can't quit cold turkey, I have to try and focus on eating for nutrition instead of emotional support. Soylent allows me to get nutrition fast and in a non-food manner when my blood sugar is low and I can't reliably make a sensible food choice.

I drink 500 calories and 42 grams of protein upon waking, and found that it increases my ability to fight urges to binge throughout the day. I'll often have another 500 calorie shot of Soylent around 4 o'clock so in a couple of hours when I have to decide on real dinner food, I'm in a good place to eat sensibly. I'm very excited at the trend of meal replacements, it's an indispensable tool in managing my addiction and I'm down 20lbs since January just as a side effect.

Lack of convenience is a major hurdle to eating healthy, however I'm not convinced that a highly-processed food supplement like Soylent is the best way to do it.

I have found that pre-packaged salads from Trader Joes are a decent tradeoff between price, quality, and convenience, at least for fast lunches and dinners. They are well portioned and easy to supplement with other ingredients like additional meat. Plus (most) salads have the benefit of low sugars and carbs which after a while will help cut cravings for less healthy foods altogether. The downside is that they don't keep for very long so you still have to make a trip to the store every few days.

I've been meaning to give Soylent a try, currently I am in a pretty bad fast food habit. It's just so convenient! I really don't feel like standing in line after a day at work. Why aren't there any healthy fast food chains? Seems like there would be plenty of demand, is it just too expensive? Too hard to keep things fresh? Or preparation takes too long? I don't require too much, just a drive through Subway would be a great start.

Chipotle is good. A burrito bowl with black beans, chicken, lettuce, salsa, guacamole and cheese is 660 calories with ~50g of protein.

We've always had the best fast food - fruits. We can eat as much fruit as we want (most fruits anyway). They are super healthy, digest fast etc etc. Just peel a couple of bananas and eat it, takes two mins. Only problem is they are expensive. Here in NYC, a watermelon costs me 8 dollars at whole foods. For 8$, I can buy a ton of junk food.

Most food sold in supermarkets are optimized for storage and profit, not for health.

Bananas are only 40 to 45 cents a pound (around here). They seem to be cheaper than many fruits in general.

Whole foods is a luxury store, you can find watermelon much cheaper.

I think healthy fast food is starting to arrive -- I live in Colorado, and we've got quite a few good places (like "Mad Greens" http://www.madgreens.com/ "the Protein Bar" http://www.theproteinbar.com/, "Modmarket" http://modmarket.com/, etc.). Many of them are expanding to other markets, so hopefully this trend will grow! They're generally 2-4 dollars more expensive than other fast food options, however.

Thought the same thing. I have no idea why there's none.

Real food is expensive.

That is because meat, dairy, corn etc are all heavily subsidized, whereas fruits and vegetables are not.

What is wrong the processed nature of Soylent? It's less processed than bread, and no one slams bread for being unhealthy for being highly processed.

There are plenty of people who slam bread for being unhealthy for being highly processed. In particular, they maintain that the milling process discards the fiber- and vitamin-containing bran and germ, leaving empty quickly-absorbed calories.

Liquid foods are pretty terrible in regards to appetite control since you don't feel full for quite as much time as with solid food. Something to consider once your maintenance calories drop and you have a harder time losing weight.

I'm not convinced this is the case, at least for me. Making it through 2000cal of soylent/day was actually pretty difficult, and I didn't have cravings during the day. Appetite/portion control with regular food continues to be a challenge for me.

I reluctantly replaced about half of my meals with Soylent while stateside for a few months recently on a visit.

Jake Shake is an EU competitor and, as far as I can tell, has the same nutritional profile and tastes about a million times better than Soylent on its best day. It also comes in single-serving pouches, which is a big win for me because Soylent has to be refrigerated after making it and the colder it is, the less palatable it seems.

I bought supply for several months' with Bitcoin, and it presently serves as 80%+ of my meals (I'm working a lot at the moment).

It doesn't have the same nutritional profile, though. Jake Shake Original seems to adhere to EU recommended daily allowances (except for protein, which they've jacked up hilariously high), while Soylent has developed their own thing.

Not sure which one is better. They're probably both pretty healthy, but they're not interchangeable.

Anyone with more knowledge on the subject who can comment on which one is healthier?

If you are looking for alternatives Ambronite (local to Finland) ships both to EU and US. The taste should be quite neutral or nutty-ish, but I can't compare the taste to neither Soylent or Jake Shake since I haven't tried them.

Any idea how to get it if you're outside the EU?

From their FAQ (http://jakeshake.eu/faq/):

> Do you ship outside of the EU?

> Unfortunately we currently do not ship outside the EU. We are however exploring the possibility of expanding outside of the EU in the future.

Use a mail forwarder that is located in the EU.

Send them an email and ask. It's a physical good, and I don't think they're hard to get across borders. It's food though... I don't know. Worth asking.

I recommend Powder Chow if you're in the US.

Sigh. If you are drinking a Soylent or some other drink because you literally don't have the time to get up from your desk for 30-60 minutes for a meal I question what type of human existence you are living. There are so many things central to living life that revolve around eating (social benefits, maybe fresh air and sunshine, tasting and smelling the food itself) that one misses out on by just drinking a shake and not seeing daylight for days on end. It seems like another way to make people more productive. Who needs a lunch break? Just drink a shake and keep coding! If you don't have any ownership in what you are making why one would give up one of the rights they have as a worker, a break in the day to get something to eat, is beyond me.

With that said I understand the value of a meal replacement if you are trying to loose weight. Soylent seems to be better vs the older meal replacement shakes out there, ie that slim fast junk.

I don't get it either. I have a few coworkers (in Cleveland) who have started on the Soylent thing for breakfast / lunch, and it seems insane. I personally relish the chance to take a break for lunch / coffee / etc. and spend a few minutes decompressing / socializing and find myself re-energized to continue working.

I'll be starting a new position with Google[x] in Mountain View and the meals are one of the things I really look forward to - not so much because they're free food, but because socializing at lunch can make such a big difference in terms of building community / "company culture". Some of my fondest memories of college were regular lunch gatherings at the cafeterias -- sharing a meal is such a fundamental human thing, and giving it up for some "scientific" meal replacement just seems like one more way to remove our humanity.

Some people don't enjoy that. If I've been having an especially meeting-laden day, I will sneak out for lunch, and get some takeout and go to a park to read and play with my dog for an hour. Or sit in my office and drink my soylent and catch up on my blog reader. The key is that I don't have to deal with people and have that blessed time to myself.

Or, drink the soylent and skip the lunch rush at subway and go for a walk, ride your bike, or read a book under a tree instead.

I've been using Soylent and other powdered food products (Schmilk, Keto Chow) regularly (as in 4-5 times per week) for the past 8 months.

I'm a full-time student. I spend upwards of 10 hours a day in classes or in the lab. I've tried prepping meals beforehand to avoid eating out, but in the end I always ended up getting fast food on campus because I didn't have time or energy. Powdered foods have a surprising amount of utility as a meal replacement for one or two meals a day.

Soylent itself is a fantastic product, truly. They've been attentive to the needs of their users, adapting the formula to issues as they crop up (such as digestive troubles from an excess of fiber), and recently made it a lot easier to use by incorporating the oils into the powder. Now they just send you the powder, and you mix it with water in the included pitcher. No measuring or anything. Of all the powdered foods, Soylent is easily the most convenient.

Nowadays, I'm a big fan of Schmilk. It tastes pretty good (like milk and oats) for powdered food, and it's very inexpensive at $55/week (with no subscription) for the powder (and around $10/week for the whole milk required).

"While a meal generally costs upward of $50 at Silicon Valley-area restaurants, a week’s worth of Soylent or Schmoylent totals $85."

I get it, Soylent can save you money on food, but this comically excessive exaggeration isn't helping make that point. Even in "Silicon-Valley area restaurants", I've only ever spent $50 on a meal when it was a nice dinner with drinks.

Soylent was originally touted as a meal replacement but I (and others) have found that it works best as a "plan B" to nutrition. It changes the way you look at food if you always have an option to just get the nutrition you need quickly and easily: a lot of meals you'd normally skip you don't, and a lot of meals you eat that are less than nutritious you can either opt-out of or can supplement with proper nutrition with soylent.

I've also found it to be pretty transformative that it turns hunger into something as easily solved as thirst and puts it into the same mental framework.

Where Soylent falls short in this respect is that it's nutrition is only ideal given that the rest of your diet is Soylent too. It has a ton of carbs, and if you're anything like most Americans, you already have way too many carbs in your diet. Unless you're doing a lot of physical activity and you need those carbs, most people would do better just drinking a regular whey protein shake.

Just in case you aren't aware, the latest update of Soylent (v1.4) has upped the fat. Carbs now account for 43% of the calorie count, which is (slightly) less than you'll see any mainstream source recommending.

Still nothing that counts as "low carb", but not exactly "a ton" either.

The thing that keeps me from really jumping in on Soylent is the lack of a low-carb option. I've made my own LC version, based on recipes online, but it takes a long time and is a pain in the ass, which is a killer considering Soylent's main virtue is that you dump it on the shaker, shake it up, and are done. I'm hopeful that if things keep going well for the company eventually they'll offer a LC version; or maybe a competitor will.

[I know there are things like Keto fuel, but these all require buying a bunch of oil and stuff and mixing it in, which is not the seamless solution I really want.]

multi vitamin/mineral + fish oil capsules (a few depending on quality) + normal decent quality protein powder. If you don't eat any fiber rich foods, add a spoon of fiber (phylum husks or something)

Unless you go 100% soylent (why though?) that will sort pretty much any deficiencies you may have from the rest of your meals.

Soylent and other meal replacement shakes are a lot more than just protein and carbohydrates.

Soylent 1.4 (the most recent formulation) is 40/43/17 fat/carbs/protein and the carbohydrates that is supplies are slow digesting. So I would say supplementation of Soylent to an average diet would improve it overall.

Yeah, but there's no better solution. They could offer versions that correct your diet given a proportion of avg. American diet to Soylent intake, but it would be complicated and very inaccurate.

I found myself using Soylent as a "plan B" and drinking it when I'd normally skip a meal. Within the first two weeks of drinking Soylent I gained five pounds. I've never gained five pounds in the course of two weeks. It turns out skipping those meals was keeping my weight stable. I'm now careful to skip the meals I normally would and now use Soylent to replace the occasional meal I'd otherwise eat.

5 pounds in two weeks comes out to around 1,250 extra calories a day, or 2.5 Soylent meals. Are you sure you were using the correct serving sizes?

Each pouch (one days worth) is 4 servings at 500 calories each so it's not that difficult to over eat when using Soylent as a supplement.

So, here's a question; If you're using it as a supplement rather than a total meal replacement, why spend the exorbitant amount for Soylent specifically when you could get 90% of the way by getting some whey, mixing in a bit of cheap oil, and taking a multivitamin?

I wouldn't call Soylent "exorbitant". It works out to like $3 a meal.

Right, but whey protein is less than a dollar per serving.

You should probably look at the nutrition information in Soylent (or similar) and compare it to your notional proposal. If your proposal is better, give it a go and do a write-up on it.

From a quick look-see, whey protein seems to carry only ~100 calories per serving, offers almost no carbohydrates or fiber and provides almost no other vitamins or minerals. So you'd need about six servings to hit a meal's worth of calories, still have to make up for the lack of carbs and fiber sources and still have to find a good multi to take with.

If a serving is $1, then we're already at around $5-6 per meal with whey protein.

With meal replacements, convenience is the killer feature. Buying whey protein, some oil, and a multivitamin is undoubtedly cheaper, but there's the non-negligible overhead of purchasing the ingredients (instead of just a Soylent subscription), and measuring ingredients for every serving.

And a supplement at best -- not a meal.

What's the distinction?

A supplement is something you take to complete the nutrition an otherwise incomplete meal provides.

Isn't the entire point of Soylent that it's just a mixture of supplements with the appropriate calorie content?

And that's what makes it a meal (replacement). You can't survive on whey protein shakes alone. If the malnutrition doesn't kill you, the smell of your farts surely will.

Many do. People eat official Soylent because the convenience, specifically, is worth it to them.

However easy your recipe is, mixing a bag of powder with a pitcher of water is still faster, easier, and less to pay attention to.

Good question. Nature usually favours diversity so I'm skeptical at how convenient this really is at a Molecular Biology level.

It's cheap enough for me I don't think about it, what you describe sounds like work to do properly and at parity with soylent's nutrition label. (Other people seem to do DIY soylent, not me.)

Soylent just shows up at my door every couple of weeks, I throw it in the soylent cabinet, and I can make and drink one in about 2 minutes.

You forgot the carbs

Always strange to read about the la la land that New York Times reporters seem to stumble into when they take a cross country flight. It's like an exaggerated cartoon version of the real California. I guess they've got papers to flog.

to be fair, for someone one not from SV, sv is quite lala land. Just spent sometime there and it does look like a caricature of normal living.

For fun, I ordered a couple weeks of Soylent. On my first taste I realized it tasted almost exactly like a common but old Korean grain drink called Misugaru (미숫가루)[1]. It's hard to get exact nutrition information on Misugaru because even today it's usually ground up at the supermarket and put into nondescript bags. It's usually made with water or milk and chilled or mixed with ice. Like Soylent it dissolves poorly in whatever liquid you put it in, so you'll end up with big chunks of powder at the bottom of your cup. Leaving Soylent overnight usually resolves most of that, I have no idea if Misugaru does the same. Soylent is a little more "pancake/unsweetened cake batter" flavor than Misugaru, but the experience is remarkably similar.

Soylent is weird stuff, I expect to get hungry shortly after drinking it, but it holds satiation longer than regular food for me. I usually drink it as a quick breakfast, and where I'd normally get hungry around 11:00-11:30, I'll still be fine till around 1:00-1:30pm. I've also started drinking it on weekends where my option is microwave garbage or fast food. I'll be fuller, longer, and can almost guarantee it will have a better nutrition profile than what I would have eaten. And it'll probably have been cheaper as well.

As a result, I'm buying fewer groceries, and I have other stuff in my freezer that I'm not eating and seem to just take up space. I have fewer dishes to do as well. It's kind of weird how much time and space is taken up by food and food related activities and items and you don't realize it until you don't need them.

The only real weird side effect I've had is that when I go for a couple days at more than half Soylent, I get really vivid dreams, often about eating red meat. They're kind of disturbing so I usually just keep to under half my meals. That way. I've read other people reporting similar meat cravings and vivid dreams as well when they dose up.

One other benefit, when I decide to eat food, I'm doing it for flavor and experience, so I find I'm focusing on finding great foods to eat more than just looking for something to get me through the next few hours. It's paradoxically made me like good food more than I did.

So on the whole: cheaper, more nutritious, more convenient offsets the boring taste for me.

edit they also support a robust community of DIYers, which is a really smart way of growing the marketspace out.

1 - http://mykoreankitchen.com/2013/02/05/korean-multigrain-shak...

I would really like to see a long-term study of heavy Soylent use. It would be awesome if we're getting close to an optimally healthy meal replacement, but I have some serious doubts about the stuff due to the lack of phytochemicals. Vegetables contain thousands of organic compounds that are metabolized by our bodies in poorly understood ways -- my hunch is that Soylent doesn't have enough ingredients to keep human bodies running optimally. I guess it depends on where your baseline is, though; a soylent meal seems better than a fast food meal. I'll be watching the scientific literature with interest!

From 2008-2009 when I was still in the Marine Corps I spent a year in Iraq operating on small teams while embedded with the Iraqi security forces. We'd go out on 6-9 man teams and stay in the field for 1-2 weeks at a time.

Since a lot of what we did was clearing operating we were constantly on the move, so we needed something quick that packed a lot of calories since it was hard to keep weight on.

What I found that worked really well was a high calorie protein powder called TrueMass (I'm not sure if it's still around, but I use Syntha 6 now since it's leaner) since we could find it at just about every PX (store on military bases) we came across.

It worked well because we had those large bottles of water and you could drink half of it then pour some powder in, shake it up and polish it off for some calories. It wasn't super filling, but by the time you made it through the next half a bottle of water you'd be ready for more. The large jugs of protein and the large water bottles were a bit unwieldy on patrols, but we always had our vics relatively close by so it wasn't a problem.

When I heard about Soylent I thought back to this and got pretty excited. I have yet to try it yet (I ordered some early on, but cancelled after waiting a few months), but look forward to it. I'm especially looking forward to more variations in flavors and lifestyles (i.e. athletes, bodybuilders, distance, sedentary, etc.).

From what I understand, they're not planning to go into the low-carb-high-protein market, as there is already a giant protein powder industry out there to cover that kind of need.

I'd love to be wrong though, as I usually do 40P/25C/35F and I would LOVE to not have to spend a hours every weekend doing meal-prep, having to plan just how much food I need delivered, stuffing everything into tuppowerare etc. Would love to do something more enjoyable and useful with that time.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I feel like there's an unmet need for healthy (arguably, powdered food is likely not in this category), quickly available, hassle free and nutrition-plan specific meals out there. I can't find anybody who addresses this need though. Idea for YC2016, please? :)

They have a DIY site so users can trade recipes and check the formulation against a basic nutrition calculator.

Most of them are made to target different goals (weight loss, allergen avoidance, bodybuilding, etc) and come with Amazon links so you can just add all the components to your cart at once.

http://diy.soylent.com/recipes

When I placed my last order it showed up before the end of the week. You might want to give it a shot again.

I've been eating our own type of soylent for the past year and a half now. 2 per day, morning and noon, and 'normal' dinner. The type I eat is ketogenic (meaning low carb).

I have to conclude that I feel better than ever before. Where previously I ate very monotonic (and one could argue, I still do), I did not get all the nutrients I should. I now do, and feel pretty damn good.

I do feel soylent is the future, but there are many varieties.

In my circles, the whole movement has sparked a lot of discussion, and many people close to me are now eating all kinds of soylent, homemade, joylent, jake shake etc.

Let's hope that someday the whole 'fat is bad' concept leaves the mainstream, it does not seem to do a lot of good.

Btw the variety I eat costs below 5 euros per day, with 2100 calories. And I think it tastes pretty great. Only wins.

Soylent will never be the future. Just like slim fast or ensure were not the future in the 80s and 90s. This is because food, and to some extent drink, are central to cultures around the world. Many countries have food traditions dating back 100s and 1000s of years. Heck, ever since we discovered fire humans have been taking a break from the day, gathering around something, and enjoying the fruits of a hunt or harvest with their community. This is why outside of tech and maybe health/weight loss circles meal replacement of any type will have an incredibly hard time catching on. In my opinion that's a great thing.

IMHO if cooking or ordering food is "taking time away" then, well, you need to evaluate the whole picture, maybe you need to improve in other areas, plus, you are not going to get to me to sign a check serving soylent as dinner, sorry! Dinner is more than a meal.

It's one thing to say you would rather spend time chatting and enjoying food (so would I), but it's quite another to say something is wrong with someone who disagrees.

Depends whether you're eating the meal alone in front of a screen or at a restaurant. I love frozen pizza. So much. But hell, I know that a shake would be a lot better for me, and I wouldn't exactly miss out on anything memorable.

Welcome to the future.

It has taken surprisingly long time for people to make difference between functional eating and social eating. The key insight is: they are not mutually exclusive.

When there’s something more important to focus than food, so be it, and powdered foods enables you to stay in flow. However, nothing replaces the psychological need for social dining with your friends.

I’m just a bit worried of some of the second grade ingredients some of these powders contain. There are also organic real-food options available which contain 100% of nutrition guidelines. Have a look at Ambronite ( http://ambronite.com/ ) for example.

Whenever I hear anyone talk about Soylent as a utilitarian product made for boring people it always makes me think of the Volkswagen Beetle. Everyone initially thought they were utilitarian cars and only boring people should buy them, until they realized that artists and trendsetters were buying them because a vast majority of people don't use their cars as their main source of artistic expression. There are a lot of people that don't use what they eat as their main artistic expression.

I gave Soylent a try when it first came out. The initial formulation gave me incredible gastro-intestinal distress, and it was so painful that I could barely sleep at night. Apparently they heard this sort of feedback from a bunch of people and changed their mixture so it wasn't as hard on the digestive tract. I haven't tried it though, so I don't know if it'd work for me. Honestly, I'm a bit scared to do so. Oh the pain!

I've been trying the 1.4 mix this month. It's maybe a little more fiber than I had been eating, but I haven't experienced any gas or discomfort.

I understand that everyone has their own needs and desires. But personally, if I found the need to appeal to some product like this, I'd view it as an indication of a problem rather than a solution to one.

Are there any solid-food equivalents of these powdered foods?

yes, it's called food

Anybody knows if the soy used to produce Soylent is a GMO?

For the lecithin? Who knows, probably not.

Of all the ingedients in Soylent, why are you interested in almost the last ingredient on the list?

https://soylent-production-herokuapp-com.global.ssl.fastly.n...

Maybe because it's included in the product name?

It's not unreasonable to assume that "Soylent" contains lots of soy.

It's a pretty clear play on Soylent Green, which would imply that it's made of people.

Fortunately neither is true.

While it does not mention the soy specifically, the FAQ on their website indicates that Soylent contains GMOs:

https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/201274745-Vegan-Or...

You can ask them specifically about the soy through their support, if you like.

It is not GMO-free. https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/201274745-Vegan-Or...

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