I don’t want Huel to become like every other company ever (especially with the recent push on natural ingredients and focus on the environment, lots of us are sick of that marketing already because it’s simply everywhere all the time).
I want Huel to be better than them. Huel created a product that has a potential to revolutionize how humans eat, so by default that is a disruptive force in the food business, and Huel shouldn’t be like other companies.
We can’t change the price of v3.1, we can only choose to consume or not consume v3.1 for 100% of our calories, and for that the nutrition aspect is more important in this thread.
In theory, if someone who was consuming v3.0 for 100% calories, and wanted to make v3.1 the same by adding what has been removed, they’d effectively be paying more now. So a diet of Huel would no longer be the same price for them - and I made this thread to illustrate that for the most part it isn’t necessary to pay for the extra stuff that was removed.
For those of us on 100% Huel for long enough, we haven’t had any tolerance or absorbance issues with any of the vitamin C forms across the years. Nobody developed scurvy, nobody became anemic (I even donate blood regularly), or got any other symptoms associated with poor vitamin C status.
Having looked at Pureway-C (and the four studies they mention, PureWay-C - Search Results - PubMed ), it’s aimed at people who prefer to megadose vitamin C, which is something that can cause digestive issues often. Adding 2g of vitamin C powder to Huel works just fine, the other ingredients in Huel prevent the digestive distress you might experience if you took those 2g on empty stomach. I haven’t personally tested more than that (and I don’t do megadoses of vitamin C anyway, it was just an experiment years ago), but I know some people take 10g of vitamin C or more.
Additionally, Huel already contains fatty acids that will help the absorption of vitamin C, just like in Pureway-C. Huel also has ingredients shown to lower oxidative stress, can lead to a lower cholesterol level, and improve other markers - it is doubtful that using Pureway-C on a 100% Huel diet would lead to a statistically significant difference in those.
I was going from other sources such as studies like:
and commercial probiotics products like:
where they indeed use CFU unit to indicate dose, and hence was expecting Huel to present the same information at 2000kcal.
At 1000mg/day of sodium, as contained in Huel v3.1, it is significantly below the intake that is classified as low salt intake, “populations exposed to dietary intakes of low sodium (<115 mmol)” according to:
where <115mmol corresponds to a daily dose of <2645mg of sodium, Huel has less than half of that. Quoting their conclusion: Both low sodium intakes and high sodium intakes are associated with increased mortality, consistent with a U-shaped association between sodium intake and health outcomes.
The science is still not conclusive on such a low salt intake, however it would be preferable to not experiment in Huel with having such a low sodium content. Ideally, Huel would present their reasoning for why they think 1000mg/day of sodium is ok, when research seems to (not conclusively) show that it isn’t ok for the average person.
So yes, I still stand by the argument that Huel is potentially no longer complete nutrition at this level of sodium, for a person eating Huel for 100% of their calories. However, it is trivial to add salt yourself, which is what I’m doing.
I agree that it may be harsh, but I don’t want the company to fall into the way of thinking that they don’t need to pay close attention to stuff because if something is wrong they can just say sorry and everyone would shrug it off. I praise Huel by continuing to purchase it, even the v3.1 version, and I’d argue that’s the only praise that truly matters because it’s quantifiable.
I don’t care about the environment at all, I care about my health and my time.
How Huel captured my attention over 7 years ago was that it looked like a product that makes the life of a busy professional easier. Plain white and black color scheme, no unnecessary words, no unnecessary ingredients (like sweeteners and food colorings), focus on nutrition first.
There was another product at the time, called Joylent, that had all sorts of colorful marketing that looked like it was drawn by someone on illegal drugs and the words on their website sounded like written by a nature-loving tree-hugging hippie. I simply wouldn’t take myself seriously if I consumed something that looked suitable for someone driving a VW hippie van, instead of someone driving a professional status car.