Many people eat over 2000 calories worth of Huel a day. Huel is advertised as something that can completely replace food. Therefore it should be expected that it is safe to do so. Currently it is not safe to eat over 2000 calories of Huel.
You can not compare an eat once a day food (ready-to-eat sandwich) to Huel.
I don’t personally eat over 400 calories of Huel a day so it’s not going to stop me from ordering a new batch, but I am susceptible to high blood pressure and fluid retention so it’s not exactly something I want more of.
Once again, by eating “normal” food, you are significantly over the guidelines of salt for the UK or the US. Except in France, where it’s 8g per day, guess everybody doesn’t have the same point of view on salt after all…
5g is the equivalent of a little spoon, that’s reached with a blink of an eye if you eat twice a day some pastas or rice, eat some cheese, some bread, etc etc…
This is the guideline to prevent risks of hypertension, and i say risk, OMS never said that if you ate 10g of salt per day (as everyone does right now), you ARE going to have hypertension or cardiac problems. Nor does it say that by consuming less, you will be healthy. You’ll just have a higher probabilty of…
And the guy that eats 4000kcal a day, is a guy doing a lot of sports (or an obese wanting to gain weight, which is,odd). So he needs way more than the guidelines of salt intakes because of all the fluids he looses with perspiration…
A sandwich isn’t a eat once a day food, if you want, you can eat it deliberately 3 times a day, who is there to stop the supermarkets selling this nonsense !!!
My point is the sandwich is not sold as a product that can replace all your food - I doubt many people eat 3 of the same cheese and pickle sandwich every day. Huel is. You can not compare the two.
I don’t know what ‘normal’ food you eat but I certainly don’t go over 6g of salt regularly.
I’m sorry but where are you getting your stats from - I feel like you’re plucking them from thin air? Pasta has less than 1% of your RDA of salt (based on 100g / a serving), as in 0.1% of your RDA. Same goes for rice. Even if I covered that pasta in a serving of cheese I’d only hit about 20% of my RDA (based on a 30g helping of cheddar). I certainly wouldn’t be eating a ‘little 5g spoon’ of salt.
There is no actual salt in pasta. You put salt in the water to cook pasta. And there is no such thing as a standard for how much people put salt in the cooking water of their pastas…
The majority of the population is eating 10 to 12g of salt per day, do you think they stuff themselves with crisps ? No, it’s actually hidden salt that is everywhere in our food. Beginning with bread and all pre made food, even sugary biscuits contains sometimes a lot of salt. Then, there is the bit that you add yourself to your food, which is just the part of the iceberg.
Serious question: is there any way that the inclusion of sea salt, a food which is, I’m guessing, a different shape and density of particle than the oats and likely the other ingredients, is there any way that during transit those salt particles have migrated upward to make the first few shakes super super salty? And actually a remixed batch of 2.0 would distribute the salt more evenly? E.g. if the salt isn’t ground as fine then this happens - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granular_convection
Where do you get these figures? I think internet discussion can sometimes get sidetracked when people start making unsubstantiated claims - in all the posts I’ve made I’ve tried hard to provide a reasonable external link as a source for any figures I quote.
Do you have a link for the France figure? I thought the EU Reference Intakes applied EU wide so I’m not sure why France would have a different value.
To reach 5g of salt a day you would have to eat 11 packets of Ready Salted crisps (all your calories). I don’t think thats a blink of an eye. I am sure I don’t consume that much salt when I eat regular food (by taste alone - no need for numbers!)
You are arguing that 6.4g of salt per 2000 kcal is not actually a health issue and is a level you are happy with. You are the first person to do that since v2.0 was released (certainly no one from Huel has tried to make that argument).
Yeah, very poor judgement on the addition of so much salt and sodium fluoride. The salt content in V1.2 was fine, and common sense tells you that we don’t need fluoride - it has no biological function or use that’s beneficial for us internally - topically for teeth, maybe, but not by ingestion.
I’m a little disappointed that these rather controversial changes aren’t discussed with customers on the forum beforehand, as this is likely to make everybody much happier.
Sorry James, but I don’t know how you can say the addition of fluoride is to allow Huel to be ‘nutritionally complete’. Please show me one bit of evidence to suggest that we need fluoride in our diet? Disappointing.
Total for day: 2258 kcal, salt: 4.2g (Huel equivalent: 7.22g)
I don’t dispute that 5g is easy to reach in a day on a normal diet but equally I don’t think its true to say the majority of people are consuming 10g+.
The only products you mentioned that have salt levels similar to Huel v2.0 are bread and cheese, and I agree if you got all your calories from bread and cheese it is likely that you would have too much salt in your diet. That doesn’t mean Huel v2.0 meets its goal of providing healthy complete nutrition for the majority of people.
If they want to meet that goal, the salt level has to be reduced. That is a fact.
That’s a little disingenuous. The majority of people aren’t eating clean unprocessed foods for the majority of the diet. Start adding a pasta sauce to that pasta, some bacon in that sandwich and jarred curry sauce with that rice. It’d be fairly easy to have some fairly high salt intakes without noticing unless you were really paying attention.
Studies looking at salt intake and how that effects health make for interesting reading - it can be very hard to get a decent control group, given that those restricting their salt intake then also (by the very nature of changing diet) eat far less processed foods and increase their fruit and veg intake and are often more health conscious in other ways - for example, increasing exercise.
Another thing to consider is that salt is a natural preservative. Very low salt foods tend to have to add extra preservatives to compensate which also might have health issues associated with them.
I have no particular side on this - I’d like Huel to have a little less salt if possible - but on balance I think any health risks to the current level of salt, all else considered, is unlikely to be significant for me. Others may well assess otherwise, depending on their individual health needs.
“But what may be even more important for health is the relationship of sodium to potassium in the diet: People with the highest ratio of sodium to potassium in their diets had double the risk of dying of a heart attack than people with the lowest ratio, and they had a 50 percent higher risk of death from any cause.”
I.e. the problem with most highly processed diets is that they have high sodium AND low potassium. Perhaps Huel could also increase the amount of potassium to improve the ratio, which might help ameliorate people’s concerns.
The EU has been doing research on salt consumption and its effect on health. A report from 2012 can be found here.. Table 2 on page 14 has estimates of consumption.
It is indeed correct that most people do consume significantly higher amounts of salt than what one would get on a diet consisting solely of Huel. For example, in England the estimated daily average for an adult male is 9.3g/day. According to page 16 of that report, the largest sources of dietary salt intake are bread, (presumably processed) meats and dairy products.
However, that in no way justifies the unnecessarily high amount of salt in v2. The detriments of over-consumption of salt are incredibly well-understood and well-documented. The only reason to add additional salt is to suit certain tastes, and these people can satisfy their desire for more salt by simply adding table salt.
Maybe sea salt is here to cover another taste, not to improve the saltiness of the product. There has been some changes in the formula that may have led to increase salt in order to balance taste. As Huel can’t obviously add sugar or any sweetener (imagine the disaster, with 150 studies about sugar killing people and sweeteners giving cancer and everything), maybe they had to do something ?
And thank you for pointing the actual debate over sodium and potassium and not "salt’ only.
Interesting because if you read either the conclusion and summary of the report the authors state: “The available data are not sufficient to establish an upper level for sodium from dietary sources.” The main reasoning for restricting sodium intake appears to be small reductions in blood pressure which in turn results in a small reduction of risk of cardiovascular and renal disease - with some sections of the population being much more sensitive to sodium intake than others.
Disclaimer: I’ve only skim read the report and may have missed some important information, but even so, that feels like a very weak conclusion to me!
Every day, there are also products that don’t change, all over the world.
Yes. It’s called the ingredients on the back of packaging for all to see. Besides, what most famous brands are doing in reaction to health concerns from a population less duped by bold colours and advertising, is making their food healthier by removing sugar and salt. They are doing this in order to survive, or go out of business. It’s the central reason why Huel was created and has been doing so well up until now. McDonald’s comes to mind, but there are lots of examples of brands and manufactures removing salt and then telling the world about it (apologies in advance for linking to the daily mail, I will take a hot shower after this):
Yes. As do many people on this forum. As do lots of people who care about what they put into their bodies. It is why I chose Huel in the first place, it is the reason for this discussion. If I didn’t care about specific changes to ingredients, I would not have noticed the salt intake in Huel. Nor would others, and so the thread where you could ask whether we care about changing ingredients couldn’t exist.
Yes. And I didn’t - see first half of answer as to the reasons why.
Huel has a nutritionist, and his job is to get the blend right and healthy, because once he has the blend sorted, he will make more money for Huel. Below is a description of what a nutritionist does (note the end bit in bold, where it says taking client preferences into account).
Dietitians and nutritionists typically do the following: Assess patients’ and clients’ health needs and diet. Counsel patients on nutrition issues and healthy eating habits. Develop meal plans, taking both cost and clients’ preferences into account.Google
They absolutely do, hence having James on board, it’s his job. He’s a certified expert in nutrition. It’s what he does. Check out his website here: http://healthyaction.co.uk/services/
Here are some quotes from his (and this) website about James to help you understand his role better:
“James’ nutrition expertise is extensive”
“Written by James Collier BSc (Hons), Registered Nutritionist, who devised the Huel formula. He has over 25 years of experience working in nutrition and dietetics, including 7 years as a Clinical Dietician in the NHS”
Sounds like an expert in nutrition to me.
Nope. It’s about feedback. Just because there are a lot of people with the same feedback doesn’t change it from feedback to anything else. In fact, because everyone is saying exactly the same 4 things, it is absolutely the most amazing feedback any company could hope to receive. And the feedback isn’t about ‘this’ or ‘that’ it is very specifically about the following:
Please remove/lower the gum.
Please lower the salt.
Please remove the flouride
I (we?) love everything else, thank you!
Not funny. It’s part of a serious process lots of people care about. Before there was too little salt. Now there is too much. They just need to drop the salt back to within safe levels, keeping it a bit above what they had before. It’s really very simple. Put a poll up asking for a rough acceptable level, and we’ll give an answer. That’s a really positive relationship between the bosses of Huel, and the people drinking it.
The salt levels in Huel are above the RDA. This is a fact. It is this fact, that people are using to contest the salt levels in Huel. Your example (to have any kind of correlation to the discussion being had) would have to ask this: 'if 100,000 scientists from all over Europe got together, shared data and advised politicians to change the RDA of broccoli per day in their countries, and this advice was accepted as true by the NHS and medical professions throughout the world and so was actioned, would you ask Huel to change the RDA broccoli content if it remained above the new level as recognised as safe by every study on broccoli ever taken by lots of very intelligent people?
And the answer would be: We hope we wouldn’t have to - because by this time the broccoli content should have been lowered to within safe levels, because Huel are experts in nutrition, so they should be a step ahead of us. But, if they had not, based on scientific and health facts, yes - we would, or we would be idiots.
You can have no actual idea about this.
This is above the recommended safe levels of Donald Trump to have in a single argument. Your argument has moved from “Huel aren’t nutritionists!” to “Stop giving feedback in a forum designed to give feedback, you have no right!” to “You all bloody love salt anyway!”
No actual facts. Visually creative use of words like ‘stuffed’ to distract from little content. If you cannot defeat someone with logic and facts, tell them they are what you think they are, and then solve that problem.
The people on this forum are simply discussing the product, which is what the forum is designed to do…and I (and others) are not happy with the salt content. Miracles don’t exist, but yes, I thought Huel would make me healthier. This is because that’s actually what Huel is intended to do (hence it being nutritionally complete - there’s that word again).
So personally I would like the salt content reduced, so I can get back to using it. But no drama, and ‘concern’ should be taken with perspective. This is a first world problem, and nobody is suggesting it’s anything other than that. The concern is for the people at Huel, because they have too much salt in a product that claims 'to have everything your body needs - nothing more" - that ‘nothing more’ is currently not true.
I’ll second this by adding myself as an anecdote. From time to time I eat around 3000 calories of Huel a day. On top of that I’m eating way. more. food. I have friends who are interested in Huel that have bulked on 5k calories a day.
It is of course up to the consumer once you hit these kinds of numbers, but the fact that some people will be eating faaar over the levels that Huel and other soylents measure for might have to be taken into consideration.
Hey @JamesCollier just wondering when we will get an update as to what is going to be done about this - if anything?
Honestly love Huel and support it 100% - was even listening to a podcast that Julian did with Shopify which was really informative.
Just think it is maybe time to update everyone or at least put out a statement of some kind with regards to either a 2.1 and expected release date or that nothing will change.
Reading through the forum there are only 1 or 2 main issues that are being mentioned time and time again - apart from them i think everyone here supports you guys 100% and genuinely wants to consume more and more…
I have dropped to under 2000 calories per day now because of this which isn’t good business for you either considering the more i consume the more i buy from you.