Soylent Thinks It Found What Was Making People Sick: Algae

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.

"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.

http://www.fda.gov/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencies/

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.

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.

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:

http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/GRAS/No...

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).

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.

I'd really like to see him take a double blind test to see if it's actually true. Saying you have an allergy to monosodium glutamate is a lot closer to saying you have an allergy to monosodium chloride (i.e. table salt) than it is to an actual food allergy.

You need glutamate to live [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate_(neurotransmitter)

Food companies optimize for palatability and against satiety. Then they brag about it, advertising that you will never eat just 1.

Why do they do this? Because the food market is saturated and getting people to consume more is a good growth strategy.

We can blame the paint industry and the cotton industry for the food industry's mistakes. Paints & stains used to be made from "drying oils" (soybean oil, linseed oil, etc), now they're made from petroleum. Cotton production creates a lot of cotton seed as a waste product.

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

Instead of going quietly into the night, the seed oil industry now sells "vegetable oil" for human consumption. Crisco was made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil until it was reformulated in 2007. IMHO, Crisco is still not appropriate for human consumption.

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

Charlatanism: it's what's for dinner.

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...

What kinds of poison can you build an immunity to by eating small amounts of it?

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.

Granted the real issue is drinking more liquor because you don't notice how much liquor you have already drunk.

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.

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.

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.

I'm neutral on this debate, but I think you are wrong here. Soylent is a meal replacer. It is supposed to bring you all nutrients you need in a meal.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra#Side_effects

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.

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.

Users should expect hiccups.

This is not the same for a bulk of consumer restaurants.

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.

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.

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)?

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).

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.

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.

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.

How else are you going to find 1:10000+ problems?

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Only if you don't see a problem with buying from a company whose other product lines include ground up paupers.

The name is like a stupid teenage joke which somehow managed to survive onto packaging.

Also it's objectively ironic that the problem is related to algae, which is commonly green.