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A comment on Metrecal.

Re:Metrecal by mtdewcmu on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @10:26PM (#6247808)
You could almost certainly live indefinitely on Boost or Ensure, because they are essentially flavored versions of the same products used medically in tube feeds. You could also simply drink tube feed, with or without flavoring. Liquid nutrition is not a new idea in the medical field, and there are numerous medical conditions that can make a person dependent on liquid feeding. Clinical nutritionists are professionally trained in the management of these regimens, and this makes up a lot of what they do daily in various health care settings.

The accumulated knowledge about liquid diets in the context of health care is undoubtedly vast.

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Re:Metrecal by hcarvalhoalves on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @12:51AM (#6248254)
> You could almost certainly live indefinitely on Boost or Ensure, because they are essentially flavored versions of the same products used medically in tube feeds.

I'm not sure you can claim that. Patients live off enteral diets for long periods but in very controlled environments, and even then it's still hard to get right. For a fully functional person, going to work, going to gym, being exposed to environmental stresses, and so on, to only live off Ensure might not be feasible.

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Re:Metrecal by mtdewcmu on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @01:41AM (#6248423)
Certainly no doctor or nutritionist would advise it for a healthy person. If it's not safe to live off of carefully formulated enteral diets, then you would definitely not want to try it with Soylent.

Still, people have survived poor diets and near-starvation throughout history. If the body was that fussy about nutrition, we'd be extinct.

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Re:Metrecal by Maxious on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @01:29AM (#6248389)
"Metrecal and other similar products were pulled off shelves after the United States government connected 59 deaths to liquid protein products"
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Re:Metrecal by mtdewcmu on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @01:51AM (#6248448)
I'm sure the problem with liquid protein is that they're concocted for weight lifters, but over-zealous dieters use them as a substitute for food.
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