I upvoted you because I agree that it is actually pretty easy to eat healthily for pretty cheap if you are willing to manage it correctly.

I will say that you seem to have a surprising low daily caloric intake, though. I have a high metabolism, but sit in front of computer all day and I still need 2500 calories/day to maintain my weight.

Yeah my roommate has commented on this as well. I'm thinking of adding in more nuts and other calorically dense foods. I've only been doing this for a few months so it's a bit of an experiment.

you probably just have a low natural appetite but most people need far, far more fat in order to feel satisfied and not crave food all day and binge on crap later.

nuts work great, but my personal favorite fat-booster is eggs, followed by lots of olive oil.

At rough estimate, like half the calories most people need: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cup+oatmeal+%2B+1+tbs...

scaled to the 2000'calories in soylent: 2000/951*$6.20 = $13.04 or 43% more expensive than soylent's $9.11.

shopping and cooking and eating and cleaning for this must take at least around 1/2 hour - hour each day (compared to about 5 minutes for soylent) equals about 3-6% of your waking hours.

Also, for the first time in my adult life, I'm pretty well prepared for natural disaster. before I would only keep a couple days of food in my apt and a lot of that needed refrigeration or cooking. Now I have a couple of weeks worth at the ready.

I think, though that the value prop probably makes far more sense for single people without children. For them, preparing food is far less efficient and they have to coordinate their eating with others less often. Also, it probably makes less sense if your employer provides you with free meals.

Whey protein & milk and he would be fine I think.

I have Soylent for around 40% of meals. I know it's more expensive than my regular diet, but it's quick and healthy food. Of course you can argue that your meals are very low effort, but even just grocery shopping and planning meals is something I'm happy I don't have to do now.

It makes my life simpler and more enjoyable and that's worth the price to me.

I haven't seen any compelling evidence that Soylent is healthy, given that there are not even agreed upon RDA for most nutrients or macro nutrients.

Are you arguing that you haven't seen compelling evidence that /any/ food or diet is healthy, given that there are not even any agreed upon RDA for most nutrients or macronutrients?

I'd suggest comparing the nutrition of Soylent to the nutrition of actual meals we eat when we don't have time for a proper meal. Since that's how many people use it.

For one, there will be a fiber deficiency if you stick with Soylent only. It's like juicing every day - strip fruits of most of the fiber, release immediate sugar into blood and welcome diabetes with open arms!

The whole concept of Soylent feels to me like a typical reductionist approach - let's mix some stuff together and all will be good. It's like trying to control your weight by calories - calories are the roughest, least precise way to decide what you need to eat (are you literally burning your food in fire when you digest it?) and completely ignores your metabolism characteristics and state of your health. It's like measuring programming capabilities by the number of lines written, yet we still somehow stick with it when planning our diets.

Please people, do your research, don't endanger your health by following what look like trendy geeky diets!

>It's like trying to control your weight by calories - calories are the roughest, least precise way to decide what you need to eat

>Please people, do your research

You're being contradictory here. Your body obeys the laws of physics.

Losing weight is LITERALLY calories in < calories out.

Being healthy and losing weight are two different things that often overlap.

>(are you literally burning your food in fire when you digest it?)

What a silly remark ... of course not.

"Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products.[1] Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition." (Wikipedia)

>It's like measuring programming capabilities by the number of lines written, yet we still somehow stick with it when planning our diets.

Comparing apples with oranges.

There's this strange opinion circulating that the calories don't matter. It stems from an observation that some calories 'stick' more readily than others. From that, they leap to the conclusion that calories are meaningless.

I'm with you - physics rules. No matter what calories you consume, fewer is better for weight control. But don't try to argue with these folks. They can't acknowledge even the obvious boundary cases: eating nothing inevitably leads to losing weight.

There is some anecdotal evidence that varying macronutrient levels affect hormone levels in significant ways.

Screwing with hormone levels is a great way to affect the metabolism rate and lipid storage capability of the human body. That's what bodybuilders have been doing for decades. Steroid use is the ultimate manifestation of that school of thought.

The truth is that we know very very little about nutrition because doing controlled double-blind studies on human subjects is very very difficult. Bodybuilders are probably the best population to study because of the self-experimentation angle.

We know this about nutrition: activity burns calories at extremely predictable rates. Food has calories at extremely predictable densities. Physics works.

And see? Even these fundamental facts about physics get disputed/denied by the nutrition nuts.

I'll bite.

We measure calories in food by burning it in a lab and calculating the exact energy given off. Very precise. What we don't measure is how many pieces of that cob of corn I ate for dinner will pass through to my stool.

And I'll accept the comment that activities burn calories at predictable rates (they don't across populations -- look at exercise adaptation) but they can per individual. But treating the consumption of calories and the expenditure of calories as independent variables seems foolish. For an absurd comparison -- do you think my Caloric consumption over the next 24 hours would be identical if I consumed 10 calories of chocolate or 10 calories of amphetamines?

Physics works. A calorie is a calorie. But pretending that the human body treats all calories the same as a calorometer seems foolish.

All correct, agreed. What it means is, there is some level of exercise that will consume enough calories to exhaust ready supply. Then weight loss occurs.

The silliness begins when folks start to bargain. How little exercise can I get away with? How can I eat a lot and not gain weight? Its this lazy concern that occupies everybodys thoughts and behaviors. They write whole books about it.

When in fact, if they'd get off their lazy butts and exercise, really exercise, they could forget about all those details. Physics could work for them.

And by exercise I mean ride that bike 20 miles over the lunch hour. With some stiff hills involved. Really exert yourself. But few want to do that. They want to ride a recumbent 5 miles on the flat and then eat 3 hamburgers. And complain that exercise clearly doesn't work because they're not losing weight.

Its astonishing how little exercise most folks have ever done in their lives. I'd go this far: most folks have never exercised. They've warmed up, and then stopped when they hit the point their muscles feel it. I know this - I've taken folks hill-riding and had them stop. "Something's wrong. I feel funny. My heart rate is up and my muscles are complaining". They'd never gotten aerobic in their entire lives, and were afraid of the feeling.

From personal experience, and this was some years ago, I've found that on a high carb, high fat diet e.g. breakfast: beans, bacon, eggs, toast. lunch: sandwich with deli meat, cheese, mayo. supper: bread, veg, and meat, plus a few cups of coffee and a beer thrown in caused pretty rapid weight gain (30lbs.) with what I would call a normal amount of activity, walking a reasonable distance to and from work, intentional exercise 2 - 3 times per week, some activity on the weekends but the rest of the time spent at a desk or on a couch.

After taking a summer job doing manual labour that involved constant, intense activity (lots of shovelling, sweeping, lifting, walking, pushing and pulling) from 8 AM to 1 PM every day I saw a complete reversal in weight while maintaining the same diet.

So from my own experience, it is absolutely possible to eat a fairly heavy diet and lose weight. It all depends on balancing your intake with the amount of energy you consume during the day. The only problem is that it takes a lot of heavy physical work to use those calories and the exercise regimen that most people assume comes no where near to what it takes to use up the amount they take in.

As far as quitting before you actually really start exercising, there was a good quote by Muhammad Ali circulating the other day [1] "I don't count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting. That is when I start counting, because then it really counts. That's what makes you a champion."

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ylOAYnR.jpg

Exercise is great and all, but diet is faaaaaar more important for weight loss.

Indeed, this chart shows caloric burn for various activities, the body is very efficient:

http://www.thehealthyeatingguide.com/calorie-burning-chart/

It entirely depends on your effort level. To say 'biking' burns 530 calories per hour seems precise. But a racer can burn 5000 calories. And you can burn everywhere in between those numbers, depending on your exertion level and the course.

Agreed - however, cutting caloric intake requires far less effort, and doing so via certain diets is far easier than others.

Apparently not, considering the vast industry around gaming just that activity.

While your are correct in a fundamental physics way, you might be ignoring the details of human chemistry and its resulting psychology impact. There's are reasons for the relatively recent obesity epidemic. Those reasons are rooted in the misguided dietary recommendations to reduce fat in favor of increasing carbs.

https://www.thebairs.net/2015/05/recommended-reading-why-we-...

These reasons are rooted in everybody sitting on their butt 23 hours a day, and not really exercising at all even when 'working out'.

You say that as though exercising like a competitive athlete is necessary for good health or weight maintenance. It isn't. It's much simpler to understand the insulin cycle and work with it rather than against it.

I'll hop in, though I'm likely to regret this. Note that I am not only replying to the parent comment here, but also addressing the general conversation descending.

The primary disconnect I see in this sort of disagreement about the importance of calories is what we count as "calories in" and what we count as "calories out". The calories listed on nutrition labels are determined by burning a sample of food in a bomb calorimeter. Since our body does not reach the efficiency of a bomb calorimeter, calories consumed through oral or intravenous ingestion will overstate the number of calories that are used by the human body calories in < calories out. As a stupid example, there is clearly a large amount of energy in wood. A human may ingest wood and "touch" none of the calories contained therein. Should a daily branch of intake count as part of our calories in? Where do we draw the line then? Should we exclude calories from fiber?

The nutrition label gives us an upper limit of what we can consider calories in, but does not, on its own, give us an actual value for this measure.

The other side of the disconnect is how we measure calories out. Some people consider only energy expenditure, or how many calories ingested are turned into energy for useful work in the body. Some may also consider those calories utilized for structural purposes. Protein does not necessarily get utilized for energy; in fact it is the least desirable energy source of the three macronutrients. Some may also consider the caloric value of excrement for measurement of calories out.

So calories in can be calories ingested, or calories "processed" (here loosely defined as anything that doesn't pass straight through to stool or urine). Calories out can be calories utilized for useful work, or anything that exits the body, as energy/heat or excrement.

Here alone we have enough for significant confusion among reasonable people depending on which definition they are using.

I hope this helps those involved in the conversation to clarify what they mean and consider that their conversation partner may be less of a moron than they assume.

Add to this that the only piece of this that we can accurately measure across populations is gross calories ingested, and there is a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree on a "healthy intake".

Please note: I am trying to be neutral in this comment, and to only help shed some light on where we find confusion in words. I am explicitly not making an argument for or against any specific interpretation of these words. If you choose to take issue with any inferred stake I hold, have fun. I am perfectly happy to consider discussion on the potential for confusion in the words we use when discussing the issue of caloric intake, though.

You're assuming it's easy to measure "calories out."

Further, not all people are the same, so "healthy" actually varies from person to person. In at least one area this is dramatic: Some people are insulin sensitive and some are insulin resistant. I looked at the nutrition label on soylent. It might be healthy for insulin sensitive people, who generally tend to be naturally skinny.

But this would be a terrible thing for someone who is insulin resistant to consume. It has a very high amount of carbs and fat, which means that your body will see the carbs, blood sugar will spike the insulin will spike very high to compensate (since you're resistant you need more of it to get your blood sugar down) and the high levels of insulin tell the body to start storing fat... consequently making you fatter.

Unfortunately, so much of the diet science assumes everyone is the same, and ignores the insulin sensitivity factor (and I bet there are several other factors going on as well that aren't understood.)

By healthy I mean that for lunch everyday I have 500 calories of something nutritious. This is more healthful than going our for lunch and overeating or grabbing fast food. I might be setting the bar pretty low there, but that was often my habit. Given that it's the habit of of about 80% of my co-workers I don't think that's too out of the ordinary.

I agree with you though, it does concern my that I'm eating powder for 2 meals per day and that might not go well for me in the long term.

That sounds like less than 1000 calories a day. You must be getting more calories than that or you are very atypical.

There's also an issue of taste. I dislike the taste of many foods considered healthy for me. I try to eat the ones I enjoy but many are expensive depending on the season.

For example, I cannot stomach green beans. Attempting to chew them results in vomiting within my mouth. The smell of them alone is repulsive to me.

If I can have a bland solution to eating healthy - that's a win for me. The only thing preventing me from trying Soylent is the price of buying enough for 2 people, since all of my current meals are shared. Having to buy normal groceries and Soylent would nearly double my monthly cost for foodstuffs.

I'd have a healthier, cheaper diet if I only had to buy food for myself.

E:

Not to mention every "cheap alternative healthy food" to Soylent I see mentioned only targets a small section of nutrients and vitamins and often ignores proteins altogether. They aren't well rounded - even if they're healthier/cheaper than McDonalds. Soylent strikes the "well rounded" healthy food. Without the hassle of having to buy groceries or prepare the food.

> For example, I cannot stomach green beans. Attempting to chew them results in vomiting within my mouth. The smell of them alone is repulsive to me.

Maybe you're just really sensitive to lectins and your body is trying to tell you something...

> For example, I cannot stomach green beans. Attempting to chew them results in vomiting within my mouth. The smell of them alone is repulsive to me.

Sauté them with butter, it's like a different food.

I don't tend to have butter (or margarine spread) in the house. Not to mention I would have to cook them and clean the dishes :)

I've tried them buttered, steamed, roasted, in a casserole, mixed into Mac&Cheese, and 1,000 different methods my mother tried to sneak green beans into my diet as a child. I struggle to stomach them no matter how they are prepared.

I have little concern for trying foods I dislike. I make an attempt to revisit them every few years (ie. I hated sushi as a child, I absolutely love it as an adult) but don't actively try different recipes or "force myself to like it".

The few foods I eat actively, I eat because I enjoy. The other foods I eat because I guilt trip myself into eating healthy. I'd live off nothing but rigatoni with old-school traditional Ragu sauce day in and day out if I could. But I limit that to once-a-week and figure out more balanced and healthy meals the other 6 days (if I eat at all).

Soylent would likely do wonders for my dietary health.

tarragon, heavily on green beans would be worth a shot.

This diet for 5 years and you will be dead.

Add more almonds.

I would purchase a days worth but I am not going to toss eighty odd bucks on something I might not like. At least mealsquares has a sample pack at twenty five that is about my threshold for trying specialized food products.

Soylent 1.4 has a grainy/nutty taste, similar to almond milk with oats.

If you like those flavors, then you'll probably like Soylent. I spike mine with a healthy amount of chocolate protein powder (Isopure) and coconut oil since I do better with less carbs in my diet.

Given that it's sort of bland, I imagine you can easily flavor it and make fun beverages. Part of why I want to get it is to experiment. My coworker drinks soylent and I bet I could make it taste fantastic after playing with it a bit.

I've always seen the value proposition as saving time vs cooking yourself and saving money vs buying prepared food.

it depends on where you live, over here a medium sized bunch of organic kale is $2.99 at whole foods by itself, and $0.20 won't get you that many oats, let alone honey or cinnamon.

The advantage of things like Soylent is that the price is the same no matter where you live, whether you are in a small town with great produce where it's cheap or whether you live in an expensive downtown with limited access.

I don't know how anyone can afford to shop at Whole Foods!

If you want fresh veggies and fruit for cheap, go find an Asian supermarket. If you walk in and realize you're the only non-Asian, then you're in the right place.

I can easily buy enough fruits and vegetables to last a week for $15. We're talking multiple serving of both for lunch and dinner for 7 days.

Or at farmers markets! Can't upvote this enough. I go to the indian and asian markets and only buy certain things at costco where the quality is slightly better (fruits) or I get more quantity for the $.

If there's not much of an Asian population, Asian supermarkets aren't nearly as common and so not very convenient.

Where I live, buying rolled oats off the shelf from a regular grocery store will run you $0.00244 per gram. A serving of oats as indicated by the packaging is 3/4 cups or 65.7g of oats by weight. That works out to a whopping $0.1647 per serving. Prices are fairly average if not a little higher where I live so yes most people can get oats for $0.20 a serving. The secret is probably not buying at whole foods.

Honey can be a bit more expensive, for me it's about $0.012 per gram when not on sale. I use around a tablespoon in the morning so that's about 21.25g by weight which gives $0.255 in cost. Once again, that's hardly unmanageable on a daily basis. I don't know how much cinnamon you generally put in your oatmeal but a couple of shakes usually does it for me, not sure what it would be if measured but certainly less than 1/4 tsp. and it takes me a long time to go through a bottle (125g) or bag if I buy the cheaper stuff and refill a bottle ;) so the couple dollars I spend on it only gets shelled out every 2 - 3 months.

You can also order those ingredients from amazon:

50lbs bag of rolled oats $57.99 (0.00255/g) [1]

220z x 3 raw honey $28.80 ($0.0154/g) [2]

18oz. ground cinnamon $8.48 ($0.0166/g) [3]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Regular-Rolled-Oats-Bulk-Pound/dp/B007...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Y-S-Eco-Bee-Farms-Honey/dp/B000Z93FQC/...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/McCormick-Ground-Cinnamon-18-oz/dp/B00...

20 cents wont get you a serving of oats? Oats are like 80 cents a pound, dry! A quarter pound of dry oats is plenty of food for breakfast...

Where's the protein and fat? The brain needs both to function correctly.

What's your hourly wage? Don't forget an hour of your time!

Not saying that makes it impractical to cook your own food, but we can't act like the only cost in making dinner is the raw materials.

As an aside, it's pretty difficult to maintain those price levels if you'd like to eat more than oatmeal, spinach salad, and tilapia every day.

sometimes hn can feel like the cheapskate olympics.

i'll easily spend $100 on a trip to the store when i buy high quality pastured eggs, organic protein, local olive oil, fresh vegetables, CHEESE, etc.

sometimes i'll even splurge, and get an overpriced sandwich! can you imagine??? pre-made food... so irresponsible.

i don't go into work every day so i can live like a college student on dry goods and roughage.

> What's your hourly wage? Don't forget an hour of your time!

Compared to how expensive long term health care is, I'll gladly take the 30 minutes to cook my own food.

That only makes sense if you're taking time off work to cook, which most people aren't. Otherwise you weren't getting paid for that hour anyway.

This is hacker news. Why would anyone here ever take time off of work? If you're still employed (and who is?) by some BigCorp you can at least have side projects in your off time. But most of the people here are founding one or more startups while managing a productized consultancy and can probably scale their billable time to something like 22.5 hours per day (assuming 90 minutes of sleep time distributed via the Uberman schedule). So this isn't a fair argument against soylent for most people in software/tech jobs, and probably soon most other jobs as the contractor model becomes more popular and jobs become uberified.

I value my free time too. Significantly, in fact.

Serious question -- where do you shop that this amount of food for an adult only costs this much?

Late reply... can you estimate the number of hours per week you put into planning, shopping, cooking, and cleanup? If so, and if you can you assign a $ value to that time, it would be an interesting exercise to compare such _total_ costs (averaged per meal) versus the same calculation using Soylent.

I would suppose (based on doing 50% Soylent for a few months) that for an all-Soylent diet, planning and shopping time goes to zero, "cooking" time to 5 min/day (to shake up one bag in the pitcher), cleanup to near-zero (put glass in the sink). Very possibly the reduction in time, valued in dollars, makes Soylent cheaper.

Well, time = money, so unless you make that every week and have 0 daily prep/cook time, allowing you to amortize the bulk prep time across the week, Soylent probably saves you at least 8 hours a week assuming 20 minute prep/cook time per meal (I feel like, due to slop time, 20 minutes is about the minimum for this, unless you got really, really efficient with how you stored ingredients).

Further, Soylent is about $9/day, and your food system is only a bit less expensive at $6.20/day. In contrast, I've lived for months off of DIY soylents that were $3.50/day.

Food is super dead cheap to produce, In most places the bulk of cost of food is transportation and profits accounted for every level in the chain of exchange of goods between farmer and the consumer.

This is largely true in poor and developing countries. The food prices go up when fuel prices go up. I don't see this change even in the case of Soylent.

I just find it totally disturbing. Who are these people who want to eat this because it's faster so they can work more?

It's like a forum of aliens. I have nothing in common with them. It really made me feel repelled by some of the replies.

To be human is to want to eat fine food and to play.

To be inhuman is to want to consume calories so you can work longer. Yuk and yuk.

Speaking as someone who consumes one and sometimes two meals out of the usual three prepared in a simple liquid form in order to save time on food prep, it has a perfectly rational backing that fits in with most of the other activities engaged in by normal humans. Saving the time I would normally spend preparing and eating breakfast and lunch makes sense because it allows me to work more during that time so that I can finish my overall workload sooner which in turn gives me more time in the evening and on weekends to follow the pursuits that I really enjoy, of which cooking and enjoying fine food is one.

I liken it to having an interest in and owning high performance cars. Driving a beautiful and powerful car in your off-time is a perfectly valid pursuit but using the same car for your daily commute resulting in more time spent in transit and the irritation of bumper to bumper gridlock and delays in exchange for the extra time 'enjoying' your car makes no sense if you can simply jump on a train or subway and skip the traffic even if that experience is rather more bland in comparison.

We shouldn't eat to live and nor should we live to eat.

Come on - as the founder of Soylent wrote, I like to go to movies too. But not three movies a day.

There are many things in life that are interesting and fun. For some its their startup job. Everyone coming to HN should understand that.

> Who are these people who want to eat this because it's faster so they can work more?

Or maybe they eat this so they can play more? I just find it totally disturbing that you've chosen eating food as one of your primary sources of entertainment. You must be a really boring person.

Soylent is much cheaper if you make it yourself. It's only expensive if you buy it pre-made.

I spend at least 3x that

That takes time to put together. Even if you come back saying, "It only takes XX minutes to do!" that's still time it takes. Soylent is aimed at people who really don't have that time (or think they don't). People who have multiple jobs.

wow, where do you live?