Monthly Archives: July 2015

All multi-vitamins are not created equal

This entry is part 82 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

…though I’m sure their mothers love them all very much. I get asked a lot about the vitamins I include in Keto Chow, specifically they’re the “Kirkland Signature Daily Multi” from Costco. Can you use a different multi-vitamin? maybe but you will likely have deficiencies in some areas and overages in others. The recipe for Keto Chow is matched with the Kirkland vitamins, to the extent that if you want to use a different vitamin pill it has to have essentially the exact same amounts of the various vitamins and minerals and at that point you might as well just use the Kirkland ones.

When my wife started doing Keto, she wanted to use the multi-vitamins she had been using before. The only way to know if it will work is to clone the Keto Chow recipe, delete the Kirkland multi-vitamin and add your own vitamin into the recipe. When I tried this with my wife’s vitamins there were some serious problems, even though they were vitamins “for women” they had no iron, low vitamin K and no iodide/iodine. About 2 months ago I looked into using Celebrate Multivitamins because they are in capsules that could be opened up and integrated into the dry powder, which would solve a lot of issues. Here’s what I ended up with:Celebrate vitamins

Yeah, THAT’s not going to fly. So I’m back on the Kirkland. So once again, you can use a different multi-vitamin but you’re gambling that it has the stuff you need when coupled with what’s available in Keto Chow. For reference, here is the Supplement facts for the Kirkland vitamins (click to embiggen):

Kirkland signature

 

By |2016-10-13T07:28:05-06:00July 29th, 2015|Soylent, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|6 Comments
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Single day packs are coming

Some time ago I asked for feedback on the viability of doing 3-meal single day packs of Keto Chow. Then I went on a couple vacations but now I’m back and ready to go. I sourced the bags back in May and have had them for quite a while but I just didn’t have the time to figure out the logistics of packaging them and whatnot. This last weekend I finally got that done. I have initial runs of Rich Chocolate and Chocolate Mint already to go and I’ll be getting the rest of the flavors done soon. Once I have some inventory I’ll launch it though that probably won’t be until Wednesday or Thursday.

One of the big questions I had was how much could I ship in the priority mail boxes I’m using. With my test run I was able to answer that:

  • I can fit one into a small first class envelope that I currently use for samples.
  • I can fit two in a small flat rate box.
  • I can fit 7 into the padded flat rate envelopes I’m using to ship the week bags currently.
  • I can fit 14 into a medium flat rate box.
  • I cannot 28 into a large flat rate box, this sucks because that’s how I typically ship the “Build a Month*” with 4 of the week packages, the most I could fit was 27.
  • I can only fit 23 into a Regional Rate B box (useful for closer destinations like California), which sucks since a B will also hold 4 weeks of the larger bags:

2015-07-25 21.37.57The only real big question I have yet to figure out is the multi-vitamin situation. In the future I expect that I’ll replace the individual meal samples with these 1-day packs (I’m still toying with pricing but depending on the flavor it’s about 24% less than buying 3 of the samples) so People will be using them to try out the flavors. If you’re just doing a sample then the vitamin really isn’t vital and putting 1-3 vitamins in a shipment doesn’t sound hard but it gets messy pretty quickly. It’s not a money thing but simply logistics. My initial thought is to include the pills in the upcoming “Build a week” package and probably include the full bag with the seven vitamins if 5 or more days get ordered. Order 1-4 and you wouldn’t get the vitamins. But this is still up in the air right now.

Oh, and for the record: the week packs aren’t going away.

 

By |2016-10-13T07:28:05-06:00July 27th, 2015|Soylent, Ketogenic, Keto Chow, Site or Store Stuff|6 Comments
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Interesting user experience with blood sugar on Keto Chow

I did my own test a while ago on the effects of Keto Chow on my own blood sugar levels, a customer (Hi Nick!) sent me an email today (he looked this post over before I published it):

I am diabetic, and I’ve been taking daily measurements of blood glucose.  The first week, my BG fell from around 150 to 107, and then as kind of a control I switched out one meal for ‘real food’ that I would have typically eaten and my BG rose throughout the week to a rather steep 180 on a night where I splurged a bit more than usual.  Toning it back down to only the shakes and I had a

[measurement] of 104 the other evening.

Would the full graph be useful as public knowledge?  I have measurements for ‘first thing in the morning’ and then two hours after dinner time.

It’s not a cure for diabetes by any stretch, but, it has been helping me to manage my blood [glucose] and getting it into the 100 range reliably is only slightly high for a normal person, and in my opinion, very good for a diabetic.

I’ve attached an export from the app I’m using. […] There’s notes about various things and weight measurements on some of them.   The period 7/5 to 7/11 shows what my normal eating habits did to it, where as from 6/30 to 7/5 was all on keto chow with only the occasional snack and one day where I supplemented since I mixed up my numbers and prepared all 3 shakes for that day with an extremely low amount of … shake 😛  7/12 to today shows my glucose recovering after only a few days of turning down on the normal food again.  Keto chow was at least two of my meals on every day throughout this two week period.

I’m expecting the next two weeks to be a little more insightful, as there is lots of deviation in this chart that shows what happens with a diabetic eating normal food, and then what happens when I’m only on the keto chow shakes.

If Nick decides to share the additional data I’ll post an update. So here is the data, first graphical and then the raw values and notes:

Levels graphed

Date Time Event Value Units Notes
06/30/2015 06:38 Out Of Bed 138 mg/dL 224.6 lbs. Start ketochow
06/30/2015 09:54 After Dinner 120 mg/dL Soylent and a few chocolate raisins
07/01/2015 06:25 Out Of Bed 149 mg/dL 224.4
07/01/2015 09:42 After Dinner 118 mg/dL
07/02/2015 07:02 Out Of Bed 138 mg/dL 222
07/02/2015 10:43 After Dinner 110 mg/dL messed up shakes ate Jimmy John’s unwich instead
07/03/2015 08:48 After Dinner 118 mg/dL
07/03/2015 10:06 Out Of Bed 107 mg/dL 220 lbs
07/04/2015 04:55 Before Dinner 105 mg/dL
07/04/2015 06:01 Out Of Bed 136 mg/dL Had 2 hotdogs as a late night snack
07/04/2015 10:17 After Dinner 126 mg/dL
07/05/2015 09:46 After Dinner 142 mg/dL ate fries and double quarter pounder
07/05/2015 09:57 Out Of Bed 134 mg/dL
07/06/2015 06:47 Out Of Bed 149 mg/dL
07/06/2015 09:10 After Dinner 128 mg/dL
07/07/2015 06:35 Out Of Bed 143 mg/dL
07/07/2015 10:17 After Dinner 131 mg/dL Chicken and broccoli
07/08/2015 06:24 Out Of Bed 137 mg/dL
07/08/2015 10:02 After Dinner 144 mg/dL
07/09/2015 06:43 Out Of Bed 133 mg/dL Large steak for dinner last night
07/09/2015 10:34 After Dinner 148 mg/dL
07/10/2015 07:16 Out Of Bed 144 mg/dL
07/10/2015 09:58 Before Bed 153 mg/dL
07/11/2015 09:27 Out Of Bed 155 mg/dL
07/11/2015 11:27 After Dinner 184 mg/dL ate out at Chili’s  splurged on chips and salsa
07/12/2015 08:58 Out Of Bed 151 mg/dL
07/12/2015 10:31 After Dinner 117 mg/dL
07/13/2015 09:00 Out Of Bed 133 mg/dL
07/13/2015 10:05 After Dinner 104 mg/dL
07/14/2015 06:10 Out Of Bed 122 mg/dL

By |2016-10-13T07:28:05-06:00July 14th, 2015|Keto Chow, Soylent, Ketogenic|1 Comment
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Glycemic Load and Index

This entry is part 80 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

There is a pretty interesting thread on Reddit about the glycemic load of the official Rosa Labs Soylent 1.5 and how it has twice the  glycemic load as Coca Cola. It got me thinking: I wonder what the glycemic index of Keto Chow would be. I already know that it has virtually no detectable impact on blood sugar levels (at least in my own n=1 test). How would I test?

This is from http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/87/1/247S.full

The glycemic index (GI) is a measure of the blood glucose-raising ability of the available carbohydrate in foods defined as the incremental area under the glycemic response curve (AUC) elicited by a portion of food containing 50 g available carbohydrate expressed as a percentage of the AUC elicited by 50 g glucose in the same subject.

OK, so in summary: you give 50g of pure glucose to a study participant and check their blood sugar at intervaals for 2 hours. Then you wait a long time (you have to be fasting for quite a while before hand) and do it again but with 50g of “available” (NET) carbohydrates. I don’t think I could test using the generally accepted testing procedure since Keto Chow only has (depending on the flavor) 12g of non-fiber carbohydrates per day. So you would need to consume 4 days worth of keto chow (again, I’m not talking about 4 meals, I’m talking about 12 meals!) to get the 50g necessary. That’s nuts.

The Rich Chocolate flavor of Keto Chow has one of the higher net carbs with 6.0g of net carbs per meal. or roughly the same as 1.5 teaspoons of D-glucose (aka: “Dextrose” which is the same as glucose). So I suppose I could test 1 meal of Rich Chocolate and compare it to 6g of D-Glucose. But again, it’ll be a n=1 test and not of much value other than “gee whiz!”. I’ll still probably do it but not for a while.

 

By |2016-10-13T07:28:05-06:00July 13th, 2015|Soylent, Ketogenic, Keto Chow|2 Comments
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Back from vacation, getting out the backlog

This entry is part 79 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

We got home from our vacation Saturday evening (the kids didn’t even notice it was “free Slurpee day”) and we had a few hours after unpacking to get some orders out. The week before we left I built up inventory in anticipation of a lot of orders and that’s what I came back to =). I didn’t have enough on hand to fill all of the ones that came in while I was on vacation (In particular, I’m like 10 short on Strawberry and I won’t have more of that until Tuesday) but 75 out of 95 isn’t bad! I filled up the night drop boxes of the 2 post offices nearest me so the packages would be going out first thing today. I’m anticipating I’ll have the backlog completely gone by Tuesday when I get a new shipment of protein powder in.

By |2015-07-13T09:20:32-06:00July 13th, 2015|Soylent, Keto Chow|Comments Off on Back from vacation, getting out the backlog
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Great write up about mixing Keto Chow

This entry is part 78 of 139 in the series Ketogenic Soylent

Same guy who did that excellent review of Keto Chow posted another (hilarious yet informative) write up about how he mixes up Keto Chow: http://www.insignificant.info/blog-native/2015/6/29/ketochow-prep-accessories

It’s a good read, make sure you don’t miss the footnotes.

By |2016-10-13T07:28:06-06:00July 7th, 2015|Ketogenic, Keto Chow, Soylent|2 Comments
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