Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by mbrock » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:47 AM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #113

Matachines wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time Soylent is on HN people say this. Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals. I order a box of Soylent bottles every few weeks—they come in handy while working or for a quick breakfast or if I have little time and am hungry. I also cook meals with my girlfriend a few times a week…

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

That's a problem of empathy. You can't understand how other people would have this specific feeling or practice. Obviously though many people do have it.

There seems to be something very unsettling to people like you about the idea of "meal replacement". To me it appears to be a kind of cultural conservatism, like it's an attack on "family values".

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

#392

Post by skuhn » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:48 AM UTC

elmigranto wrote: post #284

Roboprog wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I never saw any official explanation, and in my perception it's a joke reference. Anyways, that surely is a talking point in some related conversations, and I guess they went for it for this very reason.

The name is derived [1] from the science fiction novel that the movie Soylent Green was loosely based on [2].

The book doesn't include the cannibalism aspect of the movie at all. However, one wonders how you could be familiar with the book and wholly ignorant of its much more culturally significant film adaptation. Especially when it makes your product's name totally unappetizing.

[1] https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/201541809-Why-is-i...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room!_Make_Room!

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

#393

Post by fasouto » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:51 AM UTC

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.

Your basic premise is wrong they are not the same thing at all. Soylent doesn't replace a meal, it is a meal with all the nutrients. Slimfast was designed to supplement food to lose weight. The nutritional aspects of each are totally different.

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

#394

Post by colordrops » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:51 AM UTC

_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…

Curious what are your thoughts on GMOs.

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

#395

Post by wirrbel » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:52 AM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #178

Meegul wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by unnatural? What is in Soylent that isn't natural ? Food in and of itself is just a mix of different chemicals - be they from plants, animals, or other sources. But at the end of the day, a molecule of glucose from a plant is identical to a molecule of glucose created synthetically.

This attitude is exactly bothered me about the CEO of Soylent when he was first doing PR about the product years ago. It's not a question of being "natural" per se, it's the question of trace elements and how our body metabolizes food. Food is not just a pile of molecules, it's a particular organization of molecules. How your body digests it matters. A bunch of milled and refined powders of macronutrients is simply n…

The main problem with most dietary recommendations is that they oversimplify in a skewed and wrongful way.

From a very basic, we can be quite sure that a very simple model roughly describes the system (as in "there are calories and the human body is bound by the laws of thermodynamics"). We also no that it is not that simple, because a biological organism is a very, very complex machine.

Everything else is mostly the attempt to find a "simpler model" than "its a complex biological machine and we need very large empirical studies to understand it" and mostly fails. In that sense, soylent is on a similar level as the "detox" crowd. Pretty sure their mission statement is not right. They might get some stuff right by accident. Other stuff is wrong.

Of course thinking in "right" and "wrong" is also an oversimplification, as we should probably use "better on the average population" or "worse on average population".

The stone-age crowd has a point in using kind of an evolutionary explanation for what food to choose. On the other hand their premise "we eat what our ancestors ate, because thats what our body has optimized for" is seriously flawed in its own logic, because we won't reproduce the hunter-gatherer environment when switching diets, and they don't account for the adaptability of the genome, as well as the variance of diets among hunter-gatherer cultures and early stone age farmers.

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

#396

Post by webscaleizfun » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:53 AM UTC

Taek wrote: post #294

blub wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that effort level I was hoping you're working on curing a disease or at least something more important than the cloud. :-/

I'm honored that you dug into it. I'm working on decentralization, which I think is a very socially important goal. The cloud is not my ultimate objective, but it's one of the very few short term use cases I see where a decentralized system seems to have the potential to utterly dominate a centralized one. Decentralized tech is very new. It's very hopium, and it's very poorly understood, both by zealots and by non-be…

What are you specifically working on decentralizing? Do you have an end goal in mind for what a perfectly decentralized world would look like? Eg. a SBC in every home & office running a mailserver, webserver, etc

Edit: I think decentralization is great (like say IPFS), but I would not risk health or put off others to dedicate all my time to working on it, social interaction is an everyday need!

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

#397

Post by DanBC » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:55 AM UTC

magila wrote: post #117

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…

Ensure is not intended to be used as a complete nutrition source, so it's not surprising that subsisting on it for long periods would cause problems. For long term use a nutritionally complete formula should be used such as Jevity or Twocal (made by the same company that makes Ensure).

> Ensure is not intended to be used as a complete nutrition source,

Why did Soylent promote it like that? When did that message change?

On the front page at Soylent they have "We engineer foods that offer complete nutrition, value, and convenience." -- here "complete nutrition" means it can be used as a sole source of nutrition.

On their about page they say "Soylent™ is a pioneer in food technology, producing convenient, complete foods designed to provide maximum nutrition with minimal effort."

They also make reference to Rob's experiment of living off Soylent for a month: "and the co-founders quickly realized that this experiment solved a problem not only for themselves but for thousands of people around the world."

In their blog post announcing v1.6 of the powder they say: "r latest iteration in convenient, complete powdered food. We have redesigned the formula to create a superior mouthfeel and taste, while still providing a nutritionally-complete staple meal."

All the language points to these products being usable as a sole source of nutrition, even if they don't actually come out and say "you can use this as a sole source of nutrition".

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

#398

Post by vidarh » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:56 AM UTC

mysterypie wrote: post #189

aaron-lebo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't attribute it to some kind of nefarious gender issue. It's as simple as marketing, which does matter. Slimfast in it's name implies a diet drink, not food replacement. Most people would never even consider them in the same arena and that's due to simple marketing by the very companies that produce them.

Yes, I can see that in the case of Soylent vs Slimfast, customer choice is driven by what marketing says is the intended use. But don't be too quick to dismiss masculinity or coolness factors in product selection. Diet Coke and Coke Zero are essentially the same thing made by the same company (the latter having a slightly different "flavor profile"). Coke Zero exists because some men or many men will not order a Diet…

Coke Zero exists because they decided to try to make a diet version of Coke that actually tastes closer to regular Coke. Diet Coke does not use the regular Coca Cola recipe with sugar replaced, but a tweaked one, on purpose.

Compare to e.g. Diet Pepsi, which is to Pepsi what Coke Zero is to Coke, Coca Cola was for decades worried about making something that was too close to the original (hence Tab being their first diet cola)

Or Diet RC Cola, which is the only diet cola product I've ever been close to confuse with the real thing (my parents insisted I "wouldn't notice the difference" with diet colas as a child in an attempt to get me to accept them, and utterly failed).

If you want a diet cola that tastes like a regular cola, Diet Coke will never be it, and it left Coca Cola with a gap in their lineup for people who weren't as concerned about picking a diet product, but would pick one if there's a diet cola available that is "close enough".

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

#399

Post by webscaleizfun » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:59 AM UTC

Taek wrote: post #241

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?

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…

Mathematicians get a similar mental state from the release of dopamine that rewards working on and successfully solving ever more complex problems. I've also seen engineers comment similarly about it, and it sounded quite like what my great grandfather described when working on a complex math problem over a span of time.

That being said, make time for yourself, all consuming projects will make you discontent with life in general.

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

#400

Post by fasouto » Fri, Oct 28, 2016, 8:59 AM UTC

mei0Iesh wrote: post #181

warfangle wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Branding? I think it's basically an Ensure for geeks. "Soylent Green" is from an old science fiction. I seem to recall Soylent being started on Reddit years ago. They call a recipe "open source", and it grew inside a group of internet culture. It's like how "Gatorade" was neon colored and marketed for athletes, when the same kind of formula was also used for less glamorous rehydration. Instead of being packaged like…

Those articles are clickbait, they don't offer a comparison between both. The difference it's not small it's huge https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Slimfastlabel...