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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

#831

Post by werdna123 »

zebraflask wrote: post #644
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…

It might just be an irrational perception, but when this first came out and got some media attention, I thought it was a great example of the attitude that some engineers/developers have: "too good to do something normal like eat a sandwich, the only thing that matters is more coding." It struck me as a fundamentally antisocial product developed by someone who might have some kind of an eating disorder. But, like I s…

Can you keep a sandwich in your backpack for weeks and it won't go bad? Can you eat a sandwich without any crumbs? Can you eat a sandwich in meeting rooms with "Drinks allowed but no food allowed?"

There are many more use cases than you have thought of

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

#832

Post by slang800 »

briandear wrote: post #289
slg wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise. Sometimes they get lucky and it works despite something like Uber's or Airbnb's total ignorance of the law. Sometimes it fails like with numerous cryptocurrency companies relearning why the finance industry has so many dang regulations. Seems like Soylent i…

AirBnB and Uber are as ignorant of the law as a medicinal marijuana dealer selling in Texas.

If ignorance gets you a 30-something billion dollar valuation, then maybe it isn't such a bad strategy after all.

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

#834

Post by sowhatquestion »

skuhn wrote: post #286
Animats wrote: post #196

Soylent made such a big deal of being a "tech company", and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute. What they didn't have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about "sending samples out" to external labs. It's not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are pro…

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…

>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.

Terrible analogy. Unlike Theranos, Soylent has been shipping their core product to many satisfied customers for over two years. The recent quality control issues are real, and they are troubling, but they don't invalidate Soylent's thesis that an engineered staple food could save people time and money. By contrast, the kind of small-sample blood analysis Theranos aimed to do may never have been possible in the first place, which is why informed investors never touched their product.

>We know that different people have different dietary needs.

Better pull Ensure from all the hospitals then, just to be safe.

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

#835

Post by jamiek88 »

paavokoya wrote: post #812
ddeck wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, I'd also point out that the term "nutritionist" doesn't even mean anything is most jurisdictions, as highlighted by the following anecdote: "A demonstration of the ease in which it is possible to become an accredited nutritionist can be seen in Dr Ben Goldacre's successful application to have his dead cat Hettie accredited as a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Cons…

I'd also point out that the term "nutritionist" doesn't even mean anything is most jurisdictions As someone who is living with someone becoming an accredited "Nutritionist" I can assure you this is not the case. There is an extreme amount of scientific research and cellular biology that is studied. This may not be the case for all nutritionist courses, but to dismiss an entire field because of one case is extremely i…

Multi choice online testing is not extreme research. A phd is research, a masters is research.

She may well be taking some courses but let's not devalue these words.

A dietitian is at least masters qualified that is what people were pointing out.

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

#836

Post by nickbauman »

rjurney wrote: post #121

Soylent is a bad idea. Your body needs unidentified parts of plants that make you live a decade or more longer if you eat them every day, called phytonutrients. You're just killing yourself by eating shit, may as well eat fast food it has as many nutrients. Fuck soylent, eat a mcburger. Tastes better, same effect.

I think before you jump on this guy for not having enough evidence to support his claims, I think it might make more sense to acknowledge that there are huge holes in our understanding of nutrition. In light of this, Soylent, as well intentioned as they may be, comes across like the folks who used to say that baby formula was all a child needs to be at its healthiest in the 1960s. You have to admit what science backs Soylent as healthy compared to food that is not processed as merely macrobiotic chemicals is notoriously lacking.

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

#837

Post by n72 »

yolesaber wrote: post #824
jayess wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare." This kind of writing is insufferable.

My favorite is when he talks about his enlightened post-kitchen lifestyle. "I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber." Did this dude just leave the stove on all the time and keep the knives pointed u…

Yeah, so presumptuous of the architect to assume he'd want a kitchen. I'll bet this architect also dared to assume he'd want a toilet.

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

#838

Post by GunlogAlm »

ck425 wrote: post #440
GunlogAlm wrote: post #75

I wonder if this applies to Huel ( https://huel.com ), essentially the British version of Soylent.

I've been drinking that breakfast and lunch for a few months and have felt great. Only downside is occasional dehydration if I don't keep my water inkeep up, but that's easy to fix fast and self inflicted.

Out of interest, if I may ask, did you start using Huel to fix a nutritional deficiency of some sort, or did you simply like the appeal? I've heard a fair few people say they feel generally healthier or 'better' after beginning it, which I find interesting.

I've been using Huel on-and-off for a few months — to replace my lunches for a few days each week, or when I don't fancy breakfast, or if I realise I haven't eaten enough calories in a day. I might start regularly replacing my breakfast with it, now.

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

#839

Post by mrob »

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!

I strongly recommend getting a good electric pressure cooker. Getting one has been a huge time saving for me because of how automated it is. Just put the food in the inner pot, put the lid on, and press a single button. It senses temperature and pressure to control the heating element so the food is cooked perfectly every time with no burning/scorching and minimal steam escaping. You can put frozen food in and it will still cook perfectly. If you don't overfill it the only thing that touches the lid is steam so all you have to clean is the stainless steel inner pot. You still have to wait about 60 minutes but most of that is leaving it unattended. The food usually has a better texture than with conventional cooking too.

I learned of these from obesity researcher Stephan Guyenet's blog: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/instant-pot-...

I use the same Instant Pot LUX60 model. I haven't tried any other model.

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

#840

Post by magila »

DanBC wrote: post #718
d0lph wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ensure is not made by Soylent.

Sorry, yes, I made a stupid error. Ensure is most assuredly designed to used as a sole source of nutrition. This happens in hospitals every day where it's used in naso-gastric feeding, sometimes against the patient's wishes. It's used in prisons as a naso gastric feed on hunger striking prisoners. It's used in hospitals for ill people. The makers of Ensure have a wide range of products, many of which are designed to…

Ensure is not indicated for tube feeding so hospitals should not use it for that. I have first hand experience with this after having been hospitalized for Crohn's and put on a liquid diet. For sole-source nutrition in a hospital setting a formula designed for that, such as Jevity, is used. If a hospital tries to give you Ensure as sole-source nutrition they are doing it wrong.
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