The real question seems easy:
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?
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.