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0 pointslegostormtroopr8y ago0 comments

Why not buy a commercially made meal replacement product that has been on the market for decades and is endorsed by nursing and medical professions and is used in hospitals?

Its not like no one had ever done meal-replacement foods before Soylent came along. Its not new, its not cheaper, its not as well regulated, its not as flavorful.

Seriously, why would you buy Soylent (which has had numerous beta 'failures') over a something like Ensure/

0 comments

tree_of_item8y ago

Ensure in particular is a bad example. I'm sure it is used in lots of hospitals but it shouldn't be: https://storiesbycarrol.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/food-or-vil...

rblatz8y ago

Everyone is all about trusting science and medical professionals right up until it comes to dietitians... Then suddenly random bloggers and cherry picked studies come flying out of the wood work, much like the anti-vaccine crowd.

And I say this with the belief that Americans eat too many carbs, and a higher fat/lower carb diet would be better for people. I just don’t understand this disconnect.

TheSpiceIsLife8y ago

> Everyone is all about trusting science and medical professionals

To counter this, I'v been reading a lot lately about how science has a publish-or-perish problem / unreproducible results problem / influence by industry problem.

And the medical profession / pharmaceutical industry is complicit in the opium epidemic. Many of the medical drugs, doctors use, outside of infectious disease control, don't actually work in the sense that you take them for a period of time and are cured.

It is the fault of government department dietitians, and their political overlords, that we are in this obesity / diabetes / heart disease mess.

Given the traditional dietary advice of "eat less fat, start your day will a bowl full of sugar and milk" is wrong, is it any wonder people are making so much noise?

2 more replies

krakensden8y ago

Nutrition science has an ugly history of wrongness and capture by industry. I am also extremely wary of psychology, which puttered along doing bad work for decades before the current replication crisis. We could all have a foodfight about Economics for fifty years.

There is a bunch of foundational stuff in science that is great, but like any human endeavour, there is also plenty of garbage and nonsense.

squeaky-clean8y ago

Ensure is extremely sweet. Living off Ensure, you'd either have to get the zero carb version, or you'll have 2x the sugars of Soylent. It's also just disgusting to drink more than 3 of something so sugary before needing something else. The original Soylent flavor I can have for weeks before feeling like I need a change.

If a cheaper competitor emerges that doesn't taste like a milk shake, I'd switch to that. But so far no one has offered a reasonable alternative.

jnwatson8y ago

I thought that too, but I was wrong. Before Soylent and the other meal replacements that came up behind them, there wasn't anything out there.

One 8 oz bottle of Ensure has 220 calories and 33g of carbs, 15g of which is just sugar. You might as well just have a coke and some protein powder.

cal5k8y ago

Ensure tastes awful. If I had to live on that for a week I'd go bonkers.

novia8y ago

Milk allergies or veganism?

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