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

441–450 of 1001 posts

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

#441

Post by akvadrako »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #369
akvadrako wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So instead of Soylent you are suggesting people live in the right country/city with the right people? Uh-huh.

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

#442

Post by LoSboccacc »

wuschel wrote: post #434
LoSboccacc wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eh, as the first trying to bring science in food science and use microbiology instead of dietary esoterism I'm willing to give them some slack sure this turn of people getting sick is worrying, because coming late and sudden hints at contamination, and I hope they can mature enough to go past manufacturing problems but the data they're collecting will be extraordinary for bringing down the layers of encrusted myths a…

Could you elaborate on the data they are collecting? The human body with it's organs and molecular pathways is quite a tough black box to crack, and there is not a spark of a doubt that Soylent - and no one else - will not understand it for quite a while. And then there is human human variations. The concept was flawed from the very beginning. It's sad to see them fail, and I feel bad for the people that suffer becau…

well human response to soylent is already a huge data set, was used so far to add/remove/rebalance stuff and of course drive recalls.

> there is not a spark of a doubt that Soylent - and no one else - will not understand it for quite a while

I agree but at some point this work should begin somewhere, somehow.

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

#443

Post by webscaleizfun »

enraged_camel wrote: post #269
greglindahl wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients. While Ensure has more sugar that I'd like, at least it's not totally ignorant.

>>And I see no evidence that Soylent paid any attention to basic things, like what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients. Care to elaborate? What exactly do you mean by "what you need to also eat in order to absorb the necessary nutrients"?

Different food items will have different absorption rates for the nutrients they contain when passing through your stomach, upper & lower intestine. For example, an apple may contain a small amount of iron absorbed at a rate of 20%, while a steak may contain significantly more, with an absorption rate of 80%.

These absorption rates can also vary widely from person to person, based on the flora in your gut, the drugs you ingest, your diet, and also certain DNA (eg. most East Asians never developed specific lactose related digestive abilities [1]) and ancestry can significantly alter this too.

For example, my grandfather had issues with high iron absorption, thus he would regularly donate blood to get rid of the excess iron in his bloodstream. Neither I nor my immediate family share that issue, but he made dietary choices based in part on avoiding iron rich food (like the iron enriched cookies I used to eat, mmm).

TL;DR: Your body & the food you eat are very complex things to understand, and we understand the tiniest sliver about it. Highly processed food likely misses important nutrients you need.

1 - https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/lactose-intolerance#statis...

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

#444

Post by aembleton »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #161
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…

There's a niche that Soylent has been really helpful in, that pretty much everyone seems to have ignored so far (including Soylent-the-company, who I sent an email to regarding this and received back a form letter response that hadn't had all of its fields filled in). Backpacking, hiking, search and rescue, hunting, anything outdoors. I carry an unopened package of Soylent powder in my SAR pack and I've been glad I h…

You've inspired me to give this a go. I do a lot of hiking, but never considered Soylent or the UK equivalent - Huel [1].

Just ordered my first batch of Huel and am going to try it next weekend. Could make my pack lighter and might be more nutritious.

1. https://huel.com/

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

#445

Post by Retric »

fintechie wrote: post #365
tomp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Antimicrobial food would be bad for you as it would harm digestion.

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

#447

Post by marincounty »

adamlett wrote: post #305
elcct wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really must be a law for everything? That's a slave mentality right there.

Not quite. It's not that there must be a law for everything , it's that there are laws for many things , and often for good reasons. It's not that we always need to regulate new things because new means risky. It's that many new things are actually old things in new guises, and we already know (or should know) what to be concerned about.

We have a law for pretty much everything. Food laws--fine. Most laws--fine.

But in the United States, the fines/fees for breaking these laws are just unfair.

The same old analogy comming up. A rich man get's a $500 red light ticket. He tells the wife over dinner. With the poor man gets the same ticket; it just might be the last straw. I'm getting so tired of writing that senerio, but I guarantee someone's rent is in jeopardy right now because of the excessive penalty.

I don't mind laws. I don't like being overcharged for the infraction.

We live in a society where the rich can do pretty much as they please.

I don't think the founding fathers would approve. For awhile, I belive the 8th admendment has been grossly violated.

Laws--fine, but tie fees/punishment to income. It's way overdue. I believe Sweden took the plunge?

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

#448

Post by webscaleizfun »

benlambert wrote: post #293
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.

You have it exactly backwards. Anyone suggesting Soylent is safe with arguments like "glucose is glucose" and "it has the right macronutrient ratios" is spouting pseudo-science. If you have insufficient evidence that something is safe and a strong anecdote suggesting otherwise the logical option is to abstain. Attempting to bring science into the decision making process when the science has not been done is pseudo-sc…

There is still so much science to do related to food, we just do not have a good grasp of all the nutrients your body needs and what allows you to absorb those nutrients the best. One form of protein from a plant can have completely different absorption rates than that of protein from a cow, its a complete crapshoot to try and blaze a trail with processed staple food products due to the lack of understanding we have of nutrition, and its going to take decades of research to even start to unravel the mysteries of the human bodies digestion system.

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

#449

Post by staticelf »

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…

I lived on liquid food for about a month after a surgery and when I started eating solid foods again my stomach was actually handling it better than it ever had.

I'm not advocating eating liquid foods for months, I thought it was hard as I was hungry all the time in the first week or so. But doctors tell patients that go through some surgeries to eat liquid foods for at least a month before the surgery. How can it be bad? It's not that the bowel movement stops like you are suggesting.

Like others have said, please submit some kind of referral if you're going to make such a statement.

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

#450

Post by tavish1 »

rando832 wrote: post #437
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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_ingredient "An active ingredient (AI) is the ingredient in a pharmaceutical drug that is biologically active. " Does it also reduce the amount of rainbows and unicorns? Your own wikipedia link does not say eating garlic is helpful to humans.

http://examine.com/supplements/garlic/#summary1-0
Post reply on HN