Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 1001 posts

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

#361

Post by akvadrako »

warfangle wrote: post #140
djsumdog wrote: post #11

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…

I'm still curious why the soylent thing has hit it off in the HN crowd and not, say, Slimfast. Which is basically the same thing but with more production hardening. Maybe fragile masculinity? IDK.

The one thing that makes all the recent food alternatives like Soylent interesting is that they are nutritionally complete, or at least aim to be. Especially if you are eating vegetarian, it's easy to miss something vital without being very careful what you consume.

I use a Soylent-like products occasionally just to increase my chances of my body getting all the specific nutrients it can use.

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

#362

Post by iaskwhy »

_23sd wrote: post #310

I guess one great thing about Soylent threads is bringing all the urban myths around nutrition out into the open. People in this thread believe everything from "people on liquid diets don't poop!" to "if you put some berries in a blender and drink it, you're getting entirely different nutrition from eating the berries raw!" That second one is a bit of a strawman, but it shows how absurd claims that crushing or grindi…

I thought the biggest problem with blending stuff is the quantity I'll be having compared to having just one unit of something. For example, I wouldn't eat 3 oranges in a row but I would definitely drink them if blended.

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

#363

Post by amelius »

slg wrote: post #278
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…

One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise. Sometimes they get lucky and it works despite something like Uber's or Airbnb's total ignorance of the law. Sometimes it fails like with numerous cryptocurrency companies relearning why the finance industry has so many dang regulations. Seems like Soylent i…

> One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise.

One of the biggest flaws of consumers is that they can't tell low tech from high tech. Writing a shiny CRUD website is not high tech.

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

#364

Post by TeMPOraL »

markdown wrote: post #275
hvidgaard wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then. It works well for menial programming tasks where time is the limiting factor. Incidently, those are the problems where you can for the most part jump out and right back in without too much overhead. But when facing a hard problem, getting up and away from the computer, and cooking a meal always mean I'll solve the probl…

> I used to do that as well when I was younger. Obviously not with Soylent, that wasn't around then. Is Soylent ramen for rich people?

Maybe, except it seems better to your body than most normal meals you eat ;).

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

#365

Post by fintechie »

tomp wrote: post #344
fintechie wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "if you put some berries in a blender and drink it, you're getting entirely different nutrition from eating the berries raw!" That second one is a bit of a strawman, but it shows how absurd claims that crushing or grinding foods ruins the nutrition sound. Well, for many foods this is 100% true. For instance, it's not the same eating raw garlic, than freshly smashed garlic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allicin

But does that change the nutritional value of garlic (as opposed to changing just the taste)?

If you lose allicin you lose some nice properties (antimicrobial, antiinflammatory, etc):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10594976

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

#366

Post by tempestn »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #166
couchand wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If there were a device I could put in my mouth and in 30 seconds everything were flossed"... I think what you're looking for is dental floss.

If it takes you less than a minute to floss you're probably doing it wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PreNWWOYfI#t=32s

With a little bit of practice you can easily do it as demonstrated there in under a minute.

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

#367

Post by DanBC »

contingencies wrote: post #51
deepGem wrote: post #26

Man, 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.

It's a fair concern, though many people forget that reducing food wastage is a great way to scale too: Roughly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year. http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/mb060e/mb060e00.htm At Infinite Food we are working to offer a broader, home kitchen-like degree of choice in personalized hot meal preparation, but usi…

Are you having any influence on product grading?

A large source of food waste is that some vegetables just don't meet over strict supermarket standards, and these are just ploughed back into the ground.

One tv show about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVk31Yv9vlg (the farming bit starts at about 5 minutes in)

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

#368

Post by Quarrelsome »

JanezStupar wrote: post #330
Quarrelsome wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, law is social contract between peers, not slave=>master.

A contract you had no participation in drafting and never signed, yet you are compelled at gunpoint to uphold it. Nice spin tho.

well if every generation had to write their laws from scratch we'd never get anything done. You have to accept that as someone coming into an already occupied world that some rules will have been made prior to your birth. You can campaign against them but just don't expect not to be challenged if you break them.

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

#369

Post by NumberCruncher »

akvadrako wrote: post #351
NumberCruncher wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need Thanks god for creating apples and bananas and thanks the grocery stores for selling them all the year round. And thanks the Germans for putting a bakery on every corner.

Those are not nutritionally complete, fruits go bad and most people don't live next to an open bakery.

Not all of your meals has to be "nutritionally complete".

You can store apples during the whole winter if you have below 0 degrees outside. We did it when I was young.

Quality of life does not starts with a 6 digit salary and ends with working on the next Uber for X. Living in the right country/city with the right people can case you a lot of happiness. I know because I was born behind the iron curtain.

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

#370

Post by NumberCruncher »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #359
NumberCruncher wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I do not understand in detail is just an "urban myth".

With nutrition you can safely assume most things you hear are bullshit.

I do not think so. The statement that keto is the best diet even if it causes rectal bleeding sounds reasonable to me [source: HN]. I go now and take a fat-shake. Cheers!
Post reply on HN