Does Huel test their micronutrients mix? (+ v2.3 update)

Experiences
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I’ve been using Huel more or less exclusively for over a month now, after having tested 5 different “soylents” (I really like the “foody” texture, compared to the others). Over the last couple of days I was feeling very tired and thin-skinned, kind of depressed even… so, not good at all. I didn’t have any life-related reason to feel that way and wondered what might be wrong. I suspected my nutrition was off, since I am at a 20% caloric deficit currently (1800 kcal), so I was planning to eat more again. But then I read about the v2.3 update and that it contains 75%(!) more potassium. Intrigued by that (and knowing that I had to fine-tune my electrolytes (magnesium, potassium, sodium) quite a lot, when I was doing keto), I supplemented 3g potassium-chloride (giving me 1.5g of potassium). Within a few hours I was already feeling much better and not tired at all! So I clearly had a potassium deficit, which caused my symptoms.

That brings me to the actual topic of this thread: Does Huel test it’s micronutrient mix? Maybe with the help of a diverse (age, gender, activity level, blood type) study group that exclusively consumes Huel? It would make a lot of sense to get a regular blood panel from those people, in order to see if Huel really is approaching “optimal nutritrion”. I am also suspecting that Huel could use at least 50% more magnesium, tbh.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

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As far as I recall when this has come up before the general message is still that these sorts of longitudinal studies require huge amounts of time and money to organise, and for a small independent company like Huel it would be difficult to run one of these without it impacting the price of the product for the customers. A more viable option would be for us customers to contribute to a self-reported style of study but then it would be hard to make any legitimate claims about the product using that i think, it’d be more for the sake of general interest.

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That’s too bad… I’d think that Huel shoud be able to find 50 people, who would do regular (once a month for half a year) blood panels for free, if Huel pays for the panels. Then they’d “only” have to pay for 300 panels, which shouldn’t cost more than 75k GBP. Well, maybe the company’s profit doesn’t allow for that kind of R&D expenses yet, but they should definitely do that when they have the resources… would also be great for marketing (“Clinically proven to provide you with optimal nutrition”).

Edit: Just for internal R&D, without the marketing claim, probably just 20 panels (10 people, 2 months) would be sufficient and cost around 5k pound.

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