No One's Sure Why Soylent's Food Bars Are Making People Puke

Soylent has been marketed as a highly efficient meal system for modern day techno-people who feel they don't have the time to pull their hands away from their keyboards and eat actual food. But unfortunately for some Silicon Valley "disruptors," Soylent's new meal bars have been forcing them away from the next groundbreaking breakthrough in scalable hybrid cloud computing and into the bathroom.

For the past month or so, people on Reddit and Soylent's message board have been complaining of some unintended side effects from eating Soylent Food Bars—namely, nausea, horrific diarrhea, and intense vomiting). Although not all of the bars were found to be problematic, Soylent was quick to act and pulled the line from its online store.

"It has recently come to our attention that a small number of our customers have experienced gastrointestinal issues after consuming Soylent Bars," Soylent wrote in a blog post. Soylent has said it will be reaching out to customers to offer refunds.

Those who ate bad bars noticed that they shared batch numbers printed on their bars. Soylent says they have tested the bars and have found nothing wrong with them. Speaking with Ars Technica, a Soylent employee said one of the leading theories for why some people might be having adverse reactions is that soy protein may be causing food intolerances to act up. Soylent bars are made from three different soy proteins, two of which are unique to Soylent Food Bars in the company's suite of products. If one batch of bars got a higher dose of a specific soy protein, it could cause digestion disaster for people with a sensitivity.

MUNCHIES Senior Editor Matthew Zuras has been eating many of the bars over the past month and a half. "My gastro-storms are as violent now as ever before, so I can't say the bars have affected me," he says.

Soylent is still trying to "get to the bottom" of the issue. But for now, programming ninjas just trying to change the world will have to deal with some of the annoying shackles of boring reality and order some food. Thankfully, there are apps for that.