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Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

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Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#131

Post by crispyambulance »

livingparadox wrote: post #109
crispyambulance wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any snack that satisfies appetite and doesn't make you sick or fat too quickly would suffice. A bag of nuts, a power bar, fruit, vegetables, canned fish/meat, etc. One can always balance out nutritional intake on subsequent "real" meals. Somehow the marketing folks for Soylent have been able to convince a lot of people that they ACTUALLY NEED a fully balanced meal replacement consisting of synthetic food upon which s…

All those examples you've mentioned fill a very different niche than what Soylent is filling. Most people on Soylent aren't looking for something to keep them from getting hungry until they get a more balanced meal. They're looking for a quick, healthy, balanced meal. Soylent fills that desire, your examples do not.

They actually DON'T NEED Soylent, that's simply the magic of marketing.

I tip my hat to their marketing skills, however. I never would have thought they could get anywhere selling a bland sludge to affluent consumers as a replacement for food... who would've thought that could work? They did it and did it well for a while at least.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#132

Post by mikeyouse »

Caerus wrote: post #40
nimish wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 1) https://o…

It depends how they're structuring everything. They add Omega-3s derived from algae to their product, so that algae is regulated via the supplement standards. The product making people sick appears to be algal flour, which probably falls on the food guidelines.

In either case, the essential standard is whether or not it's substantially similar to a product already on the market. The standard is "GRAS" or Generally Recognized As Safe. If you want to sell milk or vitamin C or whatever, you don't need to conduct your own safety studies since both have been sold for years without issue. You just have to ensure that your product is similar enough to the GRAS product to qualify.

I actually worked for an Algae Biofuels / Omega-3 company in the Bay Area for a period. The GRAS process wasn't onerous but was actually fairly regimented. We conducted uptake tests and enzyme tests on rats over several different period lengths to ensure that the algal omega-3s we were producing had the same impact as other sources of omega-3. Ours were a slightly different form (Ethyl Esters instead of Triglycerides) so our standard to meet was a little higher.

I was on the business side but have an undergrad science background if anyone has any questions.

EDIT:

Forgot to add a link to the GRAS status of the Algal Flour that Soylent is using:

http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/GRAS/No...

They did a fair amount of safety testing to determine its status.

> In a published 90-day subchronic toxicity study, Hsd:Sprague Dawley rats, (n=10/sex/group) were fed diets of C. protothecoides S106 flour at up to approximately 4,800 mg/kg bw/d for males and 5,400 mg/kg bw/d for females; no adverse effects were observed. In a published 28-day study, Hsd:Sprague Dawley rats, (n=10/sex/group) were fed diets of C. protothecoides S106 flour at up to approximately 7,600 mg/kg bw/d for males and 8,100 mg/kg bw/d for females; no adverse effects were observed. The results of a published bacterial mutation study showed that algal flour (5000 microgram/plate) is neither genotoxic nor mutagenic. Additionally, a published study showed that algal flour did not induce a clastogenic response as evaluated by the bone marrow chromosomal aberration test in mice after a single oral dose (2000 mg/kg bw/d).

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#133

Post by cptskippy »

ng12 wrote: post #126
st3v3r wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers" No, they aren't. There is nothing special about what they're trying to do compared to any other packaged food manufacturer. That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer. "It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups." It entirely is. If this happened to Twinkies, people would be l…

> That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer. I think it's the opposite, people are unnecessarily critical of Soylent. The problem is consumers weren't aware they were allergic to algae flour. It has nothing to do with Soylent's hygiene or formulation practices.

I think the attention received is relative to the attention solicited. Soylent has been everywhere in the news talking up their revolutionary product. It's not unlike Apple's Macbook debacle. They launched a product and made a big deal about it, it had a flaw and everyone latched onto it to complain.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#134

Post by saurik »

the8472 wrote: post #44
glenda wrote: post #4

Sounds 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. There always is residual risk. Some new ingredient tested at small scale might work for 99.9% of people, 0.1% has some intolerance, allergy, negative interactions with drugs or whatever. That's far better than lactose tolerance levels for example and yet we're not panicking over the presence of lactose in food. We just learn from problems and label appropr…

As someone who is pretty badly lactose intolerant, the idea that you are using frequency to make my plight somehow sound worse than that of my friend whom I had to drive to the ER to get a shot of epinephrine while his throat closed up and he started to have a hard to breathing, or of the aunt of someone else I know who has Celiac disease, or to someone whose heart medication will become less effective... the reason we don't fret about lactose in food is because the harm scales with the dose (making it hard to even hide enough lactose in something to make a difference without the person eating realizing it and stopping) and even the worst case harm of spending an entire day doing nothing but drinking milk is, on the whole, nowhere near as bad as the violently ill symptoms being described by people who were eating these batches of Soylent (which included stuff like "uncontrollable vomiting").

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#135

Post by Zikes »

st3v3r wrote: post #72
darawk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant. I really don't understand the hate that's directed towards this product. Nobody was seriously injured, it was a relatively small number of people that got sick. Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it…

"Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers" No, they aren't. There is nothing special about what they're trying to do compared to any other packaged food manufacturer. That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer. "It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups." It entirely is. If this happened to Twinkies, people would be l…

I think a lot of people are forgetting about Olestra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects

Edit: I think that a well-known incidence of a popular food product which got FDA approval and saw widespread use also causing gastrointestinal distress is entirely relevant to the discussion.

If you disagree with me feel free to use the comments.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#136

Post by nickff »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #18

>Since its introduction in 2013, the protein drink Soylent has become the go-to food substitute Maybe I'm being pedantic, but Soylent is not a protein drink. It's primarily a carbohydrate drink.

Is actually more of a fat-drink than a carbohydrate or protein drink.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_(food)#Ready-to-Drink

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#137

Post by Retric »

_23sd wrote: post #114
DINKDINK wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

Can you give any examples of reactions between food ingredients making people sick? The usual reasons that foods make people sick are quite specific to an ingredient: digestive issues usually stem from inability to digest a particular sugar, and allergies arise from food-specific antigens. Neither is created or modified when you mix two foods together, or digest one in the presence of the other.

Alcohol on a full stomach will delay Alcohol absorption which leads to delayed intoxication peaks and for many people higher Alcohol consumption. "Beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you're in the clear."

Granted the real issue is drinking more liquor because you don't notice how much liquor you have already drunk.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#138

Post by conjectures »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #115
freehunter wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You feel that way because you're on the Internet. I've never seen the movie, it was way before my time, and it exists in the tiniest amount of public consciousness today. The only reason I know what Soylent Green even means is because people on the Internet reference it occasionally. I've talked to quite a few people about Soylent and I've said "you know, like the movie" and most of the time they have no idea what I'…

Besides, it's not called "Soylent Green". Green was the cause of the shock twist in the movie, but there was also Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow in the movie, which were pretty much what Soylent, the product, is trying to become. The name is appropriate in the context of the movie, although I would have never chosen it.

> The name is appropriate in the context of the movie

Only if you don't see a problem with buying from a company whose other product lines include ground up paupers.

The name is like a stupid teenage joke which somehow managed to survive onto packaging.

Also it's objectively ironic that the problem is related to algae, which is commonly green.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#139

Post by TillE »

ng12 wrote: post #122
glenda wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do stop going to a restaurant once I or someone I know has gotten sick there. Look at Chipotle for instance, they are dealing with similar contamination related problems.

Chipotle's issues were sanitation related. Soylent's problem was people being allergic to an ingredient they didn't know they were allergic to.

You (and Soylent) have absolutely no idea whether that's true. Which is the problem.

Re: Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

#140

Post by jklinger410 »

glenda wrote: post #102
darawk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant. I really don't understand the hate that's directed towards this product. Nobody was seriously injured, it was a relatively small number of people that got sick. Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it…

I do stop going to a restaurant once I or someone I know has gotten sick there. Look at Chipotle for instance, they are dealing with similar contamination related problems.

Soylent is marketed as an innovative beta-style product.

Users should expect hiccups.

This is not the same for a bulk of consumer restaurants.

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