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It's amazing how the whole marketing aura just goes poof.

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

Well, that was still my first thought when I hit "without other sources of iron". One bottle per day of Soylent can't fix up the variation in the other 75% of your calories. I don't call Wheaties unhealthy for being low on protein, because balanced nutrition has to be calculated across a whole diet.

Having said that, it is alarming that Soylent can't possibly be a balanced replacement for everyone. A custom product would have been an interesting possibility for doing that.

The everything for everyone thing is the cardinal sin with them for me.

If they marketed it as a convenient meal replacement, like a carnation instant breakfast that wasn't a milkshake, it would be different. But they imply that eating food is bad, just drink Soylent.

>I think that Soylent will go down as a cautionary tale for anyone who looks at a field they know very little about and thinks "how hard could it be?". Along with Theranos.

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.

> Terrible analogy.

I think it's apt, but of course you're free to disagree. Both companies entered fields with a founding team that lacked any particular expertise -- dropping out of Stanford or a degree in electrical engineering doesn't give you the background to know what's truly possible in nutritional or life sciences.

Theranos and Soylent were both shipping their products to much success not that long ago. Theranos was exposed and shown to be almost wholly smoke and mirrors.

Soylent is unlikely to be that bad off, and as you said their main thesis hasn't been disproven. They also haven't shown that they have done anything novel to meaningfully reach that goal. Their constant reformulations and sales suspensions (this is not the first time) tell me that this isn't a high tech food operation based on years of research and scientific processes. It's some powder being mixed in a warehouse by a contracted company and sold on a fancy website. That's not a breakthrough.

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

I don't know if Ensure if significantly better or worse than Soylent. Just because it's from a big company and is an established product doesn't necessarily mean it's any good, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's approach is as shoddy as Soylent's either.

I can say that Ensure has not embraced the one-size-fits-all approach of Soylent [1]. They also don't seem to believe in the 25% DV at-all-costs approach. For example, iron does not seem to be included at all.

[1] https://ensure.com/nutrition-products/compare-meal-replaceme...

Soylent's story was always lackluster.

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

> I researched every substance the body needs to survive, plus a few extras shown to be beneficial, and purchased all of them in nearly raw chemical form from a variety of sources. The section on the ingredients ended up being quite long so I’ll save that for a future post. The first morning my kitchen looked more like a chemistry lab than a cookery, but I eventually ended up with an thick, odorless, beige liquid. I call it ‘Soylent’. At the time I didn’t know if it was going to kill me

> On day 3 I noticed my heart was racing and my energy level was suddenly dropping ... I check my formula and realize iron is completely absent. I quickly purchase an iron supplement and add it to the mixture the next day. I have to be more careful not to leave anything out.

But that isn't what was thought. This guy began experimenting with meal replacement for himself and got an overwhelming response. The thought most involved was let's do this. This is organically cultivated mass self experimentation.

I don't know if this is a clarification comment or a praising comment. Still, mass experimentation is a really really bad idea. We have the FDA for a reason, and that reason is because people are stupid. When a can tells me that it is has 50% more radium than leading competitors in big red bold exciting letters even if is in a Warning box, a lot of the voting public thinks this is then a better product to eat. People are really really dumb. I'm not saying that Soylent is not FDA approved, I'm saying that experimenting on customers is really immoral when it comes to health.

I appreciate the larger point, but the iron example seems pretty unfair.

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.

I'll expand a bit more on my point with the iron content of Soylent.

I picked iron out of the list to focus on because it's not water soluble and that makes it more problematic. I bet there are issues across the board with the nutrient content in Soylent.

Excess iron in your diet can be a health problem because your body has no efficient way to dispose of it. The main mechanism for shedding iron is via blood loss! You aren't going to die if you get even 40mg of iron in a day, but consistently ingesting too much iron can be problematic.

This is why you see vitamins with 3000% DV Vitamin C and 10% DV iron -- there's no harm (beyond expensive urine) in excess water soluble Vitamin C, but there can be harm with excess iron.

So if we look at Soylent, with 5mg of iron per serving (IF all of that is actually bio-available), it is not ideal even for the likely majority of its customers (adult men) and even if they only consumed Soylent.

The average adult male only requires an additional 3mg of iron per day, which can easily be exceeded from any number of sources: a multivitamin, a second serving of Soylent, eating a steak, and so on. It's extremely unlikely that the average consumer of Soylent isn't exceeding their daily iron intake (unless they're a woman, especially a pregnant one, in which case they have more wiggle room).

That isn't even considering a non-average adult male, who might need 4mg or 12mg or who knows what.

Excess iron (>20mg) can also cause "gastric upset, constipation, nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, and faintness" [1] -- which can all be caused by lots of things, but are certainly areas where Soylent has struggled somewhat.

Mainly I just think it's disappointing that Soylent adopted a naive one-size-fits-all approach and doesn't really seem to understand what RDA and %DV are meant to convey. The FDA is faced with an impossible task to provide %DV for all people everywhere without considering any of their personal variables. Soylent should be trying to go a step beyond that, not just blindly targeting those numbers.

[1] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iron-HealthProfessional/#h...

Unfortunately, Soylent is a broscience experiment that got out of hand.

sigh. :-/

A cautionary tale that produces a fast-growing company now worth at least $100 million dollars? I'll take it.

Silicon Valley is littered with the corpses of overvalued cautionary tales.

The real measure of success is whether the company becomes a cautionary tale before or after its exit. Just ask Marc Cuban.

That's basically admitting a lot of tech companies have the same mentality as snake oil salesmen.

Well, yeah. Was that ever in dispute?

If you're aiming for a failed company and a pile of cash that makes you feel empty inside, or just a failed company, you're on the right track.

Here, in a nutshell, is everything that is wrong with the toxic valley startup culture.

I agree with you. I don't support this mentality -- I'm just making fun of it.

Theranos anyone?

I think of Iomega: $100/share in 1998, $2/share in 2005. There are better investments...

> anyone who looks at a field they know very little about and thinks "how hard could it be?".

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

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

eh, as the first trying to bring science in food science and use microbiology instead of dietary esoterism I'm willing to give them some slack

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.

Could you elaborate on the data they are collecting?

The human body with it's organs and molecular pathways is quite a tough black box to crack, and there is not a spark of a doubt that Soylent - and no one else - will not understand it for quite a while.

And then there is human human variations.

The concept was flawed from the very beginning. It's sad to see them fail, and I feel bad for the people that suffer because they believed what was marketing and not hard science.

well human response to soylent is already a huge data set, was used so far to add/remove/rebalance stuff and of course drive recalls.

> there is not a spark of a doubt that Soylent - and no one else - will not understand it for quite a while

I agree but at some point this work should begin somewhere, somehow.

> well human response to soylent is already a huge data set

"People love it" isn't a rigorous double-blind scientific study.

Or it could be the move to using Soy protein in 1.6 (and the bars) and some people are sensitive to that level of it.

> ... as the first trying to bring science in food science...

I'm pretty sure food science and studies of nutrition have been around a lot longer than Soylent.

Also, I see no reason why they should be cut any slack. It's not just a webapp that experiences downtime. When this goes wrong people get hurt.

I'm pretty sure food science and studies of nutrition have been around a lot longer than Soylent.

I've only read about this in passing, in general histories, but this was one of MIT's early strengths, in the post-Civil War late 19th Century era.

Total parenteral nutrition (TPN) has been used in medicine for a while; it feeds people directly, bypassing the digestive tract and delivering nutrients via an IV. Enteral nutrition (feeding tubes) have been used for a long time as well. Medicine has thought long & hard about how to keep people alive on a liquid diet. It's not a new thing and Soylent is not even close to a "first".