Food >

While thinking about Soylent, some other things came to mind.

Products are labelled with this notion of “daily requirements”, but that’s an incomplete and possibly non-optimal paradigm. Similarly, the food groups and servings per day concept has the same perspective problem.

I think these are useful and valid concepts, but there are some other interesting things to think about.

The myth of daily requirements? ∞

There’s no way in hell that any animal will get 100% of its “daily” nutritional requirements every day. Take fruit, for example. Fruit is not always in season. The concept of eating fruit daily is ridiculous.

Looking more closely not at the food group but at its components, this same daily requirements concept still doesn’t make sense. Not all things are available for consumption at all times. It’s more likely that the various components need to be made available over the course of x number of days.

So the body, therefore, can easily cope with “fasting” in terms of the temporary absence of one or more component.

So I think the body needs 100% of a set of components, where each component needs to be provided at least every x number of days. x would be different for each individual component and perhaps with some interesting nuances for combinations. More on that..

Food combination ∞

We aren’t evolved to require 100% of our requirements every day. We get things in pieces. It’s a valid notion to say that providing all requirements at every meal is a good thing. It’s also an interesting angle to study the interactions of foods and their components.

It’s possible that because we get a staggered intake of components that various food combinations and component interactions might be accounted for by the body. Perhaps some are negative but perhaps some are also positive.

For example, certain components may interfere with the optimal absorption of others. I’ve heard of more specifics but unfortunately I don’t recall my source.

So Soylent providing everything in one package may or may not be a good thing. I doubt the body will care all that much if at all, since it’s so robust, but something tells me that there are some really interesting topics that require serious science to understand.