This bears repeating, over and over and over again if necessary, in every HN thread related to Soylent: most people who purchase Soylent will not exclusively eat Soylent. They will instead supplement their diet with it for times when they don't want to be bothered to make a meal.

Jaime from the Mythbusters does this; he explains it in an episode where they are testing fuel consumption of cars over a long distance and can't stop to eat. Adam brought snack foods, Jaime brought what he calls "444". 4 fruits, 4 vegetables, and 4 beans ground up in a blender for him to drink. He put his recipe in an email that someone posted to reddit at one point.

Jaime claims it's healthy and full nutrition, but he only eats/drinks it when he can't be bothered to actually eat something.

It bears repeating, over and over, that this is not how it was originally pitched. That is not the marketing at all.

It is being marketed as a total meal replacement. There is a thin bit of legalese to cover them in case some poor bastard will die of malnutrition.

I eat a fixed amount of calories everyday. What self-regulating mechanism are you talking about? Appetite? There's no clear consensus on that. We do know we have desire to eat. There are drugs that are pretty decent at suppressing appetite. But the claim that it's good at optimizing for life expectancy has little substance.

Just as sexual-desire might have been a nice mechanism for ensuring reproduction many years ago. But nowadays we can do better. There's no need to have it from a life-expectancy perspective. Hormones responsible for it are pretty toxic.

Appetite has it's role. But to claim somethings superiority based solely on being a 'natural'/'innate'/'genetic' is pretty naive. By extending this logic to other behaviors it's patently obvious that it's just not sound.

I see a lot of potential problems with Soylent. This part might or might not be a big problem. But the kind of simplistic arguments that are thrown around against and in-support of Soylent are depressing.

I replied to your comment but I address it to everyone. The article itself is just so low quality. Basically a very close-minded attack on Rhinehart with ambiguous mumbo-jumbo claims about nutrition.

Having been interested in nutrition for a long time I actually read many papers in search for answers. Finding high-quality research in that field is HARD. Doing good research is hard too. We're very very far from even resolving the whole carbohydrates vs protein vs fat war.

Are you seriously saying that sex hormones and sexual reproduction should be phased out because they make us die earlier? And that we have the technology and the science to do that now?

Cause if so, I don't know what you're smoking. I can tell you from personal experience that modern medicine does not have sex hormones completely figured out, nor do we have a way to replace them entirely with something 'better'...

Well I was talking specifically about the desire part rather than the actual functional/technical part of reproduction. Surely we have no tech to replace sexual reproduction. But we do have mental and intellectual capabilities to overcome such urges without any harm to our body. I was trying to illustrate that while appetite might be something innate it doesn't mean it's a perfect mechanism that we have to give up control to. Humans might simply have many instincts that are not that beneficial to us. It's easy to make it into a philosophical argument/discussion.

//FOLLOWING IS NOT RELATED TO THE ACTUAL TOPIC, COMPLETELY SEPARATE AND SPECULATIVE

As for the particular case of sex hormones you're right that we don't have a solid solution yet. But having said that many papers show that anti-androgens might not destroy male fertility even with long term usage. Actually that research kind of helped introduce the chemical-castration penalty in many countries, cause it's supposed to be reversible in terms of fertility (not to say it's every single effect is reversible. The evidence is pretty strong, but could be better. Other solution is simply castrating yourself after you have the number of children that you want to so that you don't care about fertility. For women I think it would be taking uterus and ovaries out. The thing is with women the life-expectancy might or might not be significant. But not having period would probably be nice.

Personally I don't know. My gut feel on these issues tends to fluctuate. It's actually kind of amazing - when you go and read actual papers and look for proof of this or that it often turns out nobody really knows. The line between something being good or bad (for health) is so very thin sometimes. Gosh, I wish I could get an answer on the whole supplement thing.