The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
My health kick: hitting the bottle for five days
Tom Ough traded good old-fashioned eating for a new nutrition drink. But would it be enough to fill his ‘food voids’? And what’s with the name?
hat if I told you that by making a single, simple change to your lifestyle you can become as healthy as you’ll ever be? What if I told you this change will save you time and energy? That it’ll make you focused and environmentally friendly?
All you’ve got to do is – calm down, folks, no stampeding, please! I know you’re excited but those kids are getting trampled underfoot! – all you’ve got to do is… never eat food again! Wait! Where are you all going?
Meal replacement shakes, then. People tend to be sceptical of them, but perhaps that’s going to change. A drink called Soylent, whose makers say it contains everything the human body needs to thrive (find the ingredients in the box, above right), is launching in the UK on Tuesday via Amazon UK. It won’t be the first meal replacement on the market: among others, such as Lently, Mana and Queal, there’s already Huel, a UK-devised powder, granola and bar that will soon come as a premixed shake, and Complan, the supplement that’s been around a while and is marketed at the elderly and unwell.
Soylent, however, comes with the reputation of being Silicon Valley’s meal substitute of choice. It’s currently marketing itself as a product that fills “food voids”, a term it uses for those moments when circumstances limit you to eating badly, but if it’s nutritionally complete then you should be able not only to live off it, but to live well.
So I undertook a five-day trial in which I’d have to live off Soylent, water, and nothing else. I did something similar with Huel a couple of years ago, and after some adjustment I liked it enough to have had it regularly since. On the other hand, I adore “food voids” because I view them as an opportunity to devour junk food. I was not about to relinquish them lightly.
I began on Monday morning with two Soylent shakes. There are three flavours in the UK launch: original, mocha and cacao. They come in recyclable plastic bottles which contain 414ml of the stuff and have about as much graphic flair as a copy of the Periodic Table. I started with a mocha, which has the usual formula plus a strong espresso’s worth of caffeine and some Ltheanine, an amino acid that’s supposed to improve concentration.
Glug. Reader, it was nice! Silky thinto-medium texture, slightly malty combination of chocolate and coffee. I drank it in 10 seconds, and since I was still hungry I had another for pudding. This second one was cacao flavour and it was pretty much indistinguishable from chocolate milk.
I didn’t feel hungry again until about 1pm, when I downed another pair. Since they’re all 400 calories each, I’d figured that a couple of them per meal was appropriate for me, but slugging two at a time made me queasy.
Demoralised on Tuesday, I tried to buy some Quavers from a vending machine, but the bag got stuck on the way down. I then bought an apple juice to dislodge the crisps, but the crisps remained stuck as the juice tumbled past. I refused to sink any lower, and slunk back to my desk.
Later, I cracked my queasinesshunger binary by taking them one at a time, but I’d had to pull out of dinner plans because I wasn’t eating. I went to the gym instead. I’m going to be hench and friendless, I thought sadly, but at least I’d had a productive afternoon. Who needs friends when you’re a musclebound “Employee of the Month”?
Apart from being basically socially castrated, however, I largely enjoyed the rest of the week. It helped that I liked the blandly oaty “original” flavour, which was much less popular with friends than the cacao version. The link between nutrition and mood is complex, but I felt motivated, aside from the evening when I didn’t bring enough home for dinner and, erm, woke up ravenous and demolished a pile of toast.
I spoke to Helen Bond, a dietitian, who praised Soylent’s nutritiousness and satiating plant-based protein, but warned that 3g of fibre per bottle is only a tenth of your RDA. “While nutritionally speaking you could survive on a Soylent-only diet, most people would find it boring,” she said.
Also, each case of 12 bottles costs £39.99. That’s £3.33 each, meaning my seven-a-day habit came to £163.17 a week. Nutrition aside, that’s a lot for a week’s worth of food: it makes Soylent about three times more expensive per calorie than powdered Huel, although I was glad not to have to mix it. I also lost almost 2kg, although most of that would just have been the lack of solid food hanging around in my gut.
My friends and colleagues were still sceptical (which I understood), even about trying it (which I found weirdly irrational, given the obvious potential benefits). I hope this changes, if only because it’ll drive the price down for nerds like me.