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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

#891

Post by JeremyNT »

warcher wrote: post #862
fintechie wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "if you put some berries in a blender and drink it, you're getting entirely different nutrition from eating the berries raw!" That second one is a bit of a strawman, but it shows how absurd claims that crushing or grinding foods ruins the nutrition sound. Well, for many foods this is 100% true. For instance, it's not the same eating raw garlic, than freshly smashed garlic ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allicin

Yeah, I was gonna say-- pureeing berries severely impacts dietary fiber, which in turn impacts glycemic index, since your body no longer has to work around nearly as much cellulose to get to the sugar. It's a physical process that has an impact on a chemical process. And of course you chew your food, but you can't chew anything nearly so fine as your blender does. Here's a more concrete analogy-- sawdust is highly fl…

> Yeah, I was gonna say-- pureeing berries severely impacts dietary fiber, which in turn impacts glycemic index, since your body no longer has to work around nearly as much cellulose to get to the sugar.

When I first got my Vitamix, I did some cursory web "research" which seemed to imply that blending made no substantive difference in nutritional value of fruits. Do you have a citation for this conclusion?

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

#892

Post by skuhn »

Bartweiss wrote: post #884
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…

I appreciate the larger point, but the iron example seems pretty unfair. Soylent is designed to be nutritionally complete as a sole food, or 'neutral' as part of a larger diet. That is, drinking a bottle of Soylent will reduce all of your remaining nutrition needs by the same proportion. The result is that the balance of a diet hinges on the non-Soylent parts. If the man with too much iron and the woman with too litt…

I'll expand a bit more on my point with the iron content of Soylent.

I picked iron out of the list to focus on because it's not water soluble and that makes it more problematic. I bet there are issues across the board with the nutrient content in Soylent.

Excess iron in your diet can be a health problem because your body has no efficient way to dispose of it. The main mechanism for shedding iron is via blood loss! You aren't going to die if you get even 40mg of iron in a day, but consistently ingesting too much iron can be problematic.

This is why you see vitamins with 3000% DV Vitamin C and 10% DV iron -- there's no harm (beyond expensive urine) in excess water soluble Vitamin C, but there can be harm with excess iron.

So if we look at Soylent, with 5mg of iron per serving (IF all of that is actually bio-available), it is not ideal even for the likely majority of its customers (adult men) and even if they only consumed Soylent.

The average adult male only requires an additional 3mg of iron per day, which can easily be exceeded from any number of sources: a multivitamin, a second serving of Soylent, eating a steak, and so on. It's extremely unlikely that the average consumer of Soylent isn't exceeding their daily iron intake (unless they're a woman, especially a pregnant one, in which case they have more wiggle room).

That isn't even considering a non-average adult male, who might need 4mg or 12mg or who knows what.

Excess iron (>20mg) can also cause "gastric upset, constipation, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, and faintness" [1] -- which can all be caused by lots of things, but are certainly areas where Soylent has struggled somewhat.

Mainly I just think it's disappointing that Soylent adopted a naive one-size-fits-all approach and doesn't really seem to understand what RDA and %DV are meant to convey. The FDA is faced with an impossible task to provide %DV for all people everywhere without considering any of their personal variables. Soylent should be trying to go a step beyond that, not just blindly targeting those numbers.

[1] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iron-HealthProfessional/#h...

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

#893

Post by ng12 »

dimino wrote: post #457
ng12 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

But do you understand that based on the way I was raised, eat was the thing you did because if you didn't you'd literally die? There is no cultural value to food, for me. There is no social value that I find appealing about food.

Right, I do understand that! That's the whole point. Your experience is completely foreign to me which is why I didn't understand Soylent's purpose when it first came out. It's like trying to sell an umbrella to a nomad in the Sahara.

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

#894

Post by sn9 »

arvinjoar wrote: post #556
kiba wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk made himself into an expert. I would consider him an authority on rocketry.

Kind of proving my point? :) He did have to go aginst the grain though[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P8UKBAOfGo

He's hardly a typical case.

People who get into graduate physics programs at Stanford rarely are.

And the amount of information one has to add to a solid undergrad education in physics to do rocketry is relatively minor compared to the amount most dilettantes need to add to become an expert.

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

#895

Post by michaelborromeo »

smcdow wrote: post #878
keerthiko wrote: post #875

There's a lot of anti-soylent in this thread, purporting it as a "holier-than-thou" attitude by tech-bros who are too good to eat "normal food". How ironic. Everyone here has had moments where they need to eat something because they're hungry, but are in the middle of something, a team meeting, in the zone fixing a bug, or just up late at night. The standard solutions are to either be distracted by hunger and keep wo…

What's wrong with that? Soylent is _disgusting_, that's what's wrong with it. It would be hard not to question the judgement of anyone who eats that stuff.

I'm not a big fan of drinking milk -- it causes digestive issues for me and a lot of other people and doesn't taste great by itself. It would be hard not to question the judgement of anyone who drinks that stuff.

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

#896

Post by [deleted] »

bufordsharkley wrote: post #123
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 love the Soylent concept. I did it for a good amount of last year (before getting a job with free food). My only complaints: * Too expensive * Too inconvenient (It leaves a residue on everything , and mixing a pitcherful consistently was a chore)

[deleted]

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

#897

Post by WizzleKake »

JeremyNT wrote: post #891
warcher wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I was gonna say-- pureeing berries severely impacts dietary fiber, which in turn impacts glycemic index, since your body no longer has to work around nearly as much cellulose to get to the sugar. It's a physical process that has an impact on a chemical process. And of course you chew your food, but you can't chew anything nearly so fine as your blender does. Here's a more concrete analogy-- sawdust is highly fl…

> Yeah, I was gonna say-- pureeing berries severely impacts dietary fiber, which in turn impacts glycemic index, since your body no longer has to work around nearly as much cellulose to get to the sugar. When I first got my Vitamix, I did some cursory web "research" which seemed to imply that blending made no substantive difference in nutritional value of fruits. Do you have a citation for this conclusion?

He doesn't have a citation because he's wrong.

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

#898

Post by 415Kathleem »

Does anyone else think that Soylent in and of itself is kind of ridiculous? I mean, I'm sorry that people are getting sick, and I'm thankful no one has gotten gravely ill- but come ON. You're seriously too busy to eat your meals now? The only people who would truly be too busy to eat are not the people who work in tech. And I say this as someone who works in tech. The people who would actually need Soylent couldn't afford it. /End rant

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

#899

Post by nemo44x »

webscaleizfun wrote: post #497
nemo44x wrote: post #44

A well cooked meal and wine - my greatest joys in life. Simple, romantic and fulfilling. Add butter. Add cream. A beautiful pan sauce from a well timed reduction. A cool glass of white wine in the hot kitchen as all the flavors come together. The scent of fresh cut shallots still lingering as the garlic in the pan sweats. I don't judge anyone for making food and drink a footnote in their life. I enjoy cooking as much…

Now, your gonna probably call me crazy, but take a bottle of cheap wine and throw it in the blender before ya drink it, failing that, a mixmaster works too. Completely changes the complexion of the wine when you do this, generally makes it quite a bit better.

It sounds crazy, yes. I imagine you're exposing it to a ton of oxygen very rapidly. Not just letting the wine breath but hyper ventilating it!

I suppose you could pour it in a carafe and shake it as well. But trying a blender sounds like fun!

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

#900

Post by jly »

blondie9x wrote: post #689

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…

I highly question the claims that soylent is better for the environment. This product's primary ingredient is soy. Imagine we replaced a good chunk of the currently consumed food with this. That would require field after field of soybean crops. The lack of diversity in this kind of growing would result in an unprecedented level of industrial agriculture, which is one of the great issues we face as a world population.

We should be encouraging less monoculture, with larger and more diverse crop variety. It is also possible to do in a sustainable way while still consuming some meat. Large-scale production of products like soylent is exactly the opposite of the direction we need to be going to help the environment.

This has some further background material: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html

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