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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

That's hilarious and scary. Can you imagine the reactions if any other (non Valley?) food business had this approach to food safety?

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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.

> 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.

How many products claim they're for everyone? Why not go after one-size fits all baseball caps too? It's just another round of marketing bullshit.

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.

They made a specific, clear, medical claim: this product is okay for everyone, even those with allergies.

They then made the product with known allergens.

How is that okay?

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.

They kept up with those claims over several versions.

There is literally no such thing as a drink that is ok for everyone:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/alexandra-allen-utah-teen-rare-w...

I know. I'm not making the claim - Soylent is.

Link to Soylent's words there? I'm not finding anything with a Google search.

It was made during their crowdfunding. They used those words to raise money.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130816104921/https://campaign....

> 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.

> 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.

You need glutamate to live [1].

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

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.

In essence they have proved through research that MSG causes no allergic reactions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19389112/ But they can't say there are no reactions at all. (last paragraph http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-he...)

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.

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.

The problem isn't safety, it's poor alignment of incentives.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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