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

681–690 of 1001 posts

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

#681

Post by 3pt14159 »

codingdave wrote: post #656
ajamesm wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 replace…

But we have made surgery mistakes along the way. We have made food mistakes along the way. And drug mistakes, and flight mistakes, and war mistakes.

It hurts to get better. But it should also hurt the companies making the mistakes themselves, and for companies that make things like food and drugs there should be balanced regulations. Iteration should happen on small scales, but licenses and inspections should be enforced as you grow.

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

#682

Post by dave_sullivan »

splawn wrote: post #660
dave_sullivan wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Nope, I'm using it in the "evolutionary algorithm", "evolution as mathematical optimization" sense.

> It is an optimizer for breeding and nothing more.

I really disagree there. Humans did not evolve in a vacuum; their are a ton of systems and subsystems that evolved across different species leading up to humans. I don't have time to write an essay, but I think you're vastly oversimplifying evolution in pursuit of a binary function. It's just not that simple, and neither is how food interacts with our body.

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

#683

Post by leshow »

greglindahl wrote: post #247
deepGem wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am not sure. Pretty much agriculture is eating away vast tracts of forests. Be it in Brazil, India or elsewhere. Now is all agriculture done for food. Not really. Palm oil is an example with a ton of industrial and cosmetic use.

Turning 10 calories of corn into 1 calorie of beef is not the way to save the planet. A large fraction of corn and soybeans are fed to animals. If you want to talk about non-food usage, that's a different issue.

Using a computer, having running water, driving a car, etc are all wasteful activities. And yet in every other instance people seem happy to simply reduce their use to "save the planet". But vegans say you can't reduce meat consumption, you must eliminate it. This seems a stark contrast to everything else, if your argument is environmental damage.

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

#684

Post by Latty »

throwaway101416 wrote: post #102

I had hemorrhoids that would flair up from soy/almond milk or large quantities of corn chips. However, I never had blood loss and it was mostly gone by the time I tried Soylent. After having one drink made with powder version 1.2 or 1.3, I lost about a liter of blood and couldn't move or work on anything that week. Had to switch to yogurt for a month to eat normally again. I think it has to do with jagged precipitate…

"Natural" is a terrible word for describing things when you are trying to make a point. It doesn't mean anything. Natural things can be safe or unsafe, well tested or unknown, healthy or unhealthy, better or worse.

I really wish people would use the actual comparison they are trying to make when they use "natural" - say "food that people haven't tried living on for extended periods" or whatever.

Natural has become an advertising buzzword designed to trick people into thinking something is good because people associate it with a bunch of stuff that "Natural" does not imply.

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

#685

Post by nilkn »

greglindahl wrote: post #41
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?

Ensure and related products in this space have a lot of research behind them, which Soylent appears to have completely ignored. However, this particular problem appears to be a basic processed food production screwup.

Where's this research, out of curiosity? Ensure also has a very different nutritional profile than Soylent. Just because it's a liquid food doesn't mean it was designed with the same goals in mind, and all the details suggest it wasn't.

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

#686

Post by kaitai »

Retric wrote: post #445
fintechie wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite true. Antimicrobial doesn't mean quite what you think; it means anti-some-microbes. Honey, for instance, has several antimicrobial or antibiotic aspects. Some honey is so because enzymes in it produce hydrogen peroxide, while other honey is so for different reasons, not fully understood. If you feed mice a lot of honey, their intestinal flora rebalance -- in one study, for instance, feeding mice honey as a food supplement increased their bifidobacteria and lactobacilli counts. This is actually probably good for digestion.

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

#687

Post by miend »

summarite wrote: post #220
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…

That's probably just me but a lifestyle where you have no time to take a break (or meet friends/colleagues) and eat doesn't sound very healthy and not very desirable either. I understand the desire to optimise eating times and life overall, and sometimes there's a lot of work that seems important, but at the point where you drink a supplement rather than eat it seems there's no life left in what should be more than j…

What about a lifestyle where you have time to take a break, but you don't want to spend that break preparing, eating, and cleaning up after food? You'd rather spend it, say, reading a great book, working on an interesting side project, playing a tabletop game with friends you invited over, or just laying in a hammock reflecting on life?

Due to how cultural values vary, I'm not surprised that many HN readers are repulsed to some degree by the idea of not preparing and consuming a traditional meal. It's just a kind of conservatism, a recognition of traditional values that help us find another way to enjoy life.

In my own time growing up, my family had traditionally prepared meals almost every day together, and yet even as a child I had little patience for it. I was endlessly curious, wanted to explore the world, play with dad, tinker with my computer, read something, write something, draw something, make something. My life was incredibly full of worth and value to me, and I enjoyed it immensely -- and yet, meals were only ever a distraction, merely one of the lesser chores I had to take care of to keep enjoying the rest of my life.

This sentiment is still largely with me today. Today, meals either serve as a mechanism for me to guarantee people I want to spend time with will be in the same place at the same time, or else I'm alone, in which case I simply see no point in all the bother. There are still many things much more interesting and spiritually fulfilling to me than preparing, consuming, and cleaning up after a traditional meal. Gladly would I accept a solution that successfully meets all of my nutritional needs while also allowing me to do any of those other things instead.

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

#688

Post by cyphar »

Am I the only person who is more than a little freaked out by the name choice for Soylent? Sure, I get the nerdy reference but the main point of the movie is that the products Soylent made are made from people. Why someone would name a company after that is beyond me, not to mention that the founder appears to have a cult-leader-vibe.

/shrug

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

#689

Post by blondie9x »

I unfortunately gave up Soylent when it was found to contain high levels of carcinogenic heavy metals. I believe they found it had 10-25x the minimum amount to be considered carcinogenic for arsenic, cadmium, and lead.

It's a good idea to make a product that could reduce meat consumption and food waste while helping the environment but maybe this isn't the best way? Maybe helping people and corporations better manage and track food would be a better alternative. Also all the new types of meat alternatives like new veggie burgers, such as those from beyond meat etc are looking really promising and we should support those efforts globally.

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

#690

Post by anon4711 »

3pt14159 wrote: post #681
codingdave wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 replace…

But we have made surgery mistakes along the way. We have made food mistakes along the way. And drug mistakes, and flight mistakes, and war mistakes. It hurts to get better. But it should also hurt the companies making the mistakes themselves, and for companies that make things like food and drugs there should be balanced regulations. Iteration should happen on small scales, but licenses and inspections should be enfo…

Comparing this with surgery is not fair, I think. Here (with a food like soylent) the gains are low and the risks are high. With surgery, the risks are high but so are the gains. Before you go into surgery you're given a list of 10 ways you might die if something goes wrong. Oftentimes, though, the alternative is certain death (in the very near future).

Edit: I was replying to "But we have made surgery mistakes along the way". On a second reading, I notice that you did not actually mean to imply "it was necessary there so it's necessary here".

Post reply on HN