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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Soylent is a different product from MealSquares. MealSquares likes to talk about "whole-food ingredients" but the whole point of Soylent is to get away from that and base the formula on what the body specifically needs... as opposed to what whole food ingredients happen to come close and taste decent together.

Soylent is simple to make, simple to drink, and has a pretty neutral flavor. They tweak it at each new version so the issues with the early versions have been eliminated. Some people won't like that approach and will prefer a "whole food" thing instead, which is just fine.

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Their launch comments on hn explained why they believe that using whole foods is a lower risk way to get 'everything the body needs' to actually end up in the body - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7314183

"And that's the problem I see artificially constructed meal replacements running in to--if you do the best you can based on the science available, that still may not be enough."

This is an excellent summary. It's not about a "fad" or being "organic" or something like it.

Nutrition is a very complicated subject and while science has shone a lot of light on the subject we still don't know a lot. So sticking to the "tried and true", that is, what people have actually been eating is safer.

When you don't actually know enough to make an honest assessment, then you can't come to an honest conclusion. Calling "whole food" safer is an emotional response not unlike that which make "non-GMO Himalayan sea salt" a thing people buy.

No, we know people do fine on traditionally healthy food. We do not know whether they do fine on Soylent. My guess is that anyone 100% on Soylent will become malnutritioned either very subtly or over a long time frame. Personally, I think that's fine as the body can handle pretty fucked up diets and no one is really going to go 100% Soylent anyway. Like, I'd replace 80% of my diet with Soylent if they shipped to me and I liked the taste, but I understand why someone would be a little skeptical.

> we know people do fine on traditionally healthy food

This is a valid point to an extent, but we don't know that people do fine on a particular subset of traditionally healthy ingredients. We may discover that Soylent lacks some subtle nutrient, but we could discover the same thing with MealSquares.

The body reflexes to things like mastication, salivation, etc triggered by texture and the presence of actual things in your mouth, so I think the (bias of) argument is more along the lines of reducing the variables away from normal eating. If you look at the military and other people who "starve for a living" (hikers, climbers, explorers etc), these considerations are very self-evident and at the forefront of mind. Its not clear that "wishing them away" (considerations of texture/pallatability) is backed up by any hard science. But I'd be curious to see if there are any leads in that direction.

> No, we know people do fine on traditionally healthy food. We do not know whether they do fine on Soylent.

But we don't really know how far along the scale between dead and in maximum possible health traditionally healthy food gets us. Short of some genuine scientific results, I see no reason to suspect that Soylent is less healthy than traditionally healthy food. It could just as easily be more healthy.

Tens of thousands of years of human history disagree with your assessment.

I don't buy it. Using "natural" ingredients is no less scientifically risky than using "artificially constructed" ingredients, unless of course you have scientific results showing precisely that.

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