I am a big fan of Michael Pollan, and his main argument is that even nutritionists and doctors, people who dedicate thier lives to studying nutrition, can't answer lots of the more complex questions
One fantastic thing about a versioned product like Soylent is that it actually may make it possible to determine those answers empirically. Given the existence of a simple standardized diet that people are willing to eat exclusively outside of a laboratory setting, you could pay a bunch of volunteers to eat soylent you provide which either has or hasn't been modified to include different amounts of vitamins, different amounts of carbs or whatever.
I'm not willing to prove that theory wrong using my own body.
Fortunately you can't stop other people from experimenting in just that way. The world is full of people who eat odd restricted diets and live reasonably long, healthy lives. There's no reason to let the best be the enemy of the good. Start with something that's just barely "good enough" and iterate on it until you really have something.
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One fantastic thing about a versioned product like Soylent is that it actually may make it possible to determine those answers empirically. Given the existence of a simple standardized diet that people are willing to eat exclusively outside of a laboratory setting, you could pay a bunch of volunteers to eat soylent you provide which either has or hasn't been modified to include different amounts of vitamins, different amounts of carbs or whatever.
Fortunately you can't stop other people from experimenting in just that way. The world is full of people who eat odd restricted diets and live reasonably long, healthy lives. There's no reason to let the best be the enemy of the good. Start with something that's just barely "good enough" and iterate on it until you really have something.