But soylent is closer to a smoothie than water with dissolved minerals. I think if you really tried to consume all your vitamins, minerals and proteins from something with near water like viscosity you would have to be drinking it constantly. You would be peeing 100 times a day too.
Pharmacist and 4th year medical student here. Fun fact is TPN (total parenteral nutrition, i.e. IV food) is usually somewhere around 2L of volume daily, and the limiting factor preventing us from concentrating it more is the protein component. We can make some really concentrated sugar solutions, fat is so calorie dense it doesn’t take up much space either, but protein isn’t particularly calorie dense and can’t be concentrated very high before it starts to crystallize.
I wonder how fast the ingest -> per cycle is compared to going out the back door. Wouldn’t we know this with coma patients? Or do they get feeding tube smoothies?
With regards to coma patients or patients otherwise unable to eat for themselves, they will commonly have a feeding tube placed either into their stomach or just past their stomach at the start of the small intestines. Enteral nutrition or “tube feeds” are then usually run 24hrs a day. Lower rates are easier to tolerate. For people that are otherwise active but for a given reason cannot swallow (people who have had a stroke for example), tube feeds can be run faster and intermittently to give them more freedom to move about through the day.
But soylent is closer to a smoothie than water with dissolved minerals. I think if you really tried to consume all your vitamins, minerals and proteins from something with near water like viscosity you would have to be drinking it constantly. You would be peeing 100 times a day too.
Pharmacist and 4th year medical student here. Fun fact is TPN (total parenteral nutrition, i.e. IV food) is usually somewhere around 2L of volume daily, and the limiting factor preventing us from concentrating it more is the protein component. We can make some really concentrated sugar solutions, fat is so calorie dense it doesn’t take up much space either, but protein isn’t particularly calorie dense and can’t be concentrated very high before it starts to crystallize.
I don’t know why I didn’t think about it. IV food would be precisely this already. 😅
I wonder how fast the ingest -> per cycle is compared to going out the back door. Wouldn’t we know this with coma patients? Or do they get feeding tube smoothies?
With regards to coma patients or patients otherwise unable to eat for themselves, they will commonly have a feeding tube placed either into their stomach or just past their stomach at the start of the small intestines. Enteral nutrition or “tube feeds” are then usually run 24hrs a day. Lower rates are easier to tolerate. For people that are otherwise active but for a given reason cannot swallow (people who have had a stroke for example), tube feeds can be run faster and intermittently to give them more freedom to move about through the day.
Thanks for the information, this was interesting