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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this. Let's say you took all the components of a healthy diet, then blended them together into a drink like this and consumed it. How would that be any different from eating the components separately? Your intestines don't know or care that a blender got to the food first.

Maybe this particular example is missing something, I don't know. But you seem opposed to the very concept, which makes no sense to me. Why does it matter whether you take your food in as a bland mix or as individual pre-blended components?

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First, we don't know what the components of a healthy diet are. We thought we did decades ago, but were blissfully unaware of micronutrients (and, as I understand it, infant formula from around this time made a bunch of babies have developmental disorders as a result). Second, we're quickly realizing that nutrition is significantly more than the sum of its parts. Nutrients taken together as opposed to separately can have significantly different effects. Calories in also doesn't necessarily equal calories absorbed.

It's a crappy analogy, but imagine this guy was trying to construct a human body out of parts. He's wired up a brain, muscles, blood vessels, nerves, a lymphatic system, and all the rest to a skeletal system. What do you think his chances of success would be?

Is there any reason to think that "separately" is the preferred way? As for not knowing the components of a healthy diet, that objection applies equally to taking in food the normal way, so I really don't see the relevance. If we don't know enough to build a proper slurry that contains everything, then we don't know enough to build a proper normal diet that contains everything.

This is just a small example, but I know that Vitamin C inhibits calcium absorption. That's pretty well known among athletes.

One other aspect I ignored in my earlier post is that the digestive tract actually needs solid mass in order to perform peristalsis. Hospitals have to avoid giving patients a liquid diet for too long, or else the digestive tract basically just stops — and it's a pain in the ass to restart.

Additionally, we have only the faintest idea how this might affect gut bacteria, which is an enormous component of both our digestive system as well as immune system. Without giving them our "table scraps", what happens to them?

Google "bioavailability"

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