Make Soylent - And You Will Never Have To Eat Again. Will The Cocktail Work?

The Internet has been abuzz with stories about Soylent, the soy-based meal-replacement shake invented by Atlanta, Georgia scientist Rob Rhinehart.  Soylent is not just a nutritional supplement, but a complete diet with all the needed amino acids, minerals, vitamins, essential fatty acids, and carbohydrates revealed by nutritional research. It has an unappealingly apocalyptic name, but just imagine the benefits of one complete meal to meet all your nutritional requirements!

As this article is being written, Rhinehart has been on his total diet replacement shakes for a few days short of three months. As a result, he weighs less, feels good, and has mostly excellent lab results. Of course, some of this could have to do with the fact he's just 24 years old.

No People in This Soylent

Rhinehart got the idea of making a simple, inexpensive, total nutrition diet shake one Christmas when he encountered an elderly couple who had to be admitted to hospital for malnutrition because they no longer had the physical strength to prepare food. The encounter made him just plain angry.

Food is the equivalent of fossil fuel, Rhinehart wrote in his blog. We organize our economies around it. In some countries people are dying of starvation, while in other countries people are dying of obesity. Rhinehart recorded that he resented the time, money, and energy he expended in buying, storing, preparing, eating, and cleaning up after eating food, and maybe what people need to live isn't "food," anyway. Maybe it's just nutrients.

Reading a number of books and articles on nutrition, Rhinehart prepared a liquid formula containing all the known nutrients needed for human life, primarily from chemical sources. No meat, dairy, grains, vegetables, fruit, fish, or condiments appeared in his new formula, other than a small amount of olive oil and whey for essential fats and complete protein.

Rhinehart named his formula, which also contains processed soy protein, Soylent, after the formula Soylent Green, mentioned in the book Make Room! Make Room! which was, of course, later famously translated to the big screen in the movie Soylent Green.

In the book, Soylent Green was advertised as plankton, and turned out to be otherwise. As a horrified character in the book mentioned, "Soylent Green is people." But Rhinehart's Soylent is not.

Feeling Great on No "Food" At All

Rhinehart blogs that he has been feeling mostly great on his Soylent diet. About three days into the experiment, Rhinhart says, his energy levels began to plunge. At that point he realized he had left iron out of the formula. 

So is Soylent something everyone should try?

Making the Most of Liquid Diets

There is a very basic principle of digestive physiology that explains why people tend to lose weight on liquid diets of all kinds. Much of the secretory activity of the digestive tract is regulated by stretch receptors.

When the stomach begins to stretch as it receives food, stretch receptors tell it to release stomach acid. When the digested food reaches the small intestine, another set of stretch receptors send a message to the pancreas to (1) release insulin so that cells all over the body can absorb the sugars released by digestion and (2) to release glucagon to stimulate the release of stored sugar from the glycogen stores of the liver just in case the dump of digested food doesn't contain the expected sugars.

The result of filling up is increased stomach acid. This may or may not be a problem. If you eat a big meal and lie down to take a nap, however, or if you have a condition known as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), then you will tend to relieve the resulting acid reflux by eating still more.

The effects of increased insulin release are more insiduous. Insulin doesn't just help cells absorb sugar from the bloodstream. It also stimulates the production of an enzyme that fat cells use to store fat, and prevents the production of an enzyme fat cells use to release fat so it can be burned by the muscles. If you eat a big meal with little carbohydrate, you chomp down a big steak, for example, then your blood sugar levels can crash. But if you are diabetic, eating a big meal, even if it's a head of lettuce, can cause your blood sugar levels to soar (because your body has a normal ability to release sugar but has an impaired ability to transport it into cells from the bloodstream).

This is why supervised liquid diets are so successful for weight loss. But that isn't to say there is no potential downside to Rhinehart's plan.

What Could Go Wrong If You Tried to Live on Soylent?

What Rhinehart seems to have overlooked is that we don't just feed ourselves. We also feed the healthy, probiotic bacteria in our colons, which in turn fight disease-causing microorganisms and make some of the vitamins that are not especially abundant in food, such as vitamin K2 (menaquinone). It takes more than three months to become deficient in K2, and because the symptoms of K2 deficiency are subtle (microfractures in bone, initially undetectable atherosclerosis even when cholesterol levels are normal or low), it's possible that Soylent isn't a healthy option for the long term.

But why should it be necessary to get 100% of nutrition from a single source?

The best long-term results from liquid diets are obtained in the maintenance phase of the diet when dieters continue to use the product for most of their nutrients, but eat small amounts of salad, fruit, and protein foods. Some liquid diets have helped people lose as much as 100 pounds in a year and keep it off for five years, but to date this hasn't been done with a strictly liquid diet.

And it's always possible that Soylent simply isn't as complete as Rhinehart believes it is. No mention seems to have been made of omega-3 and omega-7 essential fatty acids (which isn't to say they aren't included in the mix). While a product like Soylent — which Rhinehart is able to make for less than US $200 per month — may be a major step forward in ensuring economical human nutrition, it's not an end-all and be-all for anyone's diet plan.

It's also important to consider the fact that food in fact isn't, as Rhineheart says, just nutrients. Food is culture, food is coming together with other people, and food is a time to relax and enjoy. If the thought of having "nutrients" rather than tasty, lovingly-prepared, meals horrifies you, you are not alone. It is ultimately for this reason that meal replacements will remain best suited to emergency situations.