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Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

latimes.com

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Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#11

Post by djsumdog »

I'm really amazed by all the supporters on here. When I first heard about Soylent, I thought it was a terrible terrible idea. I mean, there's so much to food. It's not just eating it, it's all the flavours and ingredients and cooking with friends and loved ones and parties and such. I'm guessing most people on here use it as a supplement + regular food, but when I saw it originally, it seemed like it was intended to be someone's only source of food.

I think I'll just stick to Quest bars when I'm too busy to eat right. :-P

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#12

Post by themodelplumber »

Is it possible they are getting reports based on allergies? I once (cringe) alerted a local bakery to their tainted ingredients that were causing illness, only to discover years later that it was a food intolerance issue on my side. And--same symptoms as reported in this LA Times article.

I've also heard that if you eat a lot of something, you can develop an intolerance to it, but am not sure if that's really true, or under what circumstances.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#13

Post by kbutler »

shas3 wrote: post #7

I suffered very unpleasant nausea after eating bars from a particular shipment of Soylent food bars. Soylent is now forever (or at least in the near future) associated for me with those bouts of nausea. That's the unfortunate thing about nausea, one episode related to a particular food can ruin that food forever for you.

It does tend to fade with time - I was violently ill on a long car ride after eating at a fast food restaurant. I couldn't eat there for about a year afterward (but I still won't touch bacon there, a decade later...)

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#14

Post by throwaway898908 »

Not putting solid food into your system for long periods of time (months, years) will destroy your ability to digest solid food when you start refeeding. I've seen people in eating disorder facilities who have lived on diets of liquid food (historically Ensure, basically the same thing) who have not defecated for months, and when they start eating again suffer for weeks and weeks from horrendous constipation, often requiring further hospitalization. This has happened to me.

Your ability to digest basically shuts down, your intestines stop moving what little solids there are through you.

Not eating solid food is not good for you. Don't do it.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#16

Post by untog »

kartD wrote: post #5

Still waiting for the facts, but I'm pleasantly surprised and impressed by Soylent's response. I think they're doing the right thing.

Why would you be pleasantly surprised? They have a product that's making people sick - telling you not to eat it is literally the bare minimum they could do. They haven't even issued a recall, given refunds...

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#17

Post by Alex3917 »

yladiz wrote: post #4

> “Our tests all came back negative for food pathogens, toxins or outside contamination,” the company wrote. If that's true, then it could be part of the formulation that causes a small percentage of people to get sick. Maybe it's akin to how cilantro causes some people to have a very alkaline taste when they eat it.

There are lots of foods that you can develop a sensitivity to if you eat them more than a couple times per week. So it might not even be a permanent intolerance, but rather something that's more transient.

E.g. supposedly if you eat wine cap mushrooms more than twice in a week then you'll be throwing up everywhere, but then you'll be fine again to eat them a week later.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#19

Post by nkozyra »

catshirt wrote: post #9
nkozyra wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it the version or the process? This isn't software, you have a lot of mechanisms & parties in play. The biggest thing at risk here is reputation. Let me draw a comparison: how much worse would it have been for Samsung to just halt production of the Galaxy S7 then to race forward and produce a new, still-exploding version?

rollback both to a working combination? in your analogy, it would be equivalent to Samsung putting its previous phone back into production.

Could be; in both situations there's enough external impact on the entire production process that reverting everything back to normal* still means people get sick.

* even normal could be in doubt. it's entirely possible this happened before and there weren't enough reports to warrant any concern.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#20

Post by antisthenes »

I understand why people get Soylent, but I'm also wondering why people choose to trust a company to provide the powder for them instead of making it themselves.

Not only would that save you quite a bit of money (Soylent is a pretty poor value proposition if you need to consume more than 2000 calories), but you would then personally control the freshness of the ingredients.

There are so many recipes at diy.soylent.com/recipes and many of them are made from ingredients that combat the main problem of buying food at the supermarket - spoilage and waste, by letting you pre-mix months worth of food that doesn't go bad. And with the money saved compared to actual Soylent you can supplement with whatever fresh foods from time to time.

It's not like the nutritional profile of Soylent is hard to achieve - all you have to do is solve a system of equations for the necessary macros and vitamins.

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