Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I think the fake meat movement will go the way of Margarine.

Initially it's celebrated as a feat of engineering and as the healthy alternative to meat.

After about 10 to 20 years however, we'll see cancer and heart disease rates going up.

And then the billions of dollars spent in health care will pile up, but nobody will readily admit it, because the fuck up will be even bigger than with Margarine.

After all, Margarine is still on the shelves of super markets everywhere, maybe with slightly less trans fats, but it's still there, still advertised as the healthier alternative to butter.

Let that sink in for a moment.

View on HN

Do you have some reason to believe that meat is healthier, or is this speculation?

The number one reason is that we've eaten red meat for millions of years, literally.

Given fake meat is new and I'm not seeing it in stores nearby yet, I'm going to assume a fair comparison will take another decade, after the studies and the meta analysis show up.

Until then the burden of proof is not on me ;-)

As opposed to plants?

Thinking that eating fake meat is like eating plants is ... similar to thinking that crack cocaine has similar effects with coca leaves.

I expect more from HN :-)

And you’re thinking fast food meat is similar to what we ate for millions of years ... ?

Plant meat is not sold as an alternative to fast food meat, it's sold as an alternative to meat.

It will exactly go the way dessert corn flake breakfast has gone over the decades. A highly taste engineered food, loaded with chemicals and macro nutrient stuff which will give you a lot of diseases on the longer run.

Can you explain the difference between it and the vegetables it is made out of?

There are tons of plants that are not healthy to eat at all. Or can be processed in a way that makes them unhealthy, or even dangerous to eat. See: tobacco.

Which vegetables are they using that you think will cause cancer?

Eating red meat is Lindy.

Eating processed food with seed oils in factories is not.

The market is manipulated because of status games using bad science... it will unravel itself soon.

When you say something brand new and made from vegetables must cause cancer I think the burden of proof is absolutely on you, and so far you haven't given a single reason why that might be true.

Well if you want vegetables, you might as well skip this whole ceremony and straight away eat real vegetables. It's not that hard to make a vegetable sandwich.

The problem is you are selling processed vegetable mash with salts, chemical preservatives, conditioners and oil as meat.

It's not meat. It is, what it is. Processed vegetable trash. Sell it that way, and its perfectly fine. People can eat it if they want. Let's not signal this as some healthier alternative.

For more information read: Ship Of Theseus.

The person I replied to was saying that it likely to cause cancer. What are they putting in specifically that you think will cause cancer? It seems like people saying this are full of vague handwaving and won't give any specific reason or ingredient for why they think that.

Yes, it's called evolution.

We could do the same with plant based meat or whatever processed garbage gets sold in its name. We can let millions of people eat that day in and out and watch if they die out of heart disease and cancer over the next decades.

Feel free to sign up.

Personally not going to turn myself or my family into lab rats for these grandiose world changing goals.

What makes you say that other than extrapolating from a single sample? Partially hydrogenated fats are a preservative and harm from butter and fat in general has been shown to be an abuse of statistics to avoid blaming sugar (fructose).

To me this seems like the idea that things thought to be much more benign (like cigarettes) are shown to cause cancer so cell phones must cause cancer too, without understanding any fundamentals of that sort of claim.

Margarine without trans fats is readily available and can be a healthier fat than butter though. But I agree the initial, high trans-fat margarines were bad. Red meat is not very hard to beat in terms of negative health outcomes, so I doubt plant-based meats will be as horrid as the initial margarine put to market.

> Margarine without trans fats is readily available and can be a healthier fat than butter though

No.

> high trans-fat margarines were bad

There's no such thing as "high trans-fats". Industrial trans fats, like from margarine or other ultra-processed products, is unsafe in any quantity, low or high. There is indeed a principle of toxicology that "the dose makes the poison", however in case of trans fats that dose is really, really low.

Also trans fats are indeed contained, in small doses, in natural foods as well. But it's not the same thing: https://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy/

> Red meat is not very hard to beat in terms of negative health outcomes

There is in fact no tangible proof that red meat has negative health outcomes. All you have are surrogate markers and some poor and old observational studies that can't be reproduced in randomized controlled trails.

Also see:

https://examine.com/nutrition/does-red-meat-cause-cancer/

https://examine.com/nutrition/scientists-just-found-that-red...

The fake meat movement is just a cash grab for those who want to eat like crap but feel good about themselves.

Looking at the ingredients list, it's pretty obvious that cancer/heart disease will go up.

I've already got a long-term Put Option on $BYND because not even the CEO or big celebrity investors believe it is a good long-term bet -- cashing out at its peak a few weeks back.

Given the relative ease of spreading information about its deleterious health effects of their products, I think it's a house of cards that will fail, the sooner, the better...

Let me guess: You're eating a lot of meat?

A fair amount :) Put your money where your mouth is goes both ways...

> I've already got a long-term Put Option on $BYND

What's long-term? I haven't accepted the necessary terms anywhere to see the options (excuse the pun) - but whenever I've seen others' elsewhere the term's not long enough that I'm comfortable enough with it to be interested.

Like I might think 'X is over-valued, that won't last', but I could never confidently say how many Y months it will last.

2/21/20 $95 Put is what I got. I already tripled my money earlier in the month on the last fall from its post-IPO peak.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com