Impossible Burger: Commitment to consumers and our planet led us to use GM soy | Hacker News Reader

Impossible Burger: Commitment to consumers and our planet led us to use GM soy

medium.com

43 pointsmrbtc68 comments

> The levels of glyphosate detected in the Impossible burger by Health Research Institute Laboratories were 11 X higher than the Beyond Meat Burger. The total result (glyphosate and it’s break down AMPA) was 11.3 ppb. Moms Across America also tested the Beyond Meat Burger and the results were 1 ppb.

> “We are shocked to find that the Impossible Burger can have up to 11X higher levels of glyphosate residues than the Beyond Meat Burger according to these samples tested. This new product is being marketed as a solution for “healthy” eating, when in fact 11 ppb of glyphosate herbicide consumption can be highly dangerous. Only 0.1 ppb of glyphosate has been shown to alter the gene function of over 4000 genes in the livers, kidneys and cause severe organ damage in rats

Question(s): Is the lab result significant or not? Is it fairly common for other veggie products in the US to show similar levels? What is the safe level according to the FDA?

I can't really image 11 ppb is significant for glyphosate. That's below the historic 20 ppb threshold for lead.

I'm not sure where the .1 ppb study comes from, it'd be interesting.

Edit: The .1 ppb comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair

To get both sides of the story, I encourage reading the official rebuttal against that article: https://assets.ctfassets.net/hhv516v5f7sj/77NQsg1qDb6d9Hi4PB...

I don’t know but Moms Across America is 100% not a credible source for anything. If they’re right it’s a “stopped clock” situation.

The EPA safe level is about 140 mg/day for an average adult. There are proposals in progress to lower that.

https://www.ewg.org/research/california-proposes-safe-level-...

11.3 ppb would be 1.2ug per burger then, right?

I linked it above too, but 1ppm (1000ppb) is the proposed EPA guideline, but 20x that is proposed for soybeans:

https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=EPA-H...

I’d be curious to hear what the guidelines are outside of north america.

> Only 0.1 ppb of glyphosate has been shown to alter the gene function of over 4000 genes in the livers, kidneys and cause severe organ damage in rats

How true is this? That number seems pretty low.

Sounds like utter bullshit to me. 0.1 ppb causing severe organ damage? This cannot possibly be true. The LD50 of glyphosate in rats is 5,600 mg/kg, or 56 million times that concentration.

I'm all for GMO but I'm allergic to soy. I was disappointed when I heard they switched.

I developed a soy allergy when my mom decided to follow a fad in the 70s and switch me to soy in lieu of 'evil' cows' milk. One day my dad was watching me and got tired of having a continually sick infant. He switched me back to cows milk and I was fine after that.

I wish they'd go back to using healthy wheat protein (gluten) in their product, too. They did in early formulations, but eliminated it later on.

As a celiac, I certainly don't. Even for those that aren't celiac, making the claim that gluten is healthy is dubious at best.

I'd also imagine there are many more celiacs out there than those with soy allergies.

Gluten is extremely healthy. The few actual celiacs I've met would have certainly liked to be able to eat another cheap, healthy source of non-animal protein.

Soy allergies according to CDC are about 1.2% of general population. This makes it about twice as common as celiac disease (from NIH numbers) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22850429

Where are you getting that 1.2% number? This is the only study I've found citing that number, but it is _not_ for the general population, but for atopic (read: hypersensitive) children. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070118/

I've yet to see any indication that gluten is healthy. I also don't see how "what celiacs want" is relevant to the health discussion.

EDIT: Just as anecdotal evidence, I've literally never met anyone with a soy allergy or intolerance, but know tens of people with celiac disease/intolerances, and at least 10 that are officially diagnosed (myself and mother included).

Minor soy allergy checking in. It's been diagnosed, but is minor enough I don't normally notice and and don't go out of my way to avoid it, other than not drinking soy milk or eating tofu or edamame. I likely wouldn't have made the association if I wasn't tested for all allergies when we were figuring out my much more severe peanut allergy. Perhaps there's a large population of undiagnosed people allergic to soy as well. Anecdotally, I think I've always heard more about soy allergies than gluten until the recent past, though I was kinda already in the allergy community.

This. Gluten allergies or intolerance seem to be on the rise. Probably makes sense to exclude it if they wanna be the future of food.

Why would gluten allergies and intolerance be on the rise?

I believe there are two factors contributing to the perceived rise:

1. The US has lagged behind Europe significantly in their knowledge and diagnosis of celiacs disease/intolerance, so more people are finally being diagnosed. 2. The wheat in the US today is significantly different from the majority of European wheat [1]

https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/is-american-wheat-differen...

This is purely anecdotal, but I (22) know a lot of people in my generation who easily get stomach aches from milk and gluten. I've had some problems myself. Really kinda sucks.

Celiac Disease is not an allergy.

OP here.

This post quickly made the front page of HN, but after just a few hours, has now disappeared and doesn't appear anywhere when you page through hundreds of top stories.

Could this be censorship requested by investors, related to YCombinator? Does this sometimes happen?

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/impossible-foods#sec...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-impossible-foods-fundrais...

The thread triggered the overheated discussion detector, formerly known as the flamewar detector, which is software that kicks in when a discussion seems to be generating more heat than light. We monitor those software penalties pretty closely, and turn them off in cases where the thread was just happily active. I don't think this discussion meets that bar, though. Diet threads are surprisingly prone to repetitiveness and anger, as are threads about GMOs, and this one alas combines the two.

> Could this be censorship requested by investors, related to YCombinator? Does this sometimes happen?

No. YC wouldn't ask us to do something that stupid. The trust of this community is approximately 100% of the value that HN has for YC. Neither YC partners nor we on the HN side would ever jeopardize that.

Thanks for your reply.

Just guessing.

56 comments, 39 points.

Not always true, but more comments than points is often an indicator that the spam protection will trigger. Which it sounds like it did here. So got weighted off the front page.

Thanks, good to know. Hopefully its just that and a moderator can check in at some point.

I really hope that the impossible burger and the likes will be a rising trend upticking US soy consumption. Maybe to a point US farmers don’t have to rely heavily on China export to make a living.

Good. Anti-GM crusades are a load of anti-science nonsense, and if you're serious about replacing a percentage of America's meat intake (as Impossible seems to be) then it only makes sense to make the most of GM crops to get you there.

They’re doing this so they can irresponsibly dump roundup on the soy plants without killing them.

Roundup is a non-specific herbicide, so this will damage the environment near the farms. Also, Roundup is almost certainly a carcinogen, and impossible burgers already have higher levels than competitors.

I definitely won’t be buying any more of their product.

Edit: Fun reading: https://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?documentId=EPA-H...

The US is updating exposure guidelines for 2019. For soy, they recommend treating 20ppm as acceptable, even though they recommend keeping dietary exposure below 1mg/kg. So... it will be legal for the GM soy that impossible will be using to have 20x more glyphosphate than is considered safe. Assuming their product is mostly soy... well, you can do the math.

On the bright side, they’re proposing tighter regulations regarding application and drift into adjacent farms.

Do you have any evidence they plan on doing this?

From the article: "94% of the soy grown in the US is genetically engineered to resist herbicide toxicity. This helps control weeds without more toxic weed control agents or over-reliance on tillage, which drives soil carbon loss."

And while GM soy itself is harmless (per the links in the article), the Roundup herbicide it enables is far less conclusive as to its health effects: see https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/monsanto-parent-company... and https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/how-toxic-is-the-...

It's very difficult to fully avoid produce treated by these products, and I doubt that Impossible Burger does anything to concentrate herbicide residue any more than any other processed foods. (EDIT: other links in these comments throw this into question.) And I respect that they've made a pragmatic compromise: their use of GM produce could truly move the needle on livestock consumption, whereas rejecting it could prevent market adoption of their entire category. They're making the best of a horrid situation; if you want to blame someone, blame Monsanto, not them.

As far as I know, this is the only reason to use GM (aka “roundup ready”) soy. The genetic modification only affects herbicide resistance.

If they’re using some other (uncommon/obscure) GM soy, they should have said so in the press release!

> Also, Roundup is almost certainly a carcinogen

That point is highly contested.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/spray-pr...

Feed stocks for cows are also grown this way and cows eat a lot of food.

As an aside, elsewhere someone linked an article showing that the glyphosate in an impossible burger was on the order of 11ppb or 100x lower than is considered safe.

A lot of GMO soy actually lets them use less additional roundup that would contribute to runoff.

Edit: I was talking about run off specifically, not about the end product.

>The levels of glyphosate detected in the Impossible burger by Health Research Institute Laboratories were 11 X higher than the Beyond Meat Burger.

> A lot of GMO soy actually lets them use less additional roundup that would contribute to runoff.

How so? (I’m genuinely curious)

The potential downside of GM food is human extinction.

In the 80s and 90s the beef industry meddled with nature and started feeding animal meat to cows. The result was a disease that could have killed us all if we had eaten contaminated beef in the previous 10 years. If the genetic conditions that make people susceptible to vCJD were more common or universal, we might not be here today [1].

Grass-fed beef can be assumed safe because it has been eaten by humans for 200,000 years. Animal-fed beef turned out to be very dangerous very quickly. People who think GM food is as safe as food we’ve been eating for hundreds of thousands of years are highly delusional.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Creutzfeldt–Jakob_dise...

How this relates to GM?

You really don’t see the relationship?

The potential consequence of eating unnatural food that did not pass the test of time is catastrophic. Do this on a global scale, and the consequences could be global.

Trans fats are another example.

Why do you think natural things are prima facie good ?

With “natural” I mean natural for humans to eat them. Those foods can be assumed safe because, by definition, they have been eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Can you say the same thing for GM food?

> Those foods can be assumed safe because, by definition, they have been eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years

Even prior to GM foods, humans have been engineering food to change it's traits for longer than civilization, and essentially everything humans eat today is a product of such engineering. GM foods differ systematically from other forms fo engineering only on the degree of precision and control possible (which is far from perfect, but much greater than any other known technique.)

Basically nothing humans eat today has been eaten for hundreds of thousands of years.

They did it in local tribes. If the experiment proved harmful, the impact was local. In this case, the impact could be global. Big difference.

I have made some research and problem with risks of feeding animals to other animals is a much different problem than prion diseases. Eating other animals is the key factor for transmission of prions, not producing them. Misfolded prion can be formed anywhere. Just not feeding animals to animals won't prevent it, it will reduce impact. But that was true for millions of years, whats different here?

You can’t even say the same thing about broccoli.

Broccoli have been eaten for over 2000 years. If they killed us, we would have known.

Oh, that’s the cutoff? What about Brussels sprouts?

You think that the risk of consequential harm (say, death within 10 years) is the same for Brussels sprouts and GM foods? Haven’t we learned anything from mad cow and trans fats?

Edit: The risk is reduced significantly after we’ve eaten something for a few generations. The problem is if we test something new on the global population before a local tribe tries it on themselves for a few generations.

What does mad cow have to do with GM? Ironically: the process that begat mad cow: also "natural".

Eating meat-fed cows is not natural. Eating trans fats is not natural. Eating GM foods is not natural. The first two proved to have catastrophic harm. Why are we confident GM foods are safe?

We’re treating no evidence of harm as evidence of no harm. And we’re doing it on a global scale.

It sounds like "natural" just means "stuff you don't approve of". Some of your list overlaps mine, others don't. That's fine, but it's kind of a boring argument.

“Natural selection” is the process that makes something “natural”. If it hasn’t passed the test of time, it’s not natural. Which part of my list doesn’t overlap with yours? You consider Impossible Foods natural?

The only "natural" thing to eat then would be wild berries, tubers and tramplings by unruly ungulates.

Can you name one item at an organic grocery store that was eaten by modern humans even 50000 years ago?

Yes: meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts... Quite a lot.

It doesn’t have to be 50000 years. For example: I trust that drinking cow milk won’t kill me even though it hasn’t been common for long. Can’t say the same for GM food.

> Yes: meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts...

Yes, but if you zoom out to categories that broad, GM food still fits within them. GM foods are not any less like foods eaten tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago than anything else we eat.

The same was said for meat-fed cows and trans fats. Turned out their consumption had fatal consequences.

> The same was said for meat-fed cows and trans fats.

Meat fed cows and trans fats were products of the same relatively (compared to both the inherent nature and existing regulatory framework requiring proof of safety of novel food element of and faced by GMOs on the former case, and the latter of those in the latter case) uncontrolled evolution of food supply that characterizes the long history of “safe” food against which GMOs are contrasted.

I’m not sure what you mean, but there is no proof of safety for GMOs. No evidence of harm is not evidence of no harm. The only adequate test is the test of time, and testing on the global population is highly irresponsible.

Grass fed cows are about as close as it gets

Over the thousands of years we were eating foods before the inventions of GMOs, we had plenty of other ways to breed crops and livestock to be more desirable. We also tended to die a lot of malnutrition.

> We also tended to die a lot of malnutrition.

Only because populations tended to run closer to their own carrying capacity so that any shock (from variation in the natural environment or human conflict or ...) would put them over and cause malnutrition, not because normal supply was inadequate.

It's only fairly recently that humans other than in the most ideal environments could produce more than a small surplus of food even in good years (of course, that capacity was acheived in part by millenia of engineering for food for yield traits, with a lot of incidental changes induced along the way.)

Most tribal people died of natural causes or traumatic injuries, malnutrition was not widespread.

Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price for more background on this.

Why do you assume unnatural foods are inherently safe for human consumption?

The potential downside of not worshiping Roko's Basilisk: Superintelligent Godess is similarly human extinction. She kills all pagans, you see. That's her thing. Kill the non-believers. Which is everyone, currently. Come to think of it...there are a literal infinitude of things which may result in our extinction. Zombies. Aliens. Rogue trapezists. Who knows!

But we don't sweat the zombie thing. There's not sufficient evidence that Roko's Basilisk will destroy us. Or aliens. And so on. And until significant evidence shows that GMOs will destroy us, they're in the same boat. As the old saw goes: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Doubly so for extinction claims.

The burden of the proof is on the GMOs. We have plenty of evidence that eating food that we’re not used to eat can cause catastrophic harm. If this was a local tribe experimenting with GMOs, then it’s fine. But if we expose virtually every person to that downside, the risks are considerable.

GMO foods have been eaten for well over 3 decades. I think if there were adverse health effects, we would've seen 'em.

The only reason to dislike GMO is if they increased herbicide usage (e.g., roudup). But from what i hear, using GMO to reduce herbicide usage is more likely, and therefore, is better than a non-GMO version of the crop.

Every GM product is different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com