Episode 54: Meal Replacements from SlimFast to Soylent

Monday, July 24, 2017
On this week's episode, we delve into the wide world of meal replacements, from old-school SlimFast shakes to Soylent, a modern meal replacement. It's fascinating! Have you ever gone on a liquid diet before or would you? Winter is willing to try, but Sharon is not convinced. We also help a Food Fight diner thwart off (or not) french fry thieves.


We're not talking about this kind of meal replacement shake

Disclosure: Some of the links within these show notes are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, we will earn a commission, which helps support our show. This commission comes at no additional cost to you, our wonderful listener!

Let's taco 'bout it!


Peach, Tomato, and Thai Basil Salad with Seared Aussie Lamb Loin
  • Lee asked us if we had heard about Soylent before. Winter hadn't, but Sharon had heard about Soylent Green before (yikes!). Here's the trailer to Soylent Green, based on the book Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison.
  • We think of SlimFast as one of the first meal replacement brands. Ensure and Boost came about because of medical feed who need enteral feeding.
  • Tang was the orange juice substitute that the astronauts used, such as John Glenn. Buzz Aldrin confessed to NPR that "Tang sucks."
  • The Jetsons would take a meal replacement pill, but it causes indigestion.
  • Winter loves both Star Wars and Star Trek (don't send me hate mail), and we were watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the food replicator and that's how we got on to this topic of meal replacement.
  • Rob Rhinehart's blog post "How I Stopped Eating Food" that put the idea of Soylent on everyone's radar.



  • By the way, you can figure out where to get your Aussie lamb or Aussie beef by using this handy-dandy tool
  • Are you a fry thief? You just need to accept your fries will get stolen. We help our Food Fight listener just know you can't thwart a fry stealer. You just can't.

Run Time: 49 minutes

Sponsors: Our podcast is sponsored by our awesome and food-loving sponsors.


True Aussie Beef & Lamb are partnering with us to bring this amazing sweepstakes so that one of our listeners can win a Big Green Egg grill and smoker. Yay! Watch out for some yummy Aussie Beef and Lamb recipes we're cooking up and a Facebook Live video that we'll be doing today (July 24)!

Go to www.grillonthegreen.com and enter BEFORE August 1, 2017. Make sure you choose the Hungry Squared Podcast in the dropdown menu, because we want you to win!

7 comments:

  1. Soylent incorporated the fats into the powder, dropping the added oil bottle, at least two years ago. And you apparently don't know that the current product is primarily pre-mixed ready to drink in a bottle, in several flavors. Also you give Ensure a pass on its sugar content when it has 3x the sugars of Soylent.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. David! Thanks for the information (and corrections!). Do you use Soylent? I'm curious to know what you think of it?

      Delete
    2. Do you really want to hear from the "weird Soylent people", as you put it so eloquently in this podcast.

      Delete
    3. Yes! Apparently we need to! You have been using Soylent, so yes!

      Delete
  2. Soylent have birthed a *lot* of similar products, it's a niche market but growing rapidly and there's a lot of choice out there, check out https://eatcomplete.co

    They're not about weight control or mindful eating though, it's just simplifying the eating experience and getting good nutrition with minimal fuss and as little waste as possible.

    Changed my life.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for sharing your experience! Do you drink Soylent 100% of the time or do you have some "recreational" eating also?

      Delete
    2. Not sure how I ended up being anon. Also should have said that I made EatComplete :)

      I'm in the UK so no Soylent, but there are a lot of European lents available and I replace maybe two thirds to three quarters of my food with them (we tend to call them "lents" because they're all inspired by Soylent).

      As an office worker my diet used to consist of a) missed breakfast because I woke up late, b) crappy sandwich deal for lunch and c) something decent in the evening - so two thirds of my daily meals were either nutritionally questionable or missed. And of course, I'd be hungry so a lot of snacking in between.

      At the moment I'm using Lently. Making my shakes the night before means I've got them ready to go in the morning so no more missed breakfasts and no more crappy lunches, and since I'm not hungry all the time I'm not snacking. So that's a minimum two thirds of my diet from lents. Whether I cook an evening meal or have another shake just depends on how I feel and when I do cook; I go all out for something epic.

      I've been eating them for about two years and switching brands from time to time. 100% isn't really recommended by any of the manufacturers (They all say things like "whilst X can replace any meal, we don't recommend replacing every meal") but a lot of us do go high with our use and many of the early adopters of this kind of nutrition have seen positive results and I think the important thing to remember is that the idea behind Soylent was to enable us to make good choices around nutrition when we otherwise might not be able to; whether we're too busy, away from home, or just can't be bothered cooking.

      Delete

Awesome comments from our awesome readers/listeners!

Blog Archive

Powered by Blogger.
Back to Top