Move fast and break things, including people's GI tracts. The fact that Soylent powder is at "version 1.6" and causing these problems points to gross version number inflation. This is a showstopper. Rob Rhinehart asserts that the human body is "just chemicals," yet a vat of elemental hydrogen, oxygen, carbon etc. would seem to behave a little differently from a human body composed of reproducing cells and structured organs. His CS background has made him consider the body a narrowly deterministic system that requires a minimum of sanity-check testing before releasing it upon the world. We're the beta testers here. Real world, physical systems have vast amounts of variability that techies don't seem to appreciate. I won't be surprised to see VC funds starting to require deep involvement of health professionals for companies in the diet/medical space, especially in light of Theranos and now this.
Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
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Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#22I 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…
> I'm also wondering why people choose to trust a company to provide the powder for them instead of making it themselves.
Are you really wondering that? The people that buy this stuff are the ones that won't even make themselves a meal. You think they're gonna make the powder themselves?
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#23Might it be soy allergy?
I honestly see no reason to halt production entirely just because a small percentage of people are having allergic reaction.
Can they not just add an allergy warning?
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#24I'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…
> I think I'll just stick to Quest bars
Oooh, protein bar talk! Lately I'm liking EAS Myoplex 30 Chocolate Peanut Butter and NuGo Dark Mint Chocolate Chip. For when I'm uh..."too busy"...
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#25I 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...)
sounds like it has not faded at all...
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#26Man, this is a bummer. As much as I hate the concept of Soylent as food, I see it as the only way to scale food production for the growing population, without killing our planet. The other options are still in the labs. Artificial tissues for instance. Vertical farming is one alternative, but that is again fraught with massive energy consumption. I hope Soylent gets to solve this.
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#27Not 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 r…
I don't advocate for or against liquid diets necessarily - and I realize this is overtly a throwaway account - but this sounds pretty pseudo-sciency to me, anecdote notwithstanding.
At bare minimum, include some citation here.
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#28> Soylent said there shouldn’t be any issues with its premade drinks, which cost slightly more than just the powder.
Interesting. I tried the premade drinks (Soylent 2.0) a couple of months ago and within an hour had stomach cramps and was forced to retreat to the bathroom.
Unlike a software bug it's mentally very hard to forgive -- I love the idea of Soylent but doubt I will ever try it again, in any form.
Serious question: why is it so hard for them to find the root cause of these issues? There are a limited number of ingredients, all of which are surely well documented and tested.
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#29What %? What % of people normally get sick from food?
Just curious, not defensive..
Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick
#30Halt production? It seems these soylent formulations are versioned. So can't they revert back to an older version till they fix the issue? Or its not as simple as this?
they don't know what's causing it. If you just revert the formula, that doesn't mean the ingredient causing the problem has been removed. Contaminated soy protein is contaminated soy protein (for ex). Changing the amount of contaminated soy protein in your drink isn't going to fix anything.
The solution is obviously to create $n$ groups for each newly added ingredient in the previous version, randomly assign customers to a group and ship them a version with one ingredient added, then use R's prop.test to analyze the failure rate of the formulations. /s