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

651–660 of 1001 posts

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

#651

Post by widdma »

athenot wrote: post #621

I understand the time-saving aspect of this product. I understand that one's schedule can be so intense that taking the time to cook & eat is impossible, though I posit that the mental down-time offered by meals is beneficial to better process what we're thinking about throughout the day (disclaimer1: I can't back this up with data as I only have anectodal evidence). But the real issue I have is diet monotony. We liv…

As an aside "nutritionist" is not a legally defined term. Any quack can call themselves a nutritionist. Some may have had some training, but it's not necessary science based or complete.

On the other hand, "dietitian" is a registered and regulated profession of which practitioners have a recognized university qualification.

TLDR: be skeptical of nutritionist.

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

#652

Post by kaitai »

Matachines wrote: post #85
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…

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…

I think you're right -- Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need, and it's marketed with a message that appeals to men, unlike SlimFast. You gotta admit that all the folks responding who are talking about how Soylent feeds their programming mania feel way cooler & smarter drinking Soylent, the techy solution, as opposed to SlimFast, the 1970s ladies' drink, or EAS Myoplex Ketogenic Meal Replacement, the bodybuilder's choice! Only one of these companies is venture-backed!

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

#654

Post by ceejayoz »

eriknstr wrote: post #504
n72 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founder of Soylent clearly believes he's an expert in many, many fields: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1331 BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude? I wouldn't call it hybris, though it's closely related. It's a mix of arrogance, over confidence, ignorance, plus more and very prevalent in SV.

At least he's been eating his own product almost exclusively when at home according to that blog post. This gave me a positive impression at the start of the blog post and I was agreeing with what he said initially, but then it went downhill. I would not want to get rid of my kitchen and I would absolutely never replace my food with Soylent, especially now that I've heard of all the people getting sick from it. Also,…

> At least he's been eating his own product almost exclusively when at home according to that blog post.

I'd note that he got anemia early on in his Soylent journey because he forgot iron was a basic nutrient.

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

#655

Post by miend »

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…

> It's not just eating it, it's all the flavours and ingredients and cooking with friends and loved ones and parties and such.

One possible angle for explanation is that if you're already missing these things, there's only upside. Additionally, it seems most who use soylent don't use it to replace all meals, but only some where time savings is the primary consideration. Anecdotally, I searched for bars that would do the same thing some years ago, because I had no patience for cooking anything, no friends or family to enjoy it with, and always something more interesting to use my time for.

That's still largely true today. Cooking anything more than a very simple meal is a big indulgence, and will leave me questioning why I spent all the time I did preparing it. When cooking these days, usually I will prepare a few days' worth of food at a time, sacrificing time in the short-term for savings later without feeling pressured to eat something quick and unhealthy (and potentially expensive).

Soylent -- the idea, not necessarily any particular product -- seems very attractive in this case.

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

#656

Post by codingdave »

ajamesm wrote: post #647
dankohn1 wrote: post #633

Just a quick counterargument from a regular Soylent consumer: I drink a coffiest for breakfast every morning and drink two liquid Soylents on days when I don't have time for a nice lunch or dinner. It's convenient, healthy and tastes good. I've never had any intestinal troubles. I use it as a meal replacement, not a complete food replacement. It sucks that they included this ingredient in their powder and bars that h…

"doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way" I'd love to see a restaurant use that line. Food safety is hard!

Or a surgeon. "Sorry, but surgery is hard and we all make mistakes along the way!"

The statement is actually true... but you need to hold yourself to a higher standard when your product can have an impact on people's health. Of course, stopping the product while investigating the cause sounds like they are taking it seriously, so hopefully it will all work out in the end.

But I'm not worried either way - meal replacement shakes have been around a long time, and despite the marketing, Soylent isn't that different than its competitors. So hit GNC on the way home and get whatever works for ya.

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

#657

Post by [deleted] »

Chathamization wrote: post #637
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…

> 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. That's not true though. Look at the nutritional information for MRPs compared to soylent. 3 meals on an MRP will give you 21% of your daily value of potassium; Soylent will give you 100%. 3 meals will give you 12% of your dietary fiber from MRPs, 96% from MRPs. The goal of Soylen…

[deleted]

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

#658

Post by delecti »

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.

A 400 calorie bottle of Soylent has 9g of sugar, a 181 calorie bottle of Slimfast has 18g of sugar. That's 4 times as much sugar per calorie. Similarly, a 220 calorie bottle of Ensure has 15g of sugar, about 3 times as much per calorie. Cynically, Slimfast is for people trying to convince themselves that they're being healthy and losing weight, and Ensure is for people who have to stay hydrated while suffering from diarrhea. It's hardly a surprise why they hasn't caught on with the HN crowd as meal replacements like Soylent has: they're not made for it.

The spin of the marketing is almost certainly part of it, Soylent being marketed as "don't bother stepping away from that super important coding problem, just have some soylent," but it's also the first marketed (non-medical) product that really aims to be nutritionally complete and balanced. There are certainly criticisms you could levy at Soylent WRT whether they've succeeded at that goal, but at least it's their goal.

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

#659

Post by efvxcgci »

ajamesm wrote: post #647
dankohn1 wrote: post #633

Just a quick counterargument from a regular Soylent consumer: I drink a coffiest for breakfast every morning and drink two liquid Soylents on days when I don't have time for a nice lunch or dinner. It's convenient, healthy and tastes good. I've never had any intestinal troubles. I use it as a meal replacement, not a complete food replacement. It sucks that they included this ingredient in their powder and bars that h…

"doing startups is hard, and we all make mistakes along the way" I'd love to see a restaurant use that line. Food safety is hard!

Go look into health inspection reports. Restaurants of all kinds routinely violate health codes.

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

#660

Post by splawn »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #609
anExcitedBeast wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Evolution is not an optimizer for health. It is an optimizer for breeding and nothing more. The only optimizer for health that I know of is medical science.

EDIT: Also I think the term we should actually be using is "Natural Selection" rather than "Evolution" in this case.

Post reply on HN