Let’s be clear up front, for those of you that have not been keeping up on this story, I am not talking about Soylent Green, the 1973 Sci Fi movie starring Charlton Heston where he announces to his fellow humans at the end that “Soylent Green is people.”
Soylent is basically a formula created by Rob Rhinehart, a 24-year-old engineer, who felt like he had a solution to human health. Recently, he presented his idea on a crowdfunding website and received funding of roughly $800,000 to produce and market his product. Soylent is basically an adult version of baby formula. It contains oat flour, modified whey (lactalbumin or milk protein), olive oil, maltodextrin, and then some herbs, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants (see here for complete list). In his blog titled ironically Mostly Harmless, he states to his opponents who say his food isn’t natural:
Nature is not on our side. Most of it is trying to kill us. Nature abounds with neurotoxins, carcinogens, starvation, violence, and death. It is technology that makes our lives so comfortable. We have a responsibility to protect the environment, but it feels no such responsibility for us. Technological innovations should be thoroughly tested and verified to be safe, and they are. Besides being an arbitrary distinction, being “natural” is absolutely no guarantee of safety, usefulness, or practicality. Today it is often the opposite. I think it’s a little weird to eat food that comes from a tree. Do we still use leaves for clothing? Like diet, balance is key. I am glad to drink fluoridated water for the same reason I prefer the natural sky. It’s healthier.
What Rob presents to us is a natural evolutionary step in our development. The problem with that is that I don’t believe in evolution. I believe in this quote from Proverbs 14:12:
There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.
The problem with our food supply and our health is not that we are eating food from trees. The problem is that man has already (before Rob Rhinehart’s concoction) begun the process of tampering with it and we refuse to deal with the subject of gluttony.
- We chlorinate and fluoridate our water in the guise of making it “better for us”.
- We strip our main grain (wheat) of all its nutrients and fiber, then add back a few synthetic B-vitamins and call it “enriched”.
- We pasteurize our milk to give it better shelf life and to remove any “harmful” bacteria present in it.
- Fifty percent of our antibiotic usage in this country is used to routinely give to our livestock (meat supply) to keep it healthy.
- We give steroids and genetically modified grains to our animals to speed up the process of maturation so they are bigger and can get to market much sooner.
- Our food is harvested from the earth but then we refuse to put back what we took out. Our fertilizers are strictly nitrogen and phosphorus. It’s not surprising that the mineral content of our foods has decreased over the decades. Even the Bible talked about resting the land ever 5-7 years and regenerating it by basically what we call now “composting”.
- The EPA approves of just under a 1,000 new chemicals each year. Estimates worldwide say we are releasing approximately 10 million tons (over 21 billion pounds) of chemicals into our environment each year without really knowing the long-term effect of each one individually and how they act when mixed with all the other compounds.
- As Americans, we consume a record number of pharmaceuticals as solutions to disease. Health care is run by lobbyists and Big Pharma. We currently outspend every other country on the planet by almost double, and the World Health Organization (WHO) ranks our health as 38th among countries in the world.
Baby Formula or Food?
So is Soylent an improvement. Would it be better if drank an adult version of baby formula every day? The answer to that question depends on what we’re comparing it to. If we’re asking: is it better than eating Mac & Cheese and pizza and McDonald’s? Absolutely. Is it better than eating the right amount of food as God gave it to us? No.
If you are one of those people that hates dealing with food on a daily basis. You say “I don’t know what I should be eating.” And you always seem to go with food that is not good for you. Soylent might be your answer. However, it’s a flawed choice and it’s not the best way.
Medical Food
I keep calling Soylent “baby formula”… however the food industry has an existing category for it: medical food. A medical food most of you are probably aware of is Ensure®. Other ones out there are in the medical community (for most people that have a hard time eating or gastrointestinally processing foods) are Nutren® and Jevity®. Nutritional companies like Metagenics have had a line of medical food for a few decades. The original one was called UltraMeal. (Dr. Berglund sidenote: I may be biased, but I believe that a nutritional company is more capable of formulating a medical food than medical companies like Abbott and Nestle’s.)
All the other medical foods listed above are at least 400% more expensive that Soylent. And looking at Soylent’s list of ingredients, I believe it to be healthier than Ensure (unless someone is sensitive to dairy products which is the main source of protein in Soylent).
Bottom Line
Bottom line is that I’d love for you to get healthy and to overcome the challenges of healthy eating (choice and amount). I don’t think that Soylent is the answer. I think you need to find a healthy eating system that helps you achieve your goals and reduce pain and increase your energy levels. Eating right can do that. You just need to figure out (and maybe that means finding someone to be your health coach to help you figure that out) what it means to “eat right”.
Soylent is not God’s plan to make you healthy, but neither is the standard American diet (SAD).
