Soylent isn’t Healthy (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Soylent isn’t Healthy (2017)

nateliason.com

84 pointsecliptik81 comments

If you're into it, there are many user-submitted DIY Soylent recipes at completefoods.co [1].

There are recipes for Keto Chow (costs $7.15/day) [2], a super low-cost Soylent (costs $1.51/day) [3], AgroVittles solid bars (costs $14.15/day) [4], and Eldar Bread, also solid (costs $1.79/day) [5].

I'm not really interested in replacing all my meals with a drink (and I doubt many people really do that long term), but I think some of these options are a good way to get things I probably lack.

[1]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes

[2]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/keto-chow-150-maste...

[3]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/brets-soylent-corn-...

[4]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/agrovittles-electri...

[5]: https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes/eldar-flour

It doesn't need to be perfectly healthy to serve its purpose to me. It helps me avoid time-and-money-wasting bad meals.

If you are out somewhere busy, sometimes you just want to keep going but you are hungry. But all the food options might be overpriced junk food that you have to wait for. Drink a soylent and skip that meal. When you get home eat real food that you actually want to eat.

Soylent kills food cravings and keeps your mood even for hours.

> But all the food options might be overpriced junk food...

Isn't the point of the article that Soylent is overpriced junk food?

Try carrying a couple of granola bars, dried fruit and nuts when you're out.

One serving of Soylent gives me 14g of fat and 13g of protein. Better than a granola bar and some fruit and nuts, which tend to be only carb heavy with some protein.

It also gives you 37g of carbs. Read the label.

It's a fine idea and I do eat a lot of nuts. But it's pretty hard to match the convenience and effectiveness of a soylent.

Basically, if you ever have cravings or moodiness due to food, that can be solved by a soylent in about 60 seconds. Maybe nuts can solve it too, but a lot of people don't do that, and end up eating junk instead.

It has protein and it's not greasy/salty. Like a protein bar except easier to consume and doesn't require a separate drink (bars are usually super dry for me).

A soylent is a couple dollars, whereas bad restaurant food at a crowded event is easily $15 plus 20 minutes of waiting.

I guess I don't see a big problem here? What's an alternative that's better?

It is "low sugar" but actually has 37g of carbs per bottle. You can eat entire bags of nuts without getting that much carbs.

Nuts have been around forever, so they apparently aren't solving the problem of bad meals (inconvenient, time-consuming, expensive, unhealthy, and unejoyable) completely.

Soylent offers a new product that might help reduce the problem of bad meals.

Soylent works for me. If nuts work for you, then great.

>Soylent kills food cravings and keeps your mood even for hours.

Why not eat an apple, a handful of almonds or a can of sardines? There are a multiple of convenient, healthy foods.

Because taking a drink from a bottle is perhaps a bit more crowd-friendly than opening a can of sardines when you're at a grocery store, hospital, gym, etc.

Because none of those on their own has the same balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs)?

An apple is 50 calories and mostly sugar. Almonds are pretty good. Most people don't find eating sardines plain to be convenient or tasty.

Soylent is fairly well balanced, plenty of people seem to think it tastes good enough (I think it's a bit chalky, but, ymmv) and it's reasonably enough priced and convenient.

If you aren't cooking most of your meals, and if you struggle with tracking macros and your needs are statistically average, then Soylent is probably not a bad solution. I got a case for my sister when she was having trouble keeping weight on her and it helped her back on track nutritionally - anecdotal obviously.

Fasting is also a viable alternative, you don't need every meal.

While I admittedly would benefit from skipping a few meals, I get very surly when hungry; not a good thing either at the workplace or at home. Dunno how people overcome that.

Supposedly it gets better when you're used to fast, which actually might be a reason to try it ?

How bad this is depends heavily on what your diet consists of. It can also be exacerbated by withdrawal from stimulants like caffeine, which tend to coincide with meals.

FWIW when I'm eating a very low carb diet with no stimulants, fasting for a day is a complete noop, pleasant even.

But I also feel nauseous consuming caffeine when fasting. I've come to suspect a major reason people eat breakfast is so their morning caffeine dose doesn't make them sick, though they may not acknowledge it.

I've come to suspect a major reason people make silly non-falsifiable claims on the internet is to feel good about themselves and pat themselves on the back about how clever they are, though they may not acknowledge it.

Maybe I should try it more often. Definitely feels good.

> "But I also feel nauseous consuming caffeine when fasting."

Caffeine stimulates acid production in the stomach which can possibly trigger gastritis. An antacid might help there in lieu of the buffering effect of the food you'd normally be eating.

Fasting can be a valuable practice, but I think it should be applied intentionally, based on your goals for your health and body, not haphazardly when you find yourself in a context where good food is inconvenient.

It can also be a good idea to not look at screens sometimes, but it's disruptive if that time away from screens is at a time not of your choosing but forced on you by external conditions.

Title: "No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why."

Heading of the conclusion: "The Core Problem: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know"

Most sections could be summarized as "We don't know that Soylent is doing things right therefore it might be unhealthy." It's just a FUD piece.

The human body is incredibly complicated and we really don't know what we don't know. It's really not necessarily true that drinking a nutrient rich slurry like Soylent is a good substitute for a conventional healthy diet. It literally is an unknown. There's good prior reason to believe it is not significantly better. It probably isn't a whole lot worse either, certainly better than many people's diets.

Thus, unknown benefit or harm which probably isn't huge either way. It's like taking an untested drug that probably isn't dangerous but probably doesn't have a huge effect either. The precautionary principle is the usual rule with such things.

To really know, we'd need multi-decade longitudinal studies of large numbers of people. Soylent obviously doesn't have that kind of evidence.

I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy."

Maybe we're going too far into a discussion on epistemology here, but I don't think it is FUD to call out that we cannot clearly say the same thing about Soylent that we say about a serving of cruciferous vegetables. One is healthy and the other is unknown and ambiguous.

However, if we still want to call this FUD, I'd argue that maybe FUD is necessary when thinking about what we put into our bodies. I'd also practice FUD when thinking through whether I should approach a mountain lion, and I'd encourage everyone else to do the same.

> I know that when I eat a portion of leafy green vegetables. I am eating something "healthy."

There's a difference between _knowing_ and _believing_. You _believe_ this, it's not an absolute truth.

It's the same as most people believe they must drink 2L of water a day, where in reality there's zero scientific basis for the assertion.

It could be that there is scientific basis that ground up plant material of which Soylent is comprised is not nutritionally similar to "leafy green vegetables", but you don't _know_ that. You merely _believe_ it. I'm not even a soylent fan (although I did try it), but I am a fan of critical thinking.

There's no such thing as absolute proof or "knowing", only degrees of belief. Yet we make decisions based on degrees of belief all the time.

There is very good reason to believe leafy vegetables are healthy based on oodles of medical evidence spanning decades.

The 2L of water never had evidence behind specifically that quantity, and was only a reasonable general guideline for men, with it well known that the requirements vary enormously from person to person.

edit: To put it better, 2L of water a day as a good goal for the average person to shoot for is a public health message, it's not a clinical statement. There is a difference, in that public health advice needs to be easily digestible and not confuse people, even if it is leaving out nuance.

From the Mayo Clinic's site[0]:

You've probably heard the advice to drink eight glasses of water a day. That's easy to remember, and it's a reasonable goal.

Most healthy people can stay hydrated by drinking water and other fluids whenever they feel thirsty. For some people, fewer than eight glasses a day might be enough. But other people might need more.

[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...

Go ahead and address the part of my comment that talks about the use of the term "FUD".

I am also a fan of critical thinking, so I'd love to hear your opinion beyond nitpicking over words (knowledge vs. belief). What do you think about how fear and uncertainty should be incorporated into diet or, say, what kind of predatory animals a human being approaches?

No, most sections could be summarized as "We don't know that Soylent is doing things right therefore it shouldn't be called "healthy"."

By that logic, we don't know that any dietary plan is doing things right so nothing should be called healthy. That's what makes it FUD.

Haven't tried the stuff in near a decade personally but IMO Soylent is reasonably well researched and a good faith effort to try to create a healthy food, whether it ultimately is or not. "We don't know" doesn't cut it as a counterargument.

You say it’s reasonably well researched. What long running randomized trials in humans have shown it to be healthy? I’m legitimately curious.

What I mean by reasonably researched is that the nutritional science behind the ingredient choices seems defensible; you're welcome to read Soylent's own material on that. Sorry if I was unclear about that.

As for long running randomized trials, sure, there aren't any. However, none of the hidden deleterious effects the author suggests might happen have been observed in consumers over the past three years since the article was published (that I know of), so, if there is a problem, it's really subtle.

Having a background in health, I can confidently say that the human body has surprising relationships to the nutrients that go into it. The specific composition and timing of nutrient delivery to various systems in the body can have a dramatic effect on health, and so taking a first principles approach (as opposed to an evidence-based approach) can be very dangerous in the context of human health.

IMO the burden of proof for whether something is truly healthy for a human being over the course of their lifetime is on the new product rather than lack of evidence to the contrary.

Just my two cents’, and I think reasonable people can disagree.

We've been running long term trial on eggs and butter for hundreds of years, and we still don't know if they're healthy or not. The opinion flips in polarity every 5 years or so. What makes you believe long term trials would establish something conclusive here?

I would venture that it’s necessary but potentially not sufficient.

I don't use soylent, but use a similar product in the same space. I hope very few people are using these to replace _all_ of their diet. But as a tool, I find meal replacement mixes to be useful in multiple contexts:

- when traveling somewhere and I expect the options which meet my dietary requirements to be limited

- when trying to fit extra calories to gain weight

- when the other low-effort option would be snacks I won't feel good about (this used to mean the office)

Especially if you have a dietary restriction and a metabolism that requires a lot of calories to avoid unintended weight loss, arranging to always have nutritious _real_ food can require a lot of effort and planning, and I can't always be bothered. If the other options are eating too few calories, eating crappy snacks, or picking something at a geographically convenient restaurant, a meal replacement shake can quickly become best easy option.

Criticism of Soylent does often seem to imply that the alternative is a home-cooked meal of leafy greens.

I've experimented with Soylent for almost 1.5 years, and here are my main takeaways:

1. It's far from perfect, but can serve as a substitute for junk food. After six months of switching to Soylent, the cholesterol in my blood had dropped significantly, as verified by blood tests.

2. It's much easier to moderate food intake with Soylent. If you eat out, especially in the US, the portions tend to be huge, and there's often a post-meal slump. Soylent makes it possible to continuously consume little amounts of food.

3. Your body loses the ability to process solid food if you have too much Soylent. It's possible to get addicted to Soylent, and develop an aversion for regular food, and this is unhealthy, to say the least.

4. Cooking and eating home-cooked meals is an essential part of overall well-being. For snacking on-the-go, smoothies are a good substitute. With yoghurt, seeds, and protein powder blended it, it's arguably healthier than Soylent.

Conclusion: Soylent is like one of those fruit juices you might pick up at the supermarket, when you fancy it. Getting cartons of it shipped home every month is harmful to overall well-being.

I’ve started using Coffiest as a substitute for Soy Milk and protein powder.

Coffiest Frozen Bananas Ice Frozen Cauliflower & Avocado Chia Seeds Hemp Hearts Cocoa Cacao Assorted nuts (Cashews, Pistachios, Walnuts, Almonds)

As others have commented, this article is a little bit FUD-ish and doesn't back up all it's claims that much better than Soylent. But personally what I was attracted to in Soylent, I found in better in Huel. Real nutritionists, who share great content about their choices, etc. Very interesting to follow, and I'm a big fan of their powder for breakfast and their "Hot & Savory" for lunches.

My diet is now almost entirely plant-based, there are noticeable health improvements, and it's as cheap and efficient as Soylent.

I would second huel. its made my shift to veganism much, much more pleasant and practical and has allowed me to hit my macros for hypertrophy in a more manageable way

My fiancé and me have been on it for ~2 years, replacing the meal at work with it. In the evening we eat home-made food.

It's been amazing, we both feel more energized and the stool have been better (probably due to the large amount of fibers in huel).

The stool is better, ONCE YOUR BODY IS USED TO IT! One of the main reasons I'm able to be so disciplined about keeping it in my diet heavily is I don't want to subject my wife to the first few weeks back on a mostly-Huel diet :) The poor dear...

I've read a lot of comments about unsourced claims and the like. I expected that after reading the article, the tone is more matter of fact than it has a right to be based on it's citations.

Or at least it didn't present a credible argument for a crowd like HN. Despite that, from my perspective, having long followed the research in fields that relate to health, almost all of the points are the most likely explanation based on what we know (which isn't enough). Backing that up is of course a big ask, big enough that you'd have to decide between spending a few hours on a post or spending weeks compiling sources, then writing a brief history of health policy and practice.

I can understand going with option one.

All of that aside, I think this point is important:

>The default for evaluating some food that isn’t found in nature shouldn’t be that it’s “healthy until proven bad,” rather, bad until proven healthy.

We've co-evolved with our environment for 25 million years (if you count from the earliest evidence of hominoids). It's hard to argue that it doesn't make sense to approach anything that falls outside of that evolutionary relationship with healthy skepticism.

This whole article has a much too assured tone about itself than is actually warranted. The one thing I can agree with when it comes to nutrition science are:

1. There are a huge amount of unknowns in nutrition science.

2. We have multiple examples where highly processed foods (e.g. trans fats, refined sugars, low fiber) have been proven bad for you, so eating whole foods is generally a safer bet, but regardless it tastes better, too.

>We know that synthetic supplements are not absorbed the same way as when we get them in real food, so even though Soylent has everything, we’re likely not using all of it the same way since it’s not in its original form. In that case, “100%” may be more like 20%, since we can only use some of it.

Anecdotally, I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels from deficient to 57 ng/mL. Blood tested three times to confirm stability at or around that level. I've heard numerous times that vitamin supplements don't work, or aren't absorbed the way same, but the blood tests don't lie.

I've used Vitamin D drops to raise my Vitamin D levels

That's just one vitamin. I'd venture that the micronutrients you need all have different absorption profiles.

For example, someone I know had an iron deficiency. It turns out there are lots of different ways to attack that, with quite different effectiveness.

I'm sure. I just think the blanket statement is obviously not true. There was a linked study or article, but because the article is so old, the link is dead.

This article states that minimizing grains is ideal but never defends that point. Does anyone have data defending that?

I thought the same while reading the article. My understanding is that carbohydrates are not really bad, especially unrefined ones.

Examine.com has this to say: https://examine.com/nutrition/awful-nutrition-myths/#summary...

At the end of the day, no one knows I guess.

The author is confusing highly-processed white bread and sugary cereals with the grains themselves. Whole grains are some of the healthiest foods one can eat.

https://nutritionfacts.org has a lot of information on evidence-based nutrition, sadly it's mostly videos.

I am a graduate student with ADHD-PI who lives alone. Keeping my apartment in acceptable condition and taking care of myself can be quite difficult at times. It can take hours for me to fold laundry, do the dishes, or cook meals because I struggle following through with tasks. I am not bound from ever feeling like a functional human, I have my good days and my bad days, same as everyone else.

Prior to soylent, I was ordering food multiple times a week and keeping lots of junk food in the house, in case I hyperfocused through the time that I should be cooking dinner, which was quite often.

I'm not here to defend the contents of Soylent, and I'm only loyal to the brand to the extent that I find it tasting not bad. But the concept of an instant meal replacement which I can prepare in a matter of seconds has had a huge positive benefit to my life.

If anyone else has any tips for how they managed to deal with this (besides Soylent), I'm all ears. For what it's worth, I try to keep Soylent to one a day and always have a "real" meal otherwise

Soylent is not healthy. Does anyone remember how Rob Rhinehart gave himself heart palpitations? How he hired a bunch of marketers, branders, engineers before any nutritionists and medical advisors?

https://soylent.com/pages/careers

He is still making the same mistake by not prominently showing nutritional consultants, medical experts and hiding behind the claim that this is a nutritional supplement.

Please correct me if Soylent has changed their MO of "move fast and break things" with people's nutrition. I would love to be wrong.

edit: The idea of a fast, easy, nutritious paste is great. Nutrition, however, does not often fit into a piecemeal ready to eat box for all your meals. I ended up taking personal nutrition seriously when I realized my dietary choices were undermining my health. You only get one run at this life. Please take the gravity of your health and who you abdicate your health decisions with the respect those consequences deserve.

I read this and assumed he got heart palpitations from Soylent. The closest I could find was this article https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/the-man-w... that mentions that he had heart arrhythmia -- but while developing Soylent early on and _deviating_ from the USDA recommendations (specifically with the amount of potassium). From that he concluded that Soylent should adhere to the USDA recommended values, which it does.

Soylent is full of sugar (which will cause your insulin levels to spike) and has crappy fat in it from stuff like canola oil. It's objectively a terribly unhealthy beverage.

A much better alternative is Orgain, which uses monkfruit for sweetener (which won't affect your insulin if you are diabetic), and has a bunch of vegetables in it, plus protein from peas.

I had a subscription for soylent for years.

I remember someone asking me if I could go 100%. I said NO WAY. maybe 10% of your diet, more is not great.

I treated it as a snack replacement because -- hey, it's better than reaching for something really bad, right?

In the end I think it IS a snack. It was better than eating donuts, or hotdogs all day, but is only by a matter of degree. It is a highly processed food, which is not great.

I see it a little like the emergency room - it will prevent you from dying today. But it will not help you with a healthy and thriving lifestyle.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I have an issue with "liquid" food.

My concern with products like Soylent and Huel is whether the nutruients they claim to provide are actually absorbed by your body.

Solid food that has been liquidised is not the same as solid food: nutrient absorbption is affected by rate of digestion - more solid food, especially if it is fibrous, gives our bodies more time to absorb nutrients.

It's the same way a fruit smoothie is actually worse for you than just eating the solid contents (disregarding the insane sugar content you would consume).

I think solid food takes longer to digest because it takes our bodies longer to absorb the ingredients. Liquid foods are much more bioavailable, so I would expect them to be better absorbed than solid foods.

If the liquid food has bad stuff in it (ex. bunch of sugar in a smoothie) that could be a negative thing, but for good stuff that would be a good thing.

I tried Soylent for a while a few years ago, I always felt a little off after drinking it. Nothing extreme but I decided it wasn't for me.

These kinds of posts always make me think of Jay-Z - "What you eat don't make me shit"

My car is product of evolution of a couple hundred years, evolving to lubricate with refined petroleum oil in its engine.

Today I,m making oil change, too busy to get petroleum 10-30 oil, figure some canola should be just as good, it,s just oil, guys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil

I wish it wasn't bulked with maltodextrin.

> in the Silicon Valley world where everyone ought to spend 16 hours a day coding, food was a waste of time

Any more straw men you want to knock down before talking about the content people clicked for? I don't have to agree with the lifestyle of working >8 hours a day or not taking breaks to find it a convenient food without having to worry about, y'know, the 'snack' being healthy.

> this is pretty much entirely nonsense and caused significant harm to an entire generation of Americans, likely leading to much of the modern obesity epidemic

Everyone adhering to the food pyramid is why Americans got obese? Really?

But okay whatever, I'm not here for this discussion, I'm here for Soylent. Let me read on.

> the sugar-industry-funded food pyramid

[citation needed]. This kind of advice is given all around the world and doesn't seem to vary by the amount the sugar industry has control over each country's particular food agencies. But feel free to tell me of a country where it's significantly different, I will readily admit not to having checked every single one, but then I'm also not writing an article about how bad this pyramid (or disc, as it is in the Netherlands and probably other countries) is.

To be clear, I know the sugar industry shifted blame to fats. Yes, that is a thing. But not all of this can be solely blamed on the sugar industry and it's not all 100% lies by the government either.

But we're coming up on the first actual content, let me not waste more time.

> "[Soylent has no] excess amounts of sugars, saturated fats, or cholesterol." [...] There’s no good evidence suggesting that saturated fats are bad for you, only that they aren’t quite as good for you as monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. [...] eating cholesterol does not raise your cholesterol in the simple ways we used to believe, and that eating some cholesterol is important for your brain and for sexual health

So Soylent says their food doesn't contain much of these two things, and it's debatable to what degree those two things are undesirable... but does that mean they should have included more of something suspected to be bad? They just don't include, as you cited, excess amounts.

> This is a problem for Soylent.

No, this is a problem for you. You're taking issue with their wording, not their actual contents so far. I haven't seen a single ingredient being mentioned that is in excess or too little.

> you could be at higher risk for neurodegenerative disease, memory loss, decreased sexual function, and other problems.

That's a huge leap. Yeah, yeah, weasel word "could be" is in there, author's grace is saved... it's unhelpful at best.

The next point being made is about sugar in a specific product I hadn't even heard about, Coffeist. The variant of Soylent I buy also has added flavoring and sugars, I think it's obvious to everyone buying this that it's not as good as the real, original thing. The core is the part we're trusting to be free of unhealthy things.

> Odds are good that we don’t know everything about what we get from food, just what we know so far. This imperfect information about vitamins and minerals is problematic, because while a lime probably has some other [unknown good stuff, dubbed Vitamin X], Soylent doesn’t.

Wait, leap: we don't know -> thus soylent has to be incomplete. You literally just said you don't know that.

If don't know which foods have Vitamin X, you can call into question literally every diet. The only solution would be to eat a little of everything, including unhealthy things, because perhaps there is a helpful mystery ingredient we don't know about.

If an argument applies equally to the food you're trying to determine the healthiness of as well as the control group, it's not an argument against the food in question.

> when you stop eating vegetables and start drinking magical silicon valley food powder…

Yeah, this pretty much speaks for itself. Nobody ever said the former.

> It may have all of the vitamins and minerals you need, but do you absorb them the same way? The only way you would know is to consume only Soylent and nothing else and get your levels tested after a few months, maybe longer

Woa smartypants, guess what people did? I didn't research this topic, this is just regular news. You don't have to look far to find this. Top hit for my first guess at a search query, "blood test soylent", is "Blood test results. 100% Soylent 2.0 for 1 year". The results "were all within the normal ranges except for sodium and chlorine. Doctor asked about water intake and it was determined I drank way too much water". What's the top reply in that thread? "I am also on a 80%+ Soylent diet for 24 months and my blood tests came back as normal too! Except for a vitamin D deficiency."

People did this. And I'm still waiting for the first unhealthy or missing/deficit ingredient. You did literally zero research for this opinion piece.

> as an animal that evolved to eat other animals

We didn't evolve specifically to survive in space either, so let's not go there using artificial means? What an argument.

If you're saying there are non-vegetarian (let alone vegan) ingredients that we absolutely cannot miss, then please do say which ones because there are a lot of vegans and vegetarians trying to live healthy lives that would love to hear your well-founded research.

> Soylent 2.0 has a glycemic index of 49, which is about the same as orange juice, Snickers bars, and spaghetti. That’s not so bad on its own, but if it’s all you’re consuming, then every meal is hitting your blood sugar the same way as a sweet drink or plate full of pasta would. That’s not good.

Okay so here is something I can't comment on. I'm no nutritionist (neither does the author claim to be), so far everything was just common sense and plain logic. I don't know if sugar spikes cause diabetes or something. Let's read on!

...

but no, that is the end of that topic. Nothing further about what issue(s) this might cause. So a "not good" glycemic index is the sole argument of the entire post that is relevant to most Soylent eaters.

The other argument is "we don't know what we don't know". As if we're unaware of that. People get blood tests because of that. They're actively developing the formula because of that.

So, is it objectively not healthy, as you claim in the headline? Should I not have this as a snack or single meal replacement, or are you really just warning against "don't eat this 100% of the time for 30 years because it might give you a higher chance of cancer; we don't know, and I definitely can't tell you"?

"Soylent: because some of us really like people."

As a product designer, it's easy to see through the trend of repackaging old products with new "minimal" branding. Soylent is PediaLyte or Ensure for millenials.

You see it in every industry now not just tech.

PediaLyte and Ensure had far more sugar pre-Soylent

I think it misrepresents Soylent to claim it’s essentially a repackaged Pedialyte/Ensure - it had a very, very different product development process and it ostensibly has different goals.

Uhhh.. PediaLyte and Ensure are vastly different products. Ensure is a weight gain meal replacement drink and PediaLyte is fancy gatorade.

Soylent is somewhere between Slimfast and Ensure. I'm not positive there's a quality calorically balanced meal replacement drink out there? Maybe there is, but whatever that is, Soylent is the branded version of that. Not PediaLyte or Ensure.

Soy is bad for you - high amounts of estrogen.

False actually. This study states that the isoflavones in soy don’t affect serum T levels.

https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(09)00966-2/full...

That's not quite accurate. Soy contains phytoestrogen, which is a plant estrogen, not a human estrogen. It's similar in many ways and does have (in a much weaker form) some of the effects of human estrogen. However, just calling it "estrogen" implies that it's the same as human estrogen. It isn't.

From anecdotal evidence it seems for some people the phytoestrogen still activates estrogen pathways. Probably has genetic variation on the effects.

Anecdotal evidence? How does someone anecdotally detect that their estrogen pathway has been activated?

By growing big moobs.

then why is that not the case for countries with a significantly higher proportion of soy in their diets such as countries in Asia? if what you said is true then once would expect to notice it

Like I said, genetic variation.

so you suspect that some gene (evidence for which also exists "anecdotally") triggers a genetic response only in countries where this type of food isn't regularly consumed? because then this sounds like a wild guess prompted by suspicions and pseudoscience

As soon as I heard "man boobs" and "soy protein" I was out. This may be completely false, but truth is hard to come by these days. No need to risk it here when there are plenty of other good sources of protein.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18558591/

I dont have citations on hand, but my understanding is that this claim is largely attributed to a single/small amount of studies of dubious validity funded by US Beef industry, and that when you look at populations that have much higher soy intake, their estrogen levels are not elevated/are lower than similar US populations.

Grain of salt and all that, just offering a lead for those curious of the counter argument

If that were true, we'd have seen significant effects in the peoples of Asia by now, where soy consumption is high.

Did you know that cow milk contains actual estrogen and other hormones?

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