People keep going on and on about the nutritional value of the drink overall, but I'm somewhat curious to the effects it might have on the digestive tract.<p>For example, if you ate soylent for a full year, and then went straight back to regular food, would your body have trouble digesting solid food now that it hasn't had to do so for a long period of time? What if we extend this time period to 5 years, or 10? I think we can maybe pull some insight from astronauts in this regard, as we should have some information about the change from tube-food to solid food from extended space missions.<p>I can see soylent being a fantastic replacement in some respects, particularly with regards to coeliac's disease or with dairy allergies, but I'm still partially skeptical about the kinds of change that soylent will introduce in the future. One of the great parts about food nowadays is that you can basically grow and manufacture it anywhere, with the obvious caveat that not all food is available everywhere at once. On the other hand, with soylent, our food is almost "centralized" in a sense, since it is likely more difficult to create soylent than it is to throw seeds in the ground, or hunt and scavenge. This is sort of the reason why I'm curious to how the human body will react to such an abrupt change in diet. If humans just eat liquid food for an extended period of time, or their whole life, will they eventually lose / have difficulties with eating solid, more traditional food? Should a crisis arise (something akin to great floods or an earthquake), will it be possible to produce / ship enough soylent fast enough to fulfill the dietary needs of the population in need of aid?<p>Of course, these sorts of questions assume that soylent will become a dietary replacement, rather than an occasional meal replacement, but I get the feeling, at least from this article, that replacing the diet is the plan of Rhinehart et al. I won't personally test soylent out, I love fancy food and flavours too much to bother, but in some sense I will follow the product and see what happens with it. I don't think something on this scale has ever been attempted before with regards to dietary / meal replacements, so it should be interesting (not necessarily good or bad, just interesting) to see what kinds of disasters / utopias unfold thanks to a full dietary replacement.