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passive_fist comments on Open thread for December 17-23, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Given that dogfood and catfood work as far as mono-diets go, I'm pretty hopeful that personfood is going to work out as well. I don't know enough about nutrition in general to identify any deficiencies (and you kind of have to wait 10+ years for any long-term effects), but the odds are good that it or something like it will work out in the long run. I'd go with really rough priors and say 65% safe (85% if you're willing to have a minor nutritional deficiency), up to 95% three years from now. These numbers go up with FDA approval.
I actually thought this way at first, but after reading up more on nutrition, I'm slightly skeptical that soylent would work as a mono-diet. For instance, fruits have been suggested to contain chemical complexes that assist in absorption of vitamins. These chemical complexes may not exist in soylent. In addition, there hasn't really been any long-term study of the toxic effects of soylent. Almost all the ingredients are the result of nontrivial chemical processing, and you inevitably get some impurities. Even if your ingredient is 99.99% pure, that 0.01% impurity could nevertheless be something with extremely damaging long-term toxicity. For instance, heavy metals, or chemicals that mimic the action of hormones.
Obviously, toxic chemicals exist in ordinary food as well. This is why variety is important. Variety in what you eat is not just important for the sake of chemicals you get, but for the sake of chemicals you don't get. If one of your food sources is tainted, having variety means you aren't exposed to that specific chemical in levels that would be damaging.
I still think it's promising though, and I think we'll eventually get there. It may take a few years, but I think we'll definitely arrive on a food substitute that has everything the body needs and nothing the body doesn't need. Such a food substitute would be even more healthy than 'fresh food'. I just doubt that this first iteration of Soylent has hit that mark.
I'll be watching Soylent with interest.
It seems to me that Soylent is at least as healthy as many protein powders and mass gainers that athletes and bodybuilders have been using for quite some time. That is to say, it depends on quality manufacturing. If Soylent does a poor job picking their suppliers, then it might be actively toxic.