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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

#601

Post by mcv »

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…

Doesn't Soylent contain extra fibers specifically for this purpose? I don't use it, but I recall Reinhart blogging that he added fiber because he was worried about this exact issue.

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

#602

Post by mbillie1 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #253
greatjones wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent". It sounds like you have either more free time or a more a steady work schedule then their target user.

Somehow this seems like an American thing or maybe people in other places make less of a spectacle of it? Always having too little time, always working and being proud to plan every minute of every day (recently Marissa Mayer and Bill Gates and someone else from the US said in interviews they have every minute of every day planned; sounds like pure hell but he) seems very American. This Soylent thing fits in there. W…

Particularly when you are inundated in valley slave culture, being busy all the time is a sign of your importance - you're busy disrupting the market getting ready to IPO, and if you have 10 spare minutes a day in which to regain some semblance of health or sanity, clearly you aren't a 10x developer. It's absolute hogwash and sadly a good number of brilliant young engineers are going to burn out, suffer health consequences, quit the field, etc. over it.

But having employees willing to sacrifice their actual wellbeing for the pipe-dream of getting "rich" is quite beneficial if you're say, a VC, so of course they foster this culture. "Look at how busy you are, you must be doing such important work!"

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

#603

Post by wu-ikkyu »

the_duke wrote: post #598
Shivetya wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but cooking good meals is so damn easy, there are even companies which will deliver the ingredients to very nice meals if you want to cook them. anecdotal at best, but a friend years ago was diagnosed with adult diabetes and told he had to change his diet. this guy never cooked. part of his transition was cooking classes provided as part of his diabetes counseling. he discovered a world of quick and easy meals, many…

Cooking still takes time. For anything decent, you need AT LEAST 30 minutes, usually more like 60+. And then comes the cleaning of pots, pans, filling the dishwasher. That's a WHOLE HOUR I could be wasting my time on HN instead!

Listen to a podcast or audiobook etc. while you cook.

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

#604

Post by fnord123 »

ewzimm wrote: post #597
rl12345 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires you a little more upfront work indeed but once you have your stack mixed and stored it gets as practical as with any other MRP.

I think it goes against a lot of people's idea of efficieny. Why should each person need to research, source, and mix their own MRP if we have similar needs?

Because you might not don't trust a company to do a good job at the price point in question.

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

#605

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

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…

The person you're replying to didn't make any of the assertions you seem to be refuting. They didn't say "soylent is safe" or "glucose is glucose". They asked for academic evidence that long-term liquid diets later inhibit one's ability to properly digest solid food.

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

#606

Post by 6stringmerc »

ewzimm wrote: post #597
rl12345 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires you a little more upfront work indeed but once you have your stack mixed and stored it gets as practical as with any other MRP.

I think it goes against a lot of people's idea of efficieny. Why should each person need to research, source, and mix their own MRP if we have similar needs?

In the past when I was using legal prohormones and needed to feed in a lot of protein and nutrients, a 1 gallon milk jug filled with mix and stored in the fridge was ridiculously efficient. There's no way it was more unpleasant than Soylent; I distinctly remember kind of enjoying the chocolate flavor.

The deal is that people have to know what their body needs first and foremost. Gain? Lose? Maintain? All are different goals and methods. Solyent advertising as an off-the-shelf works-for-all-people might be fundamentally true, but I don't think it can be argued that it's the ideal for each and every person.

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

#607

Post by rl12345 »

ewzimm wrote: post #597
rl12345 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It requires you a little more upfront work indeed but once you have your stack mixed and stored it gets as practical as with any other MRP.

I think it goes against a lot of people's idea of efficieny. Why should each person need to research, source, and mix their own MRP if we have similar needs?

That's why I started the sentence with "if you care about maximizing the quality of your product" -- it's a trade off. If you are ok with getting the average stuff, it's absolutely not necessary to customize your own MRP. The problem is, in the supplement industry, "average" often times means bad, so at least do a little research on any off-the-shelf supplement you're about to buy.

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

#608

Post by FLUX-YOU »

yanjuk wrote: post #580

I would guess the nausea is a learned response due to people forcing the powder on themselves. Perhaps it needs to be introduced gradually with small amounts?

I wouldn't be surprised. I can't drink 2 cups of soylent 1.6 by itself. Mixing with bananas, stevia, coconut/vanilla extract lends to a much better taste.

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

#609

Post by dave_sullivan »

anExcitedBeast wrote: post #585
rl12345 wrote: post #572

Soylent’s product itself has zero novelty in it. Meal Replacement Powders (MRPs) have been around for decades and are popular among the bodybuilding crowd. The only “innovation” Soylent has brought to the table was being the first company to market MRPs to geeks and hipsters -- and that's it. Personally, I've never tried their product because the ingredients they use seemed average/fudged at best (and I tend to avoid…

> Tip: if you care about maximizing the quality of your dietary supplement, research and buy each ingredient individually, and then mix it all up yourself. That defeats my primary use case for MRP: not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life.

> not needing to think about nutrition. I hate cooking, I hate cleaning, and eating out all the time feels wasteful. I just want quick, healthy meals with a decent shelf life.

As I've come around to thinking of the human body as more of a system than a binary switch (sick/not sick), I've come to appreciate that natural food sources have a lot of nutrients in them that are hard to get with manufactured foods.

There's a lot of debate about studies proving this one way or another, but for me looking at it intuitively from a co-evolution standpoint (foods we eat evolved in conjunction with humans) is proof enough to pay attention to the quality of my food. The intuition is basically: food we've been cultivating and bringing around with us for millions of years is going to be more beneficial to our internal chemistry than a substitute we recently made up to save money on production costs.

I also view eating as a chore (except when it's not), so I often end up eating this: black beans, chicken, guac, milk

PS: for the "naturalistic fallacy" group, how do you account for the role of evolution as an optimizer for health vs evolution as optimizer for 20th century economic cost? Optimization targets make a difference.

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

#610

Post by rl12345 »

fnord123 wrote: post #604
ewzimm wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it goes against a lot of people's idea of efficieny. Why should each person need to research, source, and mix their own MRP if we have similar needs?

Because you might not don't trust a company to do a good job at the price point in question.

True. Also many times they don't tell the real story of what's really inside their packages.
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