The Race to Become the Beyond Meat of Fish
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Problems arise when these faux meats are themselves over-fortified with simple sugars and trans fats, in order to mimic real meat. Then you're losing health benefits of eating the real thing, and you should be careful.
The same hypothesis (that we can reclaim the idea of processed food for nutritionally complete foods) is also on display in a product like Vite Ramen which explicitly patterns itself after a nutritionally dubious staple food (i.e., instant ramen). I would expect to see more startups in this space in the next few years.
I find it challenging to attribute this entirely to lifestyle changes and the internet. In the mean time we have been increasingly introducing manufactured substances and products into our food systems that fit the timeline extremely well. Of course perhaps one problem is that we've introduced so many things that it's become impossible to discern cause from effect. Because while I find it difficult to attribute all change to lifestyle changes, that's undoubtedly played and is playing some role.
For instance, work/life pressure results in stress, which could result in overeating which is easy to do given that not only is fast food more readily available than ever, but now so is restaurant quality foods though Uber. By ordering Uber at home you aren't going out, therefore you are being less social, which by being less social may lead to mental health issues. All the while not exercising and watching Netflix and sitting on social media looking at the lives of others.
Very out there example, but I think it's all intertwined
In the past several decades now we've seen a huge array of companies now rushing to introduce all sorts of engineered consumables into the marketplace. This is not just genetic engineered food products, but also purely chemical compounds such as aspartame (first introduced in 1981), sucralose (first introduced in 1998), etc. And now factor in the recent discovery that our gut biome seems to be connected to far more than we ever thought in our body. And we have mostly no real clue whatsoever how these things are affecting people. Safety trials tend to be short term and only concerned with overt physical affects - a standard by which leaded fuel was also deemed harmless.
This was what stood out to me about your comment. I think there are quite a large number of questions yet to be answered about how what we're eating in recent decades has been affecting us. And we're only just beginning to be able to pursue these answers at the same time that an ever greater number of engineered products are being introduced for consumption.
Can you expand on this? Only thing I've heard is the Flynn effect, which is probably longer-term... And the only other thing I think of in association with "long-term, potentially worrisome, population-wide unexplained decline" is testosterone levels.
This has been observed to have reversed in many developed nations. By reversed it's not like it's reaching an asymptotic zero rate of growth, but genuinely decreasing. This was first observed in Scandinavian countries in the mid nineties. Outside of Scandinavia this decline has been corroborated in at least the UK, Australia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. It's probably reasonable to hypothesize that the reason it's yet to be corroborated elsewhere is a mix of the lack of testing or a lack of earlier testing to compare against. Scandinavia, for instance, has compulsory enlistment which, in turn, entails compulsory IQ testing which is then made publicly available. The declines are also extremely significant. For instance in the extreme case, Denmark IQ's dropped by 1.5 points on average in just 5 years.
For now the exact cause(s) are not agreed upon and it's a topic that isn't receiving anywhere near the attention deserves due to people's sensitivity to the topic. Dysgenic factors are almost certainly playing some role, but a decline has also been observed even between brothers. Again, yet another mystery of society somehow deteriorating for no apparent reason. In this case, I do think us inadvertently poisoning ourselves (yet again) in some way or another is probably the best case scenario.
Wiki has a decent paragraph on the topic [1]. Searches or things like Google Scholar can turn up far more as well.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
I saw that that the 'The Impossible Burger' contains near equal nutritional value of real meat; does the veg fish fillets and crab cakes you speak of contain Vitamin D3 and other essential vitamins seen mostly only in sea food?
Seafood consumption is far higher than meat-- good luck to these folks, it could be highly profitable.
Update:
Worldwide meat consumption (first graph): 317,000,000 tonnes.
Worldwide seafood consumption (later down): 154,850 kilotonnes, or 154,850,000 tonnes.
Seafood is roughly half of meat. That's still a large market.
It's better for the environment (smaller carbon footprint), it's more ethical, and it's cheaper -- if the manufacturing of meatless and seafoodless substitutes can achieve this at scale.
Your youtube video reviews something from the dollar store.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3025173/the-countries-with-the-b...
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl...
I'm much more bullish on lab grown meat - the company that can build that will be $100b+ company for sure.
It may be a 100b+ company, or it may be that producing lab grown meat costs 100x as much and there is no way to reduce that.
Have there been any initial figures? If so, why is no business capitalizing on it?
This is mostly hypothetical but if you have a response I'd like to hear it.
This may or may not be true in the short term, but it seems unlikely to me in the long run. There are physical processes occurring inside the cow which don't require many resources. I can't see what would stop us from _eventually_ being able to mimic the key aspects of those processes and to do so somewhat efficiently. Of course, it may end up taking quite a long time to develop this capability.
Sorry to be a downer, but anything remotely touching alt-food startups on HN is hyped with positive sentiment to the point where any criticism gets discouraged.
Somehow I don't feel the urge to tell someone enjoying a Budweiser™ beer at a bar that their drink "belongs" for sale only at a grocery/convenience store for at-home consumption only.
I buy sandwiches from a place that advertises they use Boar's Head meat. Shrug
Yes. Budweiser is terrible beer.
A better drinks comparison would be choosing from the menu between a 'Jose Cuervo Authentic Margarita' and a margarita mixed fresh by the bartender.
I agree with the OP - in a restaurant I would always order a made-from-scratch dish (the house margarita) than a factory-made burger (the premixed margarita).
And this isn’t just fearmongering. For most restaurants it is uneconomical to cook with anything but the cheapest vegetable oils which are guaranteed to oxidate/become carcinogenic at the temperatures required to cook the food they’re serving. So if you eat out often, being informed about a restaurants sourcing and cooking habits is definitely worth knowing about.
Some people wouldn’t even consider a veggie burger on the menu, but an impossible burger? Sure. It’s about _branding_.
The first time I tried impossible meat I was eating dinner with my old boss and he’d asked if I had heard about impossible meat. I’d heard about it but never tried it, so I ordered it and it was honestly better than I expected.
I never would have tried it if it wasn’t for word of mouth marketing because it was on the menu. Restaurants are in the business of selling food. It’s their job to make items on their menu sound appealing. Just like those Michelin star restaurants including ingredients I’ve never heard of, let alone can’t pronounce. I could never find that ingredient at my local store. Maybe I should try it.
Based on your tone it sounds like you’ve never tried “imitation meat” as you describe it but i can see why people are hyping it. I eat plenty of meat but have started buying beyond meat patties at the store every now and then. It’s magnitudes better than your run-of-the-mill black bean veggie burger.
Pretty off-topic, but a question: after seeing so many mentions on HN, I was pretty interested to give it a try after seeing Beyond Burgers appear in my Dutch grocery store recently. One thing that struck me, though, was that they were twice as expensive as the A brand plant-based burgers we already had, and over three times as expensive as the cheap ones. How expensive are they in the US? (i.e. are they just this expensive because they're from outside the EU?)
If they made their own veggie burger, I love that. If they bought the best veggie burger on the market, that's also great.
There are plenty of brands involved in restaurants, in meat, in fake meat, in the preparation of the food (Big Green Egg for example). It's rarer to come across brands in vegetables or non-meat/meat-like products, but it happens. Sometimes their bread comes from the best bakery in town and they want you to know that.
Making everything from scratch is a lot of work for a small restaurant. There's nothing wrong with outsourcing it to a specialist.
And they also sell branded drinks, don't they? They don't brew their own cola or beer (well, some do[0]), and they will tell you what brand they've got.
[0] I recently had lunch at https://deproefzaak.nl/en/ which brews their own beer and serves branded veggie burgers.
Things like beer are a bit more understandable - not every restaurant can have a brewery out the back. (although the ones that do are pretty nice)
Sounds like you need better friends.
I heard somewhere that the fake burger companies sold to restaurants first because the parameters for cooking it well are much narrower than a regular burger (for now). They didn't want to ruin their products' reputation because of mistakes people made cooking the burgers at home, whereas restaurants will probably do a better job.
That's a very short sighted view. This isn't about vegetarianism. It's about the environmental crisis, and the overfishing crisis, that we're currently experiencing at a global level. I don't care whether you are vegetarian or not, we are all in the target market for solutions to these problems. That's what replacement meat and fish are about.
Source: my wife who is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist.
fuck off.
The only tasty vegetarian food is Indian and Italian anyway.
My motivations are primarily ethical and environmental, though I have grown more sympathetic to certain of the health arguments too. If it were ethically and environmentally acceptable, then I'd have no moral compunction about eating lab-grown meat (aka "cellular agriculture" products). But I don't "miss" meat, after about six years of (ostro-)veganism, so I'd probably only eat lab-grown poultry and seafood on occasion, and skip red meat altogether insofar as it has (according to my understanding) deleterious health impacts that poultry and seafood probably don't.
I probably wouldn't.
I have personally categorized meat, especially fish, into "eww gross" so I don't think I'd enjoy it and I don't really feel like I have a nutritional need for it.
And the thought of gristle makes me want to vomit.
I don't think I've missed out on anything by restricting myself to a vegetarian diet.
I kid!
If you only eat meat you will loose weight not gain it regardless of how much fat is in it.
I lost the most weight when I eat only meat (including the fat) & green salads (or any non-carbohydrates)
Not malnutrition at all. I
That all-meat diet sure isn't helping you. Your attention span didn't even last for your whole post before you got confused, hit send, and wandered off.
> Carbs and sugar are the culprit behind the obesity epidemic, not meat
Processed food as well as particularly overeating of delicacies like meat, cheese, eggs, fish, and oil and sugar prepared plant-foods, is the mayor culprit, I believe.
Nobody got fat from eating plain potatoes, beans and apples. It's also very hard to overeat on those kinds of foods because of the high water and fiber content. People get fat by eating too much dairy, meat, eggs, and plants prepared in oils, or other highly processed plant-foods, which are easy to overeat on.
It's not that simple. Dietary fat doesn't spike insulin levels and that is a primary signal to the body to store excess calories in fat cells. High carb foods tend to spike insulin but to what degree depends on the food.
>CONCLUSIONS: Fish-eaters, vegetarians and especially vegans had lower BMI than meat-eaters. Differences in macronutrient intakes accounted for about half the difference in mean BMI between vegans and meat-eaters. High protein and low fibre intakes were the factors most strongly associated with increasing BMI.
> Vegans tended to report higher levels of physical activity; there were no clear patterns for education level across the diet groups; vegans were least likely and meat-eaters most likely to be married and almost the whole cohort reported ethnicity as white. Nulliparity was most common in the vegan women and least common in meat-eaters, with meat-eaters tending to have a greater number of children than the other diet groups. Some of these differences in lifestyle factors between the diet groups are likely to result from the disparity in median ages.
So, more exercise, less marriage, fewer children, and younger age for the vegans...
It’s pretty hard to gain weight eating boiled potatoes but you’ll pack on pounds eating fries.
Probably has as much to do with taste as anything. Plain boiled potatoes are so bland that people would only eat them if they had no other choice.
In Denmark it's a national delicacy to have same day potatoes cooked or in salads. They are silky smooth, super easy to peel (you simply just rub the skin off) and are amazing with dill, creme fraîse and any meat you can think off.
Having said that, have you tried your potatoes completely plain (no fat or salt)?
I live in the US now and you can easily get potatoes if you go upstate in New York where I live. The problem is that they are way too long to get to the dinner table :)
I love good bread, grew up with proper bread. I have tried most substitutions they just don't do it.
I think people need to realize there probably isn't a one-size-fits-all diet because humans are so varied genetically and well adapted to many different environments
That may soon be a thing of the past.[1][2]
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/30/chick-culling-germany-makes-...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/22/worlds-f...
Who do you thing would go for the beyond wheat products?
No carbs works really well for me and makes me loose weight.
Pretty much any of the myriad resources on paleo / low-carb / grain-free diets will cover most of the reasons and point to research backing up why whole grains are not healthy. Nutrition science is a weirdly controversial topic however so for every study that points in one direction you'll find someone passionately committed to a different theory who will dig up conflicting evidence.
Having read a lot on the subject over the years (and through personal experience) I'm persuaded by the evidence in favour of a low-carb, largely grain-free, high fat paleo style diet but I've largely given up trying to convince anyone who feels differently on the Internet as for whatever reason nutrition debates are as heated and futile as political ones.
1. Lectins. Lectins are substances found in many raw foods, like tomatoes, lentils, beans, and whole grains. Some lectins are toxic (like those in kidney beans) and some are completely harmless (like those in tomatoes). Toxic lectins are completely destroyed by proper cooking. Some high lectin foods (like lentils and beans) are strongly correlated with longer lifespans, so diets suggesting they be avoided are probably worth scrutiny.
2. Phytates. Phytates can bind to vitamins and minerals and make them biologically unavailable in digestion. In practice, this is only problematic in already nutrient deficient diets. And like most dietary concerns, the picture is more complex. Phytates also have remarkable positive effects, such as decreased rates of cancer, kidney stones, diabetes, and heart disease.
The paleo diet (basically rebranded Atkins) runs contrary to every developed nation’s dietary guides. To believe it’s healthy is to believe in conspiratorial thinking as silly as flat earth or faked moon landings.
Some of you people sound like you should just become Breatharians instead of burdening the rest of us with your tiresome dietary restrictions. For those of us that can eat real food without it ruining our lives, you're like so many annoying flies always pushing your strange food fads when the rest of us just want a reliable source of clean meat and bread.
When I don't eat carbs I feel the best, has the most energy and loose weight.
It's pretty significant.
It is also very easy to eat a large number of calories via carbohydrate. Essentially, carbs make you fat.
I can personally observe in myself that if I eat a chocolate bar in the morning, I will be more hungry in an hour or two than if I had eaten nothing at all.
Unrefined carbs like in potatoes and (whole)wheat and oatmeal etc. are not bad; those foods provide many good nutrients and do not cause the negative carb effects you mentioned.
It's the same as fruits containing sugar (which is a carbohydrate actually I think) but not causing the same ill effects as eating the same amount of sugar from Sour Patch Kids (candy which is ~80% sugar by weight).
That's the thing that everyone in this discussion seems to be missing: taste. There are good reasons to believe that better-tasting food may have physiological effects beyond just being pleasurable to eat [1]. This is not controversial when it comes to other substances but with food it's a much tougher battle.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry...
Fasting is a powerful thing! So is refined sugar.
The problems start when you refine all the fiber away and load them up with oil.
I only eat once a day M-F, fwiw.
> Water, Pea Protein Isolate*, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Refined Coconut Oil, Rice Protein, Natural Flavors, Cocoa Butter, Mung Bean Protein, Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Apple Extract, Salt, Potassium Chloride, Vinegar, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Sunflower Lecithin, Pomegranate Fruit Powder, Beet Juice Extract (for color)
Here are ingredients of a regular burger:
> Beef
I avoid seed oils and starches. Otherwise the Beyond Burger ingredients don't sound too bad. But clearly it's a highly processed food product compared to ground beef. That will also be true of a fish version compared to fish. The artificial versions will be relatively deficient in other nutrients like B-12, omega 3 fats, vitamin D, heme-iron, zinc and some amino acids.
In terms of nutrition rather than ethics it looks like an inferior substitute.
It's also made of whatever the cow consumed, and depending on the source of the beef, that can vary a great deal.
Also, the human body is very resilient as to the source of its nutrients, as long as it gets those nutrients in sufficient quantity and balance.
> Beef Mince, Relish (Diced Tomato (50%), Sugar, Onions, Vinegar, Tomato Paste, Herbs And Spices, Salt, Thickener (1422), Food Acid (330), Firming Agent (509)), Salt, Parsley
And if you're avoiding starches why would you be getting a burger, the bun is a starch. And lets not even start on what's likely to be in the rest of the ingredients.
> Beef
That's not very informative. It doesn't specify what kind of food went into the beef, whether it walked on grass or was locked in a cage, whether it contains traces of growth hormone, etc.
The replacement just has to taste very similar, not hurt animals, be reasonably priced, sustainable to produce and healthy or neutral for health.
Arguably cows have been impacted by as much evolution as any organism. It's not as though cows spontaneously generated 100M years ago - there were hundreds of millions of years leading up to cows becoming what we recognize today.