[drivativ]

Better arguments against Soylent can certainly be made, though by smarter people than myself. I do have three main issues with it:

1. The idea that we can take something as fantastically complex and as poorly understood as nutrition and successfully boil it down to a formula is really, really unlikely at this point.

2. As incredibly unlikely as it is that someone could create such a formula, even if they had access to and total understanding of all the research that currently exists in the world, it is even more far-fetched that it would be some random software developers who would create it.

3. Even if, despite all that, Soylent is the perfect formula, it still isn't. As is becoming more evident, diet is so individualized that the idea that one formula would be ideal for any significant percentage of the population is very unlikely.

Given all that, it seems really unlikely that Soylent should be the cornerstone of your diet.

So, having spent way too much time studying and experimenting with diet (including SAD,vegetarian, vegan, paleo-variations, etc), the only nutrition advice I feel comfortable with (assuming you are so lucky as to have the choices I do in middle-class America, with practically every food available) is just to start with a variety of whole, unprocessed foods (probably mostly plants) and do your best to identify the ones that you have obvious issues with and avoid those. As there is seemingly no known individual health benefit to gain from processed foods, the safe bet seems to be to avoid them in favor of unprocessed foods when possible. At least until the next over-hyped study comes out showing that vegetables kill!

[Houshalter]

Soylent probably isn't absolutely perfect. But it could still be better than normal food. It's not like normal food is optimized for nutrition, and we eat a ton of things that weren't around when humans evolved. Or wildly different portions and amounts. Soylent at least tries to optimize. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better.

The only risk that keeps being brought up is that there is some obscure chemical that our bodies needs that soylent excludes. As long as you don't go on a 100% Soylent diet, that risk can be avoided.

And this isn't a new idea at all. There have been liquid foods before soylent, people in comas have been fed by IV even. We mass produce meals for animals like the article mentions. And people eating soylent don't seem to be dying left and right. Young humans naturally live on an entirely liquid diet like to soylent, so it's clearly possible.