TL;DR Someone trying to sell you on another crazy diet.
A complete enteral diet (when you're in the hospital and they feed it to you in a tube) is both extremely hard to achieve and expensive, not to mention the collateral effects. Then there's this guy claiming that he can not only live on a carb/protein/fat shake he made on his kitchen, but that it gave him superpowers and it's cheap to boot. He even gave it a market name already.
I agree that this is most likely a scam, but just wanted to point out that the 'market name' is just a reference to a movie called 'Soylent Green': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
I think you are mistaking parenteral and enteral. The difference is where the tube goes. Feeding someone with a tube is difficult only if the tube goes into the bloodstream.
If it goes to the stomach, a normal meal + a blender is all that is needed (or the fancy and overpriced equivalents sold for a small fortune to the hospitals)
If it goes to the bloodstream, it can't be food, and the problem is we don't exactly know yet everything it should contain.
I get immediately suspicious when the ingredients to make such a product aren't listed. Run faster, think clearer, all for 1/5th the price, with just one simple trick a single mom found!
I'll assume this must be either satire or a sales pitch until proven otherwise -- I fully expect the first ingredient if listed to be "premium snake oil".
An engineered food replace drink named "Soylent"? It's a spoof.
Researched every substance the body needs to survive, but missed iron? And "heart racing" from iron deficiency on the third day, then corrected immediately?
I love this approach, and I would like to know more about the actual composition of his Soylent meal to check for other "missing things" such as iron which was mentioned in the article, and whether the correct biodisponible versions are used (you can't get much iron from eating screws). I'm especially curious about the proteins.
Then after careful checking, I'd like to try that myself!
Food is a waste of time. It is something you do because it has to be done. You can save time by eating out (but you may still lose time standing in line, going there, etc.) but you are just trading time for money and getting food that might not be optimal for your body.
At the moment, the best I've found is microwaving frozen food as the best tradeoff between time spent/healthy content/price : frozen minced meat and whole rice can be cooked in ~ 3 minutes for 1 person. I add a fruit, usually an apple and I call that a meal.
Sometimes I replace the minced meat by a box of tuna or herring (once or twice per weak) to get fish oil, and on weekends the meal is replaced by french saucisson and cheese (ready in 30 seconds : you cut yourself a portion!! even better !!) + fruit. I drink half a glass of acerola/mango/etc. juice each day for vitamins I could be missing.
I eat when I feel hungry - usually in the morning and in the afternoon, sometimes before going to bed I add an apple (I've noticed if I don't, I wake up around 4 am - maybe due to a too low glucose level). I do workout about 3 times a week - I then replace the apple by a full meal - same standard composition.
Not only do I feel better as the author mentioned (but I doubt that - these many little things could be just a placebo effect) but also, above all, I feel free.
I don't have to overthink what food I have to prepare or chose or anything like this - just sticking to the default. It's like creating a good habit - easy to follow is the selling point, healthy effects are sideproducts. No time lost in the supermarket. Sometimes I buy random stuff to check if it could be added to my default, but so far nothing stuck.
Now after reading that article I would like to improve it even more : I could replace the weekend saucisson + cheese by something that takes even less time, and that could be drunk.
You have your views on life and I respect them. You may enjoy spending hours everyday preparing your food, and hours eating it - why not.
But personally, I don't. Just like you, I have my own views, which I enjoy enough to openly share them, in full honesty.
For me food is a nuisance that I want to take as little time as possible (preparation + consumption). I enjoy spending my time on different things.
The original blog post might be questionable (the iron thing - I can't imagine how he might have missed that!) and light on details. It could also be a hoax.
But for the one time I find someone who shares my views, as opposed to the prevalent "food is the most important thing in life - food is sacred - spend all your time on it", I want to know more about his approach, to find mistakes, correct them, and experiment.
Who knows, maybe more people think the same secretly? Maybe some day it will be the most prevalent view on food?
I was somehow expecting some negative replies, but not something just ad hominem like this, and devoid of content. Still, I wanted to share my current approach, in the hope others could find it interesting as a baseline to experiment upon, and also to get their own (hopefully someone else is also trying to optimize the food problem on time + health constraints)
So relax, I'm experimenting my own regimen on myself, and you're free to disagree.
I think the GP is missing the point here: for many people, food is like bills. You deal with them, but not because you want to, only because you have to. Whether or not the OP is serious, it reminded me much of molecular gastronomy, and approaching food scientifically. While some may look down on this as an exercise in soul-crushing, is it any worse than the mass produced eating material that is fast/convenience food today? At least with this approach, the goal is health, not addictiveness or saleability.
I'm the kind of person who has spent hundreds of dollars on a fine dining experience (and heartily enjoy and recommend it), and has spent countless hours in the kitchen attempting to make good food. Yet, on some days, I'd rather just whip up a soylent shake and be done with it. On some days, I'm not even in any state to care what it tastes or feels like.
First, enjoying food does not imply spending hours cooking food. If you think so, this is one thing your culture taught you wrong. Good food is simple, can be frozen, or even eaten raw. Also, there's no explanation to why one can order chicken wings by phone and have it delivered in 30 minutes but not something healthier other than pure ignorance.
Second, this is a reductionist, naive view of nutrition. There's more to nurturing than swallowing a mix of nutrients. Smell, taste, chewing motion, the brain. If you don't enjoy your food, you don't feel satisfied. If you don't feel satisfied, your organism doesn't work as expected, neither your mood. Food and pleasure are intimately associated, you cannot have a whole human being by reducing the act of eating to an inconvenience.
If you were right, enteral diets (Google what it means) would be completely normal by today.
I agree with your point of view. Food is a nuisance, and I'd love this blog post to be true. I just subscribed to the guy's distribution list to get more info.
There is no easy way out of health. That's what fad diets forget to mention. People who find themselves in bad health situations (obesity, illness, etc.) due to diet want a fix that is as effortless as it was to dig that hole they've found themselves in. If it was easy, we'd all be models by now.
Its good to hear you've found a routine that works for you but I have a hard time believing it is optimal for any person's health. It seems minimal and lacking variety that unless supplemented by additional vitamins will leave you lacking in the long run. But I'll stop judging because your post obviously doesn't go into detail about your entire lifestyle, it would be wrong of me to judge based on this alone.
Despite that though you've hit on a number of points that everyone could learn from: eat when you're hungry, not because its scheduled, work out regularly, substitute your meals when you need more energy while maintaining a macro-nutrient balance, listen when your body is acting weird...
You're right, there does not seem to be a model regimen - there are just too many of them.
It reminds me of an article I've read recently on lesswrong about the limits of self-experimentation : the results are not transposable because of each person different situation.
Yet one has to take a baseline and work upon it (experiment, rinse & repeat), especially when considering the daily recommandation are of questionable quality. Proper experimentation to find them scientifically might be ethically objectionable.
IMHO the only valid evaluation is a self evaluation as described by how one feels and the lack of diseases caused by deficiencies.
Still, I don't believe my routine is optimal - from a nutrition standpoint, variety is always better than a routine (ex: vegans frequently have problems with B12).
I wish there was a known "good" routine, but IMHO even without it, the good outweight the bad - as in time and effort saved and put to some better use, not having to think about each meal individually.
Anyway, I spend some time reevaluating the routine every month or so, but that is nothing when spread to the number of meals covered, especially if the resulting default choices provide health benefits on the side.
[At the moment, I am worried about underdosing important vitamins and mineral, especially due to the low fruits & vegetables intake, even if there are also advocados and nuts on the weekends, so I'm considering adding a fresh tomato per meal.]
BTW, before the "important" weekly workout, I take milk and cornflakes (1 minute to prepare- and there come VitD too, thanks to the milk!) - a kid brand I had chosen for its content in B1/B6/B12 at the time I was using "usual" rice. It's light, but I noticed it improves the intensity of the workout (reps are stopped when they become physically impossible, with a 45 min deadline for the total duration of the session) It is supplemented by drinking liquid cane sugar + 80% water during training.
Anyway my routine is quite minimal and lack variety, but I'm not overtly worried, considering I have to eat outside at least twice per week, which should bring enough variety to fix any real deficiency.
I would be interested on your take - especially if you follow a routine and have identified potential problems in your own routine.
I still dream of a day when I will be able to drink something with water and never ever need to eat anything again.
I hate having to eat. I hate the taste of 90% of things. And I often think about how much time I lose eating.
And the worst thing in the world is when I need to have lunch with someone else.
"My cravings and tastes closely matched with my needs. One day I accidentally put in a tablespoon of salt, rather than a teaspoon. I immediately noticed the mixture tasted unpleasantly salty. When I was deficient of iron I felt a strong craving for red meat. As I started running longer distances I craved more carbohydrates. After a week advertisements for fast food looked repulsive. All I crave is Soylent." Man, this is super creepy stuff
It would seem that all the benefits the author described are relative to his health before he started this diet. Is it possible then that the diet corrected some previous nutrient deficiency and that the same result could have been obtained by just taking a multivitamin or something?
But Soylent Green wasn't people. That was a hollywood fantasy to sell more tickets. It was actually an artificial meat product engineered to taste like people. The book was awesome, the movie sucked. I remember in the movie that a front-loader was scooping up people to slaughter.
This seems to be some kind of writing experiment about the implications of "soylent" rather than a technical piece. It tries to speak toward the sociology food in culture, but it doesn't really go into great depth. What is the point of this? Considering the present day use of factory farms, I think any impact it desires is cheapened.
A complete enteral diet (when you're in the hospital and they feed it to you in a tube) is both extremely hard to achieve and expensive, not to mention the collateral effects. Then there's this guy claiming that he can not only live on a carb/protein/fat shake he made on his kitchen, but that it gave him superpowers and it's cheap to boot. He even gave it a market name already.
Not flying with me.