It's not a cheap diet-oriented meal replacement (little more than protein, sugar, and vitamin mix) intended to provide satiating filler with minimal meaningful content but still requiring "a sensible meal". It's a serious attempt at providing EVERYTHING a body needs, including hard-to-manage micronutrients.
Ensure Complete describes itself as "Provides balanced amounts of macronutrients and essential vitamins and minerals." Lacks the micronutrients needed. Strikes me as intended for "we really don't have any other options at this point" and consequential symptoms will be treated as illness.
Nutrament describes itself as "This nutritional drink is ideal as a snack, an occasional meal replacement, or a perfect post-workout drink." Note the "occasional"; it's filler augmenting an otherwise sensible natural diet.
Soylent is intended as "you can live on this stuff full time", which its creator does. He's suffered some pretty painful & weird symptoms of not getting everything right (like inadequate micronutrient supply causing bizarre cravings), and felt profoundly satiated when he did get it right.
Anecdote: I once worked on a portable IV pump intended to "feed" people lacking most of their GI tract, injecting nutritionally complete "meals" directly into the bloodstream. Each "meal" cost about $300.
There are solutions that claim to be nutritionally complete (Sustagen Hospital Formula) and anecdotally are sustainable for months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5399994
I'd first wonder about cost (hence my anecdote about $300 nutritionally complete goo-in-a-bag meals), then about completeness (side effects may be preferable to alternatives). Other products may exist which are what Soylent aspires to.
Seems a big part is that the Soylent guy just decided to DIY for fun, it went viral, and he went entrepreneur. If you've got would-be customers banging down your door, you don't respond with "somebody else makes something like it", you monetize the opportunity.
I don't think anyone's blaming him for starting the company. The reason I raised this line of questioning isn't to criticize him, but rather to figure out if this is a new idea, in a space that hasn't been explored before, and thus worthy of our interest and excitement... or just an age-old idea with a bit of new marketing.
Not that different, other than the recipe being public and the ability to make it yourself. The purpose is mostly the same, though Soylent aims to be sustainable, while most of these meal-replacement concoctions warn against prolonged usage. That might just be playing it safe though.
No it is not a serious attempt at proving everything a body needs, not in the slightest.
If it was a serious attempt the soylent team would be composed of scientists with expertise in nutrition. Instead their website lists a lot of people with absolutely irrelevant skills. I can't think of anything associated with y-combinator which is quite as embarrassing as this.
Sadly one part of hopes this takes off, so that in 10 years time we have an idea of the long term results of a diet of this kind of nonsense. It will have been tested on the kind of people who have the arrogance to believe that because they understand business / computing the can 'solve' the worlds nutrition problem.
I agree with everything you say. But I am also reminded of all the highly accomplished people, who, looking back on their lives, say that "the only reason who took this on was that we had no idea how hard it was going to be."
