Impossible Foods has raised $75M for its plant-based burgers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I promise you it is not.
At Momofuku's Ssam Bar in the East Village of NYC, you can order an off menu item called Spicy Pork Sausage and Rice Cakes. It's not really off the menu - the item has simply been around so long and is so well known to regulars that they left it off to make room for new dishes.
I've had it more times than I count.
At lunch time however, they serve Spicy "Impossible Sausage" and Rice Cakes. The first time I ordered it, I was ready to complain about one of my favorite things ruined by a hyped product.
But then I took my first bite, and it somehow tasted better than the pork sausage version. I've been back many times since and the Impossible Foods version of the dish is often tastier than the pork version.
Let that sink in for a moment. Impossible Foods was able to replace high quality pork sausage served in a beloved dish at one of New York's buzziest restaurants and make the dish better.
The vast majority of ground meat in the American food chain is of lower quality. If Impossible Foods can replace that ground meat at scale, the ramifications are enormous. They will reduce by a huge margin the number of animal lives and quantity of CO2 necessary to feed us.
I believe some MSG is still made with this and causes migraines and other heart issues, it's mostly phased out though, and can cause mixed reactions as the type of MSG isn't labelled, let alone MSG.
Until you can provide a shred of evidence for that I will assume you're just adding a layer of legitimate-sounding abstraction to the same superstition. Toxic precursors =/= toxic end products. This is chemistry, not alchemy.
Is MSG safe to eat?
FDA considers the addition of MSG to foods to be “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS).
https://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodad...
I buy shakers of it, it can be delicious in some meals.
That said glutamate is a neurotransmitter, so yeah you probably shouldn't inject large quantities or anything.
I cooked vegan at home for a long time (I'm not actually an ethical vegan, I just like vegan food). Konbu dashi will give you similar glutamate profiles, but tomatoes, fermented products like shoyu and miso, etc are simple ways to boost the umami as well. Usually the biggest trick in good vegan food is to understand how to balance all of the flavours. Meat based cooking has so many savoury flavours, and if you simply cut out the meat, you end up with overly sweet/sour dishes. They lack depth. If you're designing a dish and you are waiting until the end to figure out how to get the umami in (for example, by adding MSG), then you're really not going to succeed most of the time IMHO. If I want a savoury dish, umami is where I start.
Having said that, I've never made a vegan burger style dish that I've thought was particularly good. I've had some excellent vegan dishes like that at restaurants and I've always wondered how they did it. Since MSG triggers migraines in me, I'm pretty sure it wasn't MSG :-)
[0]http://www.fda.gov/food/ingredientspackaginglabeling/foodadd...
http://science.jrank.org/pages/4433/Monosodium-Glutamate-MSG...
Producing a URL with the word "science" in it ending in .org is not sufficient evidence. Find a single empirical datapoint or published study, otherwise stop spreading fearmongering speculation. Do you concern yourself with which table salt to buy because it may be "bad NaCl"?
They do they same pork version at both lunch and dinner now. I'll ask why they switched next time I stop by.
Aside: I too live very close to Ssam Bar and would be happy to get a coffee in the neighborhood. If you're interested, contact info is in my profile.
A good hamburger, on the other hand, relies almost entirely on the flavor of the beef.
There's an informal rule in cooking about how the simpler a dish is, the better your ingredients and technique have to be, because there's nothing to hide behind.
"Patty melt" style burgers are generally less reliant on meat quality as long as you can get a good, crunchy, umami seat on the thin mean patty or patties.
I suspect the thicker higher end style burgers would be more reliant on the quality of the beef.
However, for economic reasons, they are probably the necessary target of impossible meat until they reach a scale large enough to compete with cheap beef.
In-N-Out meat is pretty good; it's just super thin. McDonald's is not good, but believe me, if McDonald's had a good burger patty, and if they wanted to freeze it, it wouldn't be any worse for it.
On the other side of things, In-N-Out doesn't freeze their fries, and they're much worse than the frozen fries from places like McDonald's or Shake Shack's crinkle-cut fries, and it's specifically because they don't do the fry-freeze-refry process critically important for great fries.
from http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...
I do, because I'm not a restaurant, and I don't buy enough meat for one or two servings of hamburger. If a restaurant's been around long enough and has enough turn over, they won't have my problem, but a place could want to freeze for time reasons, or to help with getting a gnarly crust by cooking it from frozen, etc. If you're freezing with the kind of thing the NYC sushi guys use (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/08/nyregion/sushi-fresh-from-...), and defrosting properly, a truly great hamburger could easily be made from a frozen patty.
I've never heard of a good prefrozen hamburger patty unless you're getting something from Snake River Farms or something along those lines (they ship frozen meat). I freeze my own.
Same goes for fresh bread. Maybe they want to serve pastrami sandwiches in Manhattan, but the best rye bread they can find is in Detroit, and so they have their baker freeze the bread and ship it over. It's not that the bread is better because it was frozen, but they're able to get better bread because they could freeze it.
Long story short: freezing brisket, not a great plan.
https://www.dti.dk/_/media/66980_Effect%20of%20packaging,%20... (PDF!)
Freezing food has a stigma that it doesn't deserve if the freezing and thawing is done with care. As I mentioned before, the best sushi restaurants in Manhattan all freeze their fish and store it in extremely cold freezers, and there's no significant detriment to quality. If Shake Shack wanted to do so, they could freeze their patties, and they'd still have one of the best restaurant burgers out there. They certainly would not be freezing their meat in the way that was done in that burger paper, nor would they be using meat of that quality.
1. It's unlikely that Impossible Foods will ever match the quality of a grass-fed, grain-finished 80/20 chuck + short rib blend from a purveyor like Pat LaFrieda.
2. The dish is heavily spiced and the Impossible Foods product is playing the role of the bolognese. It can hide under the seasoning and spices.
3. I still think the product is valuable. The vast majority of meat product Americans consume meets a much lower bar. I think Impossible Foods already makes a product that's better than the ground meat that goes into a lot of fast food chains. If you didn't tell people, I suspect they'd prefer a Taco Bell or White Castle product made with Impossible Foods instead of the "mix" that they currently use.
Unless they are running a completely solar operation and managing their farms using a system of rotational grazing that sequesters CO2, they most certainly are emitting it.
I see this as only mildly better than CAFOs. Employing holistic management techniques is still the best, and unfortunately, under appreciated way to produce meat in an ethical, sustainable way that also generates new fertile soil and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect.
That said, eliminating cows I still don't think will help the environment. That freed up land will be bought and used for some other purpose. It's natural capitalism. If you want to fix the environment, you need heavy penalities / taxes for nonsustainable resource usage. That's the only way.
Huge fan of a carbon tax.
How did the North American plains support millions of bison just on grass at one point?
A better idea would be less regular manure and more humanure.
Please explain this in more detail.
>and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect
I have not heard of a farming practice that sequesters methane released from ruminants. Can you provide more information?
>Please explain this in more detail.
Sure! Plants are much less nutrient dense that animals. So for them to create fake meat that's equally nutrient dense as real meat, their farms have to be adequately large. You need a ton of plants to achieve the density of meat. Animals on land however are already nutrient dense. The only physical space they need is enough room to graze.
>>and sequesters carbon/methane as a side effect
>I have not heard of a farming practice that sequesters methane released from ruminants. Can you provide more information?
Scientists and farmers in this area can do a much better job explaining it than I [1], [2], [3].
[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...
The animal's only energy source is plants. Some portion of that energy goes into producing muscle and organ tissue. Some of it is converted to heat. The rest is used for respiration, digestion, thinking, walking around, dreaming, and all the other ongoing processes of life. Animals don't undergo photosynthesis, nor do they spontaneously generate energy.
Unless there's something else you're getting at here. Energy loss and trophic levels is a pretty well-understood idea.
http://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/90132
Admittedly, there is a bit more nuance to the issue; for example, a cow can produce milk and meat from grass, which, for humans, creates available nutrients where there were none before. However, we could also plant that field of grass with corn or potatoes and get many more calories for the same amount of water and sunlight.
Meat is expensive in energy and water because it takes huge amounts of vegetable matter and water for a period of _years_ to get to a point where it's consumable; by contrast, said vegetable matter can be produced in typically less than one year.
How will said vegetable matter get it's nutrients year after year as the soil it's growing on gets eroded? Wouldn't external fertilizer, pesticides, etc need to be brought in? Doesn't creating that expend huge amounts of energy on it's own?
Sure, you have to worry about soil erosion, but by the same token you have to consider the fact that a single cow has a large grazing area. Fertilizers, pesticides etc. are optional but not strictly required, and again don't really change the bottom line.
Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs. All they require is land, sunlight, electric fences, and some water if rainfall is inadequate or the soil is in bad shape due to prior mismanagement or desertification.
A soy bean farm is a bad idea, firstly. To maintain balance, you wouldn't just want to farm soy beans.
Next, grass doesn't just magically appear. It too needs nutrients.
Cow manure is one way to improve soil nutrients, but Permaculture shows us many more ways to keep the cycle flowing.
In the end, the best picture is actually that the cows grazing and the soy beans exist together in a larger system of many other products that work together in providing nutrients that the others need.
Cows, though, are ultimately unnecessary for a Permaculture style system, and we can grow food without them. Then they can just be there as our friends and participate in our agricultural systems as fertilizers, if circumstances happen that way.
Animals, domestic or wild are a critical component of any wild or designed sustainable ecosystem. Research indicates that without the animal’s participation and contribution, ecological integrity is diminished or impossible. Some of the activities that contribute to the system include: foraging to cycle nutrients, clear fallen fruit, weed maintenance, spreading seeds, and pest maintenance. The nutrients are cycled by animals, transformed from their less digestible form (such as grass or twigs) into more nutrient-dense manure.
Fertilizer requires manure. Without manure you need synthetic fertilizer, which breaks the natural feedback loop and no longer good Permaculture practice.
Sure grass doesn't magically appear on it's own, but it can when you rotate some ruminants around from paddock to paddock. I have a friend who has a business doing this. She drives around a truck full of sheep and revitalizes land that has been turned to desert due to overgrazing or mismanagement [2].
You just keep their shit, let it decay, microorganisms flourish, and then spread it over the fields. Also switching plants regularily helps keeping decent amount of nitrogen in the soil.
>Sure cows need grazing land, but they don't require all the external inputs an industrial soybean farm, for instance, needs
This only works for extensive breeding, which is no more than 20% in the usa [1]. Sure, these eat hay in the winter, but thats not sufficient to keep animals fat enough. Inside their diet basically is the same as others, which is 50kg of corn silage, and some 2-5 kg of dehydrated soy protein. Per day. Good luck producing as much waste as a cow during her life time.
nb : I live and studied veterinary medicine in Europe, where we don't grow soy and import it from south america mostly (USA grows a lot already, idk if its autosufficient though). So yeah, deforestation exists so we can eat beef :)
1 - http://www.beefusa.org/beefindustrystatistics.aspx " feedlots with greater than 1,000 head capacity account for 81% of all cattle on feed". These mega farms don't do extensive breeding.
1. It won't be eroded if you practice good farming, e.g. Permaculture 2. The meat industry is horrendously worse at regeneration of land than the worst farm practices 3. How else do you expect nutrients arrive in soil? It's a process that happens naturally very easily and just needs to be managed
And it will often take up land that is more fertile, and as such has a higher biodiversity cost, than what is needed for grazing animals (which can be done on land more barren or harder to farm).
It is often forgotten that you can herd animals in ways that coexist with the rest of the ecosystem, while farming plant based food (especially products like grains or soy) requires you to raze all existing life in the area you wish to use for farmland reducing it to a monoculture with no room for diversity.
(But it should be made clear that this only counts for grazing animals. Industrial meat production where you feed the animals grains gives you the worst of both worlds).
I quickly realised that what I like most about sausages isn't really the animal fat / flesh, it's the wheat, barley and or other spices + salt fried in oil that I enjoy. I should also add the texture which was easily reproduced with Seitan.
Also I found Seitan cheese burgers to be really, really good.
I'm a little more skeptical of "pork" substitutes simply because lard makes everything taste better. Split pea soup vs split pea soup with coppa. Regular pie crust vs lard crust. Plain pizza vs with prosciutto. Risotto vs risotto w pork fat (or goose fat). For all of these there's no contest (for me).
http://impossiblefoods.com/images/faq/nutrition-facts.png
A lot of veggie imitation meats are low on fat and protein and extremely high on processed carbs.
I do think the design of the labels is completely ridiculous, though. Sugar, trans fats, and caloric count should be made much more prominent and put in red so that uninformed people understand that these are the primary causes of sickness in America.
The hypothesis here being what? Lack of red highlighting in informative tables is the cause for uninformedness? :)
Most things must show the amount per serving and the amount per 100g (in common across the EU), but they also show a chart with green/orange/red based on a typical serving size.
Example: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/media/images/61458000/jpg/...
Worse is that many products have bogus information. I'm not talking just about the inexactness of the methods, but in many cases the macronutrient math doesn't add up.
Total calories should be about (protein + carb)x4 + (fat)x9. Too often, it isn't close. I was comparing two versions within a product line yesterday (chili with beans vs without beans), and the calorie count for one mismatched the macronutrient breakdown by almost 10%.
Obviously, it's easier to compare if they are all relative to 100g, but arguably per-serving is more useful when making eating decisions. When I'm buying a food, I'm not trying to do science; I'm trying to figure out how much of a particular nutrient I'm personally going to get when I eat that item.
For example, if I have soup, there's no way I'll have as little as 100g of it. If I have tea, there's no way I'm going to have as much as 100g of tea leaves. The mass of a serving could be 1 or even 2 orders of magnitude different depending on the type of food.
Serving sizes are required by law to be "based on amounts of foods and beverages that people are actually eating" (see https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocument... ).
In fact, I think that's now the norm in the whole of the EU.
If the two-serving brand is also advertised as low sodium and consumers don't notice that the serving size is half as big, that's gonna seem to be much lower sodium than it really is.
water, pea protein isolate, oil blend (canola oil, flaxseed oil, palmoil, sunflower oil, dha algal oil), methylcellulose, carrageenan, potassium bicarbonate, caramel color†, yeast extract, maltodextrin, potassium chloride, tapioca starch, sorbitol, calcium chloride, natural flavoring, spices, salt, vegetable extract mix (spinach, broccoli, carrot, tomato, beet, shiitake mushroom), l-cysteine hydrochloride, beetjuice powder (flavor and color), natural hickory smoke concentrate, calcium sulfate, onion powder, onion extract, mesquite powder, sugar‡, pomegranate seed powder, ferric phosphate (iron), paprika extract (spice and color), garlic extract, cyanocobalamin (vitamin b12)
Curious, how do you normally figure out the phosphorus content ? Is there a guideline somewhere that gives you an adequate estimate ?
Beyond thing I have few tricks to get a estimate but mostly for those things I don't know the numbers well, I eat in moderation.
Which makes them pretty bad, even worst for dieting.
I could go grab two brands of non-meat burger patty off the shelves right now, and one will be 25% carbs, and one 6%. It's ridiculous.
I'm an omnivore, love burgers. I also love veg burgers, but they're not burgers -- they're something else, the way salmon burgers and fried chicken sandos are great but don't count when you want a "beef burger."
The Impossible Burger was the first burger I tried (Jardiniere in SF) that my brain said, "yes, this is a burger". In fact, it was close enough that... it was boring. I could eat it every day and if beef burgers were taken away from me, I wouldn't notice or reminisce.
The next step is to make the raw IB meat available in grocery, so I can experiment myself - load up the umami, mix in spices, stuff it with cheese, try it with different levels of done-ness, etc.
Edit: To note that I've only been a vegetarian for about 8 years (or around a 20-25% of my life), so definitely get the occasional craving for foods I used to enjoy in the past.
Of course it is, because it should be pretty obvious that they do want meat. If they didn't want meat you wouldn't be having the argument in the first place, right?
I've never tried a real honest to god direct replacement for meat that I actually was fooled -- even for a moment -- into thinking might actually be meat. I've had some delicious vegetarian dishes, I've had some delicious vegan dishes, but those things definitely just aren't the same experience as eating meat. Tofurkey just don't cut it.
Which isn't to say that I'm not open to the idea of having a 1:1 lab-made replacement for meat that is indistinguishable from the real thing. I most definitely am. If you could provide me with lab-meat at even just a small premium I'd probably go vegetarian where that option was available.
But boy do I love me some meat-or-indistinguishable-from-meat products in my meals.
Question: does that count as going vegetarian? To me that's just going techno-carnivore.
But very often the prices on these vegetarian meat substitute products is the same or higher than the comparable meat product. I think that's because the food system, and various subsidies to "big meat", make meat unnaturally cheap.
You'd like me to try vegan food? Make real vegan cuisine with its own flavors and consistency. Don't try to make fake meat, I won't eat vegan to taste something meat-like. I'll eat it for good tasting vegetables and fruits.
There's also the aspects of food as a culture or social participation. People want to be able to participate in things like BBQs or eat out at restaurants with friends.
I think even vegans/vegetarians have to acknowledge they are killing plants to eat. I suspect the better for environment/health argument is more prevalent (why I eat little meat).
At some point somethings going to have to die to feed yourself (until we can gene edit photosynthesis into humans..). I take some consolation that I'll be feeding bacteria when I'm gone.
so I wondered why it's a no brainer that plants are ethically ok to kill and eat but species closer to us aren't.
Anyone who's dealt with animals or pets sees intelligence and Personality. So it's easy to have empathy and want to let them live (especially if they're cute and docile). Nobody likes killing animals if unnecessary (for the most part, I never understood hunting for sport). Factory farming doesn't leave a pleasant feeling either.
But there is a trend of getting protein from bugs.. and I'm wondering were that fits into people's thinking.
It's more of a thought experiment than anything.
Idle thoughts from a species on top of the food chain with ample calories available that is the steward of the planet (and not doing too well)
My wife is coming around too and you know what? Foods like this are the gateway drug for those of us born and raised on meat to change our ways (should you want to... if you want to continue to eat meat that is your path in life to take!)
But there is one last reason for the "I can't believe it's not a dead animal!"-burger/dog: Culturually, people invite you to barbeques. If you show up with your Shoujin ryouri bentou, people look down on you and tell you that you're stuck up. If you show up with an eggplant and a hot dog bun, they won't call you stuck up, but they will reasonably say, "You're really going to grill an eggplant and stick it in a hotdog bun? That's why vegan food is so sad". (BTW, that actually sounds good to me :-) ).
Yes, vegans want to go to barbeques and fit in and not have to explain why they decided not to eat meat. Sometimes they just want a normal western cultural experience without having to compromise on their principles. Sometimes they grew up with this kind of food and they are feeling nostalgic. There are huge numbers of reasons why people do these kinds of things and why it is a big deal to them.
And yes, they should learn about cuisines that are culturally vegetarian for many, many reasons as well. Most do even if they also eat processed vegetable protein in a package.
And I believe these imitations really do help a lot of people make the transition either away from meat or towards less meat. Which I see as a good thing.
Also, more options for variety and stuff.
> “I love VCs and particularly the ones that invested in us,” Brown had said. “But it’s truly astonishing how little diligence they do in terms of the actual science that underlies some tech companies.”
Recent headlines on Theranos, Juicero, uBeam really drive this point home
Since there are so many positive reviews, I wonder if it just wasn't prepared correctly? The restaurant had only started serving it a few days earlier.
However, being a meat eater, since the news of this product came out however many months and years it was, I have been wanting to try it. Which is more than I can say for other meat substitutes.
I can get behind the idea. I can't morally justify eating one animal, loving another.
You can feed more people with the same amount of resources. 80,000 humans a day die from lack of food. Everything we can do to meaningfully improve food production efficiency is a big win for the species.
We hardly know a thing about what's good for our bodies. I doubt scientists will be able to produce a food that won't hurt us somehow in the long run.
I'm not sure if the agricultural industry would be ready to support a large shift towards this very easily.
I believe the ratio is between 6 and 8 times less land for beef, although you should definetly research this number if you're interested.
This makes plant-based burger and vegetarian/vegan foods a lot more eco-friendly and requires less land to produce, which is a problem most developped countries are facing
At $16 a pound I'd much rather get some high quality meat or fish. If it comes down in price to something reasonable I might add it to our rotation.
Much like how a Tesla Model 3 isn't as cheap as a Corolla, but still not completely out of the question for alot of people like a Model S is.
Even if it settles at double the price of meat I could see myself buying it regularly. Given how unethically meat is produced now, I don't mind accepting some price increase.
It looks every other comment is trying to "sell" us something rather than being regular honest commenting. Reminds me of evangelicals or jehovah's witnesses trying to sell me their religion.
Maybe knowing how social media works now has got me cynical.
I'll never become vegetarian and I'll stay an omnivore til I die. It's great that they were able to raise money and hopefully they'll open up options for the vegetarians crowd. But please stop with the Impossible Foods is going to save the world stuff.
Tesla going to save the world. Impossible Foods is going to save the world. Jesus is going to save the world. Goodness.
But "changing the world" isn't hyperbole?
> But it's not about making a nice meal for vegetarians, it's about sustainable meat consumption for a growing population.
What? Meat eaters aren't going to choose fake meat no more than vegetarians are going to choose fake vegetables/fruits.
People are still going to hunt, still going to keep livestock and still going to consume meat. We are omnivores after all.
Also, meat production is HIGHLY sustainable already. We waste tons of meat because we have such an excess of it.
[Edit: way to be downvoted instantly for asking a serious critical question. Remember when hn prided itself on a higher level of discussion than reddit?]
Here is the Impossible Foods FAQ: https://www.impossiblefoods.com/faq/
Honestly yes if you cant be clear what your business does where others have failed IMO at the very least your marketing team is failing
Soy burgers have been around for 20 years and that has been 20 years of failure.
Vegetarians might not care how the product tastes, especially if they make their culinary decisions for ethical reasons. But this is the first time meat eaters are actually saying that they might use a veggie product just because they like it.
That is a big deal.
I wonder how the community here will respond to this. Most here seemed upset by the male-infertility story from a week or two ago. Turning around to gush over soy would be completely incoherent.
"Soy as health food" is diabolically false.
Do you have a link to that story?
Furthermore, it's said that plant-derived oestrogen does not act in the same way as human-derived oestrogen. I'll find a link...
EDIT: Link...
http://www.pcrm.org/health/cancer-resources/ask/ask-the-expe...
"Phytoestrogens, being weak estrogens, are like small, private planes with few passengers and no cargo, yet they still occupy the Jetway after landing. When phytoestrogens occupy the cell, normal estrogens cannot. Plant estrogens do not eliminate all of estrogen's effects, but they do minimize them, apparently reducing breast cancer risk and menstrual symptoms.
For men and boys, the phytoestrogens in soy do not appear to have any effect on hormone levels and have not been shown to affect sexual development or fertility. Research studies show that men consuming soy have less prostate cancer and better prostate cancer survival."
Soy protein does blunt testosterone production. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131010091557.h...
Soy's effects are well known, at least among (some) doctors.
--
edited after the parent's edit:
Soy contains phytoestrogens, which are endocrine disruptors. Soy is incredibly estrogenic (http://igrow.org/livestock/beef/hormones-in-beef-myth-vs.-fa... Table 1). See the following research if you're interested.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21175082
> Phytoestrogens, natural plant compounds abundantly found in soy and soy products, behave as weak estrogen mimics or as antiestrogens. They are considered to be EDCs [endocrine disrupting compounds], and have some beneficial effects on health, including reducing the risk of breast cancer and improving metabolic parameters. However, the supporting evidence that consumption of phytoestrogens is beneficial is indirect and inconsistent. Lifetime exposure to estrogenic substances, especially during critical periods of development, has been associated with formation of malignancies and several anomalies of the reproductive systems.
And, the most relevant one:
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/23/11/2584/2913898/S...
"These data suggest that higher intake of soy foods and soy isoflavones is associated with lower sperm concentration."
>Full Ingredient List:
>Water, Textured Wheat Protein, Coconut Oil, Potato Protein, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Leghemoglobin (soy), Yeast Extract, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Konjac Gum, Xanthan Gum, Thiamin (Vitamin B1), Zinc, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12.
>Contains:
>Soy, Wheat
This contains soy. My comment stands.
Notice that all the "soy" falls in the "2% or less of" bucket. This is not the same as a soy burger. Have you eaten one?
> Those labels are because the compounds could trigger a soy allergy
...because it contains soy, which has negative effects on fertility. That was my whole point. So why change the subject?
From https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/23/11/2584/2913898/S...:
This association was stronger at the higher end of the sperm concentration distribution suggesting that soy food intake may have stronger associations among men with normal or high sperm concentrations than among men with low sperm concentration. Also, soy food intake was more strongly inversely related to sperm concentration among overweight and obese men. Intake of soy foods or isoflavones was unrelated to the remaining semen analysis parameters examined.
>But high-temperature processing has the unfortunate side effect of so denaturing the other proteins in soy that they are rendered largely ineffective.23 That's why animals on soy feed need lysine supplements for normal growth.
>Nitrites, which are potent carcinogens, are formed during spray-drying, and a toxin called lysinoalanine is formed during alkaline processing.24 Numerous artificial flavorings, particularly MSG, are added to soy protein isolate and textured vegetable protein products to mask their strong "beany" taste and to impart the flavor of meat.25
>In feeding experiments, the use of SPI increased requirements for vitamins E, K, D, and B12 and created deficiency symptoms of calcium, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, copper, iron, and zinc.26 Phytic acid remaining in these soy products greatly inhibits zinc and iron absorption; test animals fed SPI develop enlarged organs, particularly the pancreas and thyroid gland, and increased deposition of fatty acids in the liver.27
http://www.mercola.com/article/soy/avoid_soy.htm
I shouldn't even have to post about "Textured Wheat Protein" but it's essentially another denatured protein, one that is completely doused in glyphosate right before harvest..
Check out the chart on page two...
http://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/ITX_2013_06_04_Seneff.pdf
These "vegan" foods are nowhere near healthy.
There's conflicting evidence about soy's health benefits, which is a sentence that is, generally speaking, just as true after a "s/soy/any_damn_food" operation. Nitrites are highly toxic in quantity, but in small quantity, they've been used in food processing since the Middle Ages. It's what you cure meat with. Most of the nitrites in your diet, though, are naturally occurring.
And while no one claims MSG has massive health benefits, it's been extremely well established that it's harmless. It's just a salt. I'm sure Doc Mercola will tell me the decades of tests that show it's safe are simply a sign that every first world health agency is in the pocket of Big Umami, but y'know, color me skeptical.
>When I say he's one of the folks who believe that fluoridation is a nefarious government conspiracy, I am not kidding.
Fluoride lowers IQ in children an average of 15 points, per Harvard meta-analysis.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-children...
>researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and China Medical University in Shenyang for the first time combined 27 studies and found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children.
So... what exactly is he wrong about when it comes to fluoride?
You are blinded by your bias against this one Doctor, enough to miss the main points regarding why these foods are total shit.
No. Aside from the fact that meta-analyses are primarily a means of identifying areas for direct research because they have a strong tendency to magnify publication bias (among other problems), that's not what the cited piece concludes. Your own quote shows that the conclusion is much weaker, noting that the meta-analysis “found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children.”
Finding strong indications that it has a possibility (“may” ≠ “does”) of causing some adverse reaction is not the same as concluding that it does have any adverse impact, and even farther from any particular quantification of that impact. And the actual average result (which isn't a study conclusion on the actual impact) was 7, not 15 IQ points for “high flouride content”; to quote your source: “The average loss in IQ was reported as a standardized weighted mean difference of 0.45, which would be approximately equivalent to seven IQ points for commonly used IQ scores with a standard deviation of 15.”
You acknowledge that you got the number wrong, which is good, but the smaller problem. The bigger problem is that the number was not, in either case, an impact concluded by the meta-analyses, it was merely the average impact of high flouridation in the studies included.
> However, that means there are still considerable issues (both medical and ethical) with the mass-ingesting of fluoride
No, it doesn't. Again, the source you cite does not conclude that there is any adverse effect. The meta-analysis, according to it's authors, indicates only that there may be an adverse effect.
Even the follow-up study by the authors (linked from your source; meta-analyses rarely support strong conclusions about fact, but often provide direction for further research) seems to indicate some effect, especially at high dosage levels but again, mostly is an indicator for further research, not a basis for concluding a clearly quantified effect.
Without a qauntifiable effect tied to actual flouride levels, it's not clear if there is any probl with the actual flouridation practice in the United States. Almost every substance is harmful in excess, even ones where moderate amounts are better than none.
http://fluoridealert.org/studies/brain01/
If not, what would be?
While it's true that MSG is well-studied and about as well-established as safe as can be, “It’s just a salt” is, well, not support for it’s safety; potassium cyanide is also just a salt, and no one (sane, at least) is going to argue that it is safe to ingest.
Even at scale?
When you start talking environmentally sustainable meat production, you're talking about utilizing land and calories that would not be well utilized otherwise. Pastureland that is too rocky or arid for grain or vegetable production, grazed at a level that is sustainable for that land. Food waste and mast you can feed to pigs or goats but not people.
Scale is "a whole lot of meat" but "not much as Americans eat now".
Flavor is our evolved way of our bodies telling us what our body wants to eat. "Impossible burgers" are just a simulation of food.
There is a fun analogy with Sunny Delight, with the use of cheap inputs and lots of flavoring.
We don't really live the way we evolved to live, though. I can get the high calorie foods hunter gatherers sought out to see them through lean times delivered to me at my house while I sit around in my underwear.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-safety-of-heme-vs-non-h...
"An increase in heme iron intake of 1mg/day appeared to be significantly associated with a 27% increase in risk of CHD" according to one study.
> Impossible Burgers contain heme iron, which is disastrous to the body.
Then posted
> Well, in that case, heme iron may not be so bad. I'm not here to debate that.
Are you revoking your initial claim?
Nutritional science is hard and we have very limited ability to actually study it and make strong recommendations. Cherry-picking phrases and results from limited power studies just muddies the waters.
Here's the founder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Greger
> In his lectures, videos, and writings about nutrition he tries to persuade people to change their eating habits from a Western pattern diet to a whole foods, plant-based, healthy diet—optimally to vegan diet—and says that such a diet can prevent and reverse many chronic diseases.
> Retired physician Harriet A. Hall ... has written that ... Greger often overstates the known benefits of such a diet as well as the harm caused by eating animal products (for example, in a talk he claimed that a single meal rich in animal products can "cripple" one's arteries), and he sometimes does not discuss evidence that contradicts his strong claims.
"Disastrous" is clearly a gross overstatement.
- Nutritionfacts.org is non-profit - Their conclusions are based on studies. - They're not trying to sell supplements or food products.
Do they omit certain studies that contradict their overall conclusions? Sure. That doesn't mean anything to me.
Cherry-picking doesn't mean anything to you?
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Iron-HealthProfessional/
> - Nutritionfacts.org is non-profit - Their conclusions are based on studies. - They're not trying to sell supplements or food products.
IMO: Your website is trying to sell a lifestyle. Their conclusions are made in advance; then they attempt to rationalize them with studies after the fact.
> Do they omit certain studies that contradict their overall conclusions? Sure. That doesn't mean anything to me.
That is a major red flag in science reporting.
I really can't be bothered watching the video but I had a look at the first article it "quotes" (https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/196_10_040612_sup...). The video says:
"no more likely to suffer from iron deficiency anaemia than non-vegetarians"
But has actually deliberately erased the context (it uses the same PDF, the rest has been whited out in the screenshot):
"[In Western countries like Australia, where we enjoy a varied food supply,] vegetarians are no more likely to suffer from iron deficiency anaemia than non-vegetarians."
And shamelessly cherry picked:
"but a number of studies suggest that vegetarians are at greater risk of having low iron stores (as reflected by serum ferritin)."
So I'm going to suggest that people not pay this video much mind.