Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae (opens in new tab)

Sorry for the strong language but bullshit.

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.

Edit: Here is the video. https://youtu.be/t8NCigh54jg?t=5m50s

> 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]

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390521

> 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.

>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.

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.

I do stop going to a restaurant once I or someone I know has gotten sick there.

Look at Chipotle for instance, they are dealing with similar contamination related problems.

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

«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.

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").

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.

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.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1834002/#!po=1....

Truly fascinating stuff!

You can also eat small amounts of poison and become immune.

Everything will be damage in large quantities.

And some common things probably do long term damage (e.g. any amount of charring on meat) but we never question them.

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.

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.

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.

Enteric disruption is a growth market.

Don't they all?

Do you think other food businesses have the source code for human nutrition and do white-box testing on their product?

Of course they do trial and error! It's just that most of the errors happened far in the past.

>"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.

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.

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.

1) https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-01-01-00120.pdf

> grapefruit

Try some grapefruit juice and then a coffee... whizzz!!

Grapefruit is very weird :)

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).

Please read about "The Jungle". (Wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle).

Relying on companies to compete on the basis of maximizing customer health is... short-sighted at best.

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.

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.

> 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.

>The population at large has a very poor level of education

We have a general education crisis going on in the United States. We've got some of the best propaganda in the world, and it's making us sick.

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.

That's call convenient.

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 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 take your point about the class-action.

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...

> 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.

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 know some of their earlier press focused on the founder replacing all of his food with Soylent

I'm pretty sure it was marketed as a 100% meal replacement. It's nice to see they came to their senses.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viridiplantae

Perhaps it's been changed since you posted this link but I see nothing about microalgae being plants.

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.

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.

edit: Harvard health seems to even disagree with themselves: http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/why-not-flaxse...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9637947

That shouldn't be paying customers.

> 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 magic ingredient is SV tech culture. You need the placebo effect of a food product with release notes (https://www.soylent.com/notes/).

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.

Never heard of them.

s/busy/lazy/g

At least, that's how the marketing is hitting me.

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.

You just proved my point: cGMP relates to drug safety, not to food consumption. It is not regulated as a food.

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DevelopmentApprovalProcess/Manufact...

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?

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.

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.