someone should inform the author of this article that algae aren't plants
Some algae are, and some are not. For example most green algae are still considered plants.
Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
31–40 of 341 posts
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#32Clearly there is a market for this 'super convenience' food/drink if people are still willing to buy this product after it made them sick. Even when their own stomach is the guinea pig. The company could do with better marketing though, reading things like this: In 2013, he raised capital to turn his full attention to Soylent, which he named after the science fiction novel that served as the basis for the 1973 movie…
I'm more aggrieved by the marketing (from day one) being a variation of "techies too busy to cook for themselves"
It's not even a suggestion to drink it once in a while, when you're indeed unable to eat something else. It's an invitation to replace all meals with a prepared drink.
It feeds on, and enables, the perpetually-busy/all-nighter culture of SV.
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#33Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.
> if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong.
Chemistry and biology doesn't work like this. This is excessively simplistic/reductive. Food is a concoction of elements of chemical composition (naturally and/or synthetically produced). The reaction of one chemicals is _dependent_ on all of the other chemicals present and the quantities of them. It very well not have been the algae but the reaction of the algae that occurred when another chemical's concentration was increase and caused a second or third order reaction.
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#34Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.
> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection.
>"This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection"
From my perspective as someone who studied drug development and testing heavily in university, and now works as a programmer for medical ehr (hospital) software, I don't particularly think they're being unethical.
The typical Phase 1 trial for a NME (new molecular entity; a new novel drug) is basically giving young dudes some random chemical based on "well it didn't seem to kill the animals, and the statistics we've drawn suggest it won't kill you, want $100?"
Or in the medical software field. Due to the complexity and amount of patient data, and the massive restrictions on HIPAA based PHI, it's very difficult to have robust testing environments for medical software. For a Priority problem affecting patient care, we do our best to understand, resolve and test before support patches code out, but ultimately, we sometimes rely on the same logic. We believe we resolved it, but until it's tested under live conditions, we just can't be positive.
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#35Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.
That's hilarious and scary. Can you imagine the reactions if any other (non Valley?) food business had this approach to food safety?
Obesity rates have tripled in 3 decades, I don't think we can blame Soylent for that, but clearly something major has gone terribly wrong with the industrial food system and it's approach to food safety. That's the hilarious and scary thing. I don't worry too much about what's going on at some small scale esoteric meal replacement startup.
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. A neighbor of mine has an allergy to MSG and it took him years to realize it. He's still does trial-and-error on new foods to determine which ones contain MSG as part of their "natural flavors" (sometimes with painful results). The difference here is that Soylent i…
> People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies. Soylent's words: > "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is…
> That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies.
Obviously there are caveats for their allergy claims. The first ingredient in Soylent is soy protein, and while it's not as common as peanut allergies there are definitely people that can't do soy: https://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/soy-allergy
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#37Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong. What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.
They've been playing this game from the start. I remember the original announcement blog post talking about how he figured out the formula through trial and error. We can eat small amounts of poison and never notice that it's damaged our bodies, for example. Who knows what the long term effects are.
You can also eat small amounts of poison and become immune.
Everything will be damage in large quantities.
And some common things probably do long term damage (e.g. any amount of charring on meat) but we never question them.
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#38Part of the issue is their desire to keep the product vegan. Instead of using known-safe, health-promoting sources of polyunsaturated (O3/O6) fats like fish oil, they use algal sources, which have very little data supporting them as safe/effective sources of O3.
Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection.
>"This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection" From my perspective as someone who studied drug development and testing heavily in university, and now works as a programmer for medical ehr (hospital) software, I don't particularly think they're being unethical. The typical Phase 1 trial for a NME (new molecular entity; a new novel drug) is basically giving young dudes some…
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Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae
#40Where is the FDA in all of this? I would hope that after the widespread issues with the product, they would have stepped in and blocked shipment until safety studies have been done that comply with regulations.
The supplement industry is big in Utah and Orrin hatch has blocked oversight. The upshot is that supplements are barely regulated if at all. The FDA is very limited in what it can do.
I don't think that applies here. According to the FDA Guidelines [1] (page 4) for a dietary supplement:
"Furthermore, a dietary supplement must be labeled as a dietary supplement and be intended for ingestion and must not be represented for use as conventional food or as a sole item of a meal or of the diet"
Soylent is clearly marketing it as a meal replacement which should disqualify it as a supplement.