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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

If fake meats had come first and animal meats were just now coming to market, people would make similar arguments about health effects... and they'd be warranted. With animal meat, one has to worry about salmonella, e. coli, staph, and other pathogens. These food-borne pathogens kill about 5,000 Americans a year and make millions sick.[1] Also, cooking meat creates carcinogens.[2]

If fake meats were as dangerous as the real thing, they'd be illegal to sell. Concerns about the safety of these new foods are pure status-quo bias.

1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/safe/food...

2. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d...

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I think it's foolish to assume that some novel and highly processed food item is going to be safer than something which we've been eating for thousands of generations. Basing the conclusion of safety based on a piecemeal analysis of the components hand-waves away the entire complexity of digestion and metabolization.

> I think it's foolish to assume that some novel and highly processed food item is going to be safer than something which we've been eating for thousands of generations.

It's not that processed foods are particularly safe, but that meat is unsafe in a way we're accustomed to. Again: every year, meat-borne pathogens kill 5,000 Americans and cause illnesses in 1% of the population. Fake meats simply don't cause those rates of illness or death. If they did, the FDA would not allow them to be sold.

And coal plants kill far more people than nuclear ones. It's just not as obvious that they're the cause to those who are sick.

Who is to say that eating an equivalent amount of this fake meat product wouldn't cause a far greater number of deaths and reduction in quality adjusted years? It will be much harder to tell, because the problems aren't as obvious/acute, and there are always a huge number of confounding variables when it comes to nutrition.

Unless the problems it causes are acute, the FDA isn't going to have a very good way of comparing the safety of these with normal meat.

We don't know what properties this meat will have; we do know what causes regular meat to be harmful, and fake meat does not share several of those particular factors.

I think you are crazily optimistic about both the FDA and the ability to see any significant health effects from fake meat. Even my vegan friends have only been eating it for about a decade, and that doesn't strike me as enough time for e.g. discerning whether it is carcinogenic.

Among other things, sodium nitrate (included in the above description of fake meat) is, by itself, known to be more carcinogenic than red meat itself. But you don't see the FDA ensuring new foods don't use it.

Slaughterhouses and packaged meat are a pretty recent invention, certainly not one we’ve evolved with over thousands of generations. Is it really more natural to open a cellophane package of ground meat that comes from who knows how many animals?

What makes you think slaughter houses were needed? That just made things more "efficient". Humans and our ancestors have been eating meat since we have been a species.

It’s processing, which is what you were knocking meat alternatives for.

Some of the things done in order to achieve efficiency has tangible consequences on the healthiness of the food. For instance cramming many animals in a very small space (e.g. in poultry farming) increases chances of contagious diseases developing. Industry is trying to compensate using antibiotics, but that has issues also.

Just because human race survived thousands of years eating certain food does not mean that food is safe in today's standard.

Especially considering the fact that we will live up to three times as long as the average hunter-gatherer. Time matters when considering carcinogens and other long-term effects. National and international bodies providing food guidelines tend to advocate a reduction in red meat, sausage, etc. for good reasons.

With animal meat, one has to worry about salmonella, e. coli...

You have to worry about that with vegetables as well. Certainly here in Sweden the nr 1 source of food borne salmonella is spinach, arugula and similar leafy greens.

Cooking food can create carcinogens. A couple of years ago there was much fuss about a Swedish study about carcinogens in crisps (potato chips) – that's potato fried in vegetable oils, no meat involved.[1] (The fuss was mostly caused by not understanding the quantities involved.)

You can keep all of that aforementioned "meat" afaic.

[1] more on that for example here: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/acrylamide.html

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