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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> You shouldn't consume only Ensure, but you could do it with Soylent.

[citation needed]

Malnutrition can have effects years down the line. A bunch of early-adopters with confirmation bias trying it for a couple months proves little about its long-term safety.

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Sure, but if your regular meals are pizza, hamburguers, instant noodles, junk food and the like then you are on your way to malnutrition already. Soylent could be a very positive change for those people.

It's not like meals are an arcane science working some unknown magic on your body, it's about biological needs and chemistry. And it's not like there are chefs cooking healthy food in every home. I don't claim anything about Soylent, I have never consumed it, but it sounds like a possible solution to a big problem. Time will tell.

If you subsist on fast food, you're obviously on your way to health problems, but those problems might not include malnutrition because even fast food inputs are complex compared to something engineered from the most primitive possible inputs to specific macronutrient ratios.

> Soylent could be a very positive change for those people.

It could also be worse. Without long-term, scientifically valid studies, no one knows for sure.

> It's not like meals are an arcane science working some unknown magic on your body, it's about biological needs and chemistry.

The workings of the body are not fully known, even today. There are many unknowns in nutrition, which is precisely why none of the pharmaceutical companies have a "replace all meals!" product.

Again, I'm not disagreeing (at least completely) with you. Research is necessary.

I would like to try this for those times when I'm short of time to cook and resort to ordering a pizza for example, not as a complete replacement. And I think it would be advisable for the people interested to do that as long as there's not serious research.

However, currently there are serious studies about the bad effects of fast food on your health, it's not an unknown. The way I see it, you are more worried about something that could be bad than about something we know is bad. It doesn't add up to me. Sounds like neophobia. And I'm sorry in advance if I seem rude.

The risks of fast food are a known quantity, and folks eating it as a large component of their diet tend to be folks doing so for financial reasons. Soylent is comparatively expensive.

Believe it or not, if you're eating a variety of junkfood you are probably not on the road to malnutrition. A diverse diet of pretty much any quality of food is likely to get you every nutrient you need, including the ones we don't understand. Most of the cases of people getting malnutrition from junk food seem to be from people who do something like eating nothing but ramen dry packs every day. I think that's usually part of an eating disorder, as people tend to get bored of the same food all the time.

This is why the concept of a general meal replacement (as opposed to an occasional meal replacement) is scary. It has absolutely no diversity. If it's missing something it's missing it for every meal, and it takes a long time to find out that something's missing.

> And it's not like there are chefs cooking healthy food in every home.

You don't need a chef to quickly cook healthy food at home. In fact, most chefs tend to overcomplicate food by aiming for taste instead of healthiness.

Throw some vegetables in the steamer, add some tofu and in five minutes you got yourself a healthy lunch. This is just one example.

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