Huel (at 2000kcal) contains all the nutrition it has been so far been scientifically proven that the body needs.
Knowledge of human nutrition is in its relevant infancy, and there are limitations to our current ability to scientifically test for the benefit of every nutrient, and in particular the naturally occurring specific combinations of nutrients, found in a broad range of different foods - I’m mainly speaking about those found in this list:
It’s just a corrollary of scientific certainty that we paint things outside science as untrustworthy. if science is powerful at a level where it can test a certain claim, stuff outside science quickly becomes untrustworthy, but things which are more complex than we can currently test for shouldn’t be painted us untrustworthy - they are in principle testable, they just cant currently be tested. Again, mainly speaking here about testing for a range of specific and particular combinations of various phytochemicals found in food.
I feel this is the main approach someone would use in suggesting that eating a balanced diet of as many different types of food as possible is likely to be of superior nutritional benefit than eating a 100% Huel diet - both scenarios can be thought of as ‘hedging ones bets’ in light of what we know we don’t know (yet) about human nutrition, but the former, if executed sufficiently, feels as though it makes a better stab at ‘completion’ in nutritional terms (with ‘completion’ here importantly defined as incorporating nutrients which provide health benefits above and beyond merely surviving without deficiencies)
Afaik, the above echoes the Huel creator’s feelings about their product* - they’re aware eating a balanced diet of many different foods is likely to be superior to only eating Huel, but this is besides the point of the product - most people do not achieve anything close to a diet as good as that and in the majority of cases, incorporating Huel into their diet, whether 100% or not, will substantially improve their intake of important nutrients and most likely improve their health overall.
*I am by no means certain that this is their stance, I’m going off the memory of having read them say something along these lines on this forum, but let’s not make any assumptions based merely on a memory and instead hope that they can state in this thread one way or another whether this really is their position
When questioned on this forum about why certain nutrients or combinations of nutrients aren’t included in their product (often for example those found in what people often describe as ‘superfoods’), the creators state (if my memory serves me correctly - hopefully they can confirm/deny in this thread)! that it is because these nutrients have not been scientifically proven to be of considerable nutritional benefit, and that to include them would be to incorporate pseudoscience into the product’s formulation, when they would rather only incorporate hard science. They also state that Huel has importantly been formulated as a one-size-fits-all product and that in many cases different people have different nutritional/health needs, desires and beliefs and that it wouldn’t make sense for Huel to be able to cater to each person’s individual scenario.
I totally understand, empathise and agree with these positions, and don’t seek to argue against them. Huel is a truly great product and I swear by it. And I should also mention that I do appreciate Huel includes a range of phytos as it is (listed here: https://uk.huel.com/pages/phytonutrients-in-huel) but certainly nowhere near all of them.
Now onto my question - in the spirit of continuing to ‘hedge ones bets’ but with a desire to edge closer to a ‘complete’ (see definition above) nutritional intake, whilst at the same time retaining the convenience and ‘lazy factor’ of Huel and supplementation, can anyone recommend a supplement product or products which incorporate the broadest range of all the naturally occurring phytonutrient combinations found in foods but not found in Huel which are conjectured (beyond what has as yet been hard scientifically evidenced) to be of considerable nutritional benefit ?
One of the great things about Huel vs many supplements is that it is actually made from real food, and its nutritional profile largely comes from what naturally occurs in the food Huel contains - I’d like especially to hear which products people can recommend which echo this method of formulation.
I’d like to be in a scenario where I’m using Huel to do the ‘heavy lifting’, covering all the basic (scientifically proven) building blocks of a great diet and nutritional intake, and using another product (or perhaps combination of products) that ‘boosts my chances’ (one has to talk in this language when operating in the realms of pseudoscience) even further of coming closer to a broad and balanced diet of real food.
I have actually seen a number of people on this forum discuss something similar in the past, in which they say they use other supplements in addition to Huel, broadly speaking for the reasons described in this post. It would be great for those people to chime into this thread with those suggestions as I can’t find them all using the search function!
Thanks! And I hope if nothing else that this sparks an interesting discussion 