For the past few months I’ve been using olive oil in my DIY soylent “People Chow” because it’s supposed to be better for you than soybean oil.
Humans have been consuming it for a couple thousand (recorded) years. One thing that Soybean oil has that Olive oil doesn’t is vitamin K. Vitamin K does the exact opposite of rat poison (among other things) in that it helps blood that’s leaking out of you skin coagulate and form wheaties. You can get vitamin K from green veggies and in particular from parsley.
Some people are wary of Soybean oil because of the phytoestrogen factor (does it mimic estrogen?) but everything I’ve read says that isn’t something you need to be concerned about. QuidNYC has a great write up in the notes of his Super Food recipe about oxidative stress in Canola and Soybean oil. And then there is the issue with vitamin K in soybean oil being destroyed by UV light. It’s not likely a container of oil is going to go out into the sun. But People on anti-coagulants like Warfarin need to watch their vitamin K intake. This site has a handy tip:
For those of you passionate for your soybean, canola and vegetable oils – there is good news. Exposure of oils to sunlight or fluorescent light destroys approximately 85% of the vitamin K. You must expose them to sunlight or fluorescent light for at least 48 hours.
Last time I bought oil at the grocery store it was on a shelf exposed to florescent light for probably a lot longer than 48 hours. So if you don’t want to bleed out you’ve got 2 choices:
- Get your oil from a bottle that wasn’t ever taken out of the original box or the container is opaque like metal
- Use a different oil and use a vitamin K supplement
I opted for number 2. To that end I found two vitamin K2 supplements. One is MK-4 and the other is MK-7. There is a lot of discussion as to which is better for you though most agree that the K2 variants are better than K1. So because I have two different supplements I’ve been taking one caplet on even days of the month and the other on odd days of the month. After my recent video on mixing 7 days at a time someone suggested I should just mix it in with the powder.
I have been hesitant to add it to the powder mix because the MK-4 supplement is made partly with alfalfa and I didn’t want it to affect the taste. Well, I tried it this morning.
When I mixed up my morning soylent I emptied a caplet into the powder. I wanted it to be a bit of an extreme test with 3x more than there would normally be – an entire days worth in one blender bottle so it could be the “worst case scenario.”
After mixing it all up and letting it sit in my backpack on the way to work, like always, I can’t taste any difference. So I’m going to call this one confirmed.
The end result being: from here on out I’m going to be adding the powder out of 3 and 4 of the caplets to each week batch and mixing it all in. That will be one less step for my own consumption and for the people buying mixed people chow from me.
