Consider the diet of livestock and pets. Not unusual for multiple generations to eat the same product.

If livestock and pets were generally scrawny and sickly you would have a point, but they generally seem to live much longer and healthier than in the wild, usually by a pretty large multiple. I've often wondered if I'd be willing to drink "ensure" for 240 years, much as serving meow mix to a cat seems to result in a extremely long feline lifetime. It might be boring... but 240 years might make it worthwhile.

Binary thinking always strikes HN pretty hard. This is a tar baby or minefield for startup thinkers. It doesn't have to beat the best possible diet definable, for all people in the entire world... it merely needs to be better than J6Packs average diet. And that's a very low metric to achieve. Sad to say that Meow Mix probably would be better than the average american diet... And this is before we go 3rd world and compare to the average Somalian. I think its not very controversial that the average inner city kid would probably be better off with soylent than a big mac or a school lunch.

That brings up the interesting point that we live in a nearly completely centrally controlled economy WRT food production as opposed to an actual free market and lots of people make a lot of money selling vastly inferior product, and they're not going to be too happy about this.