Soylent's problem is not a seemingly overlooked ingredient. Their biggest problem is inability to run the continuous food processing loop.
What's the point of tweaking the recipe if you can't guarantee the execution and your customers get, basically, randomness for lunch?
We had a corporate subscription for Soylent 2.0 drink. The taste varied from batch to batch on the scale from "milk in a cereal bowl" to "sewage water".
These issues have been regularly popping up on reddit and their own forums for months now. We have suspended the subscription and I can't bring myself to try another bottle, even though I originally loved the concept and the taste.
My main complaint with the 1.5 powder was extreme inconsistency between batches. One batch, which many people were complaining about in the Soylent forums, had a rancid/sour/burnt taste and smell to it. The problem with the formula is that because it has a very bland taste, inconsistency stands out like a sore thumb and your mind works wonders to create an aversion to the whole product. Once I started having the weird tasting Soylent, even the "normal" batches were no longer palatable to me.
Soylent staff dismissed these concerns as "normal variation in a plant based product".
I saw an early video and the assembly line was completely manual. It looked like a person went around the table and added a scoop of each ingredient to his container. With such an imprecise process i can't imagine how they control consistency or quality.
To be fair, this statement is something that needs to be followed up with hard evidence. Inconsistent flavour between batches does not necessarily mean you're getting different percentages of ingredients. You can't simply blame them for variation in taste; just look at orange juice companies for the amount of chemical manipulation that goes into making a single brand of orange juice taste exactly the same in every batch even though oranges naturally have varying flavors. That is not the kind of science I want behind my food.
There are thousands of individuals and organizations out there with the equipment to analyze batches to determine whether the mix is consistent. Why haven't we heard from them? I can't imagine risk of lawsuit for defamation is the only reason. The whole appeal of Soylent is that the formula is public; surely they can't be hiding behind "publishing analysis of our product is exposing our corporate secrets".
> There are thousands of individuals and organizations out there with the equipment to analyze batches to determine whether the mix is consistent. Why haven't we heard from them?
Honest question, why would anyone bother? Who would actually benefit from being able to release a statement about how variable it is?
The only reason Soylent have gotten away with it for so long is that the FDA rules for this category of product haven't been written yet.
A product shouldn't make people sick when used as intended. So if a product is intended to be consumed as 100% of your diet, it MUST:
- contain all known macro- and micro-nutrients necessary for human health
- contain nothing that makes you sick when you eat it all the time
Soylent failed on both counts:
- Early formulations lacked selenium. Beta testers duly developed symptoms of selenium deficiency.
- The latest formulation contained algae. Customers duly got sick from consuming more of this kind of algae than humans have ever consumed before.
The first mistake might be excused as a beginner's error and a learning experience. But they didn't learn. Luckily, Soylent lives in the land of class action lawsuits. The lawyers are gonna shut these jokers down.
Good lord. The percentage of people who 'got sick' by Soylent was less 0.1% of all consumers. If we went into panic-mode for that kind of result for every product, we wouldn't have any products. The variation in humans is too great to test for everything.
"The Lawyers" aren't going to shut anyone down because no one is suing, and if they tried I doubt any judge would allow a class-action lawsuit for a few tummyaches.
Soylent lists the ingredients on the box. That the consumers were unaware of their sensitivity to algae is not evidence of misconduct on the part of Soylent.
I also take your point about human choice, as far as it goes, but I still think Soylent is a special case.
If I eat ridiculous amounts of pesto and rupture my duodenum, nobody would hold the pesto producer responsible, because that's not the way people eat pesto.
But if eating lots of Soylent made me ill, Soylent's makers should, in principle, bear some responsibility, because they know that this is how people eat Soylent. Indeed, Soylent was heavily hyped as something that could be 100% of your diet, and they can't pretend that never happened.
The FDA actually DOES require that novel ingredients are tested to the point where 0.1% problems are detectable. I know that the algae isn't a novel ingredient, but if Soylent add it to their formula, it will suddenly comprise a large part of the diet of a large number of people. That is a novel thing in itself, so I would argue that Soylent has some responsibility to make sure what they're doing is safe. If FDA rules say its okay not to, the FDA rules need to catch up.
I might be inclined to give Soylent the benefit of the doubt if I thought they had a better attitude. But when they made themselves sick because they forgot humans need selenium in their diet, they didn't say, "Wow! How could we have been so dumb? We need to take more care with people's bodies." It was more like, "Hey, no problem. Nobody died and we fixed it now. Let's move on."
These are just the screw ups we know about. What are the odds there are plenty more they managed to hush up? Nobody has been killed or injured so far, but if they don't change their attitude and people continue to live off their swill...
If I release a product containing lactose, clearly state it contains lactose, and a bunch of people have stomach problems after ingesting it because they are lactose intolerant, is it my fault? Regardless on whether or not it was meant to be a 100% meal replacement?
This is a fairly ridiculous argument. People's lack of knowledge about their own food sensitivities is not Soylent's fault, nor should it be expected to be.
> The percentage of people who 'got sick' by Soylent was less 0.1% of all consumers.
If that happened to any other manufacturer's food product, there would be an immediate recall and a long intense search for the culprit before a single unit is sold to consumers again. This is people's health you're talking about, not some tech product with a dead pixel.
"Food producers recall their products from the marketplace when the products are mislabeled or when the food may present a health hazard to consumers because the food is contaminated or has caused a foodborne illness outbreak."
Soylent is not mislabeled. Soylent is not contaminated. Soylent has not caused a foodborne illness outbreak.
At the moment, it appears that a small group of consumers discovered they have a sensitivity to algae. They were not hospitalized. No one has died. I'm not even sure anyone missed work.
Let's not turn this into an Upton Sinclair novel. Humans are not particularly fragile creatures.
Gotten away with it? Have they been lying about something? If people don't buy their products, they'll leave the market. If people continue to buy them, they'll stay. I really hope the FDA doesn't get involved. As it is a low cost source of nutrition, more regulation will raise the price with no corresponding added benefit to the consumer; affecting the people who may be the most vulnerable to price increases.
There are people who believe that market forces are the only product safety regulation we need. If that's your philosophy, we're clearly never going to agree.
But if you DO believe that some level of consumer protection beyond honest labelling is appropriate, then I think I can make a case that a product like Soylent should be regulated a little more than other foodstuffs. Please see the other threads of this discussion if you'd like to pursue that idea further.
I’m no Soylent advocate (I’m a fan of home-cooked fresh food). But...
The mainstream US diet and lifestyle causes unbelievable health problems: obesity, heart disease, liver damage, dental caries, gastrointestinal conditions, some chronic anxiety, skin conditions, possibly some kinds of dementia, osteoporosis, seasonal affective disorder, and on and on..
Modern governments come absolutely nowhere close to teaching people to eat a balanced diet of healthy foods or setting policy to discourage unhealthy foods. Indeed, often official policy does just the opposite.
Compared to soda, fruit juice, beer, cookies, donuts, chips, breakfast cereal, instant noodles, packaged dinners, etc. etc., a few people having temporary digestive problems for a few days before discontinuing their liquid meal-replacement diet because they turned out to have an algae allergy is really the least of our problems.
The main thing our food safety institutions do is prevent disease outbreaks and dangerous food contamination. They aren’t set up to have a meaningful effect on people’s overall diet.
Sorry to be so bleak, but I don't think Soylent is "set up to have a meaningful effect on people’s overall diet.
The people you are talking about never heard about Soylent, and probably won't ever buy an expensive (?), bland tasting product that sounds like something from Star-Trek.
I agree. My point is just that having the FDA ban Soylent isn’t going to help any of these people either.
If the FDA were reorganized to significantly reduce the amount of soda, cookies, chips, and candy people ate, that would have a much more useful effect.
>. So if a product is intended to be consumed as 100% of your diet
Soylent isn't marketed as being intended to replace every meal anymore. I know some of their earlier press focused on the founder replacing all of his food with Soylent, but they've transitioned from that approach more recently.
It might be my non-nativeness but a meal replacement doesn't sound like a food replacement to me. At least, not if you don't want to.
The whole concept is experimental and everyone knows that. Doesn't mean they should be allowed to sell a product known to make people ill, but if you replace 100% of your food you shouldn't be surprised if it turns out they forgot an ingredient or put a little too much in for your specific lifestyle.
Too late if they have already lodged that in everyone's mind - they should have gotten a new brand if the brand proposition was going to be radically different.
Where is the FDA in all of this? I would hope that after the widespread issues with the product, they would have stepped in and blocked shipment until safety studies have been done that comply with regulations.
The supplement industry is big in Utah and Orrin hatch has blocked oversight. The upshot is that supplements are barely regulated if at all. The FDA is very limited in what it can do.
I don't think that applies here. According to the FDA Guidelines [1] (page 4) for a dietary supplement:
"Furthermore, a dietary supplement must be labeled as a
dietary supplement and be intended for ingestion and must not be represented for use as conventional food or as a
sole item of a meal or of the diet"
Soylent is clearly marketing it as a meal replacement which should disqualify it as a supplement.
It depends how they're structuring everything. They add Omega-3s derived from algae to their product, so that algae is regulated via the supplement standards. The product making people sick appears to be algal flour, which probably falls on the food guidelines.
In either case, the essential standard is whether or not it's substantially similar to a product already on the market. The standard is "GRAS" or Generally Recognized As Safe. If you want to sell milk or vitamin C or whatever, you don't need to conduct your own safety studies since both have been sold for years without issue. You just have to ensure that your product is similar enough to the GRAS product to qualify.
I actually worked for an Algae Biofuels / Omega-3 company in the Bay Area for a period. The GRAS process wasn't onerous but was actually fairly regimented. We conducted uptake tests and enzyme tests on rats over several different period lengths to ensure that the algal omega-3s we were producing had the same impact as other sources of omega-3. Ours were a slightly different form (Ethyl Esters instead of Triglycerides) so our standard to meet was a little higher.
I was on the business side but have an undergrad science background if anyone has any questions.
EDIT:
Forgot to add a link to the GRAS status of the Algal Flour that Soylent is using:
They did a fair amount of safety testing to determine its status.
> In a published 90-day subchronic toxicity study, Hsd:Sprague Dawley rats, (n=10/sex/group) were fed diets of C. protothecoides S106 flour at up to approximately 4,800 mg/kg bw/d for males and 5,400 mg/kg bw/d for females; no adverse effects were observed. In a published 28-day study, Hsd:Sprague Dawley rats, (n=10/sex/group) were fed diets of C. protothecoides S106 flour at up to approximately 7,600 mg/kg bw/d for males and 8,100 mg/kg bw/d for females; no adverse effects were observed. The results of a published bacterial mutation study showed that algal flour (5000 microgram/plate) is neither genotoxic nor mutagenic. Additionally, a published study showed that algal flour did not induce a clastogenic response as evaluated by the bone marrow chromosomal aberration test in mice after a single oral dose (2000 mg/kg bw/d).
They're busy regulating life saving drugs. If we got rid of the FDA all together, there would be more competition for products like this, and companies would need to win the trust of consumers by providing real health study information.
The argument about drugs is a strawman. Yes there is a 'D' in FDA, but there is also an 'F'. You are also making a false assumption that consumers know what's good for them and what to intake or avoid based on "real health study information" - and this is why the FDA exists in the first place. If there are issues with it performing, that doesn't mean tear it down (that would be a disaster).
That is quite possibly the most short-sighted response to this topic. Few would read it, and no company would offer any kind of information that is actually conclusive.
Expecting the free market to do anything except optimize for profit is silly. And yes, that is profit at the expense of people's health.
Sounds like they have a bug in their "food stack" and this modification is like printf debugging - if no one gets sick then it was the algae, otherwise they will need to continue poking around to figure out what's wrong.
What a silly game to play when people's health is at stake.
You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant. I really don't understand the hate that's directed towards this product. Nobody was seriously injured, it was a relatively small number of people that got sick.
Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers. It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups. If you can't tolerate that, then don't buy it.
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.
I am sure it has changed over the years but I still have vivid memories of the rodents that ran around the original warehouse they mixed soylent in. It was a joke. They had a bunch of randos mixing powders haphazardly and no sense of proper food prep/sanitation. It was scarier than some of the operations that supplement manufacturers run. I am sure its changed but it blows my mind that this is classified as an ambitious project.
None of the bags made in that facility were sold to the public. I remember because I was an original crowdfunder eager to receive my first shipment. They did not ship until they were producing it at the regulated co-packing facility.
Do you think that people with a rodent problem shouldn't invite others over for dinner? Do you think they shouldn't eat in their own home? Are your concerns actually about health or about the sanctity of food being corrupted by impurity?
About 20 million homes each year get rodent infestations. Even more have rats in them, but not at the infestation level. This is not limited to people in poverty or low incomes, either.
Commercial food prep facilities obviously should be held to higher standards, but this facility was basically the equivalent of doing it in their garage for test batch purposes, which I doubt you would bat an eyelash at.
I don't care about the standards they had as a startup before they had a commercial product. I care about the standards they have at the facilities creating the product I would be purchasing.
So, in that Vice Motherboard piece, CEO Rob Rhinehart claims that Grocers don't scale to 7 billion, but he provides nothing to back up that claim or his other claim that engineered food is better than what a standard Grocer offers.
Later, he goes on to claim that no one is lacking clean water around the 12:30 mark, seems like this CEO is just aimlessly spewing bullshit with no facts to back up what he claims.
> You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant.
But Soylent is supposed to be consumable on a daily basis, so long-term effects are important. Remember the documentary Super Size Me, which tested long term effects of food from a certain fast-food restaurant? [1]
I imagine that's why the company is still tweaking the formula based on results. It's not like they picked a formula years ago and have refused to iterate.
I have to agree with the above poster. I don't understand the hate directed at Soylent, and I don't understand what folks expect them to do. The company is very transparent as well, which is exactly what you'd hope for a company trying to develop a product like this. In many cases, the folks who say the problem Soylent is tackling is borderline impossible are the same ones who expect them to find a perfect formula right out of the gate and see any stumbling blocks as vindication that the whole effort is doomed. These expectations seem grossly at odds to me.
For what it's worth, many people absolutely do eat restaurant food on a daily or nearly daily basis. In the past year of eating a mixture of food from restaurants, home-cooked meals, and Soylent, I've only ever gotten sick (severely so, at that) from restaurant food.
Also, as for that documentary, he just lived off fast food for a month, right? That's hardly long-term. Plenty of folks have effectively repeated exactly the same experiment with Soylent many times over at this point. He also didn't just eat fast food, but intentionally overconsumed (hence the title of the documentary), which is quite contrary to the purpose of Soylent (given that each bottle is just 400 kcal).
That documentary tested overeating well outside the bounds of any sane nutritional guidelines. It's sad that people don't have the critical thinking skills required to realize the same thing would happen if you ate those levels of calories at any restaurant or even at home.
wasn't there a counter-documentary where someone ate from mcdonalds every day and also followed a fairly strict exercise regimen and wound up being way fitter than when he started?
Yep, it was called "Fat Head." The exercise regime wasn't even that strict, it was basically continuing the regular walking the documentarian already did. However, the food intake was strictly limited to 1800 calories and less then 100g of carbs per day. The goal being to show fast food isn't inherently unhealthy, it was the quantity (as already noted above) being eaten in Super Size Me that was unhealthy. In that regard, Fat Head succeeded as the documentarian's health metrics all improved (lot weight, lower blood pressure, better cholesterol measurements).
Yes, but the overall point remains if you overeat you'll get fat regardless of what it is.
You can actually get a balanced daily diet out of mcdonalds if you ask for unsalted fries and get one of their salads once in a while.
Honestly sodium aside the only thing you need to do not to over eat at MC is to get water instead of soda and just regular sized burger.
It will be around 600-700 cals per meal with fries which means you can eat 3 of those a day and maintain weight or even lose some depending on your age, sex, bodymass and daily regiment.
I did this myself around the same time as Super Size Me for a handful of reasons, none of which were to prove a point. I had good results from it. Would I have been even better off if I wasn't eating fast food for every meal? Probably. But I certainly wasn't worse off for eating that way and it scratched the itches which led me to that path in the first place.
Ya, I agree. Long-term effects are important. But AFAIK there's no indication of any long-term harm from Soylent. There's only an indication that a particular batch may have been contaminated.
This suggests not that they were careless in choosing their formulation or research, but that there was an error in the manufacturing process. This is something that can happen to any company, and has many times. Should they fix it? Yes. But I don't think they should be held to a higher standard here than anyone else.
There's no indication of long-term anything from Soylent, just people screaming that it must be bad, or people screaming that it's the future. It's mostly a ton of anecdote, and no reason to believe that it's particularly harmful, or particularly healthy in the long-term.
My feeling? You want to beta-test that with your health, I won't stop you, but I won't join you either.
All diet choices amount to beta testing with your health. There is no (known) correct way to eat, so we choose the best we can based culture/health class/news stories/diet gurus/doctors. It is very hard to make the case that eating Soylent (never tried it myself), is meaningfully different from choosing to go macrobiotic, or paleo, or following the food pyramid.
How about just... eating food? I know, I know... so unpopular, but "Paleo, Macro..." all of that crap? Let it go. Outside of people trying to sell you shit, including books, the best advice you'll ever get is just to eat a relatively balanced diet, keep up fiber intake, and maintain a healthy weight. Whether you prefer or personally thrive more on meaty diets, or eating a lot of barley isn't really that hard to figure out.
You don't need to chug slurry 24/7, or eschew all carbs to achieve it. Avoid too much of any one thing, avoid too much processed crap (not because it's inherently bad, but because it's usually loaded with salt and sugar), and learn to cook. It's hardly a science, but you have large historical samples of people living that way, compared to a couple years of someone telling you that you can spend the rest of your days drinking the latest gray sludge.
There is no such thing as just "eating food" - you are making diet choices, consciously and/or subconsciously in everything you choose to eat. Your comment is loaded with all sorts of diet judgement (fiber good, salt bad, balanced good, processed bad). We could find out barley causes cancer, or even though you thrive on a meaty diet, it causes heart disease. Or diet doesn't matter and it is all genetic or micro-biome. There is no diet that isn't beta testing.
The odds of finding out that something like barley and chicken are especially carcinogenic are a lot less than the odds that Soylent or Paleo or some other fad is frankly unhealthy.
Ignore the bulk of nutrition "research" which is after all, crap, and focus on the few things that are relatively sound. High fiber, healthy weight, good blood levels, get your nutrients. It's not that hard.
Couldn't it be argued that it's "relatively sound" that as long as you get a good balance of calories and macro and micro nutrients, which is exactly what Soylent provides, that you are on a good path?
FWIW, on the topic of healthy weight, the Soylent forum has many anecdotes of people who have used the product to lose (or gain!) weight because it allows them to easily count calories without having to spend time scanning products into MyFitnessPal every day and weighing all of their food.
The idea of "healthy weight, good blood levels, get your nutrients" is the goal of every diet I am aware of. But as for what goes in your mouth to achieve it, there is a plethora of conflicting ideas. I totally agree that the bulk of nutrition research is crap, which is why I put a barley and chicken diet, vegan diet, paleo diet, and Soylent diet in the same "beta testing" category.
Super Size Me was ridiculous, I bought into it too, but he was going out of his way to eat unhealthy at McDonald's. Even McDonald's puts nutritional information out there and doesn't recommend the daily intake of calories that guy was making.
The point is that they do recommend it, just not in the tiny print. 99% of what they say is "eat more", 1% is "with care".
The advertising shows combinations of items, the staff offer upsizing for a deal, etc. Their business model clearly takes advantage of upselling and impulse buys.
SSM is a story about what happens to someone who doesn't know any better and just goes to the convenient restaurant, eating the standard portions they sell. It's best viewed with that other documentary, about the guy who got skinny eating at McDs (and exercising!). It's not (strictly) the food that does it, but the portions and lifestyle it encourages.
I'm not sure I'd consider 30 days to be "long term", but I do agree that long-term effects are important. I think deficiencies in important micronutrients take longer to have detectable effects and are harder to debug, in general though. It's why I am intrigued by Soylent but try to get my nutrients by just having a variety of foods in my diet.
Slightly OT: in regard to „long-term“ effects of food/diet, I am curious what you consider long-term? Is long-term a defined timeframe? Is it 1 year, 10 years, 1000 years (multiple generations)?
> 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.
Really? It seems to me like it's Ensure for computer programmers.
It's intolerably sweet (comes in chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and butter pecan). There's no option for people who want a meal replacement, not dessert.
It gives me indigestion every time I drink it.
I switched to Soylent because it's a better product than Ensure.
>Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers.
I have never understood why people think Soylent is doing something so interesting. It is essentially baby formula for adults. And its not like the nutritional requirements of infants are any simpler than adults. The formula industry has existed for decades and has generally done a good enough job of producing products that are able to make up 100% of a human's diet.
It's not that interesting from a scientific perspective. They're not doing anything that any doctor or biology grad student couldn't do. It's the concept that's interesting.
Food is a pretty inefficient thing. In terms of the time we spend consuming it and the resources expended in its production. Soylent is a first step towards a solution to those problems. The theoretical efficiency gain is very high. Of course, Soylent won't achieve that, but the idea is alluring.
Personally, I don't want to drink Soylent for all or even most of my meals. I drink it 1-2x per week. I generally feel better after drinking it than after eating a meal, and i'd say say Soylent is healthier than the average meal i'd make for myself otherwise.
Aside from that, it's fast, cheap, stays good for a long time and requires no cleanup. All that doesn't mean it's going to change the world, but it is a nice addition to my palette of available foodstuffs.
Food poisoning is bad food prep techniques.Restaurants generally provide food with ingredients within an expected band, prepared in an expected way.
Soylent using experimental ingredients in their products and finding out that they are irritating some users is not the same thing.
If a restaurant told me they used all sorts of "new" industrial ingredients than I would likely balk. I would not want to be in on that beta program.
Especially since, you know, it's likely they are pursuing new ingredients all the time to improve their margins, not the food quality, taste or nutrition.
"Soylent is trying to do something more ambitious than other packaged food manufacturers"
No, they aren't. There is nothing special about what they're trying to do compared to any other packaged food manufacturer. That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer.
"It's not unreasonable to expect there to be some small hiccups."
It entirely is. If this happened to Twinkies, people would be livid. I see no reason that shouldn't be the same response here.
Soylent pretends to be more ambitious in substance, but that's mostly hype. OTOH, it's the hype that's the only reason anyone pays attention to Soylent at all, so they are kind of stuck accepting the bad side of that along with the good.
Edit: I think that a well-known incidence of a popular food product which got FDA approval and saw widespread use also causing gastrointestinal distress is entirely relevant to the discussion.
If you disagree with me feel free to use the comments.
> That's why they shouldn't be cut any more slack than any other manufacturer.
I think it's the opposite, people are unnecessarily critical of Soylent. The problem is consumers weren't aware they were allergic to algae flour. It has nothing to do with Soylent's hygiene or formulation practices.
I think the attention received is relative to the attention solicited. Soylent has been everywhere in the news talking up their revolutionary product. It's not unlike Apple's Macbook debacle. They launched a product and made a big deal about it, it had a flaw and everyone latched onto it to complain.
It seems to me that Soylent barely even has a marketing budget compared to Apple. To compare it to Apple's marketing of the MacBook Pro seems like a huge stretch. In my honest estimation, word about it has largely spread precisely due to the large amount of vitriol it receives and the fact that it easily and naturally leads to controversial forum discussions on nutrition.
Something about the very idea of Soylent causes people on lots of internet forums to pop out of the woodwork and discuss it quite passionately, from both directions. The basic concept seems to engender a lot of excitement from some and a lot of disgust from others, and when those folks clash online you immediately get 200+ comment threads like the one we're in. This phenomenon has been going on for years at this point, over and over, both here and elsewhere.
Haven't you ever seen a commercial for meal replacement shakes before? They've been a staple in the diet industry as long as I've been alive. Liquid diets are also a "thing" in medical settings for patients who are unable to take solid foods. Remember "Carnation Instant Breakfast"? That's been around since the 60s. Its really not an original idea.
I don't hate Soylent in the least but you've gotta be closing your eyes and plugging your ears to believe what they are trying to do is new or original.
I mean I used carnation instant breakfast as an example, that's available in every single grocery store in America.
Dozens of those already exist and are used everyday in hospitals across the US.
They come in a wide variety of types - high and low protein, high and low calorie, with or without fibre, designed for naso-gastric tube feeding or for drinking, flavoured or unflavoured, designed to be eaten on their own or to be mixed with some other food stuff, designed to be eaten cold or hot.
The novelty of Soylent is (irresponsibly) marketing these to the public.
Those have existed for quite some time. And, quite frankly, they're just packaging food. That's not novel. Every other food maker is responsible for making sure their product is safe. Why should Soylent be any different?
Ya, and there's nothing wrong with that. I wouldn't fault anyone for choosing not to use Soylent because of this.
But there seems to be a weird sort of vitriol in the reaction here that doesn't seem like it happened to Chipotle. Perhaps because people see it as an example of the overconfident arrogance of 'tech people'. I'm not sure. But it seems deeply misguided to me.
Yes, something has gone wrong. Yes, they are having trouble figuring out exactly what it was. But so did Chipotle. So do lots of other food companies when things like this happens. Would it be great if this didn't happen? Absolutely. But it's not unprecedented and it isn't at all clear to me that their processes and controls are substantially inferior to the industry standard.
And secondly, they market themselves as a sort of radical new approach to food. They expressly cultivate that image of transformation and self-experimentation. Anyone willing to use a product like that should be more tolerant of bugs than average, IMO. If I got sick from Soylent I might stop drinking it, but I wouldn't say they shouldn't have made the thing in the first place.
The whole point of bringing in the discipline associated with release notes and iterations is to make it a lot more transparent than existing food producers. The only problem is that they are not transparent enough with exact quantities and processes anymore.
However, their process is supposed to decrease the number of issues not increase it.
I agree i'd like them to be completely transparent. However, they're certainly more transparent than your average packaged food company.
And I don't think you can extrapolate from a single incident that their process has increased the number of issues. You need more data than that to make a claim of that sort.
> How might they acquire that knowledge, other than through the process they seem to currently be executing?
Well, a lot of folks would like to see a bit more care paid attention to the entire process. This isn't the first time Soylent has shipped potentially dangerous product.
Not long ago, they shipped their new bottled formula to folks, and it arrived covered in mold! Their snack bars have made people violently ill, and now their powder too. Every product Soylent makes, is making or has made people ill.
Soylent has practically zero quality control/testing, and doesn't have on-site staff dedicated to ensuring their product is safe. They send out a few carefully selected samples to an external lab, but that's far from continuous testing of the product rolling off the line.
Some might attribute it to the "silicon valley" mindset Soylent has. "We'll disrupt the food industry - but we won't bother to learn what it takes to produce uniformly clean and safe product".
There's good reasons the "big guys" spend so much on lab personnel and equipment. If people all around the world started getting sick from Coca-Cola, it wouldn't be good - to say the least.
Do you have sources? I was of the opinion that all of this stuff is heavily regulated by the FDA. What makes you think Soylent really criminally negligent, or at least any more so than any other food manufacturer?
Soylent is classified as a nutritional supplement, which isn't the same as "food". It's the same umbrella things like body-building supplements enjoy being under, with far more relaxed requirements than "food".
Sources are well known, a quick search turns them up[1][2][3]. The testing procedure has been disclosed by Soylent during their last debacle, and there was discussion here on HN[3][4].
I used to buy Soylent myself, started at version 1.5 (powder in the bag). But come on, this sort of thing is seriously not OK. You need better quality control, and you need better (and more rapid) testing of product as it rolls off the line. Hunt and pecking clearly isn't getting it done, and problems are slipping out under their noses. It's people's health - nothing to joke at. "Move fast; make people sick" isn't a good mantra.
> FWIW, the ingredient in question is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA
Soylent has no real idea if that ingredient was the culprit (and from the FDA's classification, it seems reasonable to suspect that ingredient is not the problem). For all anyone knows, it could be a combination of ingredients, or not an ingredient at all, but rather contamination in the manufacturing process.
I agree with most of your criticisms, but they don't actually apply to the claim that the algae-derived ingredient, while legal and safe, causes allergic reactions or digestive issues with a very small portion of people.
I believe Soylent has a pretty good idea. They know what changed in their formula, they know the difference between the products receiving complaints and the products not, and they have evidence from other companies (Honey Stinger) who had similar issues.
I wonder if they run any sort of A/B testing. Wouldn't harm if they sent few packages with one ingredient missing once in a while, then see what's the response.
> I wonder if they run any sort of A/B testing. Wouldn't harm if they sent few packages with one ingredient missing once in a while, then see what's the response.
The idea of using A/B testing for food safety testing is horrifying.
I recently went to Chipotle for I think the first time since the changes[1], and while I'm sure the food is safer, having the chicken cooked offsite ruins the texture. I'm not sure I'll go back any time soon.
[1] I didn't stop going because of the incident, I stopped going because I stopped doing what I was typically following with lunch at Chipotle.
I'm not suggesting that they weren't damaged by those incidents. 2016 data isn't in yet, but 2015 sales figures show them to be at least holding steady.
My point was that the company ultimately aggressively addressed the problem head-on and very well may have saved the company. The public has no long term memory. Let's compare notes in 2018.
I had to read that twice before I understood that you didn't mean diaphragm contractions; I was really scratching my head as to why soylent users should expect hiccups!
I don't think most people even have a concept of a "beta-style food," so it seems pretty unreasonable to expect them to infer that from Soylent's marketing.
I'm not sure that's true; I've dabbled with the idea of ordering it a few times but thought it's probably best to wait a little bit more. Maybe I'll wait forever or maybe soylent will lead to an end of the destruction caused by industrialised farming, who knows.
Despite this hiccup I'm glad they are making the attempt to be able to feed the world a well balanced diet (isn't that the plan?).
Other food manufacturers specialise in trying to poison you in the longer term with salt, sugar, flavour packs, fructose, "low fat", MSG, anemic vegetables, mercury tuna and antibiotic meat.
>We are constantly exploring the frontiers of food technology, with an aim to engineering foods which are more nutritious, efficient, and affordable than ever before.
Lots of companies say stuff like that. If what you mean to say is "We want to move fast and break things, and we consider this a beta product not ready for the wide market, so we're applying looser controls than most food companies, and this stuff might make you stick," then you need to say that. You can't reasonably expect people to intuit that from generic marketing talk† about exploring frontiers.
† For example, milk brand FairLife boasts on its website about "changing the face of the dairy industry through cutting edge innovation." This is in reference to using 22-year-old dairies as their suppliers. Nobody understands it to mean that FairLife might make you sick.
The Mexican restaurant down the street doesn't advertise that they buy the cheapest chicken in town and therefore may give you food poisoning.
They expect you to get that point based on the price.
Advertisers are simply not going to do what many of these HN comments are demanding. This isn't a tech app, this isn't a linux distro. This is a general consumer facing product.
They don't have an abnormal rate of sickness and they aren't selling people fish oil. They're using experimental products, which they are up-front about, and have experienced setbacks because of that.
A food product that pleases this community would never make it to market or be profitable.
> This isn't a tech app, this isn't a linux distro. This is a general consumer facing product.
I thought you said it was clearly an experimental beta. They can't have it both ways, where they get a pass for any problems they encounter because it's experimental and not fully beta-tested (and thus not yet ready for general consumption) and they get a pass on vague marketing because it's a general consumer-facing product (which means it's considered "ready" for the general consumer).
> They're using experimental products, which they are up-front about
No, they aren't. That is the entire point I was making in the comment you're replying to. Their marketing doesn't claim to be any more "experimental" than the countless other brands that call themselves innovative.
I don't mean to harp on Soylent, because I mean, I'm not sure how many people were aware that this allergy even existed. Stuff like this happens even to much larger companies. But I think it's reasonable to hold them to the same standards as any other company producing food for the general market, not treat them as though they're in some hazy "public beta food" state that grants carte blanche.
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
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.
Which ingredient is expiremental? The one that is "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA? Doesn't sound very expiremental to me if the FDA has already fully tested and formulated a rating for it.
«You can say the same thing about the food in any restaurant.»
Except you also have more accumulated debug time/expertise in a typical restaurant. Soylent tries to do a lot of things from first principles that otherwise people have spent many years building: food supply chains, logistics, recipes, kitchen procedures, etc.
Bringing it back to a code analogy, too, most restaurant food is "naturally" a more loosely coupled component model and it is easier to isolate components when debugging (no mayo, hold the lettuce), whereas Soylent is very tightly coupled and it shouldn't be surprising that it may suffer some of the same maintainability concerns in the long run.
> 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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
It's suggested that out digestive system is strongly linked to our intelligence. One could argue that it could either increase or reduce our capacity to cope. Possibly even change our species or provide use with a new system of organs that would make use depent on a centralized food source.
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...
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.
That may work with (fictional) iocane powder in The Princess Bride, but almost all real poisons don't work that way. For example, you aren't going to become immune to the amatoxins in death cap mushrooms by having a nibble everyone once in a while.
"It is important to note that mithridatism is not effective against all types of poison, and, depending on the toxin, the practice can lead to the lethal accumulation of a poison in the body."
"There are only a few, if any, practical uses of mithridatism. "
> 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.
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.
> Can you give any examples of reactions between food ingredients making people sick?
Without commenting on whether this applies to the case at hand: the medical term "potentiate" refers to one substance increasing the effects of another; one substance can also decrease the effect of another. Neither substance in isolation causes a problem, but the two taken together can cause harm.
One common example: you shouldn't drink milk or other high-calcium foods with some types of antibiotics (such as those based on tetracycline), because the calcium binds to the antibiotic and prevents absorption.
A less well-known example: drinking grapefruit juice with various different medications (such as blood-pressure reduction medications, some antihistamines, and some statins that lower cholesterol) can prevent the drug from breaking down as quickly, increasing the concentration in your system, such that it builds up as you take more. That interaction can kill you in various ways, such as increasing the effect of the drug in question, or destroying your kidneys.
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.
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.
Eating foods high in vitamin C increases absorption of iron. Calcium conversely reduces it, which is another reason for becoming anemic on a vegetarian diet, if you get a lot of your protein from dairy.
This isn't just food, but grapefruit juice alters the absorption of other chemicals; there are drugs that while you are taking them you can't have grapefruit juice, as it will screw with the effective dosage you get.
I recall hearing, also, that if you need both Calcium and Magnesium supplements they're better taken at separate times, as they compete for uptake due to both being +2 ions.
Alcohol on a full stomach will delay Alcohol absorption which leads to delayed intoxication peaks and for many people higher Alcohol consumption. "Beer before liquor, never been sicker; liquor before beer, you're in the clear."
Granted the real issue is drinking more liquor because you don't notice how much liquor you have already drunk.
That would be interesting if caffeine did affect the metabolism of alcohol. The points here are more about perception than any chemical mechanism as originally described:
>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.
I can't think of any chemical reactions like that off the top of my head. Some times different chemicals or the same chemical from different foods will reinforce each other.
Mixing Laxatives like prune juice and pineapples can have a stronger effect. Having two new foods that would both produce gas get's a significantly stronger reaction together. Excessive lean meat consumption can cause problems due to protein poisoning. There are also some poisons that act together.
Taking a multivitamin on an empty stomach makes me vomit. I don't have the same reaction when I take it on a full stomach. I also sometimes feel very ill if I drink black tea on an empty stomach.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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....), 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>"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.
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.
The stakes for medicine are very different. There is much more incentive to try a drug that may or may not work when compared with the potential gain of eating an experimental food.
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.
Soylent better be sure that they are right. They just fingered the problem onto another company (TerraVia). What supplier would work with Soylent if it turns out Soylent is wrong?
Companies that mess up always fix things the first time. Just like Samsung fixed the Note 7 first try. It's not like replacement Note 7s were catching on fire on airplanes or anything... oh wait /s
I love what Soylent is doing, I have wished for such a meal replacer all my life.
I've drank something like 40 bottles of Soylent (which are, so far presumably safe) and they have helped me replace a lot of fast food. Never had problems with them until I started getting nauseous and now I can't drink it anymore.
With all these news about people getting sick, I feel a bit silly having beta tested stuff with my own body. And they definitely have lost at least one customer here.
But I'm still happy to see them experimenting with such a product. I still want this to happen, I will just not beta test it myself.
What products would those be? Most meal replacement shakes marketed in the US are for people trying to lose weight, so they have far less calories and fat than a meal for people just trying to eat healthy.
Yeah, I even wrote a paragraph bashing it (or at least, people claiming that it's a product of serious medical research) last time we had a Soylent thread. It has a lot more sugar and carbs than most people would want to eat regularly, which makes it more suitable as a temporary food replacement or a snack than a lunch staple.
Yeah, stuff like Jevity is probably worth a look, but you'll have to excuse people for never considering it seeing as Abbott never thought of marketing it to overworked nerds.
>Algal flour is a fairly novel ingredient that serves as a vegan replacement for butter and eggs. Derived from algae grown in fermentation tanks and then dried
Reminds me of fungal protein, aka quorn aka mycoprotein. They were advertising it as the next big thing in protein sources. Its also grown by fermentation. If you google it, there are safety concerns.
There are safety concerns, but I think there are differences in product maturity. Quorn products have been available since the 80's, and early 2000's in the USA. Over the last ~15 years there have been a couple thousand complaints over the products, but since these are not incident related I would characterize them more like complaints about specific ingredients. Some people get reactions to peanuts, red wine, etc, but we do not consider that the manufacturer is at fault.
Thanks for getting me to take a look at Quorn safety. I've been eating it for years, and continue to. Even though I am no longer really a vegetarian I enjoy Quorn products more than chicken based products since Quorn has better product consistency (not fat or gristle bits) than animal sources.
As far as I can tell, the reported "safety concerns" are that if you're allergic to mushrooms, you may be allergic to mushroom-derived protein. That doesn't seem unreasonable, and every product I've seen based on mycoprotein clearly identifies the source as mushroom-based.
I think that the downvoting is more likely tied to your outlandishly wild claims as fact of both cricket usage in Soylent and that the government will force consumption of it. Neither of those claims are at all verifiable or likely within any basis of reality.
If your post contained "might" instead of "will", then it would be reasonable speculation, but as currently written it's an unreasonable assertion.
For example, since Soylent explicitly aims to keep the product vegan, including cricket protein is unlikely even if nutrition and economic reasons are not a concern.
Just because an idea makes one uncomfortable ("eating sludge", "efficient and sustainable nutrition impacting public policy", etc.) does not make it unreasonable, least of all unreasonable for discussion. The opposite should be true.
You can't simply hope crickets will be full of good stuff naturally. We need to "gut load" them and cover them with vitamin and calcium powder. We make them eat quality nutrients before feeding them to the reptiles. Otherwise they are only almost only empty calories and not very good for the animal's health.
We humans would simply eat what the crickets eat instead of eating the crickets themselves. We have no issues eating non-moving pray.
That being said, I do agree that insects should be added to our diet!
It depends on what you're using the crickets/insects for. When we humans eat corn-fed meat sources, you aren't exactly getting a burst of nutrition for the same reasons you point out. You're still getting the fat and protein from the meat. I'm guessing the same is true for commercially-raised crickets. The point is that the crickets are not the only thing being consumed, they are being used for their protein and fats while other parts of the diet/meal add necessary nutrients.
Clearly there is a market for this 'super convenience' food/drink if people are still willing to buy this product after it made them sick. Even when their own stomach is the guinea pig. The company could do with better marketing though, reading things like this:
In 2013, he raised capital to turn his full attention to Soylent, which he named after the science fiction novel that served as the basis for the 1973 movie featuring Charlton Heston as a detective who discovers that a new type of food called Soylent Green is made of people.
I'm more aggrieved by the marketing (from day one) being a variation of "techies too busy to cook for themselves"
It's not even a suggestion to drink it once in a while, when you're indeed unable to eat something else. It's an invitation to replace all meals with a prepared drink.
It feeds on, and enables, the perpetually-busy/all-nighter culture of SV.
>people are still willing to buy this product after it made them sick.
you can't do better than that :) They basically hit the same "hi-tech/advanced/futuristic" bullseye in the heads of today youngsters that Campbell soup and other highly processed food industry hit 50+ years ago.
I find Soylent's marketing eye-rollingly annoying for all kinds of reasons--especially its targeting of (and success with) a Silicon Valley demographic that's too busy to eat because they're writing a social network for penguins that's going to change the world.
At the same time, let's not pretend that every meal is a leisurely repast shared with friends or that there isn't a massive industry to deliver pre-made food and prepared food at various levels going back decades. To the degree that Soylent replaces a Big Mac or a frozen burrito it's hard for me to see it as the end of civilization. Even if I also think that people should make the time to cook a relaxed meal at least some of the time.
Part of the issue is their desire to keep the product vegan. Instead of using known-safe, health-promoting sources of polyunsaturated (O3/O6) fats like fish oil, they use algal sources, which have very little data supporting them as safe/effective sources of O3.
The sources mentioned in that article are ALA, which have conversion rates to the desired DHA/EPA that vary greatly between individuals [1]. Typically, something like 5% of ALA is converted to EPA and even less is converted to DHA. It's better to eat the preformed DHA/EPA rather than relying on the conversion.
Blue Bell in Texas shut down for months due to listeria. Would that put some companies out of business? Maybe, that's ok. This is public health we're talking about.
Disrupt. Move fast and break things. Iterate iterate iterate. Fail fast. This may be okay when you're making a better spreadsheet, but not everything can be a startup.
This is false. Soylent is classified as a food, and has to follow the same FDA requirements as any other food.
"Soylent is not in violation of any product-safety standards or requirements, and is manufactured in FDA-approved facilities that follow federally regulated current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP)."
Well one of the reasons I liked their products was because of the "algal oil" (no word on if they're going to remove that also). This is basically vegan fish oil, which as a vegetarian is one of the things I've missed.
As a long-time vegetarian, I've been buying algae-sourced EPA/DHA capsules for years from a company called Vegetology. They actually, you know, test their product for safety.
Here's what I don't get... There is all this bad hype about Soylent. Why not just get one of the dozens of other meal replacement shakes in your average health food store?
So it's strictly a Marketing game? There's nothing behind the product? I would have thought nerds would be smarter. Or is it something like a hipster beard and hats when it's warm?
I'm a fan of Soylent but I wouldn't say things like 'Soylent prides itself on rapid product development—an ideal popularized by Google and Facebook Inc.'
Things that are going into my body should not be rapidly developed and released. It's slightly different than Facebook launching a new feature that may or may not break.
I think I found a better alternative to Soylent called "Bertrand" (https://bertrand.bio/). It is made out of organic ingredients, tastes solid (just order the one with no flavor, it actually tastes better) and is hopefully more healthy since it is made from "real" natural powderized ingredients. So even if there are nutrition components (e.g. other micro-nutrients) which weren't researched properly till today (quite likely imho), they should still be in the drink since it's not made from artificial components.
I'm drinking it for two months now and I'm happy with it. Very convenient, fair price, available in a vegan & gluten-free version and it tastes okay-ish (like oatmeal).
P.S.: I'm not affiliated with this company in any way, just a happy customer.
Interesting. I like the idea but the macronutrients are heavily weighted towards carbohydrates. For reference, normally 30-35% of your daily calories should be protein, while only 11% of the calories of Bertrand come from protein.
That is true, especially the vegan version lacks protein (in comparison to the "active" version). That's why I add rice protein to the drink to get up to 120-150g protein/day. Besides that I add also Acerola powder for more (natural) vitamin C.
We always get latest version of soylent instead of having a way to subscribe a specific version. This is like cloud based service, the upgrade is transparent, you benefits from ingredient upgrade, and you suffer from it. The key here is how fast Soylent can identify and address customer's concerns.
I enjoyed Soylent when it first came out, but then they started trying to be clever. It was already a complex product and they went crazy trying to replace the fish oil they were using. Around v1.4 it started to taste absolutely disgusting and the consistency was that of slime.
Seaweed is a type of algae, and I eat rehydrated dried seaweeds every so often. I wouldn't call any seaweed delicious but they're no worse than the average vegetable. If you eat other seafood you'll probably find the taste of seaweed acceptable.
That's too bad. I love the algae based DHA-3 fortified milk at the super market. The other option is fish based DHA-3 fortified and I can't stand the taste. It's strange to blame something sold in supermarkets like that.
Would you prefer they complicate the discussion by trying to explain what they are? My understanding has always been that they have many plant-like characteristics, but not all. In fact, they are even a part of the plant kingdom.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070619182508.h...
Some are, some aren't. Upon further research it does appear the type used in this algal flour are related to plants but many algae species aren't closely related to plants at all.
From the article: "Unlike higher plants, microalgae do not have roots, stems, or leaves."
"Higher" here to me implies microalgae are also plants, otherwise the qualifier isn't needed.
The article for "algae" says: "No definition of algae is generally accepted. One definition is that algae 'have chlorophyll as their primary photosynthetic pigment and lack a sterile covering of cells around their reproductive cells'. Some authors exclude all prokaryotes thus do not consider cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) as algae."
So it seems a little silly to me to split hairs about whether algae are plants in an popular audience news article about a food product.
Plants generally aren't grouped with green algae despite them having evolved from a common ancestor. I guess it's a bit like the crustacean/insect division, so maybe I was being a bit too facetious.
Here is what all the off topic discussion will be:
Person1) "What is so hard to understand sheeple?! Soylent isn't for all your meals, just ones that you are too busy to eat. Also, it has all the vitamins you need not like all those thousand other bars/drinks!?"
Person2) "I'd rather move to the bottom of the ocean than buy Soylent. Why would you ever skip a meal?! Capitalism is the root of all evil including making me miss my dinner!"
Folks, we all come at food differently, it's a very personal thing. Just because you feel this way about food, does not mean we all do. It's like people that stand or sit when they are wiping after going #2. We all coexist just fine and none of us know that there is really any other way and are astounded when other people are different.
Yeah and it sounds a bit condescending. Still, in previous discussions, it's true and s/he might have prevented a similar discussion here (or maybe I haven't scrolled to it yet). That's why I decided not to downvote.
You could also say some people like Trump and other people like Clinton, and it's just an opinion. However, one opinion is highly correlated with being more educated.
I suspect that the same is true here. The population at large has a very poor level of education about food, and Soylent seeks to exploit that very large business opportunity.
I would prefer to see more people with an understanding of healthy eating and cooking.
> The population at large has a very poor level of education about food, and Soylent seeks to exploit that very large business opportunity.
Conceptually, the advantages of a product such as Soylent includes long shelf-life, reducing the frequency and time needed to shop food, offering healthy fast-food meals, having a lower carbon footprint and being more sustainable than regular food, reducing the time spent preparing food, being cheaper than other sources of ready-made food (with basis in my own budget). These are not trivial advantages if fully realized, and it seems reductive to reduce the advantages of Soylent to just being a product for people poorly educated about food.
> I would prefer to see more people with an understanding of healthy eating and cooking.
I believe most people who eat healthy basically just follow hand-wavy norms and guidelines about what is considered healthy, e.g. include fish and vegetables in your diet (simplified). Once someone actually tries to engineer a complete diet such as Soylent it becomes apparent how hard it is to guarantee rich completeness. However, in the long run I believe the engineering approach, based on scientific input, is more likely to result in a proper diet. Especially when in the long run a "Soylent version X" can be based on a closed loop with personal body telemetry and customized food mixes based on these sensor readings.
I agree with you overall, but my different viewpoint comes from witnessing other companies addressing the advantages you've mentioned.
Just as trends in the computer industry have been largely led by power users, there are also food "power users". These are people who save time cooking with new equipment (powerful blenders, sous vide, etc), have high quality, freshly-picked food delivered in weekly boxes, have convenient herb gardens, etc. There are more innovations on the horizon (Farmbot, Cinder, etc).
Of course, Soylent is still much faster, but I think these "power users" will close the gap in convenience faster than Soylent can close the gap in quality.
I do not and will not prepare my own food, so it usually takes me at least 30 minutes and $10 to go out and get a meal. When I don't feel like doing that, a bottle of Soylent saves most of that time and money.
I suspect the intelligence correlation is the other way around to what you're implying. I'm still yet to see any evidence that Soylent or similar products are unhealthy (i.e that it takes more than a good balance of macro and micro nutrients for food to be considered "healthy"), especially when compared to an average western diet rather than an ideal one.
I have seen an awful lot of baseless appeals to nature and tradition though, both of which are indicative of low intelligence.
I think you're probably right, and I didn't want to make my point about general intelligence, but only focused on food knowledge.
It's hard to prove any food healthy or unhealthy, but one of the main premises of healthy eating is prefering fresh ingredients over highly processed food. The studies which support that view are large-scale and wouldn't be able to point to a specific problem with Soylent, but undoubtedly Soylent is very much on the processed side in the spectrum of foods.
We still have people with poor level of education on programming and computer, yet company keep making more accessible PERSONAL COMPUTER for people to use.
I think personal computers area good analogy to kitchen equipment, but I draw the opposite conclusion.
Back in the 1980s, only a small group of elite users had access to workstations built by companies like SGI, which had advanced graphics beyond anything the average person would know. Many people couldn't type and had secretaries to do it for them.
Nowadays, there are millions of people who know how to use advances tools like Photoshop, every computer is essentially a workstation, and some people even want to see every child learning how to code.
Food literacy and kitchen equipment are going on the same trajectory, and I'd put my money on the food startups that cater to the high end of the market, which will eventually been the mainstream.
Soylent is more than food...the company and, more importantly, the idea (increased productivity/efficiency) that it embodies is a poster child for the social norm-disrupting technology that is coming out of SV. Many of this site work in the area and belong to its culture/brand (whether they want to or not) and it's their identity and what other people, friends and family included, quickly judge them by.
It's not rational to judge an entire area or economic movement on the merits of a few, high-profile companies that are working on products that seem to be straight out of the movies (self-driving cars, addictive ad networks, virtual reality porn, gov spy software, futuristic milkshakes) but it's exciting so it's what people do.
Nobody cares about the food aspect. Think one layer deeper - it's SVs brand, and, inextricably, "technology"s brand - yes that includes computers, servers, CRM software, virtual machines, the actual stuff that people on this website do and no it doesn't make any sense to link this stuff to Soylent's energy bars - that comes under attack every time one of SV's brand leaders is found to be harming people rather than helping them.
I don't think it's irrational to judge an industry that worships "disruption" on visible failures of that paradigm. Blithe disruption is all fun and games until it's your GI tract getting disrupted.
I ask this in every thread when it's brought up and almost never get a real answer. Are there any examples of drinks with a flavorless (or very mild) option, that don't focus on imbalanced amounts of protein and body-building?
I like Soylent because it's relatively cheap (if I was just going for cost effectiveness, nothing beats bulk-buying beans and rice), I don't get sick of the taste after having it 3 times in a row, and it has a good balance of micro/macro nutrients.
I'd gladly save money by buying a cheaper competitor. Or even just support a less popular brand that's comparatively priced. But they all either have imbalanced amounts of protein that make me feel sick eating 3+ a day, or only come in "double chocolate shake" flavors which also feel disgusting after having more than one in a day.
The only comparable products I've found are Huel [0], but they don't offer shipping to the USA.
Have you looked at medical product supply houses? There's a wide variety of tube feeding products, and many of those are unflavoured. (There's no point putting flavour in a product delivered into the stomach via a tube through the nose).
Some of these are fibre free, and most of them are high calorie, but there are normal calorie and with fibre versions available.
Anecdotal experience about Vega that might help others. I tried Vega 4 or 6 times during one month to see if I could use it as my protein shake replacement for the whey-based product I'd been using.
Every time I had a Vega shake in the morning I experienced abdominal bloating, digestive issues, and nausea two or three hours after consuming it.
The first couple of times I wasn't sure if the Vega was the cause or if it was something else going on, but after trying it in isolation (no other food products within 8 hours, only water and the powder) I was able to consistently replicate the issues.
Something in their formulation doesn't agree with me. I'm not 100% sure what it was.
Thanks for this! Looks like I can pick the "Natural" flavor at a nearby store, so I'll probably be trying this soon. A little higher on protein than Soylent, but it doesn't seem to be in the protein-shake range that normally upsets my stomach, everything else looks pretty good.
I've tried Queal myself and was given a "bad batch" that was making me nauseous. But I forced myself to drink it until a friend told me he received an email from them about the problem (they never contacted me). I complained and got a whole new batch and the taste was completely different, not making me nauseous anymore.
Depends on what you consider a serving. The second link only has 67 calories per "serving", so really 30 scoops in a day. Using the 2000 calorie baseline, that would be about 150g of sugar, twice as much as Soylent. Also 200g protein vs 100g.
The first link would still take 20 scoops in a day. There's no sugar in it, which is good (personally I hate things like Stevia, but others may not mind), but it's still clearly a protein drink with 372g of protein in one days worth of calories.
With most of these "meal replacement" products (soylent, meal squares, etc) the goal is to have 100% RDA per calorie. This means that you don't have to "make up" for them with other meals by adding some nutrient or cutting back on sugar.
Any snack that satisfies appetite and doesn't make you sick or fat too quickly would suffice. A bag of nuts, a power bar, fruit, vegetables, canned fish/meat, etc. One can always balance out nutritional intake on subsequent "real" meals.
Somehow the marketing folks for Soylent have been able to convince a lot of people that they ACTUALLY NEED a fully balanced meal replacement consisting of synthetic food upon which someone may subsist indefinitely. That's a feat of marketing, but apparently little else.
All those examples you've mentioned fill a very different niche than what Soylent is filling. Most people on Soylent aren't looking for something to keep them from getting hungry until they get a more balanced meal. They're looking for a quick, healthy, balanced meal. Soylent fills that desire, your examples do not.
They actually DON'T NEED Soylent, that's simply the magic of marketing.
I tip my hat to their marketing skills, however. I never would have thought they could get anywhere selling a bland sludge to affluent consumers as a replacement for food... who would've thought that could work? They did it and did it well for a while at least.
They also "DON'T NEED" any of the snacks you presented as alternatives. But regardless, I never claimed anyone needed it. There are few things in life that are truly "needed", but there are many that are wanted and/or provide a significant improvement in life quality.
Soylent doesn't fill a separate need from normal food, it fills the desire for a more efficient vehicle of nutrition than normal food. For example, I use Soylent not as an "I'm too lazy too make food" but rather as an easily replicatable nutritional base that is easier to customize to my nutritional needs and preferences than any other option out there that I'm aware of (there may very well be something better out here).
Their success is the result of "magical marketing", but of filling a niche desire of the market. In fact, Soylent didn't even do marketing for the first year or two of its existence. Rinehart just started experimenting, realized it hit a nerve with the hacker community, and created a product that appealed to the demographic that responded to his experiment.
Some, but not all, of the other products are marketed as medical products to doctors for use in hospital settings. There's a bunch of regulation over those products.
EDIT after downvotes. For fucks sake, it's pretty obvious that a product making medical claims to doctors has more stringent regulation than food.
To find that page I put "Does the FDA regulate enteral food products?" into a search engine. This is the first result. (Although my filter bubble might affect that.)
Maybe it's because you're entirely uninformed about the specific ingredients and macronutrient ratios of new products like Soylent vs old school meal replacements.
But enjoy your high fructose corn syrup slop Ensure / Jevity.
I flagged it because the site started playing audio while I was trying to read. Had to close the tab to make my phone shut up. It was embarrassing and I was unable to read the content.
Algae? Yeah right. Soylent green is made of people.
Seriously though, how can a food supplement (sorry, meal replacement) company expect to prosper with a brand based on a sci-fi movie about cannibalism?
You feel that way because you're on the Internet. I've never seen the movie, it was way before my time, and it exists in the tiniest amount of public consciousness today. The only reason I know what Soylent Green even means is because people on the Internet reference it occasionally.
I've talked to quite a few people about Soylent and I've said "you know, like the movie" and most of the time they have no idea what I'm talking about.
Besides, it's not called "Soylent Green". Green was the cause of the shock twist in the movie, but there was also Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow in the movie, which were pretty much what Soylent, the product, is trying to become.
The name is appropriate in the context of the movie, although I would have never chosen it.
What's the point of tweaking the recipe if you can't guarantee the execution and your customers get, basically, randomness for lunch?
We had a corporate subscription for Soylent 2.0 drink. The taste varied from batch to batch on the scale from "milk in a cereal bowl" to "sewage water".
These issues have been regularly popping up on reddit and their own forums for months now. We have suspended the subscription and I can't bring myself to try another bottle, even though I originally loved the concept and the taste.