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Having a healthy, normal period is incredibly important for long-term health in women.

Some women believe that having a monthly period is an inconvenience or annoyance. But an irregular or absent period, or one with severe symptoms, is a sure sign that there’s something else going wrong in the body.

That’s why addressing the root cause of the menstrual dysfunction is often preferable to immediately starting hormonal birth control as a quick fix.

While hormonal replacement has its place in supporting women’s health, many doctors are too quick to prescribe birth control to women whose cycle issues could potentially be solved by a change in diet and lifestyle.

In the United States, 30 to 40 percent of the reproductive female population experience pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS), and as many as 15 to 20 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). At least 4 percent of US women have secondary amenorrhea: a lack of menses for at least six months in a woman who was previously menstruating.

These stats would suggest that nearly a third of women have some level of menstrual dysfunction. I’d bet that most of you ladies reading this article have experienced some disruption in your cycle at some time in your life. (I know I have!)

Fortunately, hormonal disorders like amenorrhea and PCOS are not only manageable using diet and lifestyle changes, but even reversible in most cases.

These hormonal imbalances are almost always caused by one or more of the following:

• blood sugar abnormalities
• HPA axis dysfunction (“adrenal fatigue syndrome”)
• gut disorders
• impaired liver function/detoxification

In this article, you’ll learn the 10 most important diet and lifestyle factors affecting your hormonal function. Keep reading for my easy-to-implement tips for making changes that put you on the path to a healthy menstrual cycle.

1. Eat a healthy diet that controls blood sugar

As with any chronic health issue, the first step is to ensure you’re eating a well-balanced diet that provides you the nutrients you need for optimal physical function. While there are dozens of theories about the “perfect” diet, there truly is no “one-size-fits-all” approach, so I prefer to give general guidelines in this case.

For improved hormonal function, the goal should be to keep blood sugar as steady as possible. A “real food” diet made primarily from whole foods is ideal, with limited amounts of highly refined grains and sugars.

Having period trouble? Here are 10 tips by @AncestralizeMe to fix your cycle before going on birth control.

High-quality protein should be consumed at every meal and snack, and plant foods like vegetables and fruit should make up the bulk of the volume of the diet. Healthy fats should be consumed at each meal as well. A higher fiber intake from plant foods can help with the excretion of extra hormones in the stool.

Micronutrient-dense foods like liver, eggs, fatty fish, leafy greens, and full-fat dairy products provide vitamins and minerals that support metabolic function, detoxification in the liver, and ovarian health.

A balanced Paleo template can be a great fit for women provided they pay attention to the next recommendation listed below.

2. Eat enough to meet your needs

In my work with patients, inadequate calorie and carbohydrate intake might be the most common contributor to a dysfunctional menstrual cycle. I wrote an article a few months ago describing the common trend of under-eating in the Paleo community. It amazes me how many of my clients fall into this category.

Calorie intake and energy balance are the most important factors affecting the development of hypothalamic amenorrhea. (1, 2, 3) In fact, calorie intake is an even greater predictor of menstrual cycle function than a woman’s body fat percentage.

“Dietary restraint,” or the conscious restriction of calorie intake in an effort to achieve or maintain a certain body weight, is a risk factor for menstrual cycle disturbances. (4) While this is likely due to the unhealthy reduction of caloric intake compared to calorie burn during exercise, I wonder whether or not the excessive dietary restriction that often comes from following an overly strict Paleo diet might contribute to hypothalamic amenorrhea and other stress-related causes of menstrual dysfunction.

Use a calculator to estimate your daily calorie needs based on your current activity levels. You may be surprised to find that you’re eating much less than your body needs, which could be negatively affecting your menstrual function.

On top of adequate calorie intake, for many women, a moderate carbohydrate intake is important for regular menstrual function. A range of 20 to 50 percent of calories from carbs is ideal for improving fertility, depending on your primary underlying issue.

If you have PCOS, some evidence indicates that a lower carbohydrate intake (20 to 30 percent of calories) might be beneficial. If you are a highly active woman with normal insulin sensitivity, a higher carb intake of around 40 to 50 percent of calories could work better for you.

If you need additional assistance identifying an appropriate calorie and macronutrient target for your needs, I’d be happy to help you!

3. Maintain a healthy weight

Part of following a healthy, calorie-appropriate diet is that it will allow you to maintain a healthy body weight. Extremes of BMI, either significantly underweight or overweight, are associated with amenorrhea and menstrual dysfunction. (5)

BMI is a poor measurement of health, as athletic women with high muscle mass will generally have a higher BMI, but generally, a good BMI target for fertility is between 18.5 and 30. Lower than 18.5 is considered underweight, and higher than 30 is considered obese.

If you are overweight, eating a calorically appropriate, nutrient-dense diet and exercising regularly will help you to shed the excess unhealthy body weight that might be negatively impacting your hormones. Studies consistently show a higher prevalence of PCOS in women who are overweight and obese, which is likely related to the insulin resistance seen in many women who are significantly overweight. (6)

Eating a whole foods diet with limited refined carbohydrates and exercising regularly can help improve insulin sensitivity and shed excess body weight, reducing symptoms of PCOS.

If you’re underweight, you need to work on gaining weight, primarily by eating more food in general. If your BMI is below 18.5 and you are struggling with dysfunctional menstruation or amenorrhea, your goal should be to gain enough weight to get back into the 19 to 25 range of BMI.

A low body fat percentage is often correlated with amenorrhea in women; however, there is no solid evidence that identifies an “ideal” body fat percentage for fertility. Body fat percentage is not predictive for the loss of menstrual function in either women with eating disorders or competitive athletes. (7, 8)

The ideal body fat percentage for recovering menstrual function varies among individuals. One study found that women being treated for anorexia nervosa recovered their menstrual cycle at around 23 percent body fat. (9) Some women will lose regular menstrual function at body fat levels lower than that, while others won’t. (As I mentioned before, a big part of that risk is related to overall calorie intake related to calorie expenditure.)

Most health professionals agree that the level of “essential” body fat in women is about 12 percent, so if you are lower than that, you absolutely need to gain fat to recover normal body functioning. However, a healthy body fat percentage range for women may be more like 16 to 30 percent, with percentages in the low to mid-20s likely being ideal for fertility. Much like BMI, there’s a big range, and individual differences will determine what is healthy for one person versus another.

4. Exercise appropriately

Exercise is important for fertility, and the trick is to develop a workout schedule that allows for enough, but not too much, movement.

General exercise guidelines for women with PCOS are 30 to 60 minutes of any type of activity per day. A combination of strength training and aerobic activity works best for improving the hormonal imbalances often seen in PCOS and other menstrual disturbances. (10, 11)

Avoid exercise styles that make you anxious or overly stressed emotionally, which could exacerbate the physical stress of training. (12) Don’t go to “boot camp”-style classes where the instructor is yelling at you to push harder, and avoid negatively comparing yourself to other women in the class. Your fitness activities should be enjoyable and low stress and make you feel better about yourself when you leave.

And as you know by now, ensuring that you’re not in an excessive energy deficit is crucial to preventing the most common reason for amenorrhea in athletic women. However, some research suggests that there are women who develop abnormal menstrual cycles from the changes in androgenic hormones (i.e., testosterone) that come from high levels of exercise, regardless of their calorie intake. (13, 14) Eating a carbohydrate- and protein-dense meal or snack post-workout can help prevent rises in testosterone after tough workouts. (15)

5. Practice stress management

I’d be willing to bet that most of you ladies reading this article have experienced a missed period after a major stressful event. So it’s no secret that stress impacts your menstrual cycle.

However, while occasional stress might throw off a single cycle, chronic stress actually changes your hormonal profile and can have a long-term impact on menstrual function. Stress impairs the ovarian cycle through activation of the hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, which affects the output of ovarian hormones like estrogen and progesterone. (16)

Many of the symptoms of “adrenal fatigue syndrome,” such as reduced sex drive, worsened PMS, and even stubborn weight gain, are often related to the impact of chronic stress and HPA axis activation on hormonal balance.

Women under chronic stress are at higher risk for menstrual abnormalities and infertility. (17, 18, 19) And your personality and dispositional resilience to stress may change how much stress affects your menstrual cycle. (20) So if you’re someone who tends to feel crushed by stress rather than thriving in it, you might be at higher risk for menstrual dysfunction when faced with chronic stress.

If this sounds like you, adding in some regular stress management techniques is a crucial part of your period-fixing program. Regular meditation and yoga are two of the easier mind–body practices that can get you feeling better quickly. I recommend Headspace for a convenient guided meditation app and YogaGlo.com for at-home yoga classes if you can’t go to a local studio.

6. Improve your digestion and elimination

Excess hormones are eliminated through our poop, so having regular bowel movements and a healthy digestive system is crucial to good hormonal function.

Not surprisingly, there’s a two-way street between hormonal balance and gut function. Your ability to eliminate excess hormones through your stool will affect your hormonal profile, and fluctuations in hormones can affect your bowel function too. (21)

New research is showing that the gut microbiome has a major impact on hormonal balance. (22) Dysbiotic flora in your gut and/or gut permeability (“leaky gut”) activates your immune system, driving up insulin levels and leading to high levels of androgens. This immune activation also interferes with ovarian follicle development.

To rebalance your gut flora, increase your consumption of fermented foods, as well as vegetables of all kinds. Both starchy and non-starchy veggies contain components that help feed beneficial gut flora, and fermented foods like sauerkraut, yogurt, and kombucha provide live gut bugs that can help boost the diversity of your gut flora. If you have “leaky gut,” following a gluten-free whole foods (Paleo-esque) diet is the first step to repairing the damage caused by gut permeability.

If you’re struggling with major gut symptoms like constipation, bloating, loose stools, or reflux, your digestive function could be exacerbating your hormonal imbalance. Be sure to work with a professional if you need extra help normalizing your digestive system.

7. Sleep on a schedule

Sleep and sleep disturbances are increasingly recognized as determinants of menstrual function. (23) The underlying cause for this is the disruption of the circadian rhythms, which drive the cyclical nature of hormone release and are primarily disrupted by inappropriate light and dark signaling. (24)

In teens, girls with erratic sleep schedules who typically stay up late and sleep in late have significantly worse PMS symptoms than girls who go to sleep early. (25) Women who perform night shift work have a much higher risk of menstrual disturbances than those with a normal daytime work schedule. (26)

The primary hormone that is responsible for these circadian rhythm-related menstrual disturbances is melatonin, also called the “sleep hormone.” (27) Inappropriate patterns of light and dark exposure disrupt melatonin secretion, thus negatively impacting the menstrual cycle.

To get your circadian rhythms on a normal pattern, avoid bright and artificial light at night and get plenty of sunshine during the day. Set a regular sleep schedule and go to sleep well before midnight. If you’re dealing with insomnia, check out these great tips for improving your sleep.

8. Supplement if necessary

There are a handful of supplements that can be helpful for generally balancing hormones, as well as for improving the metabolic disturbances that occur in PCOS.

For women with amenorrhea, I typically recommend supplementing with vitamin B6, zinc, magnesium, probiotics, and methylated B-vitamins. Optimizing vitamin D status and supplementing with vitamin A if necessary can be helpful too. I talk more about supplements for amenorrhea in this article.

One largely unknown B vitamin that has been studied for its effects on PCOS signs and symptoms is inositol. There are two major supplemental types of inositol: myo-inositol and d-chiro-inositol. Myo-inositol improves insulin sensitivity, reduces androgens, and can even restore ovarian activity in women with PCOS. (28) D-chiro-inositol appears to reduce androgens even better than myo-inositol. (29)

It’s important to get both myo-inositol and d-chiro-inositol in a 40:1 ratio, which is the physiological plasma ratio and the amount found to be most effective for promoting ovulation and healthy hormone balance in PCOS. (30) The best way to get these two forms of inositol in a balanced ratio is in a supplement called Ovasitol, which you can order here. (Use my clinician code to get a discount: 127605)

A common herb used for hormonal imbalance, especially low progesterone, is vitex, or chasteberry. There isn’t a great deal of research on vitex; one small study found that 10 of 15 women with amenorrhea recovered their periods after taking chasteberry for six months. (31) Talk to your doctor about adding in vitex as an additional hormone-boosting supplement.

9. Avoid environmental toxins

Our modern environment is full of chemical toxins, in our food, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, and in the cosmetics and hygiene products we put on our body. Many of these chemicals have the ability to affect our hormones and are called endocrine disruptors. (32) These endocrine disruptors are known to have significant effects on your risk of not only PCOS and menstrual dysfunction, but also thyroid disorders, obesity, and cancer. (33, 34)

Chemicals called xenoestrogens are found everywhere; as BPA in our food, phthalates in our body care products, and atrazine in our landscaping. While we can’t completely avoid these hormone-damaging toxins, we can significantly reduce our exposure to them.

Use the Environmental Working Group’s guide to cosmetics to choose toxin-free body care products, and their food scores guide to avoid eating toxins. Check out Chris’s series on toxic skincare products for a breakdown of the types of products to avoid or replace. And see BeautyCounter for a safe supply of cosmetics, hair care, and beauty products.

10. Get acupuncture

While the evidence for acupuncture’s effects on menstrual function is mixed, there is some support for the use of acupuncture for improving menstrual function and reducing symptoms of PMS. (35, 36, 37) One study found that acupuncture was as effective as NSAID therapy for dysmenorrhea, a cycle with severe PMS symptoms, especially cramping. (38)

From my own personal experience, I find that acupuncture makes a huge difference in my stress levels, and I noticed reduced PMS symptoms when I was getting acupuncture somewhat regularly.

Acupuncture should be an adjunct to other lifestyle changes due to limited evidence of its efficacy. If you’ve already made the changes discussed above, you might want to try adding regular acupuncture for an extra dose of hormone balancing treatment.

Next steps

These top ten tips have given you plenty to chew on, and I hope that the majority of you will experience improved hormonal function and a healthy monthly menstrual cycle after implementing these changes to your diet and lifestyle.

However, this shouldn’t be the end of your health journey. While you’re making these changes (especially if you’re not seeing improvements), you should see your doctor for further testing for thyroid issues, pituitary tumors, pelvic inflammatory disease, endometriosis, uterine fibroids or scarring, or any other number of metabolic or structural issues that can cause disrupted hormones.

Consider getting hormone replacement therapy (HRT) with a licensed medical practitioner who is trained in the use of oral or topical hormones. Sometimes a little boost can help reset your cycle and get your own hormones producing more normally.

Check your medications and ask your doctor if you need to make a change. Certain medications can affect menstruation, including: antipsychotics, cancer chemotherapy, antidepressants, blood pressure drugs, and allergy medications.

Finally, if you need help identifying the diet and lifestyle issues that are holding you back from healing, I’d love to work with you. I truly enjoy helping women who are experiencing hormonal disturbances make the changes they need to recover a healthy period and start feeling better immediately!

Now it’s your turn. Did you experience a menstrual cycle disturbance? What diet or lifestyle change made the biggest difference for you to get your period back to normal? Share your story in the comments below.

About Laura: Laura uses her knowledge of traditional and biologically appropriate diets to improve her clients’ health. Growing up with a family that practices Weston A. Price principles of nutrition, she understands the foods and cooking practices that make up a nutrient dense diet.

With her strong educational background in biochemistry, clinical nutrition, and research translation, she blends current scientific evidence with traditional food practices to help her clients determine their ideal diet.

You can find her at AncestralizeMe.com, on Facebook, and Twitter!

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Technology has improved our lives, whether through the creation of new tools or by upgrading existing ones. Taxis were okay, but Uber and similar car service apps make them better (and self-driving cars will improve upon car service further). Craigslist makes classified ads free and easier to access. E-readers save trees and let people store entire libraries in the palm of their hands. Whereas world travelers used to have to wait a month for their postcard to reach a recipient (with another month for the reply), emails sent from Bangalore to Boston arrive in milliseconds. And perhaps most importantly of all, knowledge has been democratized. You can read anything from almost any time period using a device that fits in your pocket. You can talk to people halfway across the world in real time. Without technology, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do on a daily basis. Using the tools created by tech enthusiasts, I can reach millions of people every day and millions of entrepreneurs are creating new lives for themselves and new services and tools for others.

But are there limits to technological progress? Can technology improve everything?

We’ll find out. There’s talk of a “food revolution” brewing in Silicon Valley, helmed by engineers and entrepreneurs convinced they can do food better than both nature and traditional agriculture.

There’s Soylent, the food replacement shake that promises to render home kitchens obsolete save for dedicated hobbyists and save millions of hours better spent working and “being productive.” They’ve raised over $20 million in venture capital funding and are taking orders for Soylent 2.0, due to ship in October.

There’s Hampton Creek, the food tech startup seeking to replace eggs with plant-based substitutes and make food healthier and safer “for everyone, everywhere.”

Now, I’m not one that thinks pre-made foods have absolutely no place in a Primal eating plan. There are some incredible food manufacturers doing some really useful and important things using only fresh ingredients. There’s Exo, whose cricket bars are raising awareness about how delicious and nutritious insects can be. Heck, I’ve made my own foray into the food world with Primal Kitchen™ Mayo and Primal Fuel. In these cases what’s really provided is convenience without sacrificing quality or nutrition. And for most people these days, when time is so scarce, that’s genuinely worth something. I know that matters to me and I’m willing to pay a premium in many cases. But what’s important is that the food doesn’t suffer. That the quality is maintained. That nutritional compromises aren’t made. And that these foods remain adjuncts to an otherwise healthy diet.

The human brain is this planet’s ultimate technological innovation to date, and we’ve used it to improve food before. Watermelons were seedy, fibrous gourds before we used breeding to expand and redden their edible placentas to encompass the entire interior. The wild ancestor of corn, teosinte, contained only about a half dozen kernels per ear, each covered in a stony, inedible casing. Wild bananas are riddled with seeds and mostly inedible to humans. And generations of human intervention created the delicious, well-marbled wagyu breed of cattle. Our ability to wring edibility out of harsh wild plants and unpredictable half-ton beasts with selective breeding has been a huge boon to us as a species.

But bananas, watermelons, corn and wagyu cattle are still complex biological systems. They are food, and we treat them like it. We’re not trying to break down, catalogue, and reduce them to their constituent parts, transforming them into something barely recognizable.

Should we really “optimize” food in this way? Can we?

Rob Rhinehart, the founder of Soylent, thinks so:

Two years ago today I decided to bet my life on the idea that food could be empirically rebuilt. I theorized that food and the body were reducible and a novel foodstuff could be superior to that which was naturally occurring.

I’m very skeptical. In theory, we can recreate all the possible components of a given food — if we could only identify them. With the relatively infantile base of knowledge we currently possess, I don’t think any engineered food powder will contain all the micronutrients we get from real food.

Infant formula has improved by leaps and bounds over the years. They’ve introduced DHA, prebiotics, various specific nutrients like taurine, inositol, and choline, and played with the macronutrients to get it closer and closer to the real thing. Yet it’s still inferior to breast milk. Now, some time out in the future, maybe we’ll finally pin it down. Maybe parents won’t have to take leave at all. They’ll just strap the kid to the android wetnurse, refill its lab-grown mammary sacs with optimized formula, and head straight back to work. Progress!

But you see my point, don’t you?

Every major time we’ve tried to engineer food, we’ve encountered unforeseen consequences.

Margarine was supposed to improve upon butter. It was worse.

Vegetable oils were supposed to improve upon animal fats. They seemed awesome (cheaper, more profitable, “healthier”) but were worse.

Trans-fats were supposed to replace saturated fats. They looked good on paper but were way, way worse.

We can’t foresee what we don’t know. If we’re constructing our diets using isolated, reduced nutrients, we risk missing out on food-based nutrients we have yet to catalogue or whose importance we have yet to uncover. If we construct our diets using food, we get those unknown nutrients — even if we have no idea we’re consuming them.

Look at all the components that make up a simple banana. People usually cite this image as a rejoinder to chemical scaremongering, but it also illustrates the folly of thinking we can engineer the perfect food by mixing together powdered grains and synthetic vitamins. That is a huge list of “ingredients” in a simple food. Does Soylent include every last component comprising the food it attempts to replace?

And even when it comes to what we do know about what’s in food, Soylent falls short (PDF).

It’s got vitamin K1, not vitamin K2. The latter is the form that protects bone and heart health and which is missing from most normal diets. You can convert K1 to K2 if you have the right gut bacteria, but I’m not sure eating Soylent will support that conversion.

It’s got vitamin D2, not D3. D3 is better-absorbed by humans than D2.

It’s got soy protein, which makes for good vegan-friendly headlines but is of questionable nutritional worth when compared to whey protein, particularly in the context of resistance training and weight loss.

It’s fairly low in protein and the protein isn’t of sufficient quality. You can get away with plant-based protein as long as you’re eating a lot of it and low protein intakes as long as it’s animal-based protein. But lower levels of plant-based protein may not be adequate for sedentary people, let alone active people.

Where’s the prebiotic fiber? The latest (1.5) version of Soylent powder comes in at 3 grams of fiber per serving. Were it raw, the oat flour supplying the bulk of the carbs in Soylent would provide a good amount of resistant starch, but since they go rancid quickly the majority of oats on the market are heated.

It contains no phytochemicals beyond the ones found in the oat fiber/flour and soy protein components. Cocoa flavanols? Nope. Blueberry anthocyanins? None. The founder’s skeptical of their importance in our diets, doubting most “humans in history were even getting broccoli and tomatoes.”

Broccoli and tomatoes aren’t the only plants with phytochemicals. Every plant has them, and every human throughout history has consumed plants. Even historically low-plant food cultures like the Masai and the Inuit regularly consumed wild plants high in phytochemicals. The Masai cooked their meat with anti-parasitic spices, drank bitter (read: tannin- and polyphenol-rich) herb tea on a regular basis, and used dozens of plants as medicines (PDF); the Inuit utilized a wide variety of phytochemical-rich plant foods including berries, sea vegetables, lichens, and rhizomes. They also made tea from pine needles, which are high in vitamin C and polyphenols.

In related news, Hampton Creek has promised to render eggs obsolete and replicate their gelling, emulsifying, and binding culinary properties using specialized textured pea proteins. They’ve got a cookie dough and mayonnaise on store shelves and hope to bring pancake batter and a realistic scrambled egg substitute to market. They talk big, touting their ever-growing in-house database of novel plant proteins they plan to use to emulate animal foods.

I get the motivation. Wanting to save the world is laudable. Trying to eliminate the need for cruel and destructive egg farming is a just cause. But from a health and nutrition standpoint, these aren’t the Eggs 2.0 they and their supporters are hoping.

Hampton Creek’s responses to these interview questions are telling:

When asked about the status of the scrambled egg substitute and whether its nutritional profile was similar to that of actual eggs, they answered only the former (“hopefully by next summer”) and ignored the nutrition question.

In another answer, they reiterate that they’re “not focusing on the strict nutritional details at this time… so even if it is a little healthier, (e..g no cholesterol in your mayo) that is a start.” So that’s “healthier”: a lack of cholesterol. They’ve fallen into the same trap as the Soylent people — failing to realize that nonessential nutrients can still be beneficial. And the failure to mention the choline, vitamin A, DHA, folate, and biotin real eggs provide indicates that those nutrients will also be missing from the egg substitute.

Mostly, they don’t seem to care about the nutritional details. It’s about the environment, or humaneness, or cruelty. But for any food to be a worthwhile caloric source for humans, it must contain adequate micronutrition. If you’re going to replace a source of nutrition as complete as the humble egg, you’d better know what you’re doing.

Those are the two most egregious attempts at better feeding through technology, but they certainly won’t be the last. Again, I understand the sentiment behind both Soylent’s total meal replacement and Hampton Creek’s mock eggs. The techies may very well one day address the issues I’ve raised and the issues that arise in the future, and their current efforts may beat the standard American junk food diet (particularly if you throw in some colorful fruits and vegetables, a bit of liver, some raw potato starch, and maybe some whey protein), but they smack of hubris.

And when your stated goals are the replacement of the foods we’ve used for hundreds of thousands of years to fuel our brains and our cells and build enzymes and endogenous antioxidants and muscle tissue and grow new life inside our wombs, hubris doesn’t cut it.

But the potential micronutrition deficits aren’t even my major issue. My biggest qualm is that eating Soylent (even if it’s got every nutrient we require) or ditching real pastured eggs for some equi-nutritional glop that comes out of a carton and lasts for years in the fridge is missing the point of food. Food is supposed to taste good. It’s supposed to be chewed, savored, and shared with others. About the most depressing communal meal I can imagine is a bunch of 20/30-somethings sitting around together, staring into their smartphones, and sipping Soylent. Optimizing food is like optimizing sex; while I’m sure there’d be a few people interested in a pill or device that produced instant orgasms so they could get back to work, that’d be missing the point entirely. It’s the journey that makes the destination.

They’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist. Is stocking the kitchen with Soylent a better option than ordering a bunch of pizzas and cokes for your engineers so that they can get back to work right away? Maybe, maybe not. But the vast majority of people look to food not just to sustain their health and provide the necessary calories, but also to bring pleasure to their lives. To create and maintain connections with our dining companions and to do what humans have been doing for millennia: creating, sharing, and enjoying meals made out of raw plants and animals with our own hands.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’d love to hear from you down below. What’s your take on the techies’ attempts to optimize, improve, and replace real food?

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