Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pitarou | Hacker News Reader

Inexcusable.

The only reason Soylent have gotten away with it for so long is that the FDA rules for this category of product haven't been written yet.

A product shouldn't make people sick when used as intended. So if a product is intended to be consumed as 100% of your diet, it MUST:

- contain all known macro- and micro-nutrients necessary for human health

- contain nothing that makes you sick when you eat it all the time

Soylent failed on both counts:

- Early formulations lacked selenium. Beta testers duly developed symptoms of selenium deficiency.

- The latest formulation contained algae. Customers duly got sick from consuming more of this kind of algae than humans have ever consumed before.

The first mistake might be excused as a beginner's error and a learning experience. But they didn't learn. Luckily, Soylent lives in the land of class action lawsuits. The lawyers are gonna shut these jokers down.

View on HN

Good lord. The percentage of people who 'got sick' by Soylent was less 0.1% of all consumers. If we went into panic-mode for that kind of result for every product, we wouldn't have any products. The variation in humans is too great to test for everything.

"The Lawyers" aren't going to shut anyone down because no one is suing, and if they tried I doubt any judge would allow a class-action lawsuit for a few tummyaches.

Soylent lists the ingredients on the box. That the consumers were unaware of their sensitivity to algae is not evidence of misconduct on the part of Soylent.

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...

If I release a product containing lactose, clearly state it contains lactose, and a bunch of people have stomach problems after ingesting it because they are lactose intolerant, is it my fault? Regardless on whether or not it was meant to be a 100% meal replacement?

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.

Your analogy is inappropriate. You know as well as I do that common ingredients such as flour and milk are regulated differently from novel ones.

> 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.

From the FDA's website:

"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/

I've tried to explain in another thread why I think Soylent should be regulated differently from other food products.

Gotten away with it? Have they been lying about something? If people don't buy their products, they'll leave the market. If people continue to buy them, they'll stay. I really hope the FDA doesn't get involved. As it is a low cost source of nutrition, more regulation will raise the price with no corresponding added benefit to the consumer; affecting the people who may be the most vulnerable to price increases.

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’m no Soylent advocate (I’m a fan of home-cooked fresh food). But...

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.

Sorry to be so bleak, but I don't think Soylent is "set up to have a meaningful effect on people’s overall diet.

The people you are talking about never heard about Soylent, and probably won't ever buy an expensive (?), bland tasting product that sounds like something from Star-Trek.

I agree. My point is just that having the FDA ban Soylent isn’t going to help any of these people either.

If the FDA were reorganized to significantly reduce the amount of soda, cookies, chips, and candy people ate, that would have a much more useful effect.

You make a very good point. We are straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel.

>. So if a product is intended to be consumed as 100% of your diet

Soylent isn't marketed as being intended to replace every meal anymore. I know some of their earlier press focused on the founder replacing all of his food with Soylent, but they've transitioned from that approach more recently.

>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.

It might be my non-nativeness but a meal replacement doesn't sound like a food replacement to me. At least, not if you don't want to.

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.

Too late if they have already lodged that in everyone's mind - they should have gotten a new brand if the brand proposition was going to be radically different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com