I saw Soylent Orange after having invested in Soylent “Green” (1). I didn’t look into it too hard because I’d already invested heavily into traditional soylent and (a) didn’t want to incur sunk costs, (b) had already spent significant time doing “Green” well and didn’t want to look at another approach and (c) I had already put myself at enough of a deficit with “Green” that I couldn’t afford to switch again. So, a sunk cost, a trivial inconvenience, and a suboptimal investment; none of these are reasons OP shouldn’t go orange instead of green. I’ll also note that the cost per calorie is on par.
There are, however, values that make “Green” a good choice. I value mental clarity, and I’ve gotten that much more with “Green” than on any other diet (2).
If you’re into quantified self, putting in each component by itself makes it extremely simple to test the effect of one micro or macronutrient on your body.
(1) No, it doesn’t contain humans. But that’s what you’d expect me to say even if it did. But it doesn’t. Really!
(2) Obviously, having not tested Orange, there’s no reason it couldn’t yield better mental clarity than Green. Part of my intuition for Green goes something like “it doesn’t contain anything that could potentially gum up the works, which is why your thinking feels so clean when you’re strictly on Green.” By main influence here is Staffan Lindeberg’s Food and Western Disease, which spends about equal time talking about how things in food can improve health (like multivitamins) or diminish it (various defensive chemicals from plants, environmental toxins, etc.).
That said, I’d be extremely interested to find if going for a period exclusively on Orange resulted in improved mental clarity, and especially interested in a head to head test.
I will say that if you already own a blender, Soylent Orange has very low startup cost. Other than the marmite, everything involved can be purchased on the scale of a week or less, if you have Whole Foods-type places nearby.
I know I benefited tremendously, but there was a huge effect from just eating enough food, which was not my norm previously, and that probably dwarfed any noticeable effects from the diet specifically.
o_0? I can’t tell if this was sarcasm (which isn’t enormously warranted, I’m not really evangelizing) or sincere. If it was sincere, then: You’re welcome! How is it better?
I only picked it because it is cheaper than buying Soylent Green, and easier than DIY Green. It’s certainly less quantified-selfy, but it’s good enough for my purposes.
Ah, not sarcasm. Courtesy of Julia Galef via Richard Dawkins:
This is the Golgi apparatus, which is a structure in the cell that distributes macro-molecules around the cell. And when Dawkins was at Oxford, there was an elderly professor in the department who was famous for his claim that the Golgi apparatus was illusory, that it was an artifact of observation, that it didn’t actually exist.
So one day a visiting professor from the States came to give a talk at Oxford in which he presented new and compelling evidence that the Golgi apparatus was, in fact, real. So, as you can imagine, throughout the whole talk everyone is glancing over at the elderly professor like, “How’s he taking this? What’s he going to say?” And at the end of the talk, the elderly professor marches up to the front of the lecture hall and he extends his hand and he says, “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these 15 years.”
I’m most compelled by the whole foods/bioavalibility argument (point 3 here.) and the likely comparative glycemic indices. Like, my marginal cost per meal is still lower on Green (since I’ve bought half the ingredients for the next months/years/decades), and it’s worked for me, but if I were to make a suggestion to past-me, it probably would’ve been for Orange.
Except… now I think about it, I’m again compelled by my previous “cleanliness” arguments (Green doesn’t contain any extras, some of which you don’t want). Also, never grocery shopping is really, really nice.
Revised opinion: I know no one to whom I’d recommend Orange over Green. I will try Orange for comparative mental effects. If they’re comparable or superior to Green, I’ll switch, but I’m personally okay rolling dice wrt long-term health for a performance buff now (choosing Green over Orange reduces my expected life-years, but I’m okay with that if it increases what I get done during them/it gets done sooner so multiplicative effects can start multiplying earlier.).
And, in all seriousness, I’ve just updated a lot, and appreciate your role in sparking that (even if you didn’t mean to).
Also, DIY Green is seriously easy to make. It’s something like 2 minutes to put together a batch, which is an absolute godsend when you’re pressed for time (like during semester). You need to set up some infrastructure to make that work, but you can do that when you’re not under a time constraint.
...Food is complicated. Attempts to make it simple have… apparently made it more complicated. We may have just done this to ourselves (or mealsquares gets going and becomes price-competitive with soylent. Then food will be solved Once And For All and it’ll be simple.)
I can see the benefits (Orange has somewhere from 5-12 minutes prep time, and is probably slightly more expensive), but I think I’ll stick with the more risk-averse option, especially since I would worry incessantly about whether I’d left out one of the ingredients I knew about, let alone the possible missing nutrients.
But all good thoughts. I am intrigued by your ideas, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Have you considered the Soylent Orange formula from the MealSquares people? Why did you go with this way rather than that?
(I have eaten about 50% Soylent Orange, 50% other simple food, for the past ~15 months.)
I saw Soylent Orange after having invested in Soylent “Green” (1). I didn’t look into it too hard because I’d already invested heavily into traditional soylent and (a) didn’t want to incur sunk costs, (b) had already spent significant time doing “Green” well and didn’t want to look at another approach and (c) I had already put myself at enough of a deficit with “Green” that I couldn’t afford to switch again. So, a sunk cost, a trivial inconvenience, and a suboptimal investment; none of these are reasons OP shouldn’t go orange instead of green. I’ll also note that the cost per calorie is on par.
There are, however, values that make “Green” a good choice. I value mental clarity, and I’ve gotten that much more with “Green” than on any other diet (2).
If you’re into quantified self, putting in each component by itself makes it extremely simple to test the effect of one micro or macronutrient on your body.
(1) No, it doesn’t contain humans. But that’s what you’d expect me to say even if it did. But it doesn’t. Really!
(2) Obviously, having not tested Orange, there’s no reason it couldn’t yield better mental clarity than Green. Part of my intuition for Green goes something like “it doesn’t contain anything that could potentially gum up the works, which is why your thinking feels so clean when you’re strictly on Green.” By main influence here is Staffan Lindeberg’s Food and Western Disease, which spends about equal time talking about how things in food can improve health (like multivitamins) or diminish it (various defensive chemicals from plants, environmental toxins, etc.).
That said, I’d be extremely interested to find if going for a period exclusively on Orange resulted in improved mental clarity, and especially interested in a head to head test.
I will say that if you already own a blender, Soylent Orange has very low startup cost. Other than the marmite, everything involved can be purchased on the scale of a week or less, if you have Whole Foods-type places nearby.
I know I benefited tremendously, but there was a huge effect from just eating enough food, which was not my norm previously, and that probably dwarfed any noticeable effects from the diet specifically.
My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been eating a suboptimal food that I thought was optimal these fifteen months.
o_0? I can’t tell if this was sarcasm (which isn’t enormously warranted, I’m not really evangelizing) or sincere. If it was sincere, then: You’re welcome! How is it better?
I only picked it because it is cheaper than buying Soylent Green, and easier than DIY Green. It’s certainly less quantified-selfy, but it’s good enough for my purposes.
Ah, not sarcasm. Courtesy of Julia Galef via Richard Dawkins:
I’m most compelled by the whole foods/bioavalibility argument (point 3 here.) and the likely comparative glycemic indices. Like, my marginal cost per meal is still lower on Green (since I’ve bought half the ingredients for the next months/years/decades), and it’s worked for me, but if I were to make a suggestion to past-me, it probably would’ve been for Orange.
Except… now I think about it, I’m again compelled by my previous “cleanliness” arguments (Green doesn’t contain any extras, some of which you don’t want). Also, never grocery shopping is really, really nice.
Revised opinion: I know no one to whom I’d recommend Orange over Green. I will try Orange for comparative mental effects. If they’re comparable or superior to Green, I’ll switch, but I’m personally okay rolling dice wrt long-term health for a performance buff now (choosing Green over Orange reduces my expected life-years, but I’m okay with that if it increases what I get done during them/it gets done sooner so multiplicative effects can start multiplying earlier.).
And, in all seriousness, I’ve just updated a lot, and appreciate your role in sparking that (even if you didn’t mean to).
Also, DIY Green is seriously easy to make. It’s something like 2 minutes to put together a batch, which is an absolute godsend when you’re pressed for time (like during semester). You need to set up some infrastructure to make that work, but you can do that when you’re not under a time constraint.
...Food is complicated. Attempts to make it simple have… apparently made it more complicated. We may have just done this to ourselves (or mealsquares gets going and becomes price-competitive with soylent. Then food will be solved Once And For All and it’ll be simple.)
I ramble. tl;dr: thank you (sincerely).
I can see the benefits (Orange has somewhere from 5-12 minutes prep time, and is probably slightly more expensive), but I think I’ll stick with the more risk-averse option, especially since I would worry incessantly about whether I’d left out one of the ingredients I knew about, let alone the possible missing nutrients.
But all good thoughts. I am intrigued by your ideas, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.