
In Busy Silicon Valley, Protein Powder Is in Demand - credo
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/technology/in-busy-silicon-valley-protein-powder-is-in-demand.html
======
lsdafjklsd
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.

~~~
dxhdr
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.

~~~
Varcht
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.

~~~
vijayr
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.

~~~
gtk40
Bananas are only 40 to 45 cents a pound (around here). They seem to be cheaper
than many fruits in general.

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sneak
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).

~~~
timtamboy63
Any idea how to get it if you're outside the EU?

~~~
iyn
From their FAQ ([http://jakeshake.eu/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.

~~~
somedangedname
Use a mail forwarder that is located in the EU.

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brooklyndavs
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.

~~~
QuercusMax
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.

~~~
douche
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.

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frakkingcylons
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).

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LewisJEllis
"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.

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gfodor
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.

~~~
BrainInAJar
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?

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

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

~~~
Kirth
And a supplement at best -- not a meal.

~~~
BrainInAJar
What's the distinction?

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

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

~~~
Kirth
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.

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woah
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.

~~~
throwaway12309
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.

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bane
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...](http://mykoreankitchen.com/2013/02/05/korean-multigrain-shakes-
misutgaru/)

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mojoe
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!

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gmays
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.).

~~~
akurilin
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? :)

~~~
glaslong
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](http://diy.soylent.com/recipes)

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brainburn
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.

~~~
brooklyndavs
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.

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misiogames
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.

~~~
jjoonathan
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.

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gola
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/](http://ambronite.com/) ) for example.

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durbin
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.

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mingmecca
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!

~~~
douche
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.

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xefer
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.

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

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bacibaci
yes, it's called food

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

~~~
bane
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...](https://soylent-production-herokuapp-
com.global.ssl.fastly.net/static/pdfs/soylent-nutrition-
facts-1-4.750a8cbaa15f.pdf)

~~~
pavlov
Maybe because it's included in the product name?

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

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

Fortunately neither is true.

