I’m considering meal replacements for 1-2 meals a day, and recall Soylent and Mealsquares were popular meal replacements ~5 years ago when I visited the Berkeley rationalist scene. I haven’t found any recent posts discussing the newer options like Huel or about long-term effects.
Does anyone have informed opinions on these things?
I notice that I am confused: I experience comparable price and convenience, and superior subjective experience of eating, by purchasing pre-made frozen meals and microwaving them. I experience comparable price and superior travel convenience by throwing a protein bar in my bag on the way out the door.
Possible reasons one might prefer a meal replacement over comparably easy “real” food include:
less waste? a powder mixed into a drink would trade the hassle of washing a reusable bottle for the trash creation of discarding a disposable bottle
Flavor/texture concerns? If you hate eating real food for sensory reasons, you may love some meal replacements and hate others
Nutritional concerns? If there’s a specific nutrition profile that you’re seeking which can’t be obtained through sufficiently easy conventional meals, that seems worth mentioning
time savings? if you have special scheduling needs, or experience unusually high cognitive load from thinking about choosing meals, “meal replacements” might be superior?
Based on observing the eating behaviors of many friends and acquaintances, I’d speculate that the soylent-style “meal replacement” market has split between meal delivery services that offer better flavor/variety/nutrition for equivalent ease, and protein/supplement products that offer more optimized and targeted nutrition than the originals. In short, I suspect but cannot prove that demand for soylent/huel has decreased because options more pleasant to eat and otherwise cost/convenience equivalent have become more mainstream.
Anyways, could you clarify what successful meal replacement would mean to you, if you would like suggestions on how to get there?
My thought process goes like: on most weekdays I sure wish I could skip breakfast and/or lunch and only have one sit-down meal with my family in the evening. Time savings and convenience are the main concerns I suppose.
The first solution that came to mind was to try Soylent/Mealsquares/Huel for a month and cross my fingers, 50⁄50 it just goes well and solves the problem. I posted to see if there were any obvious considerations I was missing, or clear standout options to try first.
Pre-made frozen meals and protein bars are also plausibly acceptable meal replacement options.
On a first pass frozen meals register as bulky and hard to store a month of at a time, and not something I’d bring to work. I’ve also never had an item I can imagine stomaching every day.
Protein bars seem mostly fine, but my vibe check is that meal replacements are basically enlightened protein bars? Like, maybe the nutrition profile is better and they are packaged in sizes more suitable for full meals?
I’ve also never had an item I can imagine stomaching every day.
FWIW, this is likely to be a worse problem with a meal replacement than a protein bar, and a worse problem with a protein bar than a frozen option.
bring to work
That adds complexity. Are there social norms at work which necessitate eating with others? If so, having a shake or similar every day may not meet those needs.
I sure wish I could skip breakfast and/or lunch and only have one sit-down meal with my family in the evening
Are you aware of the concept of OMAD (one meal a day)? I don’t think it’s super likely that this is the right solution for you, but it seems like you’d learn useful things about the best solution for your food-is-inconvenient problem by considering it as an option and determining why you would rule it out. Basically unless you’re diabetic or attempting to gain weight, you can just have all your day’s calories in a single meal instead of spread across multiple. Again, there are many reasons why this might not be a good fit, but it seems worth making sure that it’s in your overton window as an option that works for some people.
(edit to add)
packaged in sizes more suitable for full meals?
a “full meal” for someone who’s smaller, sedentary, or pursuing weight loss can be a protein bar. A “full meal” for someone who’s larger, more active, or pursuing weight gain can be 10x that amount, at the extreme. We sort of have a standard daily intake of 2,000kcal from nutrition facts, but not even food packaging attempts to prescribe how many meals an individual eats in a day, how they distribute their intake across those meals, and therefore asking whether an item is packaged in a size suitable for a “full meal” is like asking whether a piece of software will run on “a computer”.
I appreciate the effort but am hoping to solve this problem in an afternoon (if not five minutes) and forget about it, instead of acquiring the correct language to think about things or a full theory of diet and nutrition.
Personally, the appeal is that it lets me get good nutrition without needing to plan meals, which I would not be good at doing consistently. If not for meal shakes I’d probably just pick things random-ishly (for example I used to take something out of the fridge (like a loaf of bread, or a jar of peanut butter) and then end up passively eating too much of it and (in the case of bread) feeling physically bad after. I had to stop buying bread to avoid doing this.[1]). Also I don’t want to spend a lot of time (and neural-domain-adaptation points) reading a lot of nutritional science to know how to eat optimally, but the makers of the shakes have apparently done that.
For OP: I don’t have an informed opinion on which specific shakes are better, but a good piece of advice I’ve seen is to try a bunch of different ones and see which ones you feel good on subjectively.
I am a raccoon btw. ← joking
I wasn’t the one eating it, but having prepared a couple of Huel’s “hot meal pot/pouch” options for my partner (I forger which ones exactly, but something in the way of mac & cheese or pasta bolognese), I can report that I found the smell coming off it to be profoundly unappetising.
Not sure how they went down with her, but there’s a small stash of these pots in the cupboard that she hasn’t touched beyond the first few—so I suspect not very well.
I loved the old mealsquares but have been very disappointed in version 2.0. They’re similar to Tend bars, nutritionally dense but not filling.
I find Huel hot & savory pretty good (unlike one other commenter), as someone who craves that modality of food and finds the standard shakes/bars unsatisfying for that reason.
I also recommend checking out various meal delivery services (CookUnity is my preferred one atm, but there is a whole bunch of them out there)
p=1, Soylent still seems to be the top choice at the moment. (They are running into some supply chain problem at the moment / recently.)
(Huel seemed fine too from personal experience. If you care about refined oil/canola oil and protein sources it could be a decent alt)