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

461–470 of 1001 posts

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

#461

Post by amirmc »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #419
skuhn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Soylent will go down as a cautionary tale for anyone who looks at a field they know very little about and thinks "how hard could it be?". Along with Theranos. What Soylent should have built to be worth $100+ million is a way to make a food product tailored to a particular person or group of people that's based on automation and nutritional science. Instead they seem to have a cobbled together amalgam tha…

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…

> ... as the first trying to bring science in food science...

I'm pretty sure food science and studies of nutrition have been around a lot longer than Soylent.

Also, I see no reason why they should be cut any slack. It's not just a webapp that experiences downtime. When this goes wrong people get hurt.

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

#462

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

>>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 not the same as anything we've evolved to eat over the last X million years. How different is it? That's hard to say, but when the CEO is so dismissive of the fact that there are real subtleties here and nutrition science still has a long way to go, it's not confidence inspiring.

On the other hand, what you are saying here sounds extremely pseudo-science-y and hand-wavy. You're basically saying "well, 'real' food is different because something something molecules, it's hard to say exactly how but..."

Soylent CEO on the other hand is arguing from first principles:

- Our bodies need macro- and micro-nutrients - We have a pretty good (although imperfect) understanding of how much of each we need to consume - Therefore, we can probably get rid of all the extraneous stuff associated with nutrient consumption (prep, cooking, clean-up, etc.) and still achieve the same results

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

#463

Post by dimino »

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...

I also need balanced humors and the occasional bloodletting, in addition to a "varied diet".

You realize what you're saying is completely unrelated to the actual article, right?

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

#464

Post by JanezStupar »

i386 wrote: post #404
JanezStupar wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can't have a society without having any social constructs. Nice try at Libertarianism tho.

I am not against society or law. I am against as framing law in the manner GP did.

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

#465

Post by agumonkey »

nether wrote: post #21

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…

`GIt reset head`

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

#466

Post by dimino »

IgorPartola wrote: post #15

Is anyone really surprised that this is happening? Nutrition is hard. Nutritionists don't get it. Would you trust a nutritionist by trade to program your pacemaker? If not, then why do you trust an engineer to formulate your food?

Because it worked?

If my pace maker was running better after the nutritionist tinkered, and continued to do so except for some completely unrelated issue, I'd let that nutritionist figure out the completely unrelated issue and get back to making my pace maker work smoothly, as he/she had been doing for years.

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

#467

Post by dimino »

nemo44x wrote: post #146
BigJono wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the point is that a sandwich doesn't have the macronutrient ratio most people want and a full range of micronutrients so people don't have to be worried about missing anything important if they decide to eat sandwiches for 2/3rds of their meals.

Isn't this why we invented the "multivitamin"?

In a word? No.

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

#468

Post by e12e »

dkersten wrote: post #405
orbifold wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating too much sugar has serious long term health effects.

Ignoring the effect on your teeth, it was my understanding that the fibre in fruit helped counteract many of the negative effects of fructose (at least, keeping your insulin in check). I don't have any proof on hand, so perhaps I'm wrong.

There's afaik a rather big difference between freshly squeezed orange juice, and fruit juices that have been pasteurised. I'm not sure there's that big a difference between eating an orange and drinking the juice - other than the simple fact that the orange will contain "more stuff" that is "not sugar" than the juice - hence it'll be easier to increase sugar intake by drinking, say a litre of orange juice a day, and eating some food - rather than eating six(?) large oranges and being reasonably full.

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

#469

Post by sambe »

joeyspn wrote: post #458
sambe wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those properties may not be relevant to you when consuming garlic anyway. The vast majority of such studies are showing the properties in isolation (petri-dish). People love to extrapolate that to "garlic prevents colds", but it doesn't follow. I'm not going to pay to read the full article in this case but you at least have to be careful about this.

> But those properties may not be relevant to you when consuming garlic anyway. Many of this properties are well known (not so well understood). I posted a random quick example, but there are also studies in vivo (rodent models and humans). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4103721/

My point was that you have to be careful in general. In the specific case of garlic, I don't draw the conclusion from your second link that it is "well known". There are some promising results for some of the individual diseases, but there are also many caveats. The conclusion states:

"Although it is shown that garlic may have a significant clinical potential either in their own right or as adjuvant therapy in different disorders, however, due to some issues, such as methodological inadequacies, small sample sizes, lack of information regarding dose rationale, variation between efficacy and effectiveness trials, the absence of a placebo comparator, or lack of control groups more standard experiments and researches are needed to confirm the beneficial effect of garlic in various diseases."

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

#470

Post by espadrine »

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

Aren't you severely grinding it with your teeth, saliva, and gastric acids anyway?

(Honestly asking, I have no idea.)

Post reply on HN