Are you arguing that you haven't seen compelling evidence that /any/ food or diet is healthy, given that there are not even any agreed upon RDA for most nutrients or macronutrients?
I'd suggest comparing the nutrition of Soylent to the nutrition of actual meals we eat when we don't have time for a proper meal. Since that's how many people use it.
For one, there will be a fiber deficiency if you stick with Soylent only. It's like juicing every day - strip fruits of most of the fiber, release immediate sugar into blood and welcome diabetes with open arms!
The whole concept of Soylent feels to me like a typical reductionist approach - let's mix some stuff together and all will be good. It's like trying to control your weight by calories - calories are the roughest, least precise way to decide what you need to eat (are you literally burning your food in fire when you digest it?) and completely ignores your metabolism characteristics and state of your health. It's like measuring programming capabilities by the number of lines written, yet we still somehow stick with it when planning our diets.
Please people, do your research, don't endanger your health by following what look like trendy geeky diets!
>It's like trying to control your weight by calories - calories are the roughest, least precise way to decide what you need to eat
>Please people, do your research
You're being contradictory here. Your body obeys the laws of physics.
Losing weight is LITERALLY calories in < calories out.
Being healthy and losing weight are two different things that often overlap.
>(are you literally burning your food in fire when you digest it?)
What a silly remark ... of course not.
"Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products.[1] Slower oxidative processes like rusting or digestion are not included by this definition." (Wikipedia)
>It's like measuring programming capabilities by the number of lines written, yet we still somehow stick with it when planning our diets.
There's this strange opinion circulating that the calories don't matter. It stems from an observation that some calories 'stick' more readily than others. From that, they leap to the conclusion that calories are meaningless.
I'm with you - physics rules. No matter what calories you consume, fewer is better for weight control. But don't try to argue with these folks. They can't acknowledge even the obvious boundary cases: eating nothing inevitably leads to losing weight.
There is some anecdotal evidence that varying macronutrient levels affect hormone levels in significant ways.
Screwing with hormone levels is a great way to affect the metabolism rate and lipid storage capability of the human body. That's what bodybuilders have been doing for decades. Steroid use is the ultimate manifestation of that school of thought.
The truth is that we know very very little about nutrition because doing controlled double-blind studies on human subjects is very very difficult. Bodybuilders are probably the best population to study because of the self-experimentation angle.
We know this about nutrition: activity burns calories at extremely predictable rates. Food has calories at extremely predictable densities. Physics works.
And see? Even these fundamental facts about physics get disputed/denied by the nutrition nuts.
I'll hop in, though I'm likely to regret this. Note that I am not only replying to the parent comment here, but also addressing the general conversation descending.
The primary disconnect I see in this sort of disagreement about the importance of calories is what we count as "calories in" and what we count as "calories out". The calories listed on nutrition labels are determined by burning a sample of food in a bomb calorimeter. Since our body does not reach the efficiency of a bomb calorimeter, calories consumed through oral or intravenous ingestion will overstate the number of calories that are used by the human body calories in < calories out. As a stupid example, there is clearly a large amount of energy in wood. A human may ingest wood and "touch" none of the calories contained therein. Should a daily branch of intake count as part of our calories in? Where do we draw the line then? Should we exclude calories from fiber?
The nutrition label gives us an upper limit of what we can consider calories in, but does not, on its own, give us an actual value for this measure.
The other side of the disconnect is how we measure calories out. Some people consider only energy expenditure, or how many calories ingested are turned into energy for useful work in the body. Some may also consider those calories utilized for structural purposes. Protein does not necessarily get utilized for energy; in fact it is the least desirable energy source of the three macronutrients. Some may also consider the caloric value of excrement for measurement of calories out.
So calories in can be calories ingested, or calories "processed" (here loosely defined as anything that doesn't pass straight through to stool or urine). Calories out can be calories utilized for useful work, or anything that exits the body, as energy/heat or excrement.
Here alone we have enough for significant confusion among reasonable people depending on which definition they are using.
I hope this helps those involved in the conversation to clarify what they mean and consider that their conversation partner may be less of a moron than they assume.
Add to this that the only piece of this that we can accurately measure across populations is gross calories ingested, and there is a lot of room for reasonable people to disagree on a "healthy intake".
Please note: I am trying to be neutral in this comment, and to only help shed some light on where we find confusion in words. I am explicitly not making an argument for or against any specific interpretation of these words. If you choose to take issue with any inferred stake I hold, have fun. I am perfectly happy to consider discussion on the potential for confusion in the words we use when discussing the issue of caloric intake, though.
Further, not all people are the same, so "healthy" actually varies from person to person. In at least one area this is dramatic: Some people are insulin sensitive and some are insulin resistant. I looked at the nutrition label on soylent. It might be healthy for insulin sensitive people, who generally tend to be naturally skinny.
But this would be a terrible thing for someone who is insulin resistant to consume. It has a very high amount of carbs and fat, which means that your body will see the carbs, blood sugar will spike the insulin will spike very high to compensate (since you're resistant you need more of it to get your blood sugar down) and the high levels of insulin tell the body to start storing fat... consequently making you fatter.
Unfortunately, so much of the diet science assumes everyone is the same, and ignores the insulin sensitivity factor (and I bet there are several other factors going on as well that aren't understood.)
By healthy I mean that for lunch everyday I have 500 calories of something nutritious. This is more healthful than going our for lunch and overeating or grabbing fast food. I might be setting the bar pretty low there, but that was often my habit. Given that it's the habit of of about 80% of my co-workers I don't think that's too out of the ordinary.
I agree with you though, it does concern my that I'm eating powder for 2 meals per day and that might not go well for me in the long term.
I'd suggest comparing the nutrition of Soylent to the nutrition of actual meals we eat when we don't have time for a proper meal. Since that's how many people use it.