> We have thousands of years of history of humans doing well on whole foods, and zero evidence that the human body can do as well on artificial foods.
We had thousands of years of history of humans doing well on earth, and zero evidence that the human body could survive in space. How do you find out without testing?
My point wasn't that humans couldn't survive on soylent. It's that I doubt it will beat real food. Further, it will be very, very difficult to test.
The reason for the presumption in favour of real foods is that thousands of years of testing by our ancestors let us identify foods that worked reasonably well.
We don't necessarily know why foods work, but any hidden defects would be more likely to surface over a several thousand year period, vs. the short term period we will be testing soylent.
I don't know why people downvoted you, but it's true that you need testing to explore these things. Unfortunately, it's one of those things where you can't just prove the absence of something (in this case: danger).
I found the preceding comment equally odd:
> We can nonetheless have a strong presumption that the body does best on whole foods.
Not really. The commenter even said it himself: "we don't know what we don't know about food". We can acknowledge that 'whole foods' are adequately sustainable for humans, but extrapolating any additional meaning from their traditional role is baseless without further study. Thus, saying that 'adequate' == 'best' is making a huge leap of logic in an area that we haven't even figured out enough to begin optimizing it yet.
I don't support soylent, and I don't believe any other MRPs are fully adequate either, but that doesn't mean we should throw out the baby with the bathwater here...
We had thousands of years of history of humans doing well on earth, and zero evidence that the human body could survive in space. How do you find out without testing?