> Various doctors, dietitians, and food scientists
> have been reviewing our formula and providing
> suggestions as they see fit. We have been listening
> to them and testing these changes in our beta
> program. Each modification requires making a new
> batch of Soylent by hand, shipping them to our
> beta testers, and gathering their feedback, a
> process that takes at least 10 days per revision.
Even if you had a large beta program and ran each revisions for 100 days, the feedback would be garbage unless you had proper controls and measurements in place.
But you are assuming the purpose of the test is to test the merit of the dietary motivator for the change, the testing described here might just be user acceptance tasting. That is, does this this change make it taste bad? Give you gas? etc
If you're eating normal food then some deficiency in one component of one meal may be masked by a surplus in another, and in particular if you eat a varied diet then that deficiency could start and stop within one meal. If instead your sole source of nutrition is suddenly deficient, it's not a stretch to think that you could notice a difference within 10 days.
I'm not trying to defend the product, I just don't think it's inconceivable that 10 days is long enough to notice a big problem with a formulation change.
If you want to know, if you are allergic, a short test should be sufficient. If you wanna know, if allergies might be initiated from the food, 10 days don't do much good. If you want to know, if some known things (nutrition, et al) are missing from the "food" 10 days won't do you much good and might only be detected in really rigorous blood-tests.
If you want to check for problems with unknown unknowns (and there are a lot of things we yet do not know, regarding food and our bodies) 10 days are nothing more then a nice joke. (Sorry, but living with a biologist make me quite cynical, when it comes to things, that might just endanger us.)
A really scientific method is something else. They might stumble upon some things, but I'd like to know, if every beta-tester gets his blood-work done before and after every test. How does the testing process in the first place look like (blood tests as said? just taste? subjective feeling after n-days of new soylent version? and so on).
> so everyone will get their complete amino acid profile
No everyone will get a one size fits all amino acid profile. And then comes the problem, that humans aren't "one size fits all". They will probably get a solution, that fits one, two or probably max. three sigma of the targeted population.
To be fair, I love food, so soylent would not be for me. I really think, that a cheap food-replacement that does give most people mostly everything they need in terms of nutrition, might really do a lot of good, if distributed in times of disaster or in regions with problematic food distribution (third world). But that is not the targeted audience as I see it.
It seems to be people who do not value food, but have enough money on their hand, to replace it with this product.
"The onset of symptoms of scurvy depends on how long it takes for the person to use up their limited stores of vitamin C. For example, if the diet includes no vitamin C at all, the average onset of symptoms is about four weeks"
http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pag...
Really? Their site launched with a FAQ on safety that essentially read "well, we haven't died yet..."