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Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

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

#901

Well actual food value was only a secondary feature of Soylent's product anyways, as witnessed by customers still happily supporting a food company that makes tasteless gunk that makes people ill. The primary selling point was that it allowed the customers to pretend (at least to themselves, if not to anyone else) that they were too busy even to eat food. If you're THAT busy, you must be an important, happening guy,…

>supporting a food company that makes tasteless gunk that makes people ill.

Tasteless by design - and that allows it to be mixed with other things that can provide flavor. I've mixed mine with bananas, peanut butter, cocoa powder, blueberries, and more. Some things mix better than others - I'm particularly fond of including a banana.

If it came in a strong strawberry flavor, it would be tougher for me to make it the flavor I want it to be.

>The primary selling point was that it allowed the customers to pretend (at least to themselves, if not to anyone else) that they were too busy even to eat food. If you're THAT busy, you must be an important, happening guy, or gal, right?

This is why I downvoted your comment, so you're aware.

Most people I know who use Soylent simply can't be bothered to prepare or cook meals. It isn't that they're too busy for it, but rather that they dislike the entire process. Whether it is the cooking itself of the cleanup required [0] after.

I cook a single meal a week: spaghetti. That is literally the only meal I have cooked in four years. I make it four or five times a month, every single Monday, and only on Monday. The other 6 days of the week, I don't cook. Which means 6 days of the week, I either (a) not eat at all or (b) eat unhealthy fast-food or food from a local cafeteria (still mostly unhealthy).

I'm not busy - I'm just lazy. So lazy that I've even stopped preparing my Soylent 1.5 because I can't be bothered to clean the blender every-other-day after preparing two day's worth of meals. My ideal level of food prep is two steps: Open, Eat. Granola bars are great for this - Soylent 2.0 is also ideal. I haven't gotten around to ordering 2.0, although I did try Coffiest.

I figure if there is something healthy for me that I can just grab and eat - it's healthier for me than my current eating habits. Soylent checks both boxes as far as I or the FDA is concerned. I've also never felt or gotten sick from my consumption of Soylent.

ps. The answer most people give me is "Learn to cook and make quick and easy meals!" and those people miss the entire point. I know how to cook, I had to cook for my mother and siblings nearly every night since the age of 9 until I moved out of the house. I have over a decade's worth of experience of preparing and cooking meals. The problem is I hate cooking and don't want to do it and hiring a personal chef is outside of my budget.

[0] I'm assuming they're apathetic towards cooking, not they they are slobs. :)

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

#902
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…

This is definitely something I'm facing. I have a pretty deep interest in farming and have a bunch of approaches for "disrupting" it. But you know what my hangups are? Penetrating the culture and getting involved with the industry. Case in point -- where's the best place to buy zoysia seeds? Amazon? eBay? Some random mom and pop place with a ecommerce page? No. The best place to go is to "Bill" who is friends of frie…

What's rough is you can't just google this stuff

Now we call that "rough". Back in the day, that was just how it was. Vernor Vinge, who popularized "The Singularity," observed this phenomenon in his Sci-Fi book Rainbow's End. Now it's possible for the government-business complex to effectively suppress knowledge while technically not suppressing anything. Now, just make it sufficiently hard to search. As far as the general populace goes, it might as well not exist.

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

#903
post #773

I'd bet 90% of coders are within 10 minutes of a whole Foods and btw you might actually find a date there and not the kind that grows on trees.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815651 and marked it off-topic.

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

#904
post #423

chewing is what stimulates the bile gland, bile is what you need to help with toxins removal, you need to chew, no short cut! http://www.spinelab.co.uk/chewing-is-foreplay-for-digestion-... http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/digestion/live...

Can you name any of these "toxins"?

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

#905

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?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3046297

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

#906

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. 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.

But I do, sunshine. Do you?

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

#907

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?

The general rule of thumb is cooked digests easier than raw, blended easier than cooked, juiced easiest of all. Think of it as automating preexisting parts of the natural digestive cycle-- you chew your food physically for a reason, obviously, starting in the mouth and continuing in the stomach. Cooking denatures protein. Pureeing similarly breaks down dietary fiber into smaller, more digestable chunks. Everything is still there (excepting volatile organic compounds that degrade once exposed to air, etc), it's a physical process, not chemical. But physical transformations have indisputable effects on chemical reactions. That's not controversial.

(Caveat: nutritional science is very much in the wild wild west days. It's a jungle out there, even in peer-reviewed research.)

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

#908
post #278

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…

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…

Malcolm Gladwell hosted a podcast recently called "Revisionist History". In one episode, "Generous Orthodoxy" (http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/09-generous-orthodoxy) that explored dissent, Gladwell states that we must "respect the body we're trying to heal".

I haven't been able to get that statement out of my head since I heard it. It's simple, elegant and slightly profound. It (respect) is also precisely what is missing in the tech industries rallying cry around disruption.

Study and learn why an industry has evolved the way it has before you criticize it as "backwards". In doing so, you may very well gain a deep sense of respect for it.

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

#909

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real measure of success is whether the company becomes a cautionary tale before or after its exit. Just ask Marc Cuban.

That's basically admitting a lot of tech companies have the same mentality as snake oil salesmen.

Well, yeah. Was that ever in dispute?

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

#910
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…

A) Maybe you're in a jurisdiction where it actually does mean something? That exception is clearly defined in the sentence you quoted.

B) The claim is not that nutritionists are useless, it's that (in most jurisdictions) the word is useless. The fact that you know a non-useless one does not disprove the claim.

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