9 years ago
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Could Soylent Replace Food?
Soylent, a synthetic food product, is made from raw chemical components; its formula accounts for all the major food groups. Rob Rhinehart, Soylent’s creator, says, “It’s kind of an over-all food substitute. In theory, you could live on this entirely. In fact, you’d be pretty healthy.”
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Followed this a little bit. Soylent is interesting, but could never be an actual extended replacement for food.
Why? Muscles in the human stomach move food around using Peristalsis. When 100% of your calories are in a liquid form, the muscles have nothing to act on. There's also the fact that, since you're guzzling a bunch of liquids, expect explosive diarrhea to go along with your hunger pangs and constantly rumbling tummy.
Might be fine to do for a test drive, but biologically, humans aren't really setup to handle constant liquid diets. I did a two-week liquid diet with the wife when she was going in for stomach surgery and it's fucking miserable.
Very interesting observation. Any idea on how long it would take for those muscles to weaken to the point where they are too weak to digest real food?
But some experts say that you should chew your food until it is liquid before you swallow it. So the stomach should have no problem with liquid food. I'm curious about the liquid diet that you were on, and why it was so awful.
I know from making my own protein smoothies, that if you include enough protein, fiber and fat in the smoothie, it can actually keep you feeling full for a while. If done right, a balanced liquid food would be just the same as a balanced solid diet, but the work that your teeth would do in turning it into liquid has already been done for you.
Although it does raise the question of what would happen to us in evolutionary terms if we all had liquid diets. Would be evolve into beings that were unable to chew food properly?
Did you include protein and fat as part of the liquid meals?
I remember reading about this a while back. It sounds interesting. Drinking this would probably be a healthier diet than the average person in the western world.
After fully reading this, I think it's excellent. When drinking this liquid meal, he is healthier and better-off financially than he was when eating "cheap" takeaway food.
So we could feed this to homeless people and starving nations. If it's cheaper than and healthier than the average person's diet, this is not madness but genius really. If we think of our bodies as biological machines, what this guy has done has discovered the cheapest, most efficient fuel for the machine.
After all, our desire for food is just an evolutionary biological trick to keep us alive. Just as sex is an evolutionary biological trick to keep the human race going. So just as some people find artificial insemination to be a quicker and more convenient way to bring a new human into the world, for some people this could be the cheaper, quicker and easier way to keep their body fueled.
Of course, sex is fun, and eating food is fun. That probably won't change. But don't kid yourself that real sex or real food is necessary for the survival of the species.
We will agree to disagree
Haha, okay, perhaps I went a bit too far with that last sentence :-)