As You Sow Files Notice Of Legal Action Against Soylent Super Food
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
Not trying to defend Soylent here, but these types of press releases don't provide any useful context.
http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/pdf/safeharbor081513.pdf
EDIT: someone asked for the safe harbor levels. I provide a link to the current safe harbor levels. I'm not sure why this deserves a downvote?
"One serving of Soylent 1.5 can expose a consumer to a concentration of lead that is 12 to 25 times above California's Safe Harbor level." That would mean 12 * 15 micrograms per day. Soylent's suggested serving size is 0.5 liter, so that would be a lead level of 90 micrograms / liter. The EPA's action level for lead in water is 15 micrograms / liter. So they're 6x over the allowed maximum level for water. (That's the maximum level allowed for water; the desired level, according to the EPA, is zero.)
On the other hand, heavy metal levels are routinely higher in foodstuffs than in water, because plants and animals concentrate them. It gets worse as you go up the food chain; mercury in shark and swordfish is a real issue. The EU and WHO allow a level of provisional tolerable weekly intake (PTWI) of 25μg/kg body weight. US male mean body weight is about 85kg, so that would be 2125μg/kg/week, or 101μg/kg/serving, or about 200 micrograms/liter (1 liter water masses 1kg, so assume that density). So Soylent, at 90 micrograms/liter, is about half the usual limit. That's pushing it, though; a small person drinking four servings a day of the stuff could go over the limit.
Because Soylent wants to be the only dietary component, they need pharmaceutical grade quality control. They should be running a sample of every batch through a mass spectrometer, and testing their raw materials. Given their emphasis on how "online" and "digital" they are, you ought to be able to view the analysis for your batch on line.
[1] http://www.asyousow.org//?s=soylent [2] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX...
Also, As You Sow appears to be a woo-peddler, so I would be less than inclined to take their word without independent confirmation.
Edit: And their CEO doesn't seem to be taking their complaint terribly seriously either - he issued the following statement recently.
"Andrew here. Most of what I was trying to do is get a conversation going around food safety, and it worked. I smile at every in depth analysis on lead or cadmium that I triggered. Oh no! You just proved me wrong and educated all the readers of your comment, as well as learned more yourself."
Lead: 15 micrograms/day
Cadmium: 4.1 micrograms/day
If more than 10% of tap water samples exceed the lead action level of 15 parts
per billion
Cadmium is 5 ppb.
[1] http://oehha.ca.gov/prop65/pdf/safeharbor081513.pdf
[2] http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/basicinformation/lea...
[3] http://www.epa.gov/safewater/pdfs/factsheets/ioc/cadmium.pdf
Test results commissioned by As You Sow, conducted by an independent laboratory, show that one serving of Soylent 1.5 can expose a consumer to a concentration of lead that is 12 to 25 times above California's Safe Harbor level for reproductive health, and a concentration of cadmium that is at least 4 times greater than the Safe Harbor level for cadmium. Two separate samples of Soylent 1.5 were tested.
Did independant labs buy the products direct from Soylent, or was the products supplied by a third party to the testing lab?
Was a single lab used? Are they an accredited lab?
If true (and that's a big if at the moment) this is just another confirmation that Soylent is cavalier around a product that they really should be careful about.
Of course, this press release may well be bollocks and Soylent might do rigorous QA testing on every batch, using accredited labs and posting the results to a public webpage.
It is also weird that As You Sow hasn't added any mention of whether or not they have tried to contact Soylent for a comment.
EDIT: To all those wondering why they were not first contacted before going to a court: this PRNewswire piece is a public notice of them telling Soylent that there is Lead in the product.
Personally (and tangentially), I feel this is how software exploits should be treated in open source software; let people know immediately so all the eyeballs focus on a solution, rather than a subset.
PRNewswire is indeed a public notice. But so is Oracle telling the world that Google is bad for poising Java (can't remember their exact argument).
And you're right about Oracle. Google must respond to it timely, or they have accepted the argument.
Soylent is not accused of selling a product with dangerous levels of lead, but of selling a product with normal levels of lead but without the warning sticker.
At least, that's what I can make out. Maybe I'm wrong.
EDIT: this is a proposition 65 lawsuit. The eco group is not trying to get Soylent withdrawn; they're trying to get Soylent to include the legally mandated warning "this product contains chemicals known by the State of california to cause cancer".
Test results commissioned by As You Sow, conducted by an independent laboratory, show that one serving of Soylent 1.5 can expose a consumer to a concentration of lead that is 12 to 25 times above California's Safe Harbor level for reproductive health, and a concentration of cadmium that is at least 4 times greater than the Safe Harbor level for cadmium. Two separate samples of Soylent 1.5 were tested.
This law suit is not about supplying a product with dangerous levels of lead, (because if it had dangerous levels of lead the regulators would have intervened and recalled all stocks and yu wouldn't still be able to buy it) but of supplying a product that contains some lead and not putting a warning sticker on the product.
If this notice is not addressed, you will see regulators intervening.
You seem to think the safe harbor limits are realistic safety limits, but the safe harbor limits for lead are 5ug per day. That's much lower than any other regulation.
WHO have here http://www.inchem.org/documents/jecfa/jecmono/v44jec12.htm
> (Annex 1, reference 30), when a provisional tolerable weekly intake (PTWI) of 3 mg of lead per person, equivalent to 50 µg/kg bw, was established. This PTWI was reconfirmed by the Committee at its twenty-second meeting (Annex 1, reference 47). At its thirtieth meeting (Annex 1, reference 73), the Committee assessed the risk posed by lead to the health of infants and children and established a PTWI of 25 µg/kg bw for this population group. The Committee again evaluated lead at its forty-first meeting (Annex 1, reference 107),
(PDF so not able to copy and paste) but current PTWI is 25ug per kg for all people. The prop65 level of 5ug is much lower than that.
What is this extreme reliance on 'the regulators' (who?)?
Less than one-hundred years ago, radiation exposure used to be highly commercialized and casual.
>This law suit is not about supplying a product with dangerous levels of lead
What is the meaning of the sticker, "contains chemicals that cause cancer", if not, "this product is dangerous"?
The sticker tells you that the product contains some amount of something. It doesn't tell you what it contains, nor how much it contains. All you know is that at least one of a list of several hundred chemicals is present in more than (for some examples) trace amounts.
For example, the California safe harbor level of lead is 15ug per day. The WHO has a provisional tolerable weekly intake of 25ug per kg of bodyweight, or about 1.5 mg per week.
The California safe harbor levels work out to be 15 ug * 7 which is 105 ug, or 0.105 mg per week. That 0.105 mg per week is very much lower than WHO's 1.5 mg per week.
Note that there are penalties for not including the note if you need it, but not for including the note if you don't need it. Your product could be totally free of anything and still carry the warning because you want to avoid the risk of sticker non-compliance.
http://oehha.ca.gov/prop65/law/pdf_zip/RegsArt6.pdf
Do you have any example prop 65 warning labels for food items that list the specific chemical and qty?
Are you talking about occupational exposure warnings? Is that relevant to this court case?
From your own source, California Code of Regulations,
Title 27, Article 6. Clear and Reasonable Warnings, § 25601 Clear and Reasonable Warnings
>The message must clearly communicate that the chemical in question is known to the state to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm.
The original proposition requires Clear and Reasonable Warnings:
>25249.6. Required Warning Before Exposure To Chemicals Known to Cause Cancer Or Reproductive Toxicity. No person in the course of doing business shall knowingly and intentionally expose any individual to a chemical known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity without first giving clear and reasonable warning to such individual, except as provided in Section 25249.10
Again, from your source, California Code of Regulations,
Title 27, Article 6. Clear and Reasonable Warnings, § 25603 Consumer Products Warnings
>(a) Warnings for consumer products exposures that include the methods of transmission and the warning messages as specified by this section shall be deemed to be clear and reasonable.
So, not only do you have to warn of harm from the specific chemicals you use in your consumer product, but also of those harmful chemicals that may have unintentionally ended up in your product. Further, the clear and reasonable warning you give should include specifically how that product will expose you to harmful chemicals (e.g. eating/drinking this Soylent will expose you to potentially harmful amounts of lead [don't know, we didn't test it, lol!]; or, eating/drinking this Soylent will expose you to X.Y (m/c/k)g of lead, which is known to the State of California to cause cancer or reproductive harm).
"Methods of transmission" refers to how the warning is communicated, and does not refer to how the chemical is transfered to the user.
Nothing you quote says the chemical has to be named. A generic "this product contains chemicals known by the state of california to cause [birth defects / cancer]" is sufficient.
Your last paragraph is wrong.
In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10067135 you said "What is the meaning of the sticker, "contains chemicals that cause cancer", if not, "this product is dangerous"?" -- a prop 65 label does not mean a product is dangerous! In California dangerous food would be regulated by the California deparment for public health or the food and drug administration. Your suggestion - that people could sell a food product with a dangerous amount of lead in it so long as they stick a label on it - is odd. The safe harbor limits are provided so that the labels don't go on everything. They are not risky levels of those chemicals.
From http://www.oehha.ca.gov/prop65/background/p65plain.html
> For chemicals that are listed as causing cancer, the "no significant risk level” is defined as the level of exposure that would result in not more than one excess case of cancer in 100,000 individuals exposed to the chemical over a 70-year lifetime. In other words, a person exposed to the chemical at the “no significant risk level” for 70 years would not have more than a “one in 100,000” chance of developing cancer as a result of that exposure.
> For chemicals that are listed as causing birth defects or reproductive harm, the “no observable effect level” is determined by identifying the level of exposure that has been shown to not pose any harm to humans or laboratory animals. Proposition 65 then requires this “no observable effect level” to be divided by 1,000 in order to provide an ample margin of safety. Businesses subject to Proposition 65 are required to provide a warning if they cause exposures to chemicals listed as causing birth defects or reproductive harm that exceed 1/1000th of the “no observable effect level.”
Perhaps you think I am pro-Soylent? I am not. I think they're fucking idiots, and I've said that on HN before.
>Nothing you quote says the chemical has to be named.
...
My first quote did...
"From your own source, California Code of Regulations, Title 27, Article 6. Clear and Reasonable Warnings, § 25601 Clear and Reasonable Warnings >The message must clearly communicate that the chemical in question is known to the state to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm. "
Edit: addressed here, with comparisons to other meals. Brown rice protein is the source. https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/204197379-Californ...
Why does rice tend to have such high heavy metal content? Is it simply coincidence w/ where rice tends to be grown?
So I'm going to paraphrase as follows: "As You Sow," a group claiming to be an environmental watchdog, noted a likely safety problem with Soylent and instead of notifying the manufacturer to minimize the harm to consumers chose to file a lawsuit.
Edit: less inflammatory paraphrase
That said, I'm only speaking in general. I don't claim to know anything about the factual background of this particular case.
As a quick summary, the levels they violate are calculated by finding the level at which there's reproductive toxicity in rats, then dividing by 10. Then dividing again by 1000.
And, the same group "As You Sow" also has a variety of outstanding complaints against chocolate makers for the same thing. The companies there? Ghirardelli, Godiva, Hershey, Lindt & Sprungli, Mondelez, and Earth Cicrle Organics.
If it was a safety issue they'd have contacted FDA.
It's a regulatory compliance issue.
So I value their opinion about as much as I do Dr. Jenny McCarthy's pioneering work on vaccinations.
Even if they were within safe limits, I still wouldn't want to take a food replacement. I like food, and don't think time eating it is time wasted. YMMV.