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Ars Technica reports, following online reports of customers becoming ill after eating Soylent's new snack bars, the company announced this afternoon [October 13] that it has decided to halt all sales and shipments of the bars as a precautionary measure. The company is urging customers to discard remaining bars and will begin e-mailing customers individually regarding refunds. In a blog announcing the decision, the company said it is still investigating the cause of bouts of illnesses of customers linked to the bars, including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
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Soylent Halts Sale of Bars; Investigation into Illnesses Continues
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
poverty, n.:
An unfortunate state that persists as long
as anyone lacks anything he would like to have.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kunasou on Friday October 14 2016, @09:08AM
Maybe some people will throw rocks to me but I still think that things like Soylent aren't real food. I've seen the real thing on my office.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 14 2016, @09:51AM
No rocks here, because I agree with you. Preparations such as Soylent are alright, I suppose, as a dietary supplement. People eat worse things, and call them supplements. But, as a steady diet, no way.
People know that we need iron, calcium, and other elements and compounds in our bodies to be healthy, but swallowing a nail doesn't give you any useful iron. It's a lot smarter to get your nutrients from plants and animals, IMHO. Or, if you don't believe in eating warm furry creatures, stick with plants and scaly creatures. Or, just plants. A few million years of evolution have prepared your body to use the nutrients found in leafy green vegetables, fruits, nuts, etc. And, mostly, they taste good.
Something from a factory? I'll pass.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Friday October 14 2016, @10:42AM
If anything, surely even if you assume you can make a "perfect food", by too much regular use you are destroying the ability for your stomach and digestion to cope with other things, change in diet, or even basics like solid food and outside bacteria (not food in itself, but your system needs to cope with it).
In the same way that living in a sterile atmosphere is going to kill off your immune system, living on a "sterile" diet (even if perfectly nutritious) is going to affect your body's ability to cope with the normal outside influences.
Especially if it's almost entirely liquid, are you damaging your ability to eat solid food? We worry about processed food enough, let alone living off drinks (even if that's not necessarily what they recommend).
And the less your digestion deals with, the less it's able to cope when it does need to deal with them.
Question: Would an entirely-Soylent diet be seen as "acceptable" by a court to feed a child from the day they start eating "real" food? I'm in doubt as to whether it would, even if you could argue that it's "all they need".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @12:40PM
How did you come to the conclusion that if you eat soylent you are required to only eat soylent?
This is not a joke. On what basis did you make that determination? Was there an advertisement promoting a 100% soylent diet? Because your entire criticism becomes moot without that assumption, so you must have good reason to assume it.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday October 14 2016, @02:12PM
It doesn't need to be 100% replacement.
If it's only 50% replacement, that's a 50% reduction in the work your digestion normally handles.
If you take three-square-meals as gospel (I don't, personally, it's stupid, eat when you're hungry rather than when the Victorians thought was convenient for a big meal), it's likely that a meal replacement such as this constitutes 33, 66 or 100 percent of a person's diet. Those are not small numbers. Other single foods do not exclusively make up even 33% of your diet under normal circumstances.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @03:31PM
> If it's only 50% replacement, that's a 50% reduction in the work your digestion normally handles.
What's "normal?"
Various kinds of foods require different levels of "work" to digest and different cultures have significantly different types of food.
And we already cook a lot of food which is effectively external digestion, why aren't you worried that we eat too much cooked food and not enough raw food, thus weakening our digestive ability?
(Score: 1) by helel on Friday October 14 2016, @12:42PM
Devils advocate here. If the soylent is a "perfect food" why does it matter if that's all you can digest? Vegetarians can lose gut microbes critical for meat digestion. As long as they stick to plants it doesn't matter.
You can raise a child eating nothing but plants, nothing but processed food, nothing but animal products, or nothing that hasn't been approved by god. The courts accept most of these most of the time, if you can show that Soylent is healthy long term I see no reason why they wouldn't accept it as a diet to raise a child on.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday October 14 2016, @02:08PM
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/italy-vegan-law-parents-force-diet-children-face-jail-a7180206.html [independent.co.uk]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16 2016, @09:39PM
That law may or may not be a bad law. But was a result of actual cases of children being malnourished due to being fed a vegan diet by their parents.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday October 15 2016, @02:42PM
> Devils advocate here. If the soylent is a "perfect food" why does it matter if that's all you can digest?
If windows has all kind of programs, why does it matter if that's all you can run?
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @12:33PM
It's a lot smarter to get your nutrients from plants and animals,
What do you imagine soylent is made out of? Its all plants. Even the vitamins used to fortify it come from plant sources. Yeah, some of it is algae and similar "non-traditional" plants. But its all from living organisms. Nobody is ginding up nails for iron.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Friday October 14 2016, @01:18PM
Nobody is ginding up nails for iron.
Obviously not literally, but the concept is the same. Lots of processed foods are so heavily processed they've taken to fortifying the foods to provide some modicum of nutritional value. Not saying that Soylent specifically is sourcing these from non-plant sources, but why wouldn't they? It's a common practice. Lots of the chemicals they add back are either mined ingredients or synthesized in chemical factory (sometimes from petroleum products).
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @02:05PM
Synthesized is just another way to say grown in a vat, like algae.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16 2016, @09:30PM
Not saying that Soylent specifically is sourcing these from non-plant sources, but why wouldn't they?
Because they actually want to make a product that is sufficiently nutritionally complete that you could, if you wanted, only consume it and be healthy.
If there is a significant difference in the bio-availability of ground-up iron, and iron sourced from algae, that would be a pretty good reason for them not to. If there is no difference, then maybe they would use non-plant sources, but in that case what does it matter? You were complaining about the potential health effects of a diet based largely on Soylent, and so long as the nutrients can be sufficiently well absorbed by the human digestive system, then the original source of them doesn't really matter.
I am a crackpot
Well, at least your sig is appropriate.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 14 2016, @03:15PM
You might be surprised to find out just what IS in your food. Flour is an interesting item. I have gone into a clay mine in Georgia, and loaded big 2000 pound plastic totes filled with clay, and delivered them to a bread flour mill in Chicago. I have loaded dried wood pulp in Arkansas, and delivered it to a cake flour mill in Missourri. There are all sorts of things that go into foods, that you wouldn't expect.
If I hear some outrageous story about the ingredients of some given product, I may not believe that story, but I'm unlikely to dismiss it without checking into it.
Now, I don't mean to imply that your bread flour has any high percentage of clay in it. I guess they only put maybe fifty pounds into a ton of flour, but it's there. This is a "fortified" flour, such as Wonder Bread was famous for.
In other cases, it's anyone's guess how much of the end product was dug from the ground, how much might be forestry products, and how much might be more natural foods.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @03:36PM
> I have gone into a clay mine in Georgia, and loaded big 2000 pound plastic totes filled with clay, and delivered them to a bread flour mill in Chicago.
You make it sound like they are just dumping clay straight into the mix. It doesn't work like that, but I can see how you would believe that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @04:24PM
The wood pulp is often used as a cellulose source for cake flour or flour mixes for baking or as "added fiber". The cellulose acts as a thickener and will inhibit gluten formation while working the dough so the end product won't be tough. Plain bread flour, on the other hand, should not have any cellulose added because it will interfere with gluten and would not hold its structure as well and any cellulose added would just be for filler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 14 2016, @12:04PM
I've seen the real thing on my office.
I assume you mean "ensure" and the other old people meal replacement supplements.
OK OK I understand that there's a billion dollar business of fattening extreme elderly people up with meal replacement drinks (that taste awful BTW). My grandma had to take those after heart surgery for awhile, I don't remember the details. Turned out OK in the end. So you got a new marketing campaign of selling meal replacement drinks to healthy (ish) young people. Fine.
But why try to reinvent the wheel and make people sick or kill them? Just buy "ensure" or the other competitors, slap a new label on, slap on a new hip marketing campaign, call it done. (is "hip" still "hip" to say? Well if not, you know what I mean)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 14 2016, @12:14PM
Ensure is loaded with sugar. It is not suitable for consumption by normal, healthy adults because the nutritional proportions are out of whack. A meal of soylent is much closer to being balanced both for macro nutrients of fat/carbs/protein and micro-nutrients like RDA levels of vitamins. It isn't better than a meal prepared from scratch out of fresh ingredients. But it is better than nearly the entire menu at mcdonalds/taco-bell/burger-king/etc and is unquestionably better than a bag of chips or snack-cakes from a vending machine. Its also better than simply skipping a meal.
Nobody is required to eat a 100% soylent diet, in fact hardly anyone does. But if you normally skip breakfast or buy crappy fast-food for lunch, soylent is a far better choice.