The frightening thing about Soylent (to me) is that I am not sure if it constitutes a "diet" any more than the mud patties and other non-food yet objectively nutritional foodstuffs consumed amongst the poorest of the poor in Africa.
> Changes in metabolism, bigger life changes like puberty and menopause, obviously pregnancy
I do not think these things happen on a regular basis.
If you're going to argue that all the nutritional changes can be accounted for, I won't disagree with you. But to argue that people's dietary needs don't change is just uninformed.
It probably doesn't. Some people can't metabolise certain forms of B-group vitamins. Unless Soylent includes all the different forms, those people are going to develop a serious deficiency.
That's just one micronutrient, out hundreds that are currently known about.
More worrying is the consistent pattern of being dismissive of feedback from the people who study this subject as their primary concern.
> When I was in college, I had a room-mate who lived on nothing but pizza, mac and cheese and marijuana for a year. Aside from being thin, pale, and subject to periodic, inexplicable bouts of coughing, he “felt fine”, too.
There are people in the third world who would kill for a daily diet of pizza and macaroni-n-cheese. The author fails to address that his roommate ("stupid pothead! lolz") was eating food and that Soylent is not food, rather being synthesized raw nutrients. That is the key issue at hand, not the question of variety in a diet.