This seems like a generally good thing but also unlikely to become the norm without significant effort. Capitalism, as we practice it currently in America, frequently hinges on exploiting asymmetries of information, so anything that reduces that is generally going against the tide. No one really likes "perfect information" when they are benefitting from the imperfect type.
Why Information Grows - Cesar Hidalgo (https://books.google.com/books?id=J88_CQAAQBAJ)
Best book I've read in recent memory. Changed my understanding of the world and (maybe) our place in it.
The Information - James Gleick (https://books.google.com/books?id=7ztdygAACAAJ)
All developers having anything to do with data should read this or at least be familiar with the concepts it covers.
Fantasyland - Kurt Andersen (https://books.google.com/books?id=aaX4DAAAQBAJ)
A fun, engaging American history - whether the theory behind it is accurate or not, it is still enlightening.
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (https://books.google.com/books?id=niDNtZoYsAUC)
A painful re-reading but hard not to conclude that Huxley had it way more directionally right than Orwell or any other future fiction authors.
Better arguments against Soylent can certainly be made, though by smarter people than myself. I do have three main issues with it:
1. The idea that we can take something as fantastically complex and as poorly understood as nutrition and successfully boil it down to a formula is really, really unlikely at this point.
2. As incredibly unlikely as it is that someone could create such a formula, even if they had access to and total understanding of all the research that currently exists in the world, it is even more far-fetched that it would be some random software developers who would create it.
3. Even if, despite all that, Soylent is the perfect formula, it still isn't. As is becoming more evident, diet is so individualized that the idea that one formula would be ideal for any significant percentage of the population is very unlikely.
Given all that, it seems really unlikely that Soylent should be the cornerstone of your diet.
So, having spent way too much time studying and experimenting with diet (including SAD,vegetarian, vegan, paleo-variations, etc), the only nutrition advice I feel comfortable with (assuming you are so lucky as to have the choices I do in middle-class America, with practically every food available) is just to start with a variety of whole, unprocessed foods (probably mostly plants) and do your best to identify the ones that you have obvious issues with and avoid those. As there is seemingly no known individual health benefit to gain from processed foods, the safe bet seems to be to avoid them in favor of unprocessed foods when possible. At least until the next over-hyped study comes out showing that vegetables kill!
Soylent probably isn't absolutely perfect. But it could still be better than normal food. It's not like normal food is optimized for nutrition, and we eat a ton of things that weren't around when humans evolved. Or wildly different portions and amounts. Soylent at least tries to optimize. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better.
The only risk that keeps being brought up is that there is some obscure chemical that our bodies needs that soylent excludes. As long as you don't go on a 100% Soylent diet, that risk can be avoided.
And this isn't a new idea at all. There have been liquid foods before soylent, people in comas have been fed by IV even. We mass produce meals for animals like the article mentions. And people eating soylent don't seem to be dying left and right. Young humans naturally live on an entirely liquid diet like to soylent, so it's clearly possible.
One way this industry may get nudged significantly (disruption is too strong a word and not exactly a great thing when dealing with peoples health) is to approach it from the outside the system and come at it from the consumer health angle. Yes, it is far more limited in many ways as you can't build a system a hospital can integrate but there is still a lot that can be done.
20-30 years ago, if you had a problem, you went to a doctor and that was about it. Now, people are more likely to choose to (or forced to by cost) seek alternative practitioners or at least partially take matters into their own hands (independent research, dietary and lifestyle changes, etc). These will usually be people who are not really getting helped by the system and are probably facing issues where lifestyle is a big factor (autoimmune issues, diabetes, obesity, etc). If you can successfully help that group of people where the system has failed to, then you may start to see some real changes as most people ultimately will (eventually) gravitate to what actually works (yes, I am an optimist).
Of course, as another commenter mentioned, we tend to be terrible at doing things now to benefit our future selves, but I still believe technology could play a big role in helping with that and the current options, like wearing a fitbit, are barely scratching the surface, mainly in that they aren't yet doing much to prove their benefit to the consumer or obviously help them day-to-day. That is a really hard task when health changes occur over long timespans but at least it is just hard-hard, not EMR/politics-hard.
I have used them and they are definitely on the right path but they haven't yet got past the point of just showing a lot of graphs and comparative statistics, etc. As always, it comes down to translating data to useable knowledge, which we as an industry are obviously trying to figure out across pretty much all verticals
My understanding is that PLM very much translates to useable knowledge - just for the pharma and PHM folks who mine the backend (which is how they make money). Notably, this is all quite above-board: it's not a "secretly mine people's private medical details" situation, it's "overtly mine people's private medical details in order to help find treatments for their rare disease"...
You are right about that - and I think they are doing something really good (and props to them for being really up-front about how they operate) but unless they can really do something to help patients day-to-day, is seems the participation rate will probably always be small and inconsistent, which means a smaller, less-complete data set that will yield less accurate and useful results.
Again, I like the goal and I did try them but it is not a good user experience or particularly helpful on the individual level so even doing it altruistically really didn't last. To get that kind of rich dataset, you need the user to be highly engaged which means they are really getting something out of it and using it for the primarily selfish reason that it helps them.
Having now had a lot of experience dealing with the medical system as related to complex and chronic diseases, I still find myself really surprised by how little the "consumerization of x" movement has impacted it. Per point of the original article, I shouldn't be. The massive bureaucracy, the regulatory capture, and the general politics of the industry are so all-consuming that there is little time or energy left over for the patients. (disclaimer: yes, there are a ton of amazing individuals working in the industry but even they are, unfortunately, really handicapped by the system itself)
