> in the Silicon Valley world where everyone ought to spend 16 hours a day coding, food was a waste of time

Any more straw men you want to knock down before talking about the content people clicked for? I don't have to agree with the lifestyle of working >8 hours a day or not taking breaks to find it a convenient food without having to worry about, y'know, the 'snack' being healthy.

> this is pretty much entirely nonsense and caused significant harm to an entire generation of Americans, likely leading to much of the modern obesity epidemic

Everyone adhering to the food pyramid is why Americans got obese? Really?

But okay whatever, I'm not here for this discussion, I'm here for Soylent. Let me read on.

> the sugar-industry-funded food pyramid

[citation needed]. This kind of advice is given all around the world and doesn't seem to vary by the amount the sugar industry has control over each country's particular food agencies. But feel free to tell me of a country where it's significantly different, I will readily admit not to having checked every single one, but then I'm also not writing an article about how bad this pyramid (or disc, as it is in the Netherlands and probably other countries) is.

To be clear, I know the sugar industry shifted blame to fats. Yes, that is a thing. But not all of this can be solely blamed on the sugar industry and it's not all 100% lies by the government either.

But we're coming up on the first actual content, let me not waste more time.

> "[Soylent has no] excess amounts of sugars, saturated fats, or cholesterol." [...] There’s no good evidence suggesting that saturated fats are bad for you, only that they aren’t quite as good for you as monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. [...] eating cholesterol does not raise your cholesterol in the simple ways we used to believe, and that eating some cholesterol is important for your brain and for sexual health

So Soylent says their food doesn't contain much of these two things, and it's debatable to what degree those two things are undesirable... but does that mean they should have included more of something suspected to be bad? They just don't include, as you cited, excess amounts.

> This is a problem for Soylent.

No, this is a problem for you. You're taking issue with their wording, not their actual contents so far. I haven't seen a single ingredient being mentioned that is in excess or too little.

> you could be at higher risk for neurodegenerative disease, memory loss, decreased sexual function, and other problems.

That's a huge leap. Yeah, yeah, weasel word "could be" is in there, author's grace is saved... it's unhelpful at best.

The next point being made is about sugar in a specific product I hadn't even heard about, Coffeist. The variant of Soylent I buy also has added flavoring and sugars, I think it's obvious to everyone buying this that it's not as good as the real, original thing. The core is the part we're trusting to be free of unhealthy things.

> Odds are good that we don’t know everything about what we get from food, just what we know so far. This imperfect information about vitamins and minerals is problematic, because while a lime probably has some other [unknown good stuff, dubbed Vitamin X], Soylent doesn’t.

Wait, leap: we don't know -> thus soylent has to be incomplete. You literally just said you don't know that.

If don't know which foods have Vitamin X, you can call into question literally every diet. The only solution would be to eat a little of everything, including unhealthy things, because perhaps there is a helpful mystery ingredient we don't know about.

If an argument applies equally to the food you're trying to determine the healthiness of as well as the control group, it's not an argument against the food in question.

> when you stop eating vegetables and start drinking magical silicon valley food powder…

Yeah, this pretty much speaks for itself. Nobody ever said the former.

> It may have all of the vitamins and minerals you need, but do you absorb them the same way? The only way you would know is to consume only Soylent and nothing else and get your levels tested after a few months, maybe longer

Woa smartypants, guess what people did? I didn't research this topic, this is just regular news. You don't have to look far to find this. Top hit for my first guess at a search query, "blood test soylent", is "Blood test results. 100% Soylent 2.0 for 1 year". The results "were all within the normal ranges except for sodium and chlorine. Doctor asked about water intake and it was determined I drank way too much water". What's the top reply in that thread? "I am also on a 80%+ Soylent diet for 24 months and my blood tests came back as normal too! Except for a vitamin D deficiency."

People did this. And I'm still waiting for the first unhealthy or missing/deficit ingredient. You did literally zero research for this opinion piece.

> as an animal that evolved to eat other animals

We didn't evolve specifically to survive in space either, so let's not go there using artificial means? What an argument.

If you're saying there are non-vegetarian (let alone vegan) ingredients that we absolutely cannot miss, then please do say which ones because there are a lot of vegans and vegetarians trying to live healthy lives that would love to hear your well-founded research.

> Soylent 2.0 has a glycemic index of 49, which is about the same as orange juice, Snickers bars, and spaghetti. That’s not so bad on its own, but if it’s all you’re consuming, then every meal is hitting your blood sugar the same way as a sweet drink or plate full of pasta would. That’s not good.

Okay so here is something I can't comment on. I'm no nutritionist (neither does the author claim to be), so far everything was just common sense and plain logic. I don't know if sugar spikes cause diabetes or something. Let's read on!

...

but no, that is the end of that topic. Nothing further about what issue(s) this might cause. So a "not good" glycemic index is the sole argument of the entire post that is relevant to most Soylent eaters.

The other argument is "we don't know what we don't know". As if we're unaware of that. People get blood tests because of that. They're actively developing the formula because of that.

So, is it objectively not healthy, as you claim in the headline? Should I not have this as a snack or single meal replacement, or are you really just warning against "don't eat this 100% of the time for 30 years because it might give you a higher chance of cancer; we don't know, and I definitely can't tell you"?