Why would anyone want to live on Soylent?

From the people I know who like the product, it seems to me that Soylent caters to people whose eating patters are already strange. I find it appealing because I tend to obsess over making sure I'm getting all the right nutrients and food groups (I never am). I like the idea of drinking Soylent every morning as an insurance policy, I know I'm at least getting all the nutrients I need once a day.

Generally, I'm pretty confident that my diet is "healthy."

But, when thinking about Soylent, people seem to be comparing it to perfection.

Why not compare it to some other things.

For example, would it be healthier to have a burger, fries, and a milkshake from McDonalds, or to drink Soylent?

Isn't the answer obvious?

Even as someone that regularly eats healthy meals, I still occasionally find it hard to have a healthy meal.

Whether or not Soylent should be a complete replacement for food, it's probably a great replacement for so much of the garbage junk food that many people eat very, very, regularly.

Maybe someday Soylent will put fast food out of business. The benefits would be obvious.

    Rhinehart is well aware of the fact that Soylent
    isn’t the first beverage designed to replace meals.
    He considered using Ensure for his initial no-eating
    experiment, but found it much too expensive, too sugary,
    too unpalatable, and sub-optimal in its ingredient
    make-up.

    The differentiating factor seems to be in the intended
    purpose. Meal-replacement shakes have never been
    presented as a food — something that you could (or
    might want to) live on for an extended period.

Personally, I would rather drink from a bag all day and then throw a fiesta for dinner to make up for bag time.

The primary reason is that there are almost zero proper clinical trials and interventional studies. We have thousands of cohort studies which prove almost nothing.

For example, for 60 years saturated fat has been considered the enemy of cardiovascular health (because of some poorly conducted cohort studies in the 60's and 70's). Just this March, BMJ published a major meta study that showing that there are no proven causal links between saturated fat and heart disease. In fact it is now being suggested that avoiding saturated fat has been detrimental because Americans have replaced fat intake with high glycemic index foods causing obesity and T2D.

Personally I have no doubt that Soylent will fail to provide some required nutrient or fail to induce a certain hormonal or chemical response which is obtained via natural food intake. We simply don't understand nutrition well enough to check all the boxes. That said, if Soylent wanted to follow the scientific method and conduct a proper interventional clinical trial with a control group, adequate study population and duration I would be happy to consider the results.

It's almost like drinking melted ice cream, to be honest.

I don't live on exclusively on anything else. It's a cool idea and I hope it replaces "some" meals because occasionally I just don't have the time and it has to be better (and more convenient) than fast food. Why do we have to take good things to extremes and set up unnecessary "all or nothings"?

Ensure powder from Amazon[0] gets you to about 205 calories per dollar, which comes to $305/month for the same adult male. I don't buy the 'it's a lot cheaper than Ensure' line.

Another competitor, "Optimum Nutrition Serious Mass" is on Amazon in 12 pound bags for $49. It works out to 408 calories per dollar. Only $154/month for the same example male.

Admittedly Ensure and Serious Mass have different marketing than Soylent (Ensure for old people and Serious Mass for bodybuilders), but if you compare their ingredients you'll find they aren't very different.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Ensure-Nutrition-Powder-Vanilla-Flavor... [1] http://www.amazon.com/Optimum-Nutrition-Serious-Chocolate-Po...

I'm working on the website Eat This Much (http://www.eatthismuch.com) and a huge portion of our audience are people that want to eat EXACTLY 40% of their calories from carbs, 30% from fat, and 30% from protein (that's part of the zone diet, as an example). Our meal plan generator allows you to request those proportions, but sometimes it can't meet the exact targets due to any number of other constraints, and it's a huge source of complaints from our users. It's a pretty complicated problem to solve while trying to give people a varied and interesting diet with real food, but Soylent makes it very simple. I use my own site as much as possible, and I'm excited to have it give me half of my calories from Soylent (probably my breakfast and lunch).

Not that I mind. I'm a backer of Soylent. When my month's supply arrives, I'm looking forward to living on it 100% for 30 days for a few reasons:

1) I need to lose a bit of weight. I know that for me, the best way to do that is to significantly change my "generally good but occasionally indulgent" diet. I know from experience that I can't willpower that into happening. But, I think that if I commit to a defined, strict diet, I stand a chance. Soylent should be particularly good for that because supposedly it won't leave me with carb/protein/fat cravings like every other diet I've tried.

2) I like the idea of going on a cleanse. What better cleanse than supposedly exactly what your body needs and nothing else?

3) I'm interested in the chemical science vs. mystical vitalism theory of nutrition debate. I.e. do we need certain chemicals or do we need "something to do with Real Food" to thrive? Supposedly, people feel really fine living on Soylent. I want to see for myself first-hand. I plan to get my "blood work" numbers measured before and after.

Well, this is the part that excites me a lot. Industrial scale production and distribution of a nutritionally sufficient meal could do wonders in the developing world. As of now, even though there are food subsidies for the poor, there are additional expenses (gas, stoves) and wastage involved. And the saved time could be put to work.

A different incarnation of solyent could change the world.

Last time I said this [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765697], I was surprised I got downvoted into oblivion. I was genuinely curious why this isn't a good idea to take up at the governmental level.

I think having a "standard diet" which takes food out of the picture would make it much easier to figure out how all the other pieces fit together.

For example, if you ate soylent for a full year, and then went straight back to regular food, would your body have trouble digesting solid food now that it hasn't had to do so for a long period of time? What if we extend this time period to 5 years, or 10? I think we can maybe pull some insight from astronauts in this regard, as we should have some information about the change from tube-food to solid food from extended space missions.

I can see soylent being a fantastic replacement in some respects, particularly with regards to coeliac's disease or with dairy allergies, but I'm still partially skeptical about the kinds of change that soylent will introduce in the future. One of the great parts about food nowadays is that you can basically grow and manufacture it anywhere, with the obvious caveat that not all food is available everywhere at once. On the other hand, with soylent, our food is almost "centralized" in a sense, since it is likely more difficult to create soylent than it is to throw seeds in the ground, or hunt and scavenge. This is sort of the reason why I'm curious to how the human body will react to such an abrupt change in diet. If humans just eat liquid food for an extended period of time, or their whole life, will they eventually lose / have difficulties with eating solid, more traditional food? Should a crisis arise (something akin to great floods or an earthquake), will it be possible to produce / ship enough soylent fast enough to fulfill the dietary needs of the population in need of aid?

Of course, these sorts of questions assume that soylent will become a dietary replacement, rather than an occasional meal replacement, but I get the feeling, at least from this article, that replacing the diet is the plan of Rhinehart et al. I won't personally test soylent out, I love fancy food and flavours too much to bother, but in some sense I will follow the product and see what happens with it. I don't think something on this scale has ever been attempted before with regards to dietary / meal replacements, so it should be interesting (not necessarily good or bad, just interesting) to see what kinds of disasters / utopias unfold thanks to a full dietary replacement.

Anyone know if that's true?

Pure gain.

Other people eat because they are hungry. I eat because I know I have to sustain my body. It is often hard for me or even annoying to eat food and I have difficulties getting my calories every day. Yes, I would buy this drink.

There's a certain kind of people who like to buy into simple formulas for health, success and so on. There are more of them than it's comfortable to admit.

The ad is worded to appeal to them, because after all Soylent is a business, and which business would ignore the large segment of the market that'll be buying your product regularly, every single day?

For those who are more balanced thinkers, Soylent remains an interesting option when you need to have a meal on the go. Better than fast food.

A side reminded, just like with vitamin pills, you should be skeptical of some of the claims made about Soylent's ingredients. Say, just because a product has calcium in some form doesn't mean your body can assimilate it in that form.

2. Our idea of "everything the body needs" can change.

3. We don't know the long term effects of relying solely on it.

The author spends a lot of time on stupid counterarguments. Seriously, do your homework.