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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

#241

Post by Taek »

summarite wrote: post #223
Taek wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating a meal takes a lot of time. You've got to prepare it, clean up afterwards, and take your mind off of whatever you are doing. Or you have to order it, and then still usually there's some cleanup and interaction. The liquid Soylent is about as disruptive as drinking water. That's really useful to me when I'm sucked into a programming challenge or research task. Sometimes I'll go 3-4 days doing nothing but work a…

If that's a regular schedule for you - Don't you feel you're missing out on living life?

When I'm really sucked into a problem is one of the few times that I feel fully alive. It's like being in a flow state for multiple days, pushing every cognitive resource I have to reach a solution.

I think it happens less than once a month, and almost always lasts less than a week.

I do wish that I went hiking more often, camping more often, and I wish that I had more social interactions that were free of social and business undertones.

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

#242

Post by Taek »

sgdesign wrote: post #240
summarite wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's a regular schedule for you - Don't you feel you're missing out on living life?

Telling someone they're "missing out on living life" just because they don't do the same thing as you is really condescending.

I don't think it was meant that way, I didn't take offense.

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

#243

Post by soyiuz »

thejacenxpress wrote: post #63
soyiuz wrote: post #57

The name "soylent" comes from Soylent Green, a 1973 sci fi film about overpopulation, where people survive by eating mass-produced plankton, which later turns out to be made out of old people. Naming a product "soylent" has always struck me as borderline sociopath. In this light, the company’s slogan "healthy, convenient, affordable food" is an outright mockery of its costumers.

Wrong, it came from the book Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison in which "Soylent Green" is based off of. However, in the book the soylent is not made from people. The movie added that for....drama

I'm aware of the novel. You are missing the point a bit, aren’t you? It wasn't about the origin of the word. What does one make of a company which chooses to name its product after a darkly dystopian piece of fiction?

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

#244

Post by jonmc12 »

Animats wrote: post #196

Soylent made such a big deal of being a "tech company", and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute. What they didn't have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about "sending samples out" to external labs. It's not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are pro…

I'm not sure the reports say its contamination. Its possible the powder is just incompatible with the digestive system of some people in same way as, say, leafy vegetables or carrageenan affect some people's digestion but not others.

Soylent may be recalling because they don't want to be liable in the _possibility_ of contamination. However, over time, they may find they can make the best product that is compatible with some digestive systems but not others - put a warning on product accordingly.

Cheap, accurate testing of foods for compatibility with a broad range of nutrient absorption rates and microbiomes would be key in engineering foods for everyone. But right now it would just make your food really expensive to the extent its even possible.

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

#245

Post by ericdykstra »

I personally avoid "new" food and "meal replacements" in general, because they look like garbage in a bar/mix sold by a profit-seeking company with their own best interests at heart. The only difference between Soylent and Coca Cola or other junk food is that Soylent promises time/convenience, Coca Cola promises happiness, and most other junk food relies on appealing to its taste or popularity.

I'd be happy to be wrong if it turns out Soylent is the first manufactured food that ends up beating nature, but I would never bet my health on it.

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

#246

Post by bertiewhykovich »

alphanumeric0 wrote: post #168

There is also the question of bioavailability, which applies to drug as well as vitamin intake. Just because Soylent claims to give you all of these vitamins at once, that does not mean your body is actually adsorbing them all at once. You need a varied diet. You can't just eat one thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability#Factors_influe...

Soylent also uses the cheapest vitamers available. While the jury is still out on the difference between some of these compounds and their natural (read: biochemically native) analogues, it's cause for consideration, and possibly concern. The choice of dl-alpha-tocopherol acetate as a vitamin E seems particularly concerning to me -- there's a discussion thread on that here: https://discourse.soylent.com/t/why-does-soylent-not-contain...

While a lot of questionable notions about nutrition circulate in the tech community, this concern doesn't seem without grounds.

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

#247

Post by greglindahl »

deepGem wrote: post #229
greglindahl wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much any vegan diet is sufficiently efficient, if your goal is avoiding killing the planet. No need to eat powder.

Am not sure. Pretty much agriculture is eating away vast tracts of forests. Be it in Brazil, India or elsewhere. Now is all agriculture done for food. Not really. Palm oil is an example with a ton of industrial and cosmetic use.

Turning 10 calories of corn into 1 calorie of beef is not the way to save the planet. A large fraction of corn and soybeans are fed to animals. If you want to talk about non-food usage, that's a different issue.

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

#248

Post by Roboprog »

nsxwolf wrote: post #199

I ate bad chicken once and it made me really sick. Once! Here's a product that one should be skeptical of from the get go - it needs to prove itself as being "real food", and now it's made multiple people sick. It's like Chipotle, but I think worse. Doesn't help they named it after a horrifying product from a dystopian science fiction movie either.

Seriously: "Soylent"??? Somebody thought that would be a good name to market mystery food sludge?

Just the link title made my WTF-ometer peg when I saw it.

As Bullwinkle used to say: "I think I shall now be sick."

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

#249

Post by muppetcore12 »

timdorr wrote: post #74
throwaway898908 wrote: post #14

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 r…

Having entirely lived on Soylent for a full year and having went back to solid foods with no weaning period and no ill effects, I doubt the veracity of your unsubstantiated claims.

Tim...I have a lot of sharp words for you now, probably because members of my family have spent many years inside the food industry.

1) I do not doubt the veracity of these claims 2) They are substantiated. It's clearly your research that is not.

People die because of this kind of ignorance. If you want me to elaborate, I've got the grizzly details. I wish I didn't.

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

#250

Post by muppetcore12 »

beedogs wrote: post #33
nkozyra wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He just told you what he lived through, and you're asking for a citation? Never change, HN.

Look I get it, but there are citations. https://www.reddit.com/r/soylent/comments/3orq9s/is_diarrhea...
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