Episode: 3171
Title: HPR3171: A Week On Soylent
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3171/hpr3171.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:11:35

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3171 for Monday, 28 September 2020. Today's show is entitled
A Week on Soylent. It is hosted by Lost End Bronx, and is about 12 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is, Lost End Bronx tries eating nothing but soylent,
so you don't have to.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Music
Hello, this is Lost End Bronx, and today I'd like to talk to you about Soylent.
Now, if you're not familiar with it, Soylent is a food replacement product.
It comes in a variety of forms now. The original was a powdered form, and that's the one I'm going to talk about,
but they do have it in premixed shakes that you can buy in different supermarkets and health food stores and such,
as well as energy bars and things of that nature now.
But the original was powder, and that's what I tried.
I ate nothing but Soylent for about a week, and I want to talk about that.
How it went and what the experience was like.
Now, what we did is we bought a jar of powdered Soylent, the original flavor, meaning flavor list.
There was no flavoring to it.
And in powder form, I got it off of Amazon, and it cost me about $32.
That price seems to fluctuate, because earlier, only like a week before, I'd saw it at $34,
and it probably goes up and down somewhere around that amount.
And it was a jar that was 2.3 pounds or 1.0 weight kilograms.
A little odd there, but I guess that was to cover any strange differences in weight due to the powdered nature of the product inside.
They don't, I don't know, other other powdered products that you might buy like flour and what have you.
They seem to have that dialed in, but these guys, they do leave some leeway in there.
It's a little strange.
On the package, it says it's good for about 18 meals.
I was able to get 19.5 out of it, and these were 8 fluid ounces or 1 cup of finished, you know, like a meal ready to go.
But basically, one scoop, and for me, I did one scoop flattened on the top.
Let's see, I had a total of about 19.5 meals over the course of a single week.
And it, well, it comes down to this.
They say on the package, they say,
Soilent is not intended to replace every meal, but it can replace any meal.
They don't push it as a dietary product, it is not one.
I did lose several pounds of water weight right off the back, but then it tapered out.
It's not a diet food, and you're not going to necessarily lose weight on it, except in the sense that it will...
If you went a full, if you went the full, um, Soilent root, which I did, it was a test.
If you went the full Soilent root, you probably will lose weight if you eat like I do.
I snack a lot, and if you eat nothing but Soilent and stick to your meal format, it's going to inevitably change your eating habits.
But, um, let's see, let's see.
Um, my opinion of Soilent.
Well, first off, it is as advertised, you can live off it.
Um, I did, you know, side effects, I did get diarrhea after a time, and I decided to take fiber tablet on the side.
So every meal I took a fiber tablet, and these are tablets that recommend like four to eight a day, that sort of thing.
So one tablet with every meal, and I was fine after that, no problems at all.
Um, side effects, I was hungry all the time.
Now the way I did it when I was doing, um, doing full Soilent, I was having four meals a day.
I'd have one at six a.m., one at ten, one at two p.m., and one at six p.m., and that was it, that was all the food I had.
Um, I did that for, uh, at least three days out of the week.
Uh, I did, I did this test in different ways.
I tested it as a full meal replacement, and I tested it as a supplement.
That is, it took the place of one or more meals throughout the day, but I also ate regular food.
Um, let's see.
Another side effect, and it's not of, of Soilent, but rather I believe of the fact that it's a liquid diet is, I had to pee all the time.
I mean, all the time.
Throughout the day, you just feel like you have to go. It's just, it's just the way it is.
Uh, bringing a lot of liquid, because you're, you're drinking Soilent, one cup, one eight fluid ounces, and then you're supplementing that with a lot of liquid, because you're still hungry.
So yeah, that's, that's the, you know, the nature of that.
Now the flavor, again, I had the original, it's un, unflavored, or un, you know, there, there's no change from, you know, the original flavor there.
I have had Soilent before. I've had it as the premixed shakes. They sell it at Walmart here in the United States.
And I got to tell you, I enjoyed the original, unflavored version better than the premixed.
It had far less of a lingering aftertaste, like a, um, mineralic or chemical aftertaste. I get quite a bit of that off of the shakes.
Um, it's not as thick as the shakes, which might be seen as a downside, and I didn't, I never mixed it quite as smoothly as the shakes.
But overall, I think the flavor is more pleasant. It's a little bit gritty, but not too bad.
Um, but the, the fact is, it doesn't really have much flavor.
If you were to take a cup full of water and mix maybe a teaspoon of, of flour into cup cold water and mix it up and taste it, taste it that it, it's not far off from that with some nuances tossed in.
And it's, it's got more body than that, but it's, um, there's just not a lot of flavor to it at all.
For me, that makes it much easier to consume on a daily basis than a flavor that I'm going to get sick of.
Let's see.
It, uh, another thing that's, uh, listed on the box in the back is consume within 30 days after opening.
And, uh, if you read through the ingredients, there are no preservatives in this whatsoever. So I think that's a, um, that's a reference to that.
That's just like, don't let this sit on the shelf for too long. I guess it is possible to can spoil. It can go bad.
Possibly, things like this can, uh, possibly, um, react to oxygen as well and begin to have adverse effects that way.
Um, this was version 1.9. They, they show their iterations on the, on the label.
And this was, you know, formula version 1.9. So, uh, they've been doing this for a while and they've been around for a while.
I looked, I looked up the company on Wikipedia and they have, they have a decent article on there, including, um, its history and how it got started.
And this was kind of a, um, it started as a crowdfunding project, uh, that got VC startup money as well and then rolled into a larger version of itself.
Now, I don't know the, the ownership disposition of it right now if it's still privately owned or if, if it got VC startup money, I, they're usually looking to sell these companies when they do that.
So, maybe it's been sold by now. I don't know. Um, it says that it's an imprint or it not an imprint, but it says that it's a, a brand name of Rosa Foods Incorporated.
Um, and they're, I had trouble tracking down Rosa Foods, so that just might be a holding company for, for the silent people anyway.
Uh, there is a Rosa food products incorporated out of Philadelphia, but it's a completely different company.
Uh, this, this company, soiling is in California.
So, uh, really, what I did is I, I found that it tastes best and it works best when you're only replacing one or two meals throughout the day.
Um, I, I had it in the morning when I first got up and then, um, I had a real lunch with real food.
And then I would have it again in the evening and I actually was just fine that way, but again, I did use the, the fiber supplements, the fiber tablets.
Uh, that's a good choice. Trust me. That is a good choice. Um, so that, uh, that worked really well. I actually found it was, it was not an unpleasant experience at all doing it that way.
But otherwise you are always hungry all the time. If you're eating nothing but the silent, you're always hungry.
You're not ravenous. You're not starving. You're just hungry. At any point throughout the day, you could say to yourself, yeah, I could eat.
So, that is the side effect of just eating silent, but it is possible. It isn't entirely possible. You can do it.
So, final questions. Can you live on it? Absolutely. I believe it is entirely possible. You could live on it.
In my case, I do need a supplement of fiber because there have been issues. They do see, again, according to the Wikipedia article, they've had some trouble dialing that in, you know, trying to, because for some people, it's adequate and for other people.
It's not, they originally had too much fiber in there and they dialed that back. So I don't know.
Should you live on it? Well, it depends on your use case, right? If you don't get a chance to eat throughout the day or to sit and make a meal or to stop and eat and you need something on the go, this would totally work.
As shakes go, again, you can buy the premixed stuff in bottles. I think I like this better, but you do have to stop and make it.
Some people make a whole day's worth in advance and a large picture and they do it that way. I suppose you could do it that way too. I just made each cup as I went along.
But finally, will you want to use this product? Well, if all you're doing is eating, eating soilent or drinking soilent, really.
After two or three days, no, no, you will not want to anymore. It's just, you get hungry. You're hungry. You got to pee all the time.
And when you go to the bathroom for number two, it's not pretty. So it's not the greatest experience in the world, but it's not the worst one either.
And I just thought it was interesting. There is something really cool about mixing up a cup of white powder in a cup of cold water, drinking that down and realizing you've gotten enough nutrition out of that day. You don't need to eat again.
You know, that was a full meal right there. I find that very fun and I'm glad I did it, but I'm glad I'm not doing it anymore.
So that is my review of soilent, the powdered food product. And I guess that's it for today.
This has been Lost in Bronx. Thank you for listening. Take care.
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