If you get a juicer and juice up greens, and other vegetables you have a powerful concoction loaded with nutrients. You feel a buzz from the rush of nutrients.
It really didn't take me very long to find the ingredients [1]. It's quite clear that there exists no combination of fruits and vegetables that could match the list of ingredients.
Your comment is confusing. How could there be literally no combination of fruits and vegetables that would match Soylent? Is Soylent using nutrients found only in beef and mineral water? I'm ignoring ginseng and ginko biloba. And despite my playful question, I am seriously asking.
Fish oil, rice protein, gum arabic, and other things I've noticed just from scanning their blog, which has a bit more information on sources: http://blog.soylent.me/
Fair enough, but fish oil is just for omega 3, right? Which is prevalent in many veggies; rice protein will obviously only be in rice, but it's probably equivalent to protein in other veggies; I'd be surprised if Gum Arabic is used for more than texture.
Not that I'm not excited about soylent - I most definitely am, and hope to make it my lunch at work. At ~$4 a meal it's still a little too expensive for just a healthy filler until I get home (my current meal: beans/lentils and mixed veggies), but when it comes down a bit it will be great for me. Yet I feel some around here are anointing it as the end-all-be-all of healthy consumption, superior to natural options, which I'd argue is a bit premature. And I'm not educated enough to speculate on benefits of nutrients in plants vs. those industrially derived.
Kale by itself exceeds that list of nutrients for almost every nutrient that I could find data for. For many nutrients it blows it out of the water. It also likely includes many unknown beneficial phytonutrients that are not included in Soylent.
Also, from what I understand many of the benefits of these nutrients are diminished or not observed when they are injested from industrial refined supplements like those used in Soylent as when they are eaten in whole plant foods like Kale.
The five nutrients where Kale had less were Sodium, Selenium, Pantothenic acid, Vitamin D, and Vitamin B12. Kale's Sodium was still 127% of the RDA, Selenium was 82% of the RDA, and Pantothenic acid was 91% of the RDA. Not bad for a single plant. I suspect that in a well-rounded whole plant diet these deficiencies would be resolved. If you grow your own Kale then you will make plenty of Vitamin D :) If you don't make enough then you can supplement Vitamin D like millions of animal-eating humans do. B12 is not included in plants, so obviously if you eat only plants you need to supplement it. It costs less than US$0.01/day so I don't see that as a major problem.
I'm highly suspicious that you will find many nutritionists who would say that Soylent is more nutritious than a diet of whole plant foods.
Notes: the USDA data for nutrient amounts in foods are not always very accurate. I believe the nutrient amounts linked by the parent represent an old Soylent recipe, since they have only 5g of fiber which is less than RDA of 25g (female) and 38g (male). "-" in the table indicates I don't have data for this. (+ (* 4.1 400) (* 50 4.1) (* 65 9.3)) => 2449.5 calories for the Soylent data you linked [edit: I'm not sure if carbs included fiber so it's possible that the Kale diet has 1% more calories than the Soylent diet]
Obviously I'm not recommending people eat 74.6 cups of Kale each day, but you can get all you need of these nutrients from a much more tasty diet of a variety of whole plant foods.
Yeah, eating that much Kale would make Soylent very pleasurable in comparison :)
I mention that it's a lot of Kale and allude that it's not practical to eat that much ("Obviously I'm not recommending people eat 74.6 cups of Kale each day"). The parent said there exists no combination of plants that could match the Soylent nutrients, and I showed that just using a single plant and a single supplement you could get almost there on all the nutrients for which I had data, so it's plausible there does exist some combination that gets there (except for B12, and possibly some of the other nutrients for which I don't have data if they do not exist in any plants).
