Image courtesy of RobRhinehart.com

Rob Rhinehart was tired of shopping and cooking meals. He wanted to save money. He was studying biology. The perfect storm of circumstances led to his idea to create the ideal liquid diet and stop eating traditional food altogether. Is it a good idea that, if widely adopted, could end world hunger and reduce the impact on our planet of feeding billions of people? Unlikely, but it’s worth taking a closer look.

Rhinehart drew on his knowledge of science and chemistry to come up with a frothy, yellowish brew unsurprisingly named Soylent. He claims it contains all the nutrients necessary for life — nothing more, nothing less. Rhinehart tweaked it according to his specific nutritional and physical needs but says it could easily be adapted on a broader scale to feed large populations. “Soylent can largely be produced from the products of local agriculture, and at that scale, it’s plenty cheap to nourish even the most impoverished individuals… Also, agriculture has a huge impact on the environment, and this diet vastly reduces one’s use of it,” he said an in an interview with Vice.

While the idea is certainly noble and some doctors claim Soylent is probably safe, we think it’s best to let Rhinehart’s experiment run its course a while longer before trying to re-create his nutrition drink in your own kitchen. First of all, the data he’s collected so far recounts sweeping changes to his quality of life in a matter of hours and days but remains largely anecdotal. For example, by day four he could suddenly run more than three miles nonstop (up from an endurance of less than a mile earlier in the week) and by day nine a lifelong skin condition had completely vanished.

In addition to a huge leap in mental acuity after 30 days of his strict liquid diet Rhinehart reported, “My physique has noticeably improved, my skin is clearer, my teeth whiter, my hair thicker and my dandruff gone. My resting heart rate is lower, I haven’t felt the least bit sickly, rare for me this time of year… Even my scars look better.”

In the absence of quantifiable data, it’s hard to say if these are simply the results of confirmation bias or if Rhinehart is on to something big. The details of his improved bloodwork and and other trackable data seem to indicate the answer is somewhere in between.

Rhinehart is well into two months of using Soylent as his primary source of nutrition and is now seeking volunteers to test it along with him. Sign up online and he’ll notify you if and when you’ve been chosen as a participant.

Would you ever forgo food entirely and live on liquid nutrition? What if it helped save the planet? Talk about it in the comments.