The Soylents of the Lambs

As someone that recently started using Queal - a Soylent alternative available in Europe, there are some things many people seem to be missing:

- Unless you really pay attention to what you eat, you have absolutely NO guarantee you are actually eating what your body needs by stuffing random food in your mouth.

- Soylent etc does not have to be the only food-source.

- These shake meals do provide at least a lot of stuff your body needs we already know about.

And the first point is important, I am pretty sure my diet before Queal - which was not that long ago - was a LOT unhealthier, skipping breakfast, eating sandwiches at work overflowing with random sauses, eating fastfood just to get something nutricious in my body. You think mc donalds analyses every single nutricious ingredient in their burgers to see if it might be sufficient to what your body needs? Or Subway? Or <insert any food-chain here>? The ones mostly paying attention to this are probably vegetarian companies, because there it's clear they need to be careful, but that's about it. When people claim they don't really know what your body needs, what are they complaining about? This at least actively tries to do this, no other food does this.

And regarding what the body needs, don't underestimate your body. There are testimonies from people that had to survive for a lont time at sea, living mostly on raw fish suddenly craving the eyes of the fish because it contains nutricious things your body needs too. Rob Rhinehart himself said it too in his "How I stopped eating food" blog entry that started the Soylent adventure:

> When I was deficient of iron I felt a strong craving for red meat.

That said, I wouldn't have gone through the personal experimentation that Rob Rhinehart went through to find out what was missing, where he missed some basic stuff like iron, but I'm glad someone at least looked into this concept. How it has been done, that's another matter, but right now they seem to be as close as you can get right now.

So is it perfect? Maybe, maybe not, but for me at least, it's a huge improvement. For me it comes down to something someone somewhere said about soylent-like meals:

> The best meals to replace with Soylent are the meals you aren’t excited about.

But, since using it, I have more energy, have less trouble getting out of bed in the morning and overall feel a lot better. This could be due to me eating breakfast every morning now, but still it's a remarkable improvement. I still have at least one 'normal' meal every day, which is for me is the sensible thing to do, but I don't plan to stop using Soylent-like food at all unless I really notice health-problems.