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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Soylent isn't really aimed at health, more convenience & novelty. Its not unhealthy either, but you get my point

I’d suggest it is unhealthy. We don’t even know what all is in the food we eat, so to pretend we can combine a bunch of synthetic stuff into some well rounded meal for daily consumption I believe is dangerous.

1. That's not an argument that it's unhealthy. That's an argument that it's risky. "We haven't proved it's healthy" isn't the same as "it's unhealthy".

2. Some people have been on 100% Soylent diets for years now. I don't believe there's been any indication of nutrient deficiencies yet.

3. This argument seems weak because you don't know how unhealthy the diet you're replacing is. If I grab a Soylent for lunch instead of getting a burger or pad thai at the food court, which is healthier? Are the high levels of cadmium in spinach unhealthy? How many naturally occurring carcinogens in natural foods are still undiscovered? Any diet has risk. You need to show why Soylent is worse than what it's replacing.

Yeah, I'll let other people be the guinea pigs for a couple of decades before I do it.

Fruit juice is most likely much worse than soylent. Ditto for milk.sugar and calorie bombs. Look at the ingrediants in soylent .its fine and nothing stands out as non food

It’s meant to be your entire meal, not just a drink.

Is that really that different from the stuff we put on a plate? That too seems reasonably arbitrary as to what's in it.

Soylent is at least somewhat balanced. Everything is in a ratio that someone at least actively looked at. When I cook up a meal it certainly isn't.

The alternative to soylent is solid foods that are a combined bunch of things loaded with synthetics. Anything you cook is "synthetic".

I don’t think that accurately reflects the only alternative...

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