They could have used so many better ingredients. Maltodextrin is the cheapest and worst complex carb you could have put in it. It's chemically a complex but really your body doesn't react much differently to it than other simple sugars.
Disclaimer: Not an expert, but here is a reference: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/c...
You're conflating with overeating. I don't believe healthy people, that stay within a healthy caloric range, that aren't predisposed to diabetes need to fear that the "rise in blood sugar" from simple carbs is going to lead to diabetes. And I'm not aware of any study that shows that or even could (it'd be incredibly hard to study), correct me if wrong.
Most people eat simple carbs every day and don't get diabetes. Athletes eat a lot of carbs and don't get diabetes.
2.) Highly quality carbs, such as in beans, barley, certain kinds of sweet potatoes, etc, are fermented by by your gut bacteria into short chain fatty acids. Short chain fatty acids have been linked to lower inflammation, improved mood and memory, weight loss, longer life span, the list goes on.
It will also help if you understand the chemistry of carbohydrates vs fats. Carbohydrates are inherently unstable and are much more likely to undergo spontaneous reactions than fats. This is because sugars are fringed with electrophyllic hydroxyl groups that will take part in dehydration reactions under physiological conditions. The result of this is advanced glycation end (AGE) products. The phytonutrients from plants seem to stabilize carbohydrates, which is probably part the reason the plant made them in the first place.
Carbohydrates aren't so much you body's preferred fuel, rather your body uses them first because letting them float around in circulation is harmful. This is particularly true of fructose, which the liver works very hard to prevent from entering general circulation.
> "In conclusion, macronutrient composition of the diet may differentially alter the postprandial pro-oxidative milieu, with high-carbohydrate meals potentially leading to greater oxidative stress response. However, both meals increased circulating IL6, regardless of the type of nutrient consumed."
I don't see how that translates into a sentence like your:
"Carbohydrates aren't so much you body's preferred fuel".
If you can connect the dots clearly I'd love to see it, but the impression I get is people like yourself and the 'inflammation' crowd are taking these very specific studies and totally distorting their meaning to make broader truths.
I tried to connect the dots a bit with some of the biochemistry of why carbohydrates need to be cleared quickly, it can't simplified much past that. What it comes down to is that oxygen atoms make molecules more chemically reactive than other common elements like carbon and nitrogen. This causes "unintended" reactions, which produce molecules the body doesn't know how to handle. These molecules can directly trigger an immune response, or they can be incorporated into other molecules which causes them to malfunction in various ways. Both cases are bad.
It isn't necessarily the inflammation itself that is bad. Rather, it is a sign that something is going wrong with your body. Usually when inflammation is high, either you have something foreign in your body, or your cells are killing themselves for some reason, and immune cells are being activated to "clean up" the debris.
That idea, 'the insulin hypothesis', has not been proven. In fact there is now evidence that claim is false. (Paywalled study [1], summary in this article [2]).
[1] http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v71/n3/full/ejcn2016260a.... [2] https://www.vox.com/2016/7/6/12105660/do-low-carb-diets-work
Believe what you want, I guess.
Both my current and previous company got in Soylent on occasion; the current one has gotten Coffiest a few times, which I haven't tried, while the earlier one got in the bottled Soylent and the short-lived Soylent Bar. I tried the bottled version once--maybe twice?--and had no ill effects, but didn't particularly like it, either. I had no ill effects from the bar, either, and I confess I actually rather liked it. I'd probably order it again, assuming it seemed safe.
But as someone who, well, actually likes eating, I don't see the attraction of using this stuff as anything other than "I don't have enough time to cook or even go to a sit-down restaurant" type meals, the same way I would any other breakfast bar or meal drink. And looking at it that way makes their meal drinks much less appealing to me compared to, say, Ensure. Yes, Ensure has way more sugar, but it has a half-dozen fairly reasonable flavors, none of which are "dilute pancake batter."