I have tried it for a week (eating only Joylent, nothing else), and I was completely satisfied.
The taste was okay. Not great—but that is meta-great, because I was not tempted to overeat (which is usually my problem). What I was supposed to eat during one day, was exactly what I ate during the day, and I didn’t feel hungry anytime. It was like: I am eating as much as I want to, whenever I want to; it’s okay but nothing special, merely a fuel for my body. Perfect.
And it saved a lot of time. All the thinking about what should I cook, buying, cooking, cleaning dishes—easily an hour a day—didn’t exist anymore. Convenient.
Then I stopped it mostly because my girlfriend didn’t want to join me, and cooking for one person is almost as much work as cooking for two people. (During that one week she was away, so I had a chance to try what it is like when no one at home is eating normal food.) So now I mostly use Joylent as a backup option, for example when I wake up late in the morning and I have to hurry to my job, so I don’t have to skip my breakfast completely.
We had a debate with my girlfriend about whether such food can be healthy. There are a few objections I consider reasonable, even assuming the food contains exactly what is advertised:
Just because it contains “100% of recommended daily intake of everything”, it doesn’t obviously follow that your body needs everything on the same day. Hypothetically, what if your body processing some X disallows it to process some other Y at the same time? You could have a balanced diet by eating 2X on one day, and 2Y on the other day, but if you eat 1X+1Y every day, you may get Y-deficient.
What if there are molecules your body needs that medicine still does not know about? They can occur in some meals you would randomly eat once in a while, but they may be absent from the artificial food.
Unprocessed food or diary products contain some friendly microorganisms, which will be missing in the artificial food.
But in my opinion, if you eat normal food once in a while, that should be safe enough. My opinion is that normal food should be something to enjoy, not a boring duty. If you don’t enjoy every single meal, you might as well replace the ones you didn’t enjoy by quick artificial food.
I have tried it for a week (eating only Joylent, nothing else), and I was completely satisfied.
The taste was okay. Not great—but that is meta-great, because I was not tempted to overeat (which is usually my problem). What I was supposed to eat during one day, was exactly what I ate during the day, and I didn’t feel hungry anytime. It was like: I am eating as much as I want to, whenever I want to; it’s okay but nothing special, merely a fuel for my body. Perfect.
And it saved a lot of time. All the thinking about what should I cook, buying, cooking, cleaning dishes—easily an hour a day—didn’t exist anymore. Convenient.
Then I stopped it mostly because my girlfriend didn’t want to join me, and cooking for one person is almost as much work as cooking for two people. (During that one week she was away, so I had a chance to try what it is like when no one at home is eating normal food.) So now I mostly use Joylent as a backup option, for example when I wake up late in the morning and I have to hurry to my job, so I don’t have to skip my breakfast completely.
We had a debate with my girlfriend about whether such food can be healthy. There are a few objections I consider reasonable, even assuming the food contains exactly what is advertised:
Just because it contains “100% of recommended daily intake of everything”, it doesn’t obviously follow that your body needs everything on the same day. Hypothetically, what if your body processing some X disallows it to process some other Y at the same time? You could have a balanced diet by eating 2X on one day, and 2Y on the other day, but if you eat 1X+1Y every day, you may get Y-deficient.
What if there are molecules your body needs that medicine still does not know about? They can occur in some meals you would randomly eat once in a while, but they may be absent from the artificial food.
Unprocessed food or diary products contain some friendly microorganisms, which will be missing in the artificial food.
But in my opinion, if you eat normal food once in a while, that should be safe enough. My opinion is that normal food should be something to enjoy, not a boring duty. If you don’t enjoy every single meal, you might as well replace the ones you didn’t enjoy by quick artificial food.