Original post here: Mostly Harmless
Follow up post here: Mostly Harmless
My apologies if someone else has already started a discussion on this topic, but I happened to come across this today and decided to share it with my T Nation pals. Long story short, this fellow decided to forego regular food and get all his nutrition from a drink. Anyone else seen this yet, or have any thoughts about it?
Interesting! I would love to know what actually went into that. I reckon 95% of the worlds population would be better off drinking this stuff rather than their current diet - no wonder the author felt great after analysing and controlling exactly (down to the minerals) what he drank.
Problem is, as the guy writes, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, especially when you’re delving at such rudimentary levels. Just a couple of milligrams of and someone with a different body composition might suffer adverse effects. That said, I think if one could develop a generic enough product, it might go a long way in the fight against third world poverty/hunger. The more likely scenario is it gets developed by nutrition companies who mess with it and sell it as some icky diet drink.
I just heard about Soylent yesterday and was pretty intrigued. I do love food, but only sometimes like cooking, and HATE doing dishes and kitchen cleanup.
Sometimes eating feels like such a chore, so I’ve been pretty happy with the intermittent fasting concept–save some time from the kitchen and help avoid weight gain is pretty win-win!
I wouldn’t hop on an long-term exclusively Soylent diet but I love the concept for its benefits. I’d especially love to integrate it into a Velocity Diet.
With just a quick glance at the ingredients, I would love to find a simple way to “homebrew” a customized recipe.
I would start with the Vegan protein mix from Truenutrition. [I’ve become dubious about whey recently] and then look at something like Superfood and some Flax seed for fiber and you’re good to go.
I’d love to see a thread of “Soylen-T” recipes!
Read both of the above threads and while interesting I have a lot of questions and some outright reservations - if any one has thoughts on these, I would love to hear them.
how is this any different from a meal in a bottle product like ensure?
I dispute his claim that the only thing that matters in long term diet is a selection of essential micro and macro nutrients - more and more evidence is coming forward about the importance of a wide range of known and unknown phytochemicals on genetic expression as it relates to things like inflammation, cognition, aging and cancer. Thoughts?
This product is likely derived, other than the olive oil and a few mined minerals, 100% from corn - a crop that is already well past it’s tipping point as a mono culture. He touches on the cost of food for 3rd world countries, and the environmental impact of food in 1st world countries - but both of these problems would likely be exacerbated by further reliance on a crop that is heavily dependent on irrigation and pesticides and which rapidly depletes the viable life span of farmed land. Thoughts?
I can see how something like this would appeal to someone who is psychologically adverse to food, which he clearly is from some of his descriptions and assumptions in the first post, but I see a lot of problems with it as a large scale, wide spread “solution” to food per se.
Just my $.02
Kind of like a Plumpy’nut for the west, rich folk.
Marketers will be targeting their message to us real soon.
Before your know it, this slop - in some modified, ‘highly-assimilable, insanely anabolic’ state - will be offered to us as the next big thing. Next step, or concurrent w/ this step, is micro-farming (i.e., insects for protein). Hit me up for that delicious, nutritious, vanilli/choclate straubery meal-worm shake.
Forgive me, but I have some garlic, onions, and carrot, to chop up, saute in some olive oil until nice and soft, add some tomato paste, fry until the complex, tomato-uy, god-like goodness of the paste oozes, add some (28 oz) canned fire-roasted tomatoes (with spices to your liking), and then simmer to a jelly like consistency (should take less than an hour). If it’s too acidic, add some minimal sweetener to the sauce. (Grandma Gumba gonna kill me w/ that sweetener comment, but I find just a wee bit of it balances the sauce so nicely; I accept an early death). Then add pasta and animal protein to your liking, eat, (and die @ Mama Gumba’s tough hands if necessary) a happy man. The really funked up part of the above recipe is how it IMPROVES with time (till it goes rancid, at which point you gotta trash it stopid)!
Fake food needs to stop.
Yeah, I remember hearing about this a while ago and thinking “Why doesn’t this guy just drink Ensure?”
It’s already formulated to be a complete, standalone food substitute that provides you with everything you need. This guy is literally reinventing the wheel here, and going about it quite poorly.
You all need to see the movie Soylent Green with Charlton Heston. Sums it all up.