More Details Emerge About the Soylent Food Bars Making People Sick (opens in new tab)

Who's the market for Soylent bars? Is it people who don't have time to eat/prepare complete meals and need a fast alternative? I find it hard to believe Soylent can provide all the nutrition you need.

Is it to satisfy your hunger in the afternoon of midday as a snack? If so why not just buy granola or protein bars that at least have some flavor?

This sort of thing is premature fear mongering to sell clicks.

A useful summary:

- Some people have gotten sick. There is no indication as to why or how. Likely possibilities include:

  - circumstantial/no causation

  - contamination of the batch (biological or chemical)

  - allergic reaction to an ingredient (happening 'now' could be a result of accumulation) 

- This was all from the same batch (per current evidence)

- This batch has been recalled and they are trying to figure out what went wrong. (the thing we expect any food manufacturer to do when something like this happens)

I expect Soylent is an interesting exercise in people finding out they have allergies they did not know about, but I am going to wait and see before I hunting for spare pitchforks.

Soylent seems to have disturbing contamination issues that haven't been experienced even by companies like the lovely weirdos at Joylent - who contracted with an actual food bar manufacturer to make their Twennybar.

They've narrowed it down to a batch of bars that are good thru 2017. They got some sent back and tested and didn't find anything. So they're saying it's allergic reactions.

So what does a huge food company do when it releases a new product?

Say Quaker Oats rolled out a flavorless Granola Bar, do they just expect a certain number of ER visits?

I'm disappointed with Gizmodo, and started unsubscribing to them. Has anyone else notice a decline in their articles? No one reports up-to-date facts or investigations any more. This article seems more of a bash-piece then a real fact based piece. I want to see some real investigating and not references to a subreddit. I don't care if Soylent is making people sick, tell me why and what's being done about it.

Guide to eating healthy: Avoid anything with a barcode on it.

Food products suspected of food poisoning should be reported to the FDA.[1] If it involved an emergency room visit or a serious health event, call the FDA's emergency line: 866-300-4374 or 301-796-8240. Even if it's a false alarm, they want to know. If they get multiple reports, it's clear there's a problem.

There's no recall for a Soylent product listed on the FDA's recall page.[2] So this hasn't been properly recalled.

[1] https://www.foodsafety.gov/report/problem/index.html [2] http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/default.htm

I truly appreciate the idea behind Soylent. Long before they sold the product I was already making something similar on my own using the nutrient/vitamin/mineral quantities that the body supposedly requires.

Problem is, many of those quantities (specially vitamins) are a wild guess to medical science. If you go check the literature about certain minerals/vitamins you should consume, the values vary a lot, the effects on the organism from too much or too little aren't well understood, and worst, you can't be sure you are actually ingesting all the necessary types of vitamins/minerals/??? you need to have a healthy life... there are still too many unknowns.

I did that for about 3-4 months (every other weekend I would go to my parents home and had "real" food), and in the beginning I felt good, but after about 2.5-3 months I didn't feel so good anymore.

TL;DR: I really think that something like Soylent (this one, not the one from the novel) will be the future for a good part of mankind, but that will happen a long time from now when medical science and biology advance quite a bit.

If you want food bars with a better reputation, there's Calorie Mate Balanced Food Block, the lunch bar of Japanese salarymen. Manufactured by Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Toyko. Amazon sells them. The bars taste like shortbread, and their biggest component is wheat flour.

> "What does this all mean? It means if you have a Food Bar with the expiration date July 14, 2017, it might benefit you to throw it away."

That seems a bit reactionary. A large number of the bars will have the same expiration date even if they were produced in different batches or facilities.

This whole piece seems to be designed to stir up emotions rather than provide real analysis. It is fine to express concern when people are getting sick, but this seems more like a attack. The default assumption seems to be that the Soylent team is hiding something, which does not seem consistent with Rosa Labs' previous disclosures about production issues.

Anyway I have been eating bars from a box with the same labeling (B1-00CAR BEST BY 1966 14JUL17 0716) for weeks with no ill effects. Rather than throwing all their product away if someone is worried they can try consuming a small portion of a bar first and then wait to see if there are any ill effects.

"After these reports, we have retrieved remaining bars from our consumers and have personally consumed many of the remaining bars without adverse effects.”

Lol, did they just admitted 135 PC - Destroying or Concealing Evidence ? ;)