[oblique63]

> Most meal replacement shakes I've seen (not including those used in the medical industry) aren't suitable to replace your entire diet with

We literally do not know that. Similarly, we cannot know that about soylent either. Because we simply do not know enough about human nutrition to be making these kinds of statements yet. The government's "Recommended Daily Intake" system is just a veneer over our relatively primitive understanding of nutrition to help give us some very basic possible guidelines (which are still quite susceptible to being wrong). The unfortunate part is that people take these 'recommendations' to mean that we virtually know all there is to know about nutrition when that is truly far from reality...

I'm confident that we'll get there eventually, but first the quality of nutritional research will have to improve significantly, and it'll be far more work than any one meal-replacement company can hope to realistically invest in. So as much as I am for soylent 'pushing the boundaries' in that area, it's gonna take a lot more than that to get us a full-diet-replacement figured out for sure.

[Turing_Machine]

Maybe when it comes to adults, but we do have a good idea for babies. Lots of them eat nothing but formula and do okay (though not as well as on as human milk, let me hasten to add).

There was a case a number of years ago where one of the formula makers didn't add enough chlorides, resulting in cases of chloride deficiency (previously unknown -- salt is everywhere in a normal diet, and is present in human milk).

So... while maybe we can't say that we have a maximally healthy artificial diet, we do have multiple instances of artificial diets that are good enough to survive on.