Unbalanced Nutrition for Unbalanced Times

When Rosa Foods introduced its meal replacement shake, Soylent, my fellow science fiction nerds couldn’t resist the obvious jokes. This product apparently originated in a world free of hammy Charlton Heston impersonations, where nobody would brandish their canister of pre-made powder and shout “Soylent Green is people! It's people!” I was surprised later to discover that the inventor intended this connection deliberately. Irony lives, I guess.

Soylent isn’t the first meal replacement shake I’ve encountered. However, it’s the first I recall that wasn’t designed as part of a health-conscious dietary regimen, such as a high-protein diet combined with workouts and timed fasts. Instead, Soylent is marketed to well-off professionals who can’t spare fifteen minutes per afternoon to make themselves a sandwich. Whip this stuff together, marketing says, and keep going without the tedium of lunch break.

Anybody attempting a meal replacement will probably have two questions: is it nutritious? And, will it satisfy me? Sadly, the answers are no, and no. Though rich in “micronutrients,” it doesn’t provide enough to fuel typical human activity throughout the day, and those nutrients are more than offset by the sugar content. And while the shake is temporarily filling, it isn’t really satiating. I compare it to plugging your hunger with a Snickers bar.

Consulting the nutrition label, one listed serving of this product contains twenty percent of your Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of several important nutrients, including Vitamin D, Vitamin C, various B-complex vitamins, and iron. It also includes twenty percent of various other substances we don’t normally consider nutrients, including copper, choline, biotin, and molybdenum. Twenty percent of all of them. Always, consistently, twenty percent.

But when we get off the “nutrients” train, the numbers get wonkier. One serving contains twenty-six percent of your RDA of fats, including thirteen percent of your saturated fats, and thirty percent of your RDA of added sugar. Replace one meal daily with this stuff, and you’ll have to skip dessert. It also provides about twenty-one percent of your daily fiber, two-thirds in the form of soluble fiber, which mostly just expands in your gut, making you feel full.

Charlton Heston (left) and Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green

It’s that thirty percent daily added sugar that disturbs me. Current scientific thinking contends that obesity is caused, not by eating fatty foods, but by consuming more sugar than our livers can process; our bodies respond by storing the added sugar, and added liver enzymes, in fatty tissue to process later. Except that later never comes. If you ate a diet balanced like Soylent, by the time you consumed your full RDA of other nutrients, you’d have eaten 150% of your daily sugars.

Leaving aside the specious nature of RDA computations, the fact is, your RDA of sugar and sodium is a dietary maximum, while your RDA of magnesium, niacin, and other nutrients, is a minimum. Humans evolved in environments where certain substances (salt, sugar) were scarce, but others were abundant; we retain some, and piss away whatever we don’t need of others daily. Modern processed foods reverse this balance. The effect shows on our waistlines.

Even Rosa Foods wouldn’t recommend living on Soylent for every meal. But if you ate this balance at every meal, you’d get 150% of your daily sugar, and seventy percent of your sodium, before you reached your daily necessity of other nutrients. If you just had Soylent for lunch, you’d still need to eat a nutritionally rich dinner, with no dessert, and skip your afternoon Pepsi, to balance your diet. That maketh me not happy.

All that, for a “meal replacement” that basically only takes the edge off your hunger. I’ve used this to replace my breakfast, and felt myself getting hungry again only ninety minutes later; by lunchtime, I could murder a cheeseburger, and I confess, that impairs my judgement, making me crave carbs and fat. I compared this to eating a Snickers above. Yes, both make you feel not hungry. But they’re filling without being satiating. You pay for that later.

I’d be remiss in ignoring Soylent’s convenience. We’ve all had days when even preparing and eating breakfast cereal would be an imposition. But like fast food, wise eaters should indulge this convenience as infrequently as possible. Each individual use might be okay; only when it becomes a pattern does it become a problem. Users who monitor consumption, as through a Weight Watchers journal, can probably add this to their diet, if they remain mindful. Just don't make it a daily thing.

And no, Soylent isn't people. It isn't people.