Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

One of the biggest flaws of consumers is that they can't tell low tech from high tech. Writing a shiny CRUD website is not high tech.

Basically saying well our platforms allow for infinite content sure, but we can't police all that. Sorry! These are actual arguments made in court.

And then behind the scenes they are running around scared shitless trying to police content - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-content-insight-i...

The whole thing reminds me of Samuel L Jackson's character in Jurassic Park. Yes the dino's are breeding when they shouldn't, the kids are missing, the fences are broken, the T Rex can't be found but hey as soon as power is back up I can monitor everything from this one magic console. Isn't that amazing?

Micheal Crichton had a good term for it. He called these people thintelligent.

BTW, anyone know a good word for this attitude? I wouldn't call it hybris, though it's closely related. It's a mix of arrogance, over confidence, ignorance, plus more and very prevalent in SV.

If someone has proof that Soylent employs zero nutritionists/food scientists, please enlighten us, because if that's the case, the product never should have gone to market and I'll throw my supply out immediately and go get a refund.

Here's an article elaborating on this sentiment : https://read.reddy.today/read/5/new-entrepreneurs-are-no-lon...

What's rough is you can't just google this stuff. It takes knowledge and experience in these industries to know what's up. We believe we can do a lot with technology but we're going to make a lot of BAD decisions getting there.

My wife is into architecture and told me once that "every building code has a tombstone." Every building code is there because someone (or sometimes lots of people) died. Same with vehicle and road regs, etc.

I had a lawyer tell me almost the same thing about equity, finance, and contract law: every standard provision in e.g. a VC deal and every financial regulation is there because somebody perpetuated a fraud or someone got screwed. Many are also there to compensate for large-scale systemic failure modes like runaway financial bubbles that occurred in the past.

These systems are clunky and crufty and ugly and sometimes there is some value in "disrupting" them, but at the same time I think any would-be disrupters have to understand that the content of these laws and customs is the outcome of an evolutionary "Red Queen's race" lasting centuries or more. The code base is ugly but there's a lot of value and information captured in it.

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.

IMO they had a pretty good idea but tried to execute things in a rather vague way instead of consulting the actual experts in this field.

sure this turn of people getting sick is worrying, because coming late and sudden hints at contamination, and I hope they can mature enough to go past manufacturing problems

but the data they're collecting will be extraordinary for bringing down the layers of encrusted myths about how the body works.

Last week, the average commenter would be going on about how the real problem is that people are eating unnecessary food with Soylent.

I don't think the "how hard could it be?" mindset should be discouraged.

Relevant PG article: http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Terrible analogy. Unlike Theranos, Soylent has been shipping their core product to many satisfied customers for over two years. The recent quality control issues are real, and they are troubling, but they don't invalidate Soylent's thesis that an engineered staple food could save people time and money. By contrast, the kind of small-sample blood analysis Theranos aimed to do may never have been possible in the first place, which is why informed investors never touched their product.

>We know that different people have different dietary needs.

Better pull Ensure from all the hospitals then, just to be safe.

sigh. :-/

Soylent is designed to be nutritionally complete as a sole food, or 'neutral' as part of a larger diet. That is, drinking a bottle of Soylent will reduce all of your remaining nutrition needs by the same proportion.

The result is that the balance of a diet hinges on the non-Soylent parts. If the man with too much iron and the woman with too little maintained the same (relative) diet without Soylent, they would still be unhealthy. More broadly, you can't say that a food is inherently unhealthy just because it doesn't fit into a specific slot in your diet. (You could say it's generally unhealthy for having bad nutritional balance, but that's not the case with Soylent.)

The more reasonable criticism here is of Soylent as whole-diet replacement. That's something that Soylent actually can't do, because specific nutrition needs don't vary in lockstep. If one person needs more calcium, and another needs more magnesium, Soylent can't possibly provide like a more flexible diet could.

So I agree that Soylent could have built out a more personalized (or customizable) product, with better results for many users. But I don't think it's fair to appeal to imbalances elsewhere in a diet and demand that Soylent resolve them.

May I suggest making that link lead to a "free sample" page rather than a "give us $90 before even trying a bite" page? I think you'll get a whole lot more uptake that way.

[0] https://www.quora.com/Does-blending-reduce-the-nutritional-c...

[1] http://www.livestrong.com/article/548978-does-fruit-lose-its...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3046297

"An active ingredient (AI) is the ingredient in a pharmaceutical drug that is biologically active. " Does it also reduce the amount of rainbows and unicorns? Your own wikipedia link does not say eating garlic is helpful to humans.

Here's a more concrete analogy-- sawdust is highly flammable. Many times more so than regular old wood. Why? Better oxygenation, higher surface area, lower per-unit thermal mass (which means less energy required to get a particular chip of wood to its combustion point).

I would! I tend to go overboard on fruit if I don't stop myself. Apples, oranges, blueberries, cantaloupe, all so delicious...Not always pleasant for digestion and probably a bit of sugar rush, but do you know of any more serious health effects?

anecdotal at best, but a friend years ago was diagnosed with adult diabetes and told he had to change his diet. this guy never cooked. part of his transition was cooking classes provided as part of his diabetes counseling. he discovered a world of quick and easy meals, many in a single pan and all were healthy.

As I've come around to thinking of the human body as more of a system than a binary switch (sick/not sick), I've come to appreciate that natural food sources have a lot of nutrients in them that are hard to get with manufactured foods.

There's a lot of debate about studies proving this one way or another, but for me looking at it intuitively from a co-evolution standpoint (foods we eat evolved in conjunction with humans) is proof enough to pay attention to the quality of my food. The intuition is basically: food we've been cultivating and bringing around with us for millions of years is going to be more beneficial to our internal chemistry than a substitute we recently made up to save money on production costs.

I also view eating as a chore (except when it's not), so I often end up eating this: black beans, chicken, guac, milk

PS: for the "naturalistic fallacy" group, how do you account for the role of evolution as an optimizer for health vs evolution as optimizer for 20th century economic cost? Optimization targets make a difference.

>sunday

>market, buy groceries, pasta and meat for whole week

>cook everything at once

>put everything on freezer

>clean up everything only once

Of course, I need to wash my dishes during week, but it takes literally 1 minute and half. And you can argue that there are powder to purposes other than macros, and I agree with you that you must take it if you think you need to. I, personally, don't.

I'd call a steady diet of fast food a 'food prison'. That's the addictive stuff that ruins your health.

The use case of this aptly-named "Soylent" product is a load of hooey. When the military starts using meal replacement powders instead of MREs, then I will reconsider my position on this issue.

Never change, HN.

Even if you eat no food, you'll still have bowel movements as your intestines shed cells and mucus. If you have a colostomy done (intestines no longer connect to your rectum) you'll still pass small small amounts of stool out the normal way (anus).

Anyone suggesting Soylent is safe with arguments like "glucose is glucose" and "it has the right macronutrient ratios" is spouting pseudo-science.

If you have insufficient evidence that something is safe and a strong anecdote suggesting otherwise the logical option is to abstain.

Attempting to bring science into the decision making process when the science has not been done is pseudo-science!

Unfortunately, we lack a corpus of evidence of long term liquid diet feedings (and intestinal investigations), mainly for ethical reasons, but there is at least one good rat study I could quickly recall: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01308310 There are, however, countless great articles I suggest you read on liquid diets and their impact on satiety and other important illness recovery markers. One of the important topics for researchers has been how to safely transition patients more quickly to solid food, given some of the less desirable side effects of the liquid food diet.

And yes, I understand that the Soylent team is confident that they've solved, for example, all gastric emptying issues by adding exogenous fibres. I'm positing that for every variable they're convinced they've figured out, they're opening up another potential set of problems that they've not even considered. Their latest opacity on this recall isn't giving me hope that I'm wrong here.

So not all of your diet. I very much doubt your ability to refute my claim, given that you did not meet my criteria of not eating solid food.

[1] https://twitter.com/timdorr/status/694271673248264192

Why did Soylent promote it like that? When did that message change?

On the front page at Soylent they have "We engineer foods that offer complete nutrition, value, and convenience." -- here "complete nutrition" means it can be used as a sole source of nutrition.

On their about page they say "Soylent™ is a pioneer in food technology, producing convenient, complete foods designed to provide maximum nutrition with minimal effort."

They also make reference to Rob's experiment of living off Soylent for a month: "and the co-founders quickly realized that this experiment solved a problem not only for themselves but for thousands of people around the world."

In their blog post announcing v1.6 of the powder they say: "r latest iteration in convenient, complete powdered food. We have redesigned the formula to create a superior mouthfeel and taste, while still providing a nutritionally-complete staple meal."

All the language points to these products being usable as a sole source of nutrition, even if they don't actually come out and say "you can use this as a sole source of nutrition".

The statement is actually true... but you need to hold yourself to a higher standard when your product can have an impact on people's health. Of course, stopping the product while investigating the cause sounds like they are taking it seriously, so hopefully it will all work out in the end.

But I'm not worried either way - meal replacement shakes have been around a long time, and despite the marketing, Soylent isn't that different than its competitors. So hit GNC on the way home and get whatever works for ya.

The answer is no. It's not just about molecules.

Whether Soylent qualifies as "unnatural" depends on whether its ingredients, and the amounts of them, are nutritious and not poisonous. Humanity hasn't yet reached a point where we have definite answers to questions like that.

The reason that oft-derided-as-woo-woo granola crowd is actually making the logicallly sound choice here is because given the lack of conclusive science, the default assumption should be that a diet closer to what our ancestors ate is a safer bet than a brand new diet that we fabricate based on incomplete and presumptive knowledge.

Are you serious? Any mycologist or survivalist worth their salt will tell you to avoid any mushrooms you could not identify with 100% certainty because there is no regret if you had them. Some manuals may advocate (in very desperate situations) eating a small piece of an unknown species to see if you have a reaction before consuming more, but that is still pretty dodgy since not all toxins have a short incubation period.

"Every mushroom is edible, but some only once." -- Czech proverb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_hunting#Safety_issues)

Plus Soylent has been presented as a replacement for all other food, and some people use it as such. I would think that would make it more likely that their users would experience problems, since it would mean greater and constant exposure to ingredients that might not cause issues if consumed less frequently.

We live in an era where these things are readily available and they're really easy to make and to be delicious thanks to an abundance of spices and endless styles of fats.

I enjoy so much an egg fried in a small amount of butter until the edges are crispy on a piece of rye toast. A slice of tomato with a dash of ground pepper on top. Total cost: 50 cents tops? Total time: 4 minutes? Dishes: A non-stick pan that takes 10 seconds to clean?

It has never been more accessible or easy to not only cook but discover how to cook thanks to global shipping and the Internet than today. And we are left with a slurry of questionable nutrients as the future? OK fine - but I refuse.

Oh! The horror!

One of the hardest things when reducing a sauce is to not stop to soon and to not go too far. If you stop too soon you can use a roux or more crudely use flour or starch to thicken the sauce. If you go to far you end up with a glaze. You could add stock or water to thin, however.

A well timed reduction, in my opinion, you end up with a sauce that is "nappe". But the trick is knowing when you're there. An interesting thing about reducing a liquid is that as it reduces further it reduces faster as there is less liquid but the same amount of heat. So there is the critical moment where you go "just far enough" and your sauce is perfect. Too far and you have a glaze or a burned sauce. Not far enough and and the flavors are not blended and concentrated.

I've found in cooking that stopping just before you think something is done is a good heuristic. IT keeps cooking for a bit longer. Timing this can be hard has there is a small window between not reduced enough and too much. It goes fast near the end. A classic "happens slowly, then all at once".

> * your statement equating eating soylent to making food and drink a footnote in life sounds at least presumptuous if not judgemental.*

But that was a core part Rob Rhinehart's original proposition.

I totally get that it's not why or how everyone consumes Soylent, but these were the words used to introduce it to the world:

In my own life I resented the time, money, and effort the purchase, preparation, consumption, and clean-up of food was consuming

I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. ... Now I spend about 5 minutes in the evening preparing for the next day, and every meal takes a few seconds.

Food can be art, comfort, science, celebration, romance, or a reason to meet with friends. Most of the time it’s just a hassle, though.

The food is eating us. I don’t know how to change peoples’ behavior, but now that I’ve discovered Soylent, I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, have more freedom with my time and money, and never have to worry about the stuff.

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298

I don't see how equating statements like "I resented the time", "it's just a hassle" and "never have to worry about the stuff" with "a footnote in life" can be called presumptuous.

Anyway, you don't have to cook to eat a nutritious meal that you make yourself. Nuts and dried fruit is a good meal supplement, as are greens, chopped veggies, homemade granola bars, bread with peanut butter, hard boiled eggs, etc. Even a glass of milk, honestly. All of these things can be eaten on the go, and when balanced against the rest of your daily diet, can be healthy as well as delicious.

You probably do laundry at some point. And even if you pay someone to do your laundry, you probably at least take the five minutes to gather up your laundry and bring it to your taskrabbit. Those same 1-5 minutes can be used to grab simple healthy food from your pantry or refrigerator. And there's probably over 1,000 five minute meal recipes out there. You don't even have to pop down to the market to pick uo ingredients anymore. And civilizations around the world have been making on-the-go food for millennia.

Honestly, the time argument is very improbable. Proof: you have time to comment on HN.

I eat all types of food and because I live in Manhattan I sure am fortunate to have all types of food nearby. I do enjoy fast food from time to time. Is a well made pastrami on on rye fast food? I do know it's delicious. So is a Big Mac for what it's worth.

I probably don't eat many rich lunches. Sandwiches work there. I don't think you need to have a Full English Breakfast, Croque Monsieur and some type of Béchamel based dinner every day. You also don't have to snack on garbage between meals.

Just because you make a meat and reduce a sauce from the drippings doesn't mean it's a rich meal. Served with 2 vegetables you have a rather lightweight meal. Especially when you control for portions. 1/3 pound of meat might be good enough.

Moderation.

I suppose you could pour it in a carafe and shake it as well. But trying a blender sounds like fun!

https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/204197379-Californ...

Really, I think the concern here is quite overblown. For example, Soylent 2.0 contains lead at a maximum rate of 0.010725 µg/mL. The FDA's action level for food intended for infants and children is 0.5 µg/mL (which is 46.62 times higher).

Source: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/csem.asp?csem=7&po=8

I agree we should promote crop diversity. But I don't understand why you think this one specific ingredient is a problem. When someone eats bread, do you get upset because it's promoting wheat? Bread is pretty much 100% wheat, and people eat a LOT of it.

If Soylent were the only food people consume, I would understand your concern. But most people don't eat Soylent and most Soylent eaters don't eat only Soylent. So I don't really understand your concern.

http://blog.soylent.com/post/152400464282/soylent-bar-powder...

All the food I eat is sold by profit-seeking companies, but at least it's food.

If we did have a good grasp of the nutrients that the human body needs, and in what form (particularly to prevent your bowels from shutting down or having mass dieoffs), then something like Ensure, Soylent, etc might be practical with a group of people who were well versed in the science of nutrition designing it, but I do not have that kind of faith with our abject lack of understanding & the present lack of nutritional skills Soylent, and many other processed food companies have shown.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allicin

When glucose is bound up in fiber for example, it is released at a slower rate. This leads me to believe that there may be 100s of other beneficial side effects of getting your nutrients via natural, minimally processed food.

[1] I'm not the original poster.

> Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce — compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. — are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....

The idea that we can understand each food as just the sum of the macro and micronutrients it contains is, as understood today, false. While it may be true in the future when we have a greater understanding of what food is made of and how the body works (it's trivially true that you can break food down into something and then sum that thing up to get the same food), right now that's outside the understanding of science.

We've asked you to not to include things like this in comments before, so please stop or we'll ban the account.

You can prep a month's worth of powder in the time it takes to prepare 1 meal. So yes, I'm wondering that in addition to wondering whether you read my post.

It is extremely strange that Soylent has never attempted flavoring. That's a good way of keeping it a niche product for nerds.

Very much acknowledge the blog uses the same 'handful' terminology but they also put a % to it. As much as I hate to think about it, I feel 'handful' sounds like more out of context and a news article would be less dramatic if they reported 0.1% of people were affected.

in your analogy, it would be equivalent to Samsung putting its previous phone back into production.

Isn't that exactly what happened and it was a huge disaster.

One single bar made me ill, I ate numerous bars before getting ill.

How are the getting around it? Is it classified as a supplement? "Not for human consumption"?

If they are willing to pull their product for 0.1% of customers they will probably announce a refund, give it a week .

"Our tests all came back negative for food pathogens, toxins or outside contamination,” so it's possible that it affects just a few people but they're still be being careful.

And frankly in this case refunds are implied, I would imagine that they would be sued into oblivion otherwise.

I just think it's good to see a company take things seriously and act rather than engage in PR. E.g. Theranos, Samsung etc.

They'll give you a refund for basically any reason. Just email them and say "I don't like it" and they'll give you a refund. You don't even have to ship it back.

That's always been the refund policy, by the way, it's not related to this incident.

I find the concept of release notes for things I eat pretty discomforting. Not that I would ever put Soylent in my food hole.

[1] http://files.soylent.com/pdf/soylent-release-notes-1-6-en.pd...

Wait, what?! Why would governments need to subsidize such crops? Can't the price be left to increase a bit, and have the market sort this out more "organically"?

Only reason I'd see for the US government subsidizing such crops would be to make your food exports more competitive, a pretty "dirty" tactic in a globalized economy, but at leas it would make sense...

Switch the meat eaters over to grain & legumes (with minimal fresh vegetables), and it rises by something in the 200-1000% range.

A large source of food waste is that some vegetables just don't meet over strict supermarket standards, and these are just ploughed back into the ground.

One tv show about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVk31Yv9vlg (the farming bit starts at about 5 minutes in)

I've been using Huel on-and-off for a few months — to replace my lunches for a few days each week, or when I don't fancy breakfast, or if I realise I haven't eaten enough calories in a day. I might start regularly replacing my breakfast with it, now.

There is another class of food, in addition to milk, that is able to completely support life: eggs. Proof: Live thing comes out of egg without any additional nutrition. Whether it is enough to completely support human life, is, again, unclear - but the answer might very well be "yes".

Here's the Tilt crowdfunding page: https://wayback.archive.org/web/20141012152640/https://crowd...

Note, it's titled "Soylent Free Your Body". Here are some phrases in the short post:

  "What if you never had to worry about food again?"
  "Soylent frees you from the time and money spent
  shopping, cooking and cleaning, puts you in excellent 
  health, and vastly reduces your environmental impact by 
  eliminating much of the waste and harm coming from 
  agriculture, livestock, and food-related trash."

  $255 One month supply of Soylent
  We'll ship enough soylent to fully replace one month's worth of meals

This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.

Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eating enough (bulking). Serious weightlifters go through cycles of both but most people struggle more with one side or another.

Bulking isn't a struggle for me -- I can clear 5,000 kcal/day without a sweat. I've trained myself to eat pretty healthy but I'd always prefer steak and eggs for breakfast. On the other hand, a friend of mine complains about all the pizza he has to eat to meet his targets. Soylent makes a lot of sense for him (quick calories) but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".