The founder of Soylent has repeatedly pushed his product as a solution for world hunger, unhealthy diets in the first world, and poor time management. I think critiquing the product on those terms is fair.
Agreed, while the intentions of Soylent are probably sincere, when I first heard about it my response was "nope nope nope".
My parents were hippies and we grew/raised most of our food when I was a kid. But my grandparents had embraced the new space-age diet: margarine in place of butter, tang instead of orange juice, kraft instead of cheese, etc. I thought it tasted awful compared to real food.
As we have found out, some food choices like trans fats have an impact on health. There's really too much noise in the nutrition related data to draw wide ranging conclusions. But buyer beware.
For me I think the safest option is the "whole foods" (Polan) route. For me it would be "eat what your grand-grand parents ate". I was even a vegetarian and eating fake-meats and then realized I was just eating chemicals. So I started eating meat again.
> Only one of these is a "chemical" is the vernacular.
The vernacular is wrong in this case and encourages ignorance. "Preservatives", "dyes", "perfumes", "thickeners", and "artificial sweeteners" are all words that everyone understands. We can say "artificial ingredients" instead if we want a catch all. The English language is really expressive.
"Chemicals" is a buzzword used a lot by hucksters to push sales through pseudoscience. We must demand better and more specific reasoning than "chemicals" if we want the words "shown by science" to be meaningful as well.
To add to your point, many of these "chemicals" aren't even all that artificial. Some thickeners for example come from algae and gave been in use since centuries just in different countries. Looking at some traditional food like ham they are incredibly processed we just are used to it.
How do you feel about orange juice manufacturing? They take "something grown", fractionally distil it apart into tanks of purified constituent molecules, and then create a drink by mixing stuff from those tanks together.
Is the result of this process "grown"? "Made"? "Engineered"? All of the above?
> ...that engineered is the same as non-engineered
I was just saying the vague and abused "chemicals" is a bad descriptor. It's fair to rail against "manufactured", "under-researched", or "engineered" ingredients.
Yes, I get that using the word "chemicals" is problematic. I understand that food is made up of the same proteins, fats, etc.
When I hear hucksters marketing organic, GMO, or Soylent. I'm always cautious. Caveat emptor.
Edit: I'm not anti-GMO. Nor the concept of Soylent. But I use a headset rather than hold my phone up to my head. Even though there's no definitive proof we can get cancer from smart phones. I just think there is additional risk here.
Edit: Also, your "chemicals" point is like arguing that Global Warming doesn't exist because it's snowing today. It's true, but not relevant to the discussion.
Plenty of naturally-occurring compounds found in various plants and animals are toxic for humans to consume. To say that naturally-occurring foods are inherently better for us to eat requires an awful lot of cherry-picking (no pun intended).
We do. The most obvious example is read meat (which is now officially designated cancerogene), a bit less obvious is various "natural" herbal medications that induce renal failure [1] and cancer [2]. People consumed those substances for centuries, only to find out recently that they are harmful.
Polio is not a disease caused by malnutrition. Also, your ancestors probably did not die of it -- it mostly affected young people, so people who died from it usually didn't have descendants.
Quibbling aside, health in general was certainly much worse in our great-grandparents' days, but for those who weren't straight up underfed, nutrition was probably not worse. I'm not sure it was as magically better as some would have you believe, but there is decent evidence that traditional diets were more-or-less fine, and that the modern diet has something wrong with it.
Not possible, unfortunately. Meat and vegetables are so totally different now. For example meats are raised on GM corn and antibiotics, altering their balance of omega 3's, impact on gut health, and other things. While today's vegetables are massively decremented in micronutrients- and may have less arsenic-based pesticide residue than your greatgrandparents', but more of other pesticides.
Or you could take an omega-3 supplement and eat normal beef. There isn't much evidence to show that grass-fed beef has any measurable effect on health.
Any peer reviewed, legitimate studies that suggest GM corn causes problems with beef? It's popular to critique GM, but it often seems like a knee-jerk reaction rather than based on actual scientific studies. And by studies, I don't mean an article in Mother Jones, but actual science.
I mean it tastes better but that's not peer reviewable, the major issue currently is that the microbiom of a cow's digestive track really can't handle corn that well and as a result methane output of the live stock skyrockets contributing more drastically to anthropomorphic climate change.
My wife raises our livestock and garden while I work. Yesterday I had a sandwich and I know where every ingredient came from(our yard). Look, it's not impossible. It just requires you to look outside of your modern context.
Glycemic index means nothing. Cake has a low glycemic index (someting like 30, depending on fat content). Oatmeal has a higher glycemic index (55). Does that mean we should stop eating oatmeal and substitute it with cake?
For everyone else, I just want to add that there is a place for things like Soylent, beyond the marketing. We're most likely not going to be able to continue our current method producing food cheaply. I could be wrong but things like Soylent will probably be the future that mitigates this issue for a lot of people.
Yeah, meat/food substitutes are likely central to our population growth rate, but let's be intellectually honest. I'm not sure it'll work. I'm really hopeful the meat substitutes will pan out. We haven't figured out cancer yet. You're betting on us figuring out food?
Edit: because cancer is complex, the same a food and nutrition
Things like Soylent are already here. It's not vaporware. Yes it's not perfect or ideal but it's an answer to really inefficient food production whose water and nutrient needs aren't sustainable for a growing population.
>it's an answer to really inefficient food production whose water and nutrient needs aren't sustainable...
But, is it? The ingredients include oats, grapeseed oil, soy derivates, and whey. I'm sincerely having trouble seeing how this represents more efficient food production.
In fact, it would seem to be less efficient from that perspective: it still requires the resources for crops/farming, derives isolates from foods that are otherwise more whole (what happens to the rest?), then adds a degree of processing that requires still more resources.
Isn't it more efficient to just eat whole foods rather than extracts from various foods that, by definition, require energy/processing to obtain and must leave some waste in the process?
Maybe it's more convenient from the consumer's perspective, but I don't see how it solves the production problems you suggest.
Well, for example, you shouldn't eat soy derivatives that haven't been processed. This is why fermented soy products have been popular - they are more easily digested by humans. Raw soybeans are actually toxic.
I'm not calling it vaporware. We don't understand clearly about our gut bio/digestion/food absorption. It'd be great to hear an expert on this chime in, but my guess they would say "we don't know yet".
I'm not telling you to not eat Soylent or that it won't potentially be great for the human race. But again, we don't know.
Edit: fixed wording
Edit: What if they get something wrong like including trans fats? I know this a "playing to fear" argument, but there is a long history of industrial foods being not healthy. It just takes a new generation of suckers to come of age.
People have been eating imperfectly for millenia and keeping on nevertheless. How many billion (trillion?) Chinese peasants, across history, do you think ate only rice their entire lives?
Sure, said peasants probably had vitamin A deficiency—but they managed to live long, mostly-healthy lives despite that. Which is my point: we don't need to get "food" perfect in order to ensure that 10x as many people as today can live "long, mostly-healthy lives." It's not unethical to feed starving people food that's missing some micronutrient we aren't yet aware of, because they'll still be better off than if they were starving. The human body is hardy.
The Soylent of today doesn't claim that though. It says right on bottle that it can replace a meal but it should not replace every meal. In that respect it's not much different than Ensure or other meal supplements.
Where do you see that? It only claims it's a meal substitute, which it is. The only other recommendation I could find was this:
> As a nutritionally complete food source, Soylent should be considered a food product just like any other. You can include Soylent in your diet for as long as you’d like, in any amount that suits your needs. There is no right or wrong amount of Soylent to eat - the whole idea is to find a balance that works for you.
And Soylent can be fine for those things. It's simple to see that it's faster than cooking a meal. Does that mean you'll spend that time better? No. It's simple to see that your calories are measured out for you - does that mean you won't eat more than you should? No.
Both examples had underlying issues that Soylent did not solve, because it never could. Doesn't mean it can't solve those same problems for others.
My parents were hippies and we grew/raised most of our food when I was a kid. But my grandparents had embraced the new space-age diet: margarine in place of butter, tang instead of orange juice, kraft instead of cheese, etc. I thought it tasted awful compared to real food.
As we have found out, some food choices like trans fats have an impact on health. There's really too much noise in the nutrition related data to draw wide ranging conclusions. But buyer beware.
For me I think the safest option is the "whole foods" (Polan) route. For me it would be "eat what your grand-grand parents ate". I was even a vegetarian and eating fake-meats and then realized I was just eating chemicals. So I started eating meat again.
Edit: Changed wording on first sentence