Yeah, anyone selling supplements is suspect in my book (Alex Jones/Infowars is the perfect example of this type of huckster). Nonetheless, his soy write-up is mostly legit, so I’m going to leave it (although I will be sure to avoid him in future).
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Ah, the latest chapter in "Rob Beschizza personally doesn’t like Soylent."
Obviously “less than .1%” doesn’t equate to any kind of “gastrointestinal mayhem” one could possibly be "amid."
Beschizza has some kind of emotional issue here which I hope doesn’t extend beyond Soylent.
Meanwhile, I’ll go back to enjoying my Soylent. Great stuff.
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Why would you say that? My ‘need’ was finding a link (quickly) that summarized little-publicized holes in soy marketing in one place. I guess you just want to ignore the 70 page NIH summary I also linked?
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Here ya go:
Happy Thankdgiving!
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This is why we shouldn’t shit on engineers. They quickly understand how stupid this statement is. If Soylent was being packed with vomit inducing ingredients in 0.1%, yes, this would be the risk you take each time you drink it. If on the other hand it makes 0.1% of the people sick 100% of the time, and everyone else fine 100% of the time, no, you are not playing Russian roulette. If you try Soylent and it makes you sick; stop.
I’m glad you lived a blessed life where food has never made you sick. I have managed to get food poisoning a few times in my life. It never came with a warning. There are a handful of foods that makes me sick, they have now warning.
You know what induces me to vomit pretty much every single time? Fucking Earl Gray Tea. All other teas I have tried are fine, but fucking Earl Gray Tea makes my blood pressure drop, my stomach twist on itself, and while I don’t vomit every time, I sure do think about it. It has no warning. It turns out I am just sensitive to something in it. This is a pretty blandly normal thing to happen to humans.
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That is an absurd false equivalency.
This is not a product that has been subjected to years of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials costing tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, intended for use by only a small cohort of people suffering from a specific (perhaps life-threatening) condition, the treatment or cure for which is a medically-ethical trade-off for quantified, expected, and manageable side effects.
This is a bro-dude with no training in food science or nutrition releasing a product that has been subjected to a criminal lack of quality control intended for mass consumption by the general population that makes one in a thousand people violently ill.
No, of course not. And if that’s what anybody was asking for, or if that were even in the same galaxy as what Soylent is hitting as a rate of not-catastrophic-product failure, that question might be relevant. This isn’t a bridge designed to withstand a 100-year flood that failed during a 100-year flood, and so falls within the acceptable margins. This is food. Food that makes 1 in 1000 people violently ill. I very very comfortable with an acceptable standard of “makes fewer than 1 in 1000 people violently ill” for food.
Oh, please. The food supplement industry is not making the world a better place. The food supplement industry is trying to make money off the gullible by selling them a product they do not need, that serves no purpose, and that, in this case, is poisoning them. Soylent is selling food, and they have repeatedly and systematically fucked up the very first rule of food: don’t make people sick. They are incompetent, they are dangerous, and they should not be allowed to remain in business.
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The answer is not very. Guy is one of the big names in alt med nonense. And that article is full of typical scaremongering and misinformation. The NIH article is better. There are more comprehensive summaries. But this NYtimes article gets to the heart of it quick:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/ask-well-is-it-safe-to-eat-soy/
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/09/29/does-genistein-interfere-with-breast-can/
Bigger concern seems to be that it interferes with medications with similar properties.
Suppliments are not recommended because supplements are generally unregulated, and not tested for safety or efficacy of their claims. Regardless of the suppliment. Much of the concerns about soy and psuedo-estrogens to appear not to have been born out in subsequent research. But that in itself is not atypical. Diet studies are really hard to conduct well so its almost certain you’ll see conflicting information. General consensus among actual medical professionals seems to be that its perfectly safe, and a certain amount of soy in your diet can lower risk of cancer.
His write up is “good enough for your needs” despite not being very good or very accurate. It confirms a position you already have rather than accurately summarizing the consensus. That’s sort of how Alt med marketers like Mercola operate.
Not so far as I’m aware. Its been a while since I looked into the state of comparative studies. But IIRC the general take away from looking at all of it is that the healthiest people are actually former vegetarians. Still eat meat, but in lower amounts than the general populous. And tend to eat far more vegetables too.
Vegan Betrayal: The Myths vs. the Realities of a Plants-Only Diet | Science-Based Medicine[quote=“AcerPlatanoides, post:79, topic:88402”]
Comparing a factory food (Soy stuff) to a bespoke food
[/quote]
That sort of thing is shot through the entire food movement. But its likewise sitting at the heart of Soylent. But the “green” comparisons of meat to plants are often skewed in similar ways in the opposite direction. Comparing the very best of agriculture with the very worst of animal husbandry. And the key studies and claims that sit at the base of the whole subject got their nice big numbers by doing things like including transportation effects with meat but not for plants. Models that work best always seem to revolve around both. In support of each other. Manage the farm as an ecosystem. But current approaches to that are really only appropriate for small farms in certain climates. So they sit in the expensive food for privileged yuppies zone. Most of the farms near me never departed the old school rotation and poly-culture thing. Though they stopped raising animals after the 70’s. They’re bringing it back, and though much of it is expensive compared to the supermarket. If you know who to buy from you can actually get this shit cheaper from a lot of places near here. There is a lot of gouging though. 10 dollars for one duck egg. $40 a pound beef. Chickens costing $20 each. We have a huge tourist business here, and a large number of them will pay through the nose to hang out at a farm and bring home dinner.
Bergamot:
It can be slightly toxic. Tasty stuff but I’ve heard some people get exactly the symtoms you’re talking about and like grapefruit it can apparently interfere with meds.
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Those two things you just described are not in any way the same thing.
Science: propose a possible explanation of observed phenomena, an explanation based on an informed understanding the underlying principles that control that phenomena; rationally design a controlled series of tests of the explanation by isolating variables one at a time, and identifying patterns in the results; refine initial explanation as necessary to conform to those new patterns, and continue the process forever as new understanding leads to new questions.
Trial and error: try a random thing and see what happens, then try another random thing and see what happens, and keep doing that until you get what you want, and then stop, with no understanding or attempt to understand the underlying factors that lead a given set of conditions to a given result.
Trial and error is not science. Trial and error is random fucking around. Trial and error is what you do when you have no hypotheses to test, no theories to guide you, no understanding of what’s actually happening, and no interest in developing any those things.
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That may be a little harsh. Though trial and error is certainly how a lot of pseudo-science works. I have a belief I want to prove. So I haphazardly (or not) try things over and over until I get the results I want.
But more focused and informed trial and error is often important to practical uses of science. Again the engineering approach. I have x product or effect I need. I should be able to accomplish it y way. If that does not work, I try different variations of y. Iterating till I get the results I require. Or I try z approach. Results incrementally moving towards the end requirements. Its not science. Though there are aspects to that in science. But in science if y gives you different results than you expect you don’t immediately change y. You interpret the results you have, rather than seeking the particular results you require. Its a different scope.
But it is a valid way to say, code a database structure. Or develop a new running shoe. Or invent something like Velcro.
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They didn’t throw paper clips, 4 eggs, cat vomit, and milk into a blender and then keep trying shit until they got what they have today. When it was a dumb DIY project by a lone nerd, he built the first formula off of nutritionist guidelines and reading text books. When symptoms of fuck ups happened, he researched, came up with theories, and changed the formula. This is the very fucking definition of science. Theory, experiment, observation, rinse and repeat. When it became an open source project, other people also contributed research and observations as they refined the formula. I’m going to go way the fuck out on a limb here and suggest that all changes made were based upon theories and observations.
Get the fuck over yourself. This was the very definition science and engineering. I am sorry that the science was done on a subject you were not interested in and without the funding from fucking Nabisco.
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the point was more that there isn’t a simple model based on food chain position, it is possible one is consuming soy with a worse impact then the next persons beef. also, i agree that local grazed animals is a privilege in north america, as is not realizing that is how many countries raise all their animals this way and that it is actually factory farming that is more of a first world privilege then locally grazed animals.
yes, of course. most of the soy from the usa is, for factory farms, which are just awful and agreeably very high environmental impact as well as cruel and produces lower quality meats. soy isn’t the natural diet of any of the meat animals. the companies driving the deforestation in brazil are actually mostly for human consumption, and ironically the “healthy brands”. it isn’t as simple an equation as people like to think. processed soy products require a much larger amount of energy then most people realize.
the point is that it isn’t a overly simplistic linear model. animal products are by far more nutrient dense, and animals can be raised naturally with a dramatically reduced footprint, whereas many soy products have a much larger footprint then most people realize.
environmental impact, no. carbon footprint yes. you have to look at all the impacts by the time it hits ones mouth though. production. harvesting. processing. waste products. distribution. packaging. supply chain requirements like refrigeration. percent of spoilage. etc.
I knew my post would raise some eyebrows, because we were all taught a very simple linear model in grade school. of course life isn’t that simple.
is a fish i catch in my local stream a lower impact food then soy chicken nuggets? yep. is it higher on the food chain? yep. is it higher impact then an apple from my yard? of course.
my point isn’t to discourage vegetarianism which is a fantastic way to eat, but rather to not take an overly simplistic view of diets and to consider the entire impact chain if one cares about the environmental impact of their food.
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I popped in to see BoingBoing for the first time in a long time and I forgot why I stopped visiting BoingBoing, but this thread reminded me. I’m not sure what the fuck happened, but apparently we are in the middle of a full anti-nerd backlash, and BoingBoing seems fully onboard.
A nerd saw a niche problem and tackled it with old school self testing, and with a DIY mentality, combined with an open source method, made a pretty good stab at solving the problem. He executed the very definition of science by going from theory, to trial, to observation over and over again. He came up with a pretty solid solution, started a company, and now there is a full company out there making food supplements that are pretty decently targeted for non-bodybuilding and non-infirmed. It even has some cute spin offs like a morning version. If there is a better meal supplement out there for the random nerd, I don’t know what it is.
This is by pretty much a nerd success story by any definition that includes all the heroic parts of DIY, open source, and a focus on nerds, geeks, and other happy mutants being weird solving a problem lots of people don’t even consider a problem. Yet, you people seem to have a visceral hatred and glee when they see any failure of this mentality. That there now exists a nerd started company, that’s foundation is a DIY project, that came from open source learning, that has the fucking nutritionist and scientist that people were so offended they didn’t start with, and yet people seem to be filled with joy whenever they have a problem. They take the most perverse glee on shitting on the founder because he is a happy mutant weirdo.
There are so many cool DIY things to praise or massive evil corporations to give shit to. Instead, you folks are obsessed with one of your own (assuming you consider yourself a happy mutant) who achieved a success with DIY and open source mentalities. You people are stuck up nerd hating assholes, not happy mutants.
I am, no joke, going to grab myself a nice coffee Soylent from my fridge because I don’t feel like spending time to cook, and then I’ll spend a few hours programming (for which I have no formal school for) for my DIY lighting setup, like the loser nerd I am.
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What theory? Where’s the trial? and What are the observations?
For what problem? What question is he answering? What is it a solution to? Also does it accomplish its goal? It doesn’t appear to.
This isn’t the “very definition of science”. Its the very definition of product development.
So we’re just supposed to back every Nerd because they’re a nerd? Or because they wrapped their “disruptive” start up product in a thin veneer of science and techno-utopian futurism?
Likewise as some one who was frequently labeled a Nerd when the fists started flying. It isn’t an identity or community. And such tribalism gets you no where. That’s just what assholes label you when you fall outside the social in group.
ETA: Also it strikes me you haven’t noticed how god damned nerdy this thread is. You’ve got people bickering about the particulars of how you define and conduct science. Links to studies all over. Fucking pop culture references everywhere.
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You are offering these examples apparently as an attempt to suggest that the fact that Soylent’s product causes 1 in 1000 to become violently ill is just par for the course in the food industry, that it’s just acceptable levels of collateral damage.
If so, you have missed the point. The reason the CDC has those pages is that such contamination of food are totally unacceptable, and that if even a tiny handful of people get sick (e.g. just 11 people in two of the pages you cite), all food products that are affected or have even the smallest chance of being affected are recalled and destroyed, the problem is aggressively and quickly traced to its source, production is shut down and the company responsible is forced to address the cause of the contamination, and that company often faces large fines or, in some cases, criminal liability.
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Part of this reminds me a bit of the Chipotle outbreaks. They still haven’t really determined the root cause. Largely because they have a large, diverse and distributed supply chain with lots of opportunities for contamination and little tracking (to a certain extent it may not even be possible) of what came from where when. Combine that with the increased risk of contamination in organic products. And its a recipe for bad poops.
Soylent has a similar problem. Given how its made, each nutrient largely added separately. Sourced differently. In a distributed supply chain. If its a contamination issue it could very well be impossible to track, and similarly impossible to prevent in the future.
Also I think @Biggles acknowledged that soy lent isn’t food…
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Do you not know how this works? You have something you want to accomplish. You study. You make a theory on how to solve it. You test it. You make observations. It is an iterative process. If you read his original blog posts you can see for yourself. He talks about a specific instance where he found he observed that he was getting sick off of the formula after a week. He did research and realized that he was missing an important nutrient. His theory became that he was missing a nutrient. He added the nutrient back in. His trial was to start drinking the new formula. He continued observations and found the problem went away, lending support to his theory. In fact, the entire time he was taking detailed observations in addition to monthly blood tests. He was having others take observations and monthly blood tests.
Are you being incredulously stupid? What was the problem? He wanted the quickest, cheapest, healthiest way to deal with the nutritional requirements of a human. What were the questions? There were piles of them, but most of them revolved keeping a human healthy. What was the final solution? The final solution, which they are still working on, was ingredient makeup of Soylent. What did it accomplish? You can drink it for at least months on end and survive.
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Are you suggesting that a molecule of ammonia synthesized in a Haber-Bosch factory is in any way distinguishable from a molecule of ammonia synthesized by a nitrogen-fixing bacterium? Or that the Haber-Bosch ammonia is less capable than the nitrogenase ammonia of supplying to a plant the nitrogen atoms necessary to synthesize amino acids, nucleobases, and porphyrin rings? Are you suggesting that the biochemical “complexity” (whatever that means) of corn grown with Haber-Bosch ammonia is somehow different than that of corn grown with cow shit?
Because that’s nonsense.
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I never said that’s what Soylent did. I wasn’t addressing Soylent’s methodology. I was disputing Biggles’ assertion that trial and error and genuinely scientific theory and experiment are the same thing.
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So you are just going to completely ignore that I specifically made a distinction between whole soy foods and processed soy derivatives? The point I have been making all along? I don;t care about Dr. Mercola, I know nothing about him, apparently I need to say it again, I posted his article because it summarized some of the common concerns about processed soy additives like s.p.i. From your own linked ‘evidence’ of a NYT blogger’s post:
But the guidelines do not recommend soy supplements, which tend to be highly processed and not very rigorously tested.
We can go back and forth all day with studies showing which diet a,b, or c is healthier. But instead, I’m just going to leave one of my personal guiding principles of processing scientific information:
“Science has long been wrapped up in capitalism, which means so long as we ascribe a huge importance to it, as long as we accept it as an ultimate source of truth, people with money will have the means to advance the truths that most benefit them. It allows for us to highlight certain truths—validate them and treat them as universal—while invalidating and ignoring other truths, the truths of the disadvantaged. Science comes from rich stock and works hard to stay rich. And truth is never objective because it is always filtered through the lens of an ideology.” - from a blog post by Ari Laurel
