The drab stupidity of Soylent
kernelmag.com
kernelmag.com
In other words, the proposition "Soylent will not provide close to optimum nutrition for everyone" is extremely different from the proposition "Switching to Soylent will improve the diet of most people".
Most people get most of their calories from sugar, refined starches, and refined vegetable oils. They do not finely-tune their nutritional intake based on their gender, weight, age, activity level, stress level or time of year. I'm interested in the pros and cons of Soylent for this type of typical person.
I'm extremely skeptical of Soylent, but this vector of attack seems incorrect to me, applicable only to people who already have extremely health diets.
Ignorance of such a broad field should not be seen as heroic when you are potentially placing people's health at risk. Placing a legalistic figleaf over the top does not make the ethical problem go away.
I advise all to read the comment through to the conclusion.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1jvsie/the_man_w...
So? Once you add feedback (blood tests, medical supervision) to your dietary "loop", these mistakes have the potential to sort themselves out.
>Ignorance of such a broad field should not be seen as heroic when you are potentially placing people's health at risk.
Some people's health is at risk simply by maintaining their normal eating habits.
>Placing a legalistic figleaf over the top does not make the ethical problem go away.
What ethical problem? Don't participate if you don't like the terms. It is not as though the stuff is being tested on schoolchildren, or anyone who is unwilling.
That he is wilfully avoiding the advice of the experts who study this full time, has demonstrably already made dangerous errors and could reasonably do so again.
He continues to hint that Soylent will be a total meal replacement while using paper-thin disclaimers to try to excuse himself from wrongful death and preventable illness lawsuits by relatives and insurance companies.
He is aware, because numerous nutritionists have now explained these facts to him, that a total meal replacement is not possible in the long run. Actual food contains a wide variety of nutrients, only some of which are known about, some of which are essential to life in differing degrees for different people.
At the point where your product + blood panels is only breaking parity with the standard western diet, then you need to rethink the development and plausibility of such a product.
If I was selling flying cars right now that did no more than eventually catch fire, I would be dragged into prison for fraud and being a danger to the public. But because this bloke is selling it as a "supplement" while all the press is about total meal replacement, it's A-OK. Hunky freaking dory.
It's unethical. But people want to believe.
That's the basis of marketing: a person willing to believe an impossible claim and another person willing to lie.
Well -- you win by default. His mixture doesn't provide unknown nutrients that can't be identified or tested for... I will call them "god nutrients" or "magic nutrients"... take your pick... that is an insane standard to hold anyone too.
How can I ensure I get my daily allowance of "magic nutrients" via my normal diet... now I am worried. Do you have can full of "magic nutrients" that I can use to supplement my diet?
Any expert who tells me there is a "magic nutrient" that can't be tested for and isn't known (then how do they know it exists?) about... well... I won't be taking a lot of advice from them, I will stick to my trusted palm reader.
There are enough experts with differing opinions that anyone who does anything will always be ignoring the advice of a few of them at any given time. That doesn't him right, but participation isn't compulsory in any way.
>has demonstrably already made dangerous errors and could reasonably do so again.
That is the nature of research. By adding analytical feedback to his dietary intake, he can correct mistakes. Groundbreaking discoveries are often made by young researchers who are not prejudiced in their thinking. This guy may be disadvantaged by his greater lack of knowledge in some ways, but it may turn out to be an advantage in the end. It is also a kind of sad commentary on the state of the field that this stuff isn't either: known to a high degree of confidence or if it were then, isn't communicated to non-experts in an effective way.
In fact, nutritional technology, and medical practice surrounding nutritional technology is eff-ing pathetic. (Medical technology is pathetic too, for other reasons.) We ought to have toilets that will do quasi-medical diagnostics for us by now. There is no good reason why that tech can't exist. But instead, it is far more common that people wait until they are unwell, often partially disabled in the case of dietary ailments before medical intervention is available. Dietary tech. is relatively unchanged for most people even, in affluent societies since the end of subsistence farming. If anything, many people are worse-off.
>while using paper-thin disclaimers to try to excuse himself from wrongful death and preventable illness lawsuits by relatives and insurance companies.
I'll just assume he's hired legal counsel, and said what they told him to say.
>If I was selling flying cars right now that did no more than eventually catch fire, I would be dragged into prison for fraud and being a danger to the public.
You'd be the subject of a Popular Mechanics article once or more times per year, and you might even get a cover.
>But because this bloke is selling it as a "supplement" while all the press is about total meal replacement, it's A-OK. Hunky freaking dory.
The problems with FDA regulation, food labeling, media coverage of products, advertising industry practice, are numerous and neither do they start nor do they end with Rhinehart.
>It's unethical.
I'd argue not according to most peoples' ethics.
>But people want to believe.
So, let them. It will be a learning experience, either for them, or for you. Maybe both.
>That's the basis of marketing: a person willing to believe an impossible claim and another person willing to lie.
Nothing new about that.
except the ones that take years to present, and are things that we don't necessarily understand well yet.
>Some people's health is at risk simply by maintaining their normal eating habits.
Just because people have bad nutritional habits doesn't mean that soylent is the answer. Surely better education and a redistribution of farm subsidies to nudge people towards healthier lifestyles is a more complete and safe route?
But yeah, soylent does allow people to feel that sense of achievement of playing armchair scientists.
>What ethical problem? Don't participate if you don't like the terms. It is not as though the stuff is being tested on schoolchildren, or anyone who is unwilling.
There is an assumption amongst educated and knowledgeable people that others are equally so. Some of the people who participate in the soylent trials wont be knowledgeable enough to be able to make good meaningful decisions about what they put in their bodies.
Sure, it's their choice, hell they can suck lead paint off walls if that's their thing, but the whole point of food and supplement laws and safety regs is to prevent people doing themselves harm, particularly when they are not themselves cognisant of the harm they might do.
Add to that the hubris of those who know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be cautious, and something is going to go terribly wrong eventually. Perhaps not for the originator of the idea, but certainly one or several of the participants.
This problem is not also not currently addressed by standard dietary practice.
>Just because people have bad nutritional habits doesn't mean that soylent is the answer.
Okay, don't participate. Or wait and see. Or seek out some expert you trust.
>Surely better education
Never hurts
> and a redistribution of farm subsidies
No point in arguing that the Nanny State can't do a better job. It can and should. Is that Rhinehart's responsibility? Or is it even within the set of things that an individual could affect?
> to nudge people towards healthier lifestyles is a more complete and safe route?
Government intervention hasn't worked well yet. It is anybody's guess as to how much better/worse it could be.
>But yeah, soylent does allow people to feel that sense of achievement of playing armchair scientists.
Some people do like control of their lives. For some people, any action, even though there is potential for harm, is better than inaction.
>There is an assumption amongst educated and knowledgeable people that others are equally so.
Other people are free to do as they wish, so long as they don't bother me. Your freedom to swing your fists ends where my nose begins
>Some of the people who participate in the soylent trials wont be knowledgeable enough to be able to make good meaningful decisions about what they put in their bodies.
Their mamas ought to have taught them better.
>Sure, it's their choice, hell they can suck lead paint off walls if that's their thing,
But, you've just been arguing that someone ought to save them from themselves!
> but the whole point of food and supplement laws and safety regs is to prevent people doing themselves harm, particularly when they are not themselves cognisant of the harm they might do.
Is it? Maybe that was the point, that's certainly the way it gets sold to us. Would you argue that those laws and regs are particularly effective to that end?
>Add to that the hubris of those who know just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be cautious, and something is going to go terribly wrong eventually. Perhaps not for the originator of the idea, but certainly one or several of the participants.
How many? Half? A quarter? A percent? Less than that? People makes similar policy compromises all the time, the gov't does it for us too. None of these people are abandoning medicine, they will get medical checkups (if they don't, they really are fools!) It obviously isn't acutely poisonous, people who don't react well will either discontinue, or consult a physician. I bet most will abandon drinking goop even absent any negative outcome.
I don't think the OP is arguing that everyone needs a nutritionist to regulate their diet; rather, he's arguing that a drink like Soylent is inferior to even the basic amount of dietary adjustment that normally happens in a person's life.
If all you care about is calories, sure, Soylent is probably fine. I'd be concerned that if you get used to how it feels to mostly subsist on Soylent, you might be intentionally tuning out important cues from your body.
Jaime claims it's healthy and full nutrition, but he only eats/drinks it when he can't be bothered to actually eat something.
It is being marketed as a total meal replacement. There is a thin bit of legalese to cover them in case some poor bastard will die of malnutrition.
Just as sexual-desire might have been a nice mechanism for ensuring reproduction many years ago. But nowadays we can do better. There's no need to have it from a life-expectancy perspective. Hormones responsible for it are pretty toxic.
Appetite has it's role. But to claim somethings superiority based solely on being a 'natural'/'innate'/'genetic' is pretty naive. By extending this logic to other behaviors it's patently obvious that it's just not sound.
I see a lot of potential problems with Soylent. This part might or might not be a big problem. But the kind of simplistic arguments that are thrown around against and in-support of Soylent are depressing.
I replied to your comment but I address it to everyone. The article itself is just so low quality. Basically a very close-minded attack on Rhinehart with ambiguous mumbo-jumbo claims about nutrition.
Having been interested in nutrition for a long time I actually read many papers in search for answers. Finding high-quality research in that field is HARD. Doing good research is hard too. We're very very far from even resolving the whole carbohydrates vs protein vs fat war.
Cause if so, I don't know what you're smoking. I can tell you from personal experience that modern medicine does not have sex hormones completely figured out, nor do we have a way to replace them entirely with something 'better'...
//FOLLOWING IS NOT RELATED TO THE ACTUAL TOPIC, COMPLETELY SEPARATE AND SPECULATIVE
As for the particular case of sex hormones you're right that we don't have a solid solution yet. But having said that many papers show that anti-androgens might not destroy male fertility even with long term usage. Actually that research kind of helped introduce the chemical-castration penalty in many countries, cause it's supposed to be reversible in terms of fertility (not to say it's every single effect is reversible. The evidence is pretty strong, but could be better. Other solution is simply castrating yourself after you have the number of children that you want to so that you don't care about fertility. For women I think it would be taking uterus and ovaries out. The thing is with women the life-expectancy might or might not be significant. But not having period would probably be nice.
Personally I don't know. My gut feel on these issues tends to fluctuate. It's actually kind of amazing - when you go and read actual papers and look for proof of this or that it often turns out nobody really knows. The line between something being good or bad (for health) is so very thin sometimes. Gosh, I wish I could get an answer on the whole supplement thing.
Sure, but I think the size of its success or failure for each person should be measured against their health if they were to go on eating their regular diet, not some hypothesized perfect diet.
The alternative to me seems a little like saying condoms will always be a terrible method of STI prevention because their prevention rate is less than 100%, and you can achieve 100% prevention with strict abstinence. For people who can't or won't practice strict abstinence, that comparison doesn't seem very useful.
Do you know this or believe this?
Unfortunately I also haven't surveyed 'most people' during that time so I don't know whether the statement I originally quoted is an opinion, or in-depth knowledge. Which is why I asked.
An argument could be made that most people don't eat poorly, they simply eat too much. Over half of the US population is fat. It's insane.
Fine. So how well does normal food adjust to those needs? Who the hell tunes their food intake exactly to their needs? Do we even have the science to determine what your personal needs are?
The vast, vast majority of people simply eat what tastes good. Or even just what's available. Some people try to stick what they think is healthy, but they often do that on a much narrower scientific basis than Rhinehart uses. Lots of people follow thoroughly unhealthy diets hoping to lose weight for a few months become they gain it again.
Soylent, in contrast, is pretty easy to tune to your needs, once you're aware of them. You're not stuck with whatever the nutritional value in your favourite food is, you can actually tweak it (or let a qualified nutritionist do it for you). In the future, I can imagine Soylent dispensers that dispense your perfect mix when you insert your chipcard with your nutritional needs.
So despite the author's dislike for amateurs, his only argument sounds to me like it's in favour of the direction Soylent is taking.
The fact that nobody likes to admit is that nutrition is still a large 'black box' in the human system, and we only know a handful of basic correlations that involve it. Macro nutrients aren't nearly as important as 'low carb' dieters like to think they are; glycemic index and blood sugar levels aren't nearly as important as some others like to think they are; similar story for acidity and all kinds of other theories. Then for caloric intake, most arguments stand on top of the high-horse of having the most scientific backup and leave it at that, without ever giving much practical information. No, exercise is not an efficient way to burn calories; and No, just because a diet is backed by some misguided theory does not mean it's not a significantly more practical approach to take. However, because there is such polarization, nobody ever reaches a consensus for what's a good practical (!) approach to eating healthy that's actually backed up by significant data. Personally, I don't see this happening anytime soon either, at least not until we discover everything there is to know about human digestion (and that includes developing the understanding of the relatively 'new' microbiome as well).
1. Nutrition is an ongoing research project.
2. Therefore wilful ignorance is better than being versed in what is currently understood.
Trying to paint my nuanced argument in such a bleak light is exactly the type of needless polarization I'm frustrated with.
That's interesting. What were they saying? Any sources?
Personally, I don't care about soylent, because like I said, it feels a bit premature to try and make heads/tails out of any meal-replacement plans anyway. But yeah, given that they were marketing themselves as 'consulting with nutritionists' (I believe, could be wrong though), that's interesting.
Either way, it's important to note that Nutritionist != Dietician != Scientist/Researcher.
As for a source of one such account:
http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1jvsie/the_man_w...
I have a vested interest in this whole debate, being that I went ahead and bought a month's supply. After reading Rob's blog throughout the development of the product, I'm not as much worried about the "almost dying" and rampant self testing, as it seemed an honest and open process. He was solving a personal problem in a complex area and tested his solution on himself constantly. From an amateur science standpoint, a well documented approach such as this is better than most. I also am not as concerned by the full diet replacement route, as I only ever planned to replace breakfast and/or lunch most days.
The critiques that concern me from this dietician are those about the source of weight-loss coming from too little protein (the daily recommended amounts are clearly under anything I've ever heard from modern nutritionists; including a NASA nutritionist), the medical meal replacement this is based off of being woefully incomplete, and the possibility that the founder actively shuns criticism from dieticians/nutritionists.
The first concern can be supplemented with another protein source, but the other two definitely mean I have more research ahead of me. I'm glad the author in those comments included a different meal replacement formula to compare against. At the very least, the commentary provided has many small things that could be incorporated into my own Soylent to improve it (carnitine, spirulina, etc.)
"Poorly" is relative. Most Westerners suffer no deficiencies, and are unhealthy more from a lack of activity and excess intake. This turns people mystical about their food, as if finding the magic elixir will cure lifestyle issues (such as the current hysterics about carbs: The Japanese get 70%+ of their calories from very simple carbs -- white rice, which is of a nutrition profile closely related to table sugar -- and they have marginal obesity and excellent health profiles. They just eat less of it and maintain active lives).
There is the paradox that the US is one of the least healthy people's, yet one of the most absolutely obsessed about their food.
A Big Mac has an enormously complex nutritional profile, as hard as that may be to imagine. An egg and a slice of bread is a superfood. Both have been maligned because of excess or sedentary lifestyles, but either in moderation can be an ideal part of your diet.
Nonetheless, I dislike the linked article: It attacks Soylent mostly from a defensive, elitist attitude that tries to hold information freedom as some sort of anti-intellectualism. While there are legitimate complaints about Soylent (and I don't think "everyone is different!" is a good approach), it seems like the creator(s) are trying to find the relevant information, and trying to use the accumulated knowledge of nutritionist. Just because they didn't classically train as a nutritionist does not invalidate their work.
White rice is 90%+ very simple carbohydrates. It has a glycemic impact on your body extremely similar to straight sugar, from a gram to gram (of carbs) perspective. Now as the other poster mentioned there's the matter of fructose, though that is an area that has a little too much pseudo-science right now (it has become the new boogyman).
1. "Rhinehart does not know much about nutrition and he cannot learn everything he needs to know from Wikipedia and textbooks."
True, but irrelevant. Soylent's basic proposition is that you can make a food substitute like this one work and they are iterating on a promising candidate. Who is to say they cannot or will not partner with various nutritional specialist in the future to improve the recipe and mitigate risks? You get the best of both worlds: Enthusiastic creativity powered by some necessary naivety combined with extensive domain knowledge. This formula can work amazingly well. Case in point: Elon Musk/SpaceX.
2. Nutritional needs are specific to each person and change over time.
Again, true - but if anything, this is an argument in favour of Soylent. In the future, it could easily and automatically be tweaked to everyone's individual habits, biomedical indicators or even genetic tests. As others have pointed out, most people currently eat extremely sub-optimal and are typically not keeping track of their nutritional intake. Soylent in its current form will give a well-rounded base level that is surely more healthy than the average food intake in developed countries. With an individualised formula it has the potential to among others thing be a convenient to consume a more healthy and balanced diet.
Like you said, when he mentioned that everyone's nutritional needs were unique, my mind also went immediately to bio-feedback devices that would not only indicate what you needed but also create a meal plan and order the food for you. There's no reason this also couldn't be done with Soylent. But because these things don't exist today people assume that they'll never exist.
Our metabolisms are way more adaptable than that. Generally if you're even in the right ballpark you are fine. There's clearly no exact optimal diet (even at an individualized level). If it were this way people would be keeling over left and right.
So in my family, everyone from the 4-year-old girl to the 33-year-old man (me) eats the same food 90+% of the time, just in different amounts... and we all seem to be doing fine. Should we be dropping dead at any moment now?
Also, how do I know I'm getting the correct mix of everything? If I go by cravings, then the stuff I'm missing is usually ice cream or cake or candy...
You simply can't rely on a one-size-fits-all diet without some risks. One person might be lactose intolerant, another might have nutritional deficiency, and a third might be at risk of overdose due to genetic or medical factors preventing them from offloading excess amounts of Sodium, Potassium, etc.
But for everybody else, Soylent sounds a lot easier to customize to personal needs. You can avoid allergens without losing the required nutrients, you can tune the amount of sodium and potassium to whatever you can deal with, etc. With normal food, you don't get that kind of fine-grained control.
Whatever, it doesn't matter. Soylent will probably still succeed. It's the power-bar of a modern era. You won't eat it all the time, but it will be nice to have around as an alternative when you don't want to cook a meal. I'm actually quite looking forward to having this around to take with me each day as lunch. Probably better for me than the crap they sell in some of my local cafeterias.
Let's not go overboard. Soylent is non-dairy Slim Fast that some guy mixes the chemicals for in his basement which at the moment offers no cost savings to the customer.
For only using it as a replacement from one meal a day you might as well buy a blender, mix (frozen) fruit, oatmeal, wheat germ, honey, yogurt, milk and drink it.
If they had of come out and said, its a meal replacement then I think more people would be open to trying it.
However they came out and stated that you will never need to eat again and this can replace all your meals.
If you believe that you can survive consuming nothing but Soylent then that should give you all the confidence you need to use it as a simple quick meal when you're feeling too lazy to cook. The way I think of it is the marketing works in the same way as it does for the advanced technical gore-tex jackets people walk around in when it rains or the 4x4s mums drive their kids to school in. Sure I don't need to take my use of these products to the extreme but it's good to know that I can if I need to.
Of course the article still makes a good point - how can you possibly design a complete meal replacement formula for everyone?
It would be as if someone came up with a new, super-high end car and called it a Yugo. No matter what you do, you could never completely erase the pre-existing market perception even though the new product might be totally different.
In a general sense, meal replacements are great - they let you simplify eating and save money by buying in bulk, and the regulated intake can help if you're trying to lose weight, too. But you better believe the friends of mine who try to lose weight using a completely replacement-based diet are being supervised by a doctor!
Is it ironic that his position of expertise here is as a amateur diet and workout enthusiast as he berates amateur enthusiasm everywhere? This article is definitely part of the cult of amateur enthusiast...
> Rhinehart might not realise it, but he is a classic symptom of a generation and, even, a cultural movement within the United States that appears to believe you don’t actually need to know facts: all you need to do is be creative and enthusiastic.
which particularly made me think of that tech journalist Virginia Heffernan, a creationist, who refuted the big bang in place of her own story because essentially she preferred it and found it more appealing.
The writer seems to be making two assumptions:
(1) if everyone eats the same food, it will cause health problem, including death, for many
(2) if people individually choose what to eat, they'll mostly eat healthier than if they all have the same diet chosen for them.
Are these assumptions true? To find out, we'd need to do an experiment. However, the experiment has already been done: during WW2 in Britain food was rationed and everyone ate what bureaucrats in Whitehall decided they should, not what they wanted to. The result? The nation's health improved.
So Stevens appears to be wrong.
"Greg Stevens, a lifelong diet and work-out enthusiast, is unimpressed..."
"...It’s all part of the cult of the amateur enthusiast."
"Greg Stevens is an ex-academic and corporate mathematician who writes about science, philosophy, history, fitness, politics and the intersections between them."
So he's every bit as unqualified as Rhinehart.
> When I was in college, I had a room-mate who lived on nothing but pizza, mac and cheese and marijuana for a year. Aside from being thin, pale, and subject to periodic, inexplicable bouts of coughing, he “felt fine”, too.
There are people in the third world who would kill for a daily diet of pizza and macaroni-n-cheese. The author fails to address that his roommate ("stupid pothead! lolz") was eating food and that Soylent is not food, rather being synthesized raw nutrients. That is the key issue at hand, not the question of variety in a diet.
The frightening thing about Soylent (to me) is that I am not sure if it constitutes a "diet" any more than the mud patties and other non-food yet objectively nutritional foodstuffs consumed amongst the poorest of the poor in Africa.
> Changes in metabolism, bigger life changes like puberty and menopause, obviously pregnancy
I do not think these things happen on a regular basis.
If you're going to argue that all the nutritional changes can be accounted for, I won't disagree with you. But to argue that people's dietary needs don't change is just uninformed.
It probably doesn't. Some people can't metabolise certain forms of B-group vitamins. Unless Soylent includes all the different forms, those people are going to develop a serious deficiency.
That's just one micronutrient, out hundreds that are currently known about.
More worrying is the consistent pattern of being dismissive of feedback from the people who study this subject as their primary concern.
I think most people would prefer food if they're starving. And for genuine medical emergencies there are already genuine medical food substitutes intended to be used on a temporary basis.
> It could be a good alternative to take when camping and hiking for days.
Google "trail mix".
Also, trail mix doesn't negate Soylent being a good alternative.
Logistics are not the cause of starvation. Local poverty is. Selling a bloody expensive powder doesn't seem to be the magic ticket here.
Could I be wrong?
I'm not going to knock Soylent as being dangerous or stupid. Quite frankly, I don't know enough about nutrition to make such a judgement, but I don't think it's design is anything revolutionary, either.
Soylent's angle on this isn't really positioning itself as a "meal replacement", but rather a full "diet replacement". When I eat a protein bar in the morning instead of eggs and veggies, I have no expectation or desire to live the rest of my life eating nothing but those protein bars. Soylent is specifically saying "you can live your life eating nothing but this". That's a ridiculous, if not dangerous, claim to make without having substantial data to back that claim up.
People enjoy eating food that tastes good. Fast junk food tastes good to a lot of people (including me, even knowing the health risks).
The only thing that has a chance of replacing this is food that still tastes good, or that you can convince them is good for them (Subway has been pretty successful with this tact).
I'm definitely skeptical that something mildly sweet tasting (like watery cake batter) is going to get the masses on board with it.
Maybe I didn't understand their mission.
What is this guy's argument? That doctors and nutritionists had to study hard, and if none of them decided to do it then it must be a bad idea? Rhinehart's idea isn't even new, he just managed to get it in front of the right audience.
>Unfortunately, such idealism doesn’t survive contact with reality.
Maybe Rhinehart will fail. So what? It is a pretty low-risk project. I don't think anybody is going to drop dead, and if anyone does manage to hurt themselves, they will probably only do so after ignoring some warning signs. OTOH, if he is in some way successful, he will have advanced nutritional science where domain experts failed to do so.
Why should one start to "eat" in a way that our body was never made for?
For how long has humanity been eating natural and solid things again?
I don't particularly like the idea of soylent, but coming at it from a "but it's not natural" is just ridiculous. You know what's natural? Dying in horrifying ways, with no hope or understanding of what's happening. Fuck natural.
Remember natural smallpox? Not a single person in the world has it. How many people die during childbirth now compared to 150 years ago?
> a way that our body was never made for?
We weren't made for anything. We're a loosely connected series of insane reactions that just about doesn't die. We put load on non-load bearing structures (hi, spine), we have our optic nerve running through the centre of our retina giving us a blind spot, our body can decide that peanuts = a threat so bad we should stop breathing and occasionally some of our cells will rebel and try and kill us. We don't even produce vitamin C thanks to a single error, something we need to live and could easily produce.
We weren't made for anything, we just are.
No, but our bodies have been fine-tuned through evolution over the last million years, up until probably the last 20,000 or so. Your digestive tract is different from a cow, snake, or wolf for a reason.
Evolution gets you to functional, it doesn't get you to "good".
To suggest that what we've been doing in the past is optimal seems ridiculous to me. I'm not saying I think this gruel is a good idea, but the argument "it's not natural" holds no weight.
You real question is non-sensical. Pre-humans and humans have eaten in many different ways throughout, and will continue to do so.
If we only get the nutrients without the crap to poop out, much of our digestive tract has little to do. And physiology tends to revolve around "use it or lose it". Astronauts living weightless for a significant time lose muscle and bone mass because they don't need it. If you eat nothing but Soylent for a year, will you still be able to handle normal food?
That's really the only significant problem I can think of with the Soylent approach to eating. And it could be a serious one, though I suspect it's easy to mitigate by mixing the occasional real meal into the mix.
He apparently defecated every 40-50 days.
(Though the stories about this are pretty recent, the event being described happened in 1965.)
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/24/3549931.ht...
Would make an interesting "how far a person can get trying to bite a wild cow in the neck before being trampled to death" case study.
Actually, the writer is the one that's ill-informed. The Earth is constantly falling into the sun. We call that an orbit. Doesn't lead to the truck driver's conclusions, but the author of this should be ashamed.
And still I buy pants at the Gap.
most people currently eat extremely sub-optimal
Are we really sure about the EXTREMELY suboptimal for people in the developed world who are not morbidly obese or dangerously underweight? I have much doubt about this assertion, because for sure my diet, as a middle-class North American, is much more varied as to number of different foodstuffs eaten per week or number of foodstuffs available per season than the diet of, say, my grandparents, who lived to the ages of 48 (death in car crash), 82 (death in car crash), 87, and 99. General rates of morbidity (illness) and mortality (death) are decreasing at ALL ages throughout the world known to most Hacker News readers. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,
http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...
originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high-income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."
http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....
A comparison of period life expectancy tables and cohort life expectancy tables for men and women in Britain
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lifetables/period-and-cohort-l...
helps make the picture more clear. ("Period life expectancy" is what is usually reported for a whole country. But cohort life expectancy provides a better estimate of future lifespans of young people today,
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1...
and is still steadily on the rise around the world.) So if many people today are eating "suboptimal" diets, as claimed without particular evidence by some of the supporters of the Soylent startup, it would appear that the health effects of that suboptimality are, at least, swamped by more favorable trends.