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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

#211

Post by jklinger410 »

chc wrote: post #203
jklinger410 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We are constantly exploring the frontiers of food technology, with an aim to engineering foods which are more nutritious, efficient, and affordable than ever before. Right on their index

Lots of companies say stuff like that. If what you mean to say is "We want to move fast and break things, and we consider this a beta product not ready for the wide market, so we're applying looser controls than most food companies, and this stuff might make you stick," then you need to say that. You can't reasonably expect people to intuit that from generic marketing talk† about exploring frontiers. † For example, m…

The Mexican restaurant down the street doesn't advertise that they buy the cheapest chicken in town and therefore may give you food poisoning.

They expect you to get that point based on the price.

Advertisers are simply not going to do what many of these HN comments are demanding. This isn't a tech app, this isn't a linux distro. This is a general consumer facing product.

They don't have an abnormal rate of sickness and they aren't selling people fish oil. They're using experimental products, which they are up-front about, and have experienced setbacks because of that.

A food product that pleases this community would never make it to market or be profitable.

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

#212

Post by endophage »

dnautics wrote: post #196
hueving wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That documentary tested overeating well outside the bounds of any sane nutritional guidelines. It's sad that people don't have the critical thinking skills required to realize the same thing would happen if you ate those levels of calories at any restaurant or even at home.

wasn't there a counter-documentary where someone ate from mcdonalds every day and also followed a fairly strict exercise regimen and wound up being way fitter than when he started?

Yep, it was called "Fat Head." The exercise regime wasn't even that strict, it was basically continuing the regular walking the documentarian already did. However, the food intake was strictly limited to 1800 calories and less then 100g of carbs per day. The goal being to show fast food isn't inherently unhealthy, it was the quantity (as already noted above) being eaten in Super Size Me that was unhealthy. In that regard, Fat Head succeeded as the documentarian's health metrics all improved (lot weight, lower blood pressure, better cholesterol measurements).

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

#213

Post by endophage »

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.

Probably not "allergic" given the reported reactions. More likely intolerant. Important distinction, an intolerance isn't going to kill you.

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

#214

Post by jghn »

dnautics wrote: post #196
hueving wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That documentary tested overeating well outside the bounds of any sane nutritional guidelines. It's sad that people don't have the critical thinking skills required to realize the same thing would happen if you ate those levels of calories at any restaurant or even at home.

wasn't there a counter-documentary where someone ate from mcdonalds every day and also followed a fairly strict exercise regimen and wound up being way fitter than when he started?

As others mentioned, there was.

I did this myself around the same time as Super Size Me for a handful of reasons, none of which were to prove a point. I had good results from it. Would I have been even better off if I wasn't eating fast food for every meal? Probably. But I certainly wasn't worse off for eating that way and it scratched the itches which led me to that path in the first place.

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

#215

Post by M_Grey »

darawk wrote: post #146
amelius wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant. But Soylent is supposed to be consumable on a daily basis, so long-term effects are important. Remember the documentary Super Size Me, which tested long term effects of food from a certain fast-food restaurant? [1] [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521

Ya, I agree. Long-term effects are important. But AFAIK there's no indication of any long-term harm from Soylent. There's only an indication that a particular batch may have been contaminated. This suggests not that they were careless in choosing their formulation or research, but that there was an error in the manufacturing process. This is something that can happen to any company, and has many times. Should they fi…

There's no indication of long-term anything from Soylent, just people screaming that it must be bad, or people screaming that it's the future. It's mostly a ton of anecdote, and no reason to believe that it's particularly harmful, or particularly healthy in the long-term.

My feeling? You want to beta-test that with your health, I won't stop you, but I won't join you either.

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

#216

Post by M_Grey »

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.

Do you have any links that prove the "allergy" hypothesis?

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

#217

Post by WorldMaker »

darawk wrote: post #69
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.

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…

«You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant.»

Except you also have more accumulated debug time/expertise in a typical restaurant. Soylent tries to do a lot of things from first principles that otherwise people have spent many years building: food supply chains, logistics, recipes, kitchen procedures, etc.

Bringing it back to a code analogy, too, most restaurant food is "naturally" a more loosely coupled component model and it is easier to isolate components when debugging (no mayo, hold the lettuce), whereas Soylent is very tightly coupled and it shouldn't be surprising that it may suffer some of the same maintainability concerns in the long run.

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

#220

Post by DanBC »

Someone1234 wrote: post #47
Xisiqomelir wrote: post #19

I'm still amazed people pay for this shit when fully-regulated formulated meal replacements have been around for years.

What do you mean by "fully-regulated?" I guess, can you clarify why the examples you've using differ from Soylent's regulation?

Some, but not all, of the other products are marketed as medical products to doctors for use in hospital settings. There's a bunch of regulation over those products.

EDIT after downvotes. For fucks sake, it's pretty obvious that a product making medical claims to doctors has more stringent regulation than food.

Here's the FSA guidance to industry about enteral food products: http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocuments...

To find that page I put "Does the FDA regulate enteral food products?" into a search engine. This is the first result. (Although my filter bubble might affect that.)

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