15 ms·

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 wil

by glenda 10y ago

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.

arkitaip 10y ago
That's hilarious and scary. Can you imagine the reactions if any other (non Valley?) food business had this approach to food safety?
- jobu 10y ago
  Really doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. A neighbor of mine has an allergy to MSG and it took him years to realize it. He's still does trial-and-error on new foods to determine which ones contain MSG as part of their "natural flavors" (sometimes with painful results). The difference here is that Soylent is a "food replacement". That means it's often the only thing these people eat and a small change to the formulation could be a breaking change for a few of them.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies. Soylent's words: > "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." EDIT: I think this is scumbag behaviour on Soylent's part.
    - jobu 10y ago
      > That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies. Obviously there are caveats for their allergy claims. The first ingredient in Soylent is soy protein, and while it's not as common as peanut allergies there are definitely people that can't do soy: https://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/soy-allergy https://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/soy-allergy
      - DanBC 10y ago
        But that's the point - they claim it's fine for everyone, even those with allergies, but then formulate the product with known allergens. And now, with the new formula, when people are complaining of sickness they're saying it's a potential allergy or sensitivity to algae.
        67726e 10y ago
        How many products claim they're for everyone? Why not go after one-size fits all baseball caps too? It's just another round of marketing bullshit.
        pvg 10y ago
        One-size-fits-all caps usually don't make you sick. The bar (and corresponding regulations) is much higher when you're selling food, especially if you're claiming it replaces all other food and is somehow also good for various medical problems.
        DanBC 10y ago
        They made a specific, clear, medical claim: this product is okay for everyone, even those with allergies. They then made the product with known allergens. How is that okay?
        jacobolus 10y ago
        Their product pages all clearly state that they are vegan, lactose-free, nut-free, but are not organic, not certified kosher, not GMO free, not allergen free (“contains soy & gluten”), not gluten-free (e.g. “less than 20 parts-per-million (ppm) of gluten but does not meet the Celiac Support Association gluten-free guidelines.”), and have a list of all ingredients. Your complaint seems to be about one sentence on the marketing page for their original pre-order campaign in 2013 (as seen at the internet archive here https://web.archive.org/web/20140506133101/https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body https://web.archive.org/web/20140506133101/https://campaign....), which was based on a different formulation of their product without the current problematic ingredient, and didn’t list any detailed nutrition information at all, instead explicitly directing curious readers to their other web pages / blog posts for more information (including a full list of ingredients with the note that the product contained soy). I don’t quite understand why you think their new product version in 2016 should be considered to retroactively make their (no longer existent) page from 2013 false advertising.
    - bloaf 10y ago
      There is literally no such thing as a drink that is ok for everyone: http://www.medicaldaily.com/alexandra-allen-utah-teen-rare-water-allergy-struggles-take-showers-and-possibly-328494 http://www.medicaldaily.com/alexandra-allen-utah-teen-rare-w...
      - DanBC 10y ago
        I know. I'm not making the claim - Soylent is.
    - artimaeis 10y ago
      Link to Soylent's words there? I'm not finding anything with a Google search.
      - DanBC 10y ago
        It was made during their crowdfunding. They used those words to raise money. https://web.archive.org/web/20130816104921/https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body https://web.archive.org/web/20130816104921/https://campaign.... > What if you never had to worry about food again? > For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous. Soylent will be personalized for different body types and customizable based on individual goals. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost. > For anyone who struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you. > 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. > There are problems with the current state of food > 50% of the food produced globally is wasted, and food makes for the largest component of municipal garbage. If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive. 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. 70% of americans are overweight or obese. 1 in 7 people globally are malnourished, and 1 in 3 in the developing world suffer from deficiency. Countless others are living hand-to-mouth, subsistence farming, hindering economic development. Even in the developed world, agriculture is the most dangerous industry to work in by occupational injuries and illnesses, and obesity is on the rise. > By taking years to spoil, dramatically reducing cost, and easing transportation and storage, soylent could have a dramatic effect on hunger and malnutrition. Proceeds from the purchase of soylent enable us to work with aid partners and reduce hunger and environmental impact both in the United States and the developing world. > Think about what the future of food looks like. Imagine everyone having a customized, efficient, nutritious default diet and the freedom to eat for leisure as desired. It is a bright, healthy future indeed. I have problems with a bunch of these claims ("takes years to spoil"), but Soylent do appear to have pulled back from some of them. And donating money to the WFP is always good.
  - insaneirish 10y ago
    > A neighbor of mine has an allergy to MSG and it took him years to realize it. I'd really like to see him take a double blind test to see if it's actually true. Saying you have an allergy to monosodium glutamate is a lot closer to saying you have an allergy to monosodium chloride (i.e. table salt) than it is to an actual food allergy. You need glutamate to live [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter)
    - sosuke 10y ago
      From personal accounts, ones I've only read about, it seems that sensitivity to things like MSG, ingested orally, are completely possible. But the reactions are small enough to never require any medical attention or further study. No anaphylaxis for instance. Anyhow, since the reactions aren't large enough to be measured in an acute way there is no allergy. However when lay-people speak about how they have reactions to something they eat you might often encounter them using the term allergy in a sense that doesn't require caring a steroid injectable. In essence they have proved through research that MSG causes no allergic reactions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19389112/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19389112/ But they can't say there are no reactions at all. (last paragraph http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/monosodium-glutamate/faq-20058196 http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-he...) It might be MSG causing a headache or eating too much salt in a single meal but either way the symptoms are avoided by elimination of that from their diet. No deaths, no acute reactions, no more study needed. It hurts when you do that? Stop doing it.
- dictum 10y ago
  Enteric disruption is a growth market.
- Fricken 10y ago
  Obesity rates have tripled in 3 decades, I don't think we can blame Soylent for that, but clearly something major has gone terribly wrong with the industrial food system and it's approach to food safety. That's the hilarious and scary thing. I don't worry too much about what's going on at some small scale esoteric meal replacement startup.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    The problem isn't safety, it's poor alignment of incentives. Food companies optimize for palatability and against satiety. Then they brag about it, advertising that you will never eat just 1. Why do they do this? Because the food market is saturated and getting people to consume more is a good growth strategy.
  - teslabox 10y ago
    > Obesity rates have tripled in 3 decades, I don't think we can blame Soylent for that, but clearly something major has gone terribly wrong with the industrial food system We can blame the paint industry and the cotton industry for the food industry's mistakes. Paints & stains used to be made from "drying oils" (soybean oil, linseed oil, etc), now they're made from petroleum. Cotton production creates a lot of cotton seed as a waste product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil Instead of going quietly into the night, the seed oil industry now sells "vegetable oil" for human consumption. Crisco was made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil until it was reformulated in 2007. IMHO, Crisco is still not appropriate for human consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisco Charlatanism: it's what's for dinner.
- saint_fiasco 10y ago
  Don't they all? Do you think other food businesses have the source code for human nutrition and do white-box testing on their product? Of course they do trial and error! It's just that most of the errors happened far in the past.
estefan 10y ago
> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. As such, it's pretty stupid to be an early adopter here. Just ask children of thalidamide...
harveywi 10y ago
> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection.
- criley2 10y ago
  >"This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection" From my perspective as someone who studied drug development and testing heavily in university, and now works as a programmer for medical ehr (hospital) software, I don't particularly think they're being unethical. The typical Phase 1 trial for a NME (new molecular entity; a new novel drug) is basically giving young dudes some random chemical based on "well it didn't seem to kill the animals, and the statistics we've drawn suggest it won't kill you, want $100?" Or in the medical software field. Due to the complexity and amount of patient data, and the massive restrictions on HIPAA based PHI, it's very difficult to have robust testing environments for medical software. For a Priority problem affecting patient care, we do our best to understand, resolve and test before support patches code out, but ultimately, we sometimes rely on the same logic. We believe we resolved it, but until it's tested under live conditions, we just can't be positive.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - archgoon 10y ago
    Can you expand on how HIPAA and PHI impact testing? That sounds interesting and important.
    - criley2 10y ago
      The amount of information a patient generates while staying at the hospital is pretty immense. Vital signs, lab results like imaging data, lab results like blood tests, documentation created by every single professional who sees the patient, diagnosis data, financial/billing data, medication/pharmaceutical data, an insane amount of regulation check box filling things like as a random example, the CCD - Continuity of Care Document. As they move from ER outpatient to inpatient observation to outpatient ambulatory (or whatever unique pathway they take entering a hospital and returning to their primary care physician or homecare/hospice), new accounts are created, diagnoses entered, complicated compounding medications evaluated and modified. This information is generated by real physicians, real nurses, real aides, etc, in actual care environments. People who trained for over a decade to understand what they're doing. I trained for a very long time be a programmer, and I have extensive biology education. But when testing my code, how can I emulate a PhD MD oncologist? How can I emulate a certified Nurse Practitioner, a Home Health Aide or a Licensed Nurse Practitioner? How can I generate an enormous amount of valid, real-world medical data for my test patient? I can learn that coumadin + aspirin creates a drug interaction and is a big no-no for I50.x style heart failure patients. But that's just one little trope I can repeat. There's 10,000 more things they do on a daily basis that I'll never grok. The short answer is that I cannot. I use the programs, I enter things, I learn and do my best to emulate what my users do, but many of them have spent more time learning and perfecting their job than I have been alive. Plus, I don't have ten millions dollars worth of hospital equipment to generate real data with, to interface with, just various abstractions/test code we use when testing. In the case of HIPAA/PHI, if there was more freedom to use protected health information, I wouldn't have to emulate medical professionals, I could copy real patient data and test my code against a production database. But for the ultimate safety of the patients in our care, protected patient data is only allowed in 2 very secure messaging systems we use, and literally no where else. So it often falls to the other half of our programming staff, the support staff, to take our code, patch it to a real hospital test system (hospitals generally have a live system and a test system physically hosted in their facility), and test against actual patient data from within the hospitals own network. As an application programmer that option isn't really available to me. So it's two fold: the difficulty of emulating the incredibly technically detailed behaviors of highly educated professionals when testing, and the inability to use real world data for in-house testing efforts prior to shipping code.
dkersten 10y ago
They've been playing this game from the start. I remember the original announcement blog post talking about how he figured out the formula through trial and error. We can eat small amounts of poison and never notice that it's damaged our bodies, for example. Who knows what the long term effects are.
- XorNot 10y ago
  You can also eat small amounts of poison and become immune. Everything will be damage in large quantities. And some common things probably do long term damage (e.g. any amount of charring on meat) but we never question them.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - dkersten 10y ago
    That's not the point I was tying to make. My point was that he created the formula through trial and error (I distinctly remember he said he'd put whatever amount he read online was correct and then if he felt sick he'd adjust the amount down; but "getting sick" is a rather extreme indicator). That is, at least prior to investment money (which I hope was at least partially spent on testing the stuff for safety), his safety claims were based off "I didn't get sick in the short term" without any real data on the medium to long term effects. I mentioned small amounts of poison only as an anecdote that his trial and error testing could potentially have been harming him without him knowing it. That is, it's simply an anecdote to demonstrate that the "safety tests" he had done up until that blog post were themselves anecdotal at best. I haven't been following soylent since and assume (and hope) that since he took on funding that he then followed up with proper scientific procedures. But people ate his stuff based on that initial blog post, so...
    - Blaaguuu 10y ago
      It's not a subject that I have done a ton of reading on, but from the many random articles that I have read over the years, it really seems like the bulk of nutritional science is still pretty much trial and error... Hence the new studies that seem to come out ever other month saying that eggs are good/bad for you... or coffee... or soy... or algae... or multi-vitamins... or gluten... or berries... For something that affects us so deeply, it seems like we still know remarkably little about how food affects our bodies/minds. Any research that the Soylent folks do or read is helpful, but I wouldn't expect them to do a 5 year study and be able to suddenly say without a doubt that they have a the perfect formula.
pavlov 10y ago
Samsung tried the same thing with the Galaxy Note 7. They gave up after one round of "if it doesn't explode then it was the battery vendor".
rosser 10y ago
Let's remember that these are the same rocket surgeons who neglected to include iron in their original formula. Trial-and-error, with someone else's health as the stakes, is apparently the name of the game here.
- harveywi 10y ago
  Collecting money from the risk-takers is telling as well, due to the psychological/influential aspect of the buyer as well as the motives of the seller.
DINKDINK 10y ago
> 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 them. It very well not have been the algae but the reaction of the algae that occurred when another chemical's concentration was increase and caused a second or third order reaction.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- resfirestar 10y ago
  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.
  - frenchy 10y ago
    Heme-bound iron is better absorbed by the body than other sources of iron, which is why sometimes vegetarians are anemic despite the high quantity of iron in vegetables. Much of the the known mechanics of digestion are molecular, but that's mostly due to the fact that we have a lot better scientific tools to deal with things on a molecular level than we do with macro-molecular constructs.
    - resfirestar 10y ago
      Okay, but you're still talking about how a particular nutrient interacts with the digestive system in a particular way. I don't assume there's any evidence that eating meat increases the absorption rate of iron from plants as well, for example. The hypothesis I responded to was a component of algae reacting with another chemical to create a product that some people are sensitive to.
the8472 10y ago
> 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 appropriately, after the fact. And in most cases those problems don't even have lasting effects, they just cause discomfort for a few hours/days, in some small fraction of people. Sure, that might not be optimal, but not a catastrophe.
- saurik 10y ago
  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").
  - the8472 10y ago
    Maybe it was not the best example, but it was just a stand-in for "ingredient with negative effects for some fraction of the population", of which we have many in the food supply chain, some of which have more serious effects than others as you highlight. But we still do not ban them categorically. I don't see how one can avoid these issues while testing new ingredients. And if we want to explore sustainable food sources then testing new ingredients should be an option.
    - imtringued 10y ago
neves 10y ago
I'll let them alpha test their product in other guinea pigs. When none dies, I'll buy it.
darawk 10y ago
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. People get food poisoning randomly from restaurants all the time. And usually they can never figure otu exactly what it was that caused it, they just carry on and maybe get their rating lowered or license taken away if it keeps happening. Chipotle even just had the same problem. Yes, they get a bunch of shit for it. But it's not like this is a problem that doesn't afflict the 'normal' food industry as well.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  because we crack down on and have to on companies selling food products when people are getting sick. look at all the recalls companies do with just possible contamination. the professional food industry knows damn well there are no acceptable risks. if people are getting sick entire batch numbers are yanked from retail. the one time a big company purposefully ignored resulted in jail time for executives from Peanut Corporation which knew they were selling contaminated product. As in, people are getting sick and they did not pull it
  - darawk 10y ago
    Ya, but it seems to me that's exactly what happened here. They pulled the batch numbers that were contaminated. I guess I don't really see the difference. This isn't unprecedented in the packaged food industry, and it doesn't seem like they're handling it any worse than any other company has.
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      It is in that Soylent used an experimental ingredient which had not been shown to be appropriate for this use.
      - 10y ago
marcosdumay 10y ago
> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. Hum... Do you know of any other way to do health research?
- jonlucc 10y ago
  For one thing, if this is research, the subjects should know that and the protocol should be approved by an IRB. Instead, they are selling it as a product, so it should meet the standards of safety that other food products do. Personally, I'm not sure they've failed that, but it shouldn't be allowed under the guise of calling it health research.
duaneb 10y ago
"printf debugging" is just glorified experimentation. How would you proceed differently?

by glenda 10y ago

arkitaip 10y ago

That's hilarious and scary. Can you imagine the reactions if any other (non Valley?) food business had this approach to food safety?

jobu 10y ago
Really doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. A neighbor of mine has an allergy to MSG and it took him years to realize it. He's still does trial-and-error on new foods to determine which ones contain MSG as part of their "natural flavors" (sometimes with painful results). The difference here is that Soylent is a "food replacement". That means it's often the only thing these people eat and a small change to the formulation could be a breaking change for a few of them.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > People are complex and sometimes have allergies or reactions to foods that they don't even know or understand. That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies. Soylent's words: > "For anyone that struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." EDIT: I think this is scumbag behaviour on Soylent's part.
  - jobu 10y ago
    > That's fine, but Soylent marketed the product as being suitable for everyone even if they had allergies. Obviously there are caveats for their allergy claims. The first ingredient in Soylent is soy protein, and while it's not as common as peanut allergies there are definitely people that can't do soy: https://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/soy-allergy https://www.foodallergy.org/allergens/soy-allergy
    - DanBC 10y ago
      But that's the point - they claim it's fine for everyone, even those with allergies, but then formulate the product with known allergens. And now, with the new formula, when people are complaining of sickness they're saying it's a potential allergy or sensitivity to algae.
      - 67726e 10y ago
        How many products claim they're for everyone? Why not go after one-size fits all baseball caps too? It's just another round of marketing bullshit.
        pvg 10y ago
        One-size-fits-all caps usually don't make you sick. The bar (and corresponding regulations) is much higher when you're selling food, especially if you're claiming it replaces all other food and is somehow also good for various medical problems.
        DanBC 10y ago
        They made a specific, clear, medical claim: this product is okay for everyone, even those with allergies. They then made the product with known allergens. How is that okay?
        jacobolus 10y ago
        Their product pages all clearly state that they are vegan, lactose-free, nut-free, but are not organic, not certified kosher, not GMO free, not allergen free (“contains soy & gluten”), not gluten-free (e.g. “less than 20 parts-per-million (ppm) of gluten but does not meet the Celiac Support Association gluten-free guidelines.”), and have a list of all ingredients. Your complaint seems to be about one sentence on the marketing page for their original pre-order campaign in 2013 (as seen at the internet archive here https://web.archive.org/web/20140506133101/https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body https://web.archive.org/web/20140506133101/https://campaign....), which was based on a different formulation of their product without the current problematic ingredient, and didn’t list any detailed nutrition information at all, instead explicitly directing curious readers to their other web pages / blog posts for more information (including a full list of ingredients with the note that the product contained soy). I don’t quite understand why you think their new product version in 2016 should be considered to retroactively make their (no longer existent) page from 2013 false advertising.
  - bloaf 10y ago
    There is literally no such thing as a drink that is ok for everyone: http://www.medicaldaily.com/alexandra-allen-utah-teen-rare-water-allergy-struggles-take-showers-and-possibly-328494 http://www.medicaldaily.com/alexandra-allen-utah-teen-rare-w...
    - DanBC 10y ago
      I know. I'm not making the claim - Soylent is.
  - artimaeis 10y ago
    Link to Soylent's words there? I'm not finding anything with a Google search.
    - DanBC 10y ago
      It was made during their crowdfunding. They used those words to raise money. https://web.archive.org/web/20130816104921/https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body https://web.archive.org/web/20130816104921/https://campaign.... > What if you never had to worry about food again? > For many people, on many occasions, food is a hassle, especially when trying to eat well. Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous. Soylent will be personalized for different body types and customizable based on individual goals. It allows one to enjoy the health benefits of a well balanced diet with less effort and cost. > For anyone who struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you. > 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. > There are problems with the current state of food > 50% of the food produced globally is wasted, and food makes for the largest component of municipal garbage. If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive. 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. 70% of americans are overweight or obese. 1 in 7 people globally are malnourished, and 1 in 3 in the developing world suffer from deficiency. Countless others are living hand-to-mouth, subsistence farming, hindering economic development. Even in the developed world, agriculture is the most dangerous industry to work in by occupational injuries and illnesses, and obesity is on the rise. > By taking years to spoil, dramatically reducing cost, and easing transportation and storage, soylent could have a dramatic effect on hunger and malnutrition. Proceeds from the purchase of soylent enable us to work with aid partners and reduce hunger and environmental impact both in the United States and the developing world. > Think about what the future of food looks like. Imagine everyone having a customized, efficient, nutritious default diet and the freedom to eat for leisure as desired. It is a bright, healthy future indeed. I have problems with a bunch of these claims ("takes years to spoil"), but Soylent do appear to have pulled back from some of them. And donating money to the WFP is always good.
- insaneirish 10y ago
  > A neighbor of mine has an allergy to MSG and it took him years to realize it. I'd really like to see him take a double blind test to see if it's actually true. Saying you have an allergy to monosodium glutamate is a lot closer to saying you have an allergy to monosodium chloride (i.e. table salt) than it is to an actual food allergy. You need glutamate to live [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter)
  - sosuke 10y ago
    From personal accounts, ones I've only read about, it seems that sensitivity to things like MSG, ingested orally, are completely possible. But the reactions are small enough to never require any medical attention or further study. No anaphylaxis for instance. Anyhow, since the reactions aren't large enough to be measured in an acute way there is no allergy. However when lay-people speak about how they have reactions to something they eat you might often encounter them using the term allergy in a sense that doesn't require caring a steroid injectable. In essence they have proved through research that MSG causes no allergic reactions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19389112/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19389112/ But they can't say there are no reactions at all. (last paragraph http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/monosodium-glutamate/faq-20058196 http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-he...) It might be MSG causing a headache or eating too much salt in a single meal but either way the symptoms are avoided by elimination of that from their diet. No deaths, no acute reactions, no more study needed. It hurts when you do that? Stop doing it.
dictum 10y ago
Enteric disruption is a growth market.
Fricken 10y ago
Obesity rates have tripled in 3 decades, I don't think we can blame Soylent for that, but clearly something major has gone terribly wrong with the industrial food system and it's approach to food safety. That's the hilarious and scary thing. I don't worry too much about what's going on at some small scale esoteric meal replacement startup.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The problem isn't safety, it's poor alignment of incentives. Food companies optimize for palatability and against satiety. Then they brag about it, advertising that you will never eat just 1. Why do they do this? Because the food market is saturated and getting people to consume more is a good growth strategy.
- teslabox 10y ago
  > Obesity rates have tripled in 3 decades, I don't think we can blame Soylent for that, but clearly something major has gone terribly wrong with the industrial food system We can blame the paint industry and the cotton industry for the food industry's mistakes. Paints & stains used to be made from "drying oils" (soybean oil, linseed oil, etc), now they're made from petroleum. Cotton production creates a lot of cotton seed as a waste product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drying_oil Instead of going quietly into the night, the seed oil industry now sells "vegetable oil" for human consumption. Crisco was made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil until it was reformulated in 2007. IMHO, Crisco is still not appropriate for human consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisco Charlatanism: it's what's for dinner.
saint_fiasco 10y ago
Don't they all? Do you think other food businesses have the source code for human nutrition and do white-box testing on their product? Of course they do trial and error! It's just that most of the errors happened far in the past.

estefan 10y ago

> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. As such, it's pretty stupid to be an early adopter here. Just ask children of thalidamide...

harveywi 10y ago

> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection.

criley2 10y ago
>"This is an important observation, and one that deserves some serious and deep reflection" From my perspective as someone who studied drug development and testing heavily in university, and now works as a programmer for medical ehr (hospital) software, I don't particularly think they're being unethical. The typical Phase 1 trial for a NME (new molecular entity; a new novel drug) is basically giving young dudes some random chemical based on "well it didn't seem to kill the animals, and the statistics we've drawn suggest it won't kill you, want $100?" Or in the medical software field. Due to the complexity and amount of patient data, and the massive restrictions on HIPAA based PHI, it's very difficult to have robust testing environments for medical software. For a Priority problem affecting patient care, we do our best to understand, resolve and test before support patches code out, but ultimately, we sometimes rely on the same logic. We believe we resolved it, but until it's tested under live conditions, we just can't be positive.
- deleted 10y ago
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- archgoon 10y ago
  Can you expand on how HIPAA and PHI impact testing? That sounds interesting and important.
  - criley2 10y ago
    The amount of information a patient generates while staying at the hospital is pretty immense. Vital signs, lab results like imaging data, lab results like blood tests, documentation created by every single professional who sees the patient, diagnosis data, financial/billing data, medication/pharmaceutical data, an insane amount of regulation check box filling things like as a random example, the CCD - Continuity of Care Document. As they move from ER outpatient to inpatient observation to outpatient ambulatory (or whatever unique pathway they take entering a hospital and returning to their primary care physician or homecare/hospice), new accounts are created, diagnoses entered, complicated compounding medications evaluated and modified. This information is generated by real physicians, real nurses, real aides, etc, in actual care environments. People who trained for over a decade to understand what they're doing. I trained for a very long time be a programmer, and I have extensive biology education. But when testing my code, how can I emulate a PhD MD oncologist? How can I emulate a certified Nurse Practitioner, a Home Health Aide or a Licensed Nurse Practitioner? How can I generate an enormous amount of valid, real-world medical data for my test patient? I can learn that coumadin + aspirin creates a drug interaction and is a big no-no for I50.x style heart failure patients. But that's just one little trope I can repeat. There's 10,000 more things they do on a daily basis that I'll never grok. The short answer is that I cannot. I use the programs, I enter things, I learn and do my best to emulate what my users do, but many of them have spent more time learning and perfecting their job than I have been alive. Plus, I don't have ten millions dollars worth of hospital equipment to generate real data with, to interface with, just various abstractions/test code we use when testing. In the case of HIPAA/PHI, if there was more freedom to use protected health information, I wouldn't have to emulate medical professionals, I could copy real patient data and test my code against a production database. But for the ultimate safety of the patients in our care, protected patient data is only allowed in 2 very secure messaging systems we use, and literally no where else. So it often falls to the other half of our programming staff, the support staff, to take our code, patch it to a real hospital test system (hospitals generally have a live system and a test system physically hosted in their facility), and test against actual patient data from within the hospitals own network. As an application programmer that option isn't really available to me. So it's two fold: the difficulty of emulating the incredibly technically detailed behaviors of highly educated professionals when testing, and the inability to use real world data for in-house testing efforts prior to shipping code.

dkersten 10y ago

They've been playing this game from the start. I remember the original announcement blog post talking about how he figured out the formula through trial and error. We can eat small amounts of poison and never notice that it's damaged our bodies, for example. Who knows what the long term effects are.

XorNot 10y ago
You can also eat small amounts of poison and become immune. Everything will be damage in large quantities. And some common things probably do long term damage (e.g. any amount of charring on meat) but we never question them.
- deleted 10y ago
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- dkersten 10y ago
  That's not the point I was tying to make. My point was that he created the formula through trial and error (I distinctly remember he said he'd put whatever amount he read online was correct and then if he felt sick he'd adjust the amount down; but "getting sick" is a rather extreme indicator). That is, at least prior to investment money (which I hope was at least partially spent on testing the stuff for safety), his safety claims were based off "I didn't get sick in the short term" without any real data on the medium to long term effects. I mentioned small amounts of poison only as an anecdote that his trial and error testing could potentially have been harming him without him knowing it. That is, it's simply an anecdote to demonstrate that the "safety tests" he had done up until that blog post were themselves anecdotal at best. I haven't been following soylent since and assume (and hope) that since he took on funding that he then followed up with proper scientific procedures. But people ate his stuff based on that initial blog post, so...
  - Blaaguuu 10y ago
    It's not a subject that I have done a ton of reading on, but from the many random articles that I have read over the years, it really seems like the bulk of nutritional science is still pretty much trial and error... Hence the new studies that seem to come out ever other month saying that eggs are good/bad for you... or coffee... or soy... or algae... or multi-vitamins... or gluten... or berries... For something that affects us so deeply, it seems like we still know remarkably little about how food affects our bodies/minds. Any research that the Soylent folks do or read is helpful, but I wouldn't expect them to do a 5 year study and be able to suddenly say without a doubt that they have a the perfect formula.

pavlov 10y ago

Samsung tried the same thing with the Galaxy Note 7. They gave up after one round of "if it doesn't explode then it was the battery vendor".

rosser 10y ago

Let's remember that these are the same rocket surgeons who neglected to include iron in their original formula. Trial-and-error, with someone else's health as the stakes, is apparently the name of the game here.

harveywi 10y ago
Collecting money from the risk-takers is telling as well, due to the psychological/influential aspect of the buyer as well as the motives of the seller.

DINKDINK 10y ago

> 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 them. It very well not have been the algae but the reaction of the algae that occurred when another chemical's concentration was increase and caused a second or third order reaction.

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resfirestar 10y ago
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.
- frenchy 10y ago
  Heme-bound iron is better absorbed by the body than other sources of iron, which is why sometimes vegetarians are anemic despite the high quantity of iron in vegetables. Much of the the known mechanics of digestion are molecular, but that's mostly due to the fact that we have a lot better scientific tools to deal with things on a molecular level than we do with macro-molecular constructs.
  - resfirestar 10y ago
    Okay, but you're still talking about how a particular nutrient interacts with the digestive system in a particular way. I don't assume there's any evidence that eating meat increases the absorption rate of iron from plants as well, for example. The hypothesis I responded to was a component of algae reacting with another chemical to create a product that some people are sensitive to.

the8472 10y ago

> 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 appropriately, after the fact. And in most cases those problems don't even have lasting effects, they just cause discomfort for a few hours/days, in some small fraction of people. Sure, that might not be optimal, but not a catastrophe.

saurik 10y ago
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").
- the8472 10y ago
  Maybe it was not the best example, but it was just a stand-in for "ingredient with negative effects for some fraction of the population", of which we have many in the food supply chain, some of which have more serious effects than others as you highlight. But we still do not ban them categorically. I don't see how one can avoid these issues while testing new ingredients. And if we want to explore sustainable food sources then testing new ingredients should be an option.
  - imtringued 10y ago

neves 10y ago

I'll let them alpha test their product in other guinea pigs. When none dies, I'll buy it.

darawk 10y ago

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. People get food poisoning randomly from restaurants all the time. And usually they can never figure otu exactly what it was that caused it, they just carry on and maybe get their rating lowered or license taken away if it keeps happening. Chipotle even just had the same problem. Yes, they get a bunch of shit for it. But it's not like this is a problem that doesn't afflict the 'normal' food industry as well.

Shivetya 10y ago
because we crack down on and have to on companies selling food products when people are getting sick. look at all the recalls companies do with just possible contamination. the professional food industry knows damn well there are no acceptable risks. if people are getting sick entire batch numbers are yanked from retail. the one time a big company purposefully ignored resulted in jail time for executives from Peanut Corporation which knew they were selling contaminated product. As in, people are getting sick and they did not pull it
- darawk 10y ago
  Ya, but it seems to me that's exactly what happened here. They pulled the batch numbers that were contaminated. I guess I don't really see the difference. This isn't unprecedented in the packaged food industry, and it doesn't seem like they're handling it any worse than any other company has.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    It is in that Soylent used an experimental ingredient which had not been shown to be appropriate for this use.
    - 10y ago

marcosdumay 10y ago

> What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake. Hum... Do you know of any other way to do health research?

jonlucc 10y ago
For one thing, if this is research, the subjects should know that and the protocol should be approved by an IRB. Instead, they are selling it as a product, so it should meet the standards of safety that other food products do. Personally, I'm not sure they've failed that, but it shouldn't be allowed under the guise of calling it health research.

duaneb 10y ago

"printf debugging" is just glorified experimentation. How would you proceed differently?