I've heard that claim repeatedly, but Abbott disagrees with you and everyone else who says it. Look at Ensure Complete: http://ensure.com/products/ensure-complete-shakes

"Ensure Complete, one simple choice for 4-in-1 nutrition. Each delicious shake provides balanced nutrition and targeted muscle, heart, immune, and bone health benefits. It’s a simple choice to get the right nutrients in the right amounts to help you stay strong. Take charge of your health and your nutrition with Ensure Complete!"

From their FAQ: http://ensure.ca/en/faq/

"For how long can I use Ensure? Ensure products deliver complete and balanced nutrition that is always beneficial. There is no time limit to using Ensure products. In fact, long-term use is encouraged if you’re at a nutritional risk (for example, if you’re an older adult)."

"Can Ensure replace a meal? Yes. Ensure products are complete and balanced, when used in appropriate amounts they can be used to replace meals."

Didn't know about Ensure Complete and it seems that you are right, it looks pretty complete. The problem though is the variance in the DV% of different nutrients. For instance, if I wanted to get 100% of sodium from Ensure then I would have to intake 3500 calories and 260% protein, and I haven't heard too many great things about having too much protein. The DV% of most micros is not listed so there may be a lot of problems like this.

Where does one get the DV% that one needs? And are those % about surviving or thriving? There is literally no definitive place to get such information that is actually backed by science and data.

For instance, that 260% protein you cited is about half the protein I take in a day.

Also, FYI, the danger in taking in too much protein is very much overblown. I doubt you could actually consume enough protein to make it a problem unless you had a medical problem with your kidneys already.

Do you know how Abbott (or others) deal with nutrients that block each other's absorption? e.g. Iron and some vitamins, copper and zinc?

I tried using a week's worth of Ensure Complete as a meal replacement. It didn't provide satiation.

No, they don't disagree at all. They say you can replace A MEAL with ensure. Not all of your food consumption period. There is a big difference. They only ever talk about using ensure as a supplement to your diet, not a replacement for it. If you want to live on ensure you need to drink 5 ensure completes per day, plus consume some extra calories, possibly some extra protein, some salt and a few vitamins. But they explicitly recommend that you do not exceed four servings per day: http://ensure.com/nutrition-faq

They say not to have more than 4 servings of _Ensure High Protein_ because of the protein content. I am not talking about that product.

In the FAQ I pointed to they say that Ensure is safe for long term use, is complete, and they answer a question about how many servings a day are necessary for meet your needs.

Soylent only probably has 100% of what it's testers know they need and who knows how much of what they don't know they need. Ensure is good enough that people live on it, they don't loudly trumpet it as a complete replacement because 1) the market for that is small and it makes you look like a quack 2) people have a variety of nutritional needs based on life style, genetics. Hell ALTITUDE will change your nutritional needs.

The looks like a quack part is strong with soylent, imo. I'm getting a very big snake oil salesman vibe from this whole thing.

Why are people so hypocritical that they claim soylent is not nutritionally complete but ensure is, despite the obvious fact that nutritional labelling laws allow us to see that soylent contains everything ensure does and more?

Here in we see why marketing matters. A product marketed as a supplement to help round out a diet that's affected by age, jaw-being-wired-shut, chrons..., that the company is willing to cop to[1] as "yes it's designed to fully replace food" on their website's faq is positioned very differently than a product marketed as "100% food replacement, oh and maybe we'll save Africa" with heavy notes of fuck-the-establishment and some questionable understandings of how people eat[2].

[1]actually abbot and the like will advertise as being a full meal replacement... for situations where people have medical need and are being monitored by a medical staff, which is to say, in situations where problems might be caught and addressed.

[2]Don't want to eat three multi dish meals a day at 8,12,7? Human bodies have plenty of reserves to deal with out getting 100% of their RDI every single day, just so long as it averages out over a week or two.

But you still want something to keep the stomach from rumbling? Great, the supermarket is chock-a-block full of foods that need no preperation and supply a wide variety of nutrients, either in the form of specialized products (Ensure, Clif bars, various other supplements/diet products) or just no-prep food: pouch of tuna, quart of milk, yogurt, that thing of trail mix that's clearly just muesli with extra peanuts, sack of pre hard-boiled eggs. Whatever.

You didn't address anything I said at all. So, why is your post a reply to me?