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Comment by OneGuy123 | Hacker News Reader

This will be horrible.

Natural meat gets tons of micronutrients through many different processes in the animal in it that this artifical meat never can unless they can 100% mimic an entire animal, which well, means that they would have to grow an entire animal...

You cannot just "add some zinc here and there" and pretend that it's ok.

This will lead to severe micronutrient deficiencies, just protein is far from enough.

Anyone who says this is a good food product is an idiot, there is no nice way to say this. In fact the term idiot as a way to mild term for this kind of a person.

To belive you can give & match all the required delicate balance of nutrients in lab grown meat compared to real meat is beyond stupid.

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Would one or more of the downvoters be willing to actually answer these claims? I'm not a subject matter expert, but like everyone I have an interest in good nutrition. The micronutrient claim appears prima facie plausible. Even whole organism food like vegetables is poorer in micronutrients today than it was in generations past.

To some extent this is already a problem with real meat, because almost nobody in the USA eats organ meat and it's particularly rich in micronutrients.

Yeah - the micronutrient claim does make sense on the surface. However, the claim is wildly simplistic. We get tons of different micronutrients from tons of sources. If OP were correct, vegans wouldn't be able to survive. Vegetarians wouldn't be able to survive.

Basically everything we need in terms of nutrients (micro and macro) can be found in non-meat food products. Wherever a non-meat diet falls short of the needed micronutrients, multivitamins can be added to make up any deficiencies. Again, see vegans.

Finally, lab grown meat IS meat. Our bodies can break down and harvest any micronutrients grown into the meat. Furthermore, as developments are made, it's naive to assume the companies producing the lab grown meat won't attempt to add anything important which might be missing.

There's also precedent in the food industry for adding nutrients to food staples - white rice in America is legally required to be enriched. This point also confirms OPs concern is worth thinking about to begin with - the rice nutrient deficiency has caused epidemics in Asia. However, this problem has largely been solved.

Finally, OPs rant seems to start from an adversarial position. The arguments put forward seem to be in bad faith, as they are mostly distilled with minor research on lab-grown meat.

You are one of the people I was talking about: you belive you can just add a few vitamins and minerals here and there and call it a day: that is not how it works!

Example: vitamin C in supplements is only ascorbic acid. But the real vitamin C is a "complex" and contains multiple other vitamins INSIDE of it+ stuff surrounding the complex.

You cannot break down meat into minerals and vitamins if they don't have them in the first place.

You fundamentally misunderstand my point. I'm saying you can add those in to your diet, not meat. I'm not claiming we need to inject these missing nutrients into the meat, and I'm not claiming that our body manufactures them from sources where they are absent. But your implication here is that humans eat only one type of meat from an animal that provides all nutrients we need. That's not true, and it's stupid to think that. You really need to try to understand the science of this topic because you're out of your depth, clearly. Stop putting words in peoples' mouths.

The downvotes are probably more due to the dismissive/inflammatory tone, e.g. "Anyone who says this is a good food product is an idiot, there is no nice way to say this. In fact the term idiot as a way to mild term for this kind of a person."

I doubt anyone here has tried this product yet or seen any extensive analysis, so to say it's good or not good is pure speculation at this point. Laying insults atop an argument seldom strengthens it.

The Great Courses has a nutrition course I watched and it it indicated a vegetarian diet if done right is 100% fine. I wouldn't expect adding artificial meat to a vegetarian diet to cause any deficiency if the vegetarian diet alone is fine.

They don't have any: it just goes to show you that people still think that all you need are carbs, protein and fats and you're good to go.

This belief is what caused the food to get so depleted in all micronutrients in the 1st place: because people aren't aware how important they are -> they don't care about them -> no one enforces rules for food quality in the micronutrients department -> food quality goes to shit over time.

What makes you think no one cares about micronutrients in food, or that no rules for food quality are enforced?

White rice in the US is required by law to be enriched [1]. The FDA heavily regulates food in the US, leading to some of the highest quality food in the world.

Perhaps you don't live in the US. If you do live in the US, I highly recommend taking some time to learn about the things you talk about in online forums. Spreading BS around isn't helpful for anyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_rice

> Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I guess people who buy protein powders are idiots? The whole point of "a well balanced diet" is to eat a variety of things to get all your nutrients. This product is simply another means of getting protein in your diet.

Your comparison doesn't hold. Whey protein is a supplement (of questionable utility, btw), whereas lab-grown meat is intended to replace meat.

One does not need to eat meat in order to be healthy. There are hundreds of millions of vegetarians world wide; that's a hell of a sample size and yet there is a remarkable lack of evidence to support the claim that they are all unhealthy.

So really, what's the problem with replacing meat?

Whey protein is not of questionable utility, it's used heavily by athletes worldwide, to great effect. Other proteins can be used, but it's the most common by far.

The comparison might still not be perfect, but OPs point about needing a well-balanced diet is still relevant and important to this discussion. We don't get all our nutrients from a single source, especially not meat. So not getting all our nutrients from lab-grown meat isn't a problem. We'll get them from somewhere else. Unless you know there is a specific nutrient in meat, which we don't get from any other source, which lab grown meat won't replicate. However, that's unlikely or vegans would all be dead.

Strawman, I never mentioned only those.

Also this product will sooner or later be marketed as legit meat replacement.

But otherwise yes, even those who'd eat it just for protein would be idiots because eg whey comes from a natural food source beforehand which means nature has already done it's thing properly beforehand.

To think that growing stuff in a lab has no unintented consequences is beyond stupid, even if you use it "just for protein".

Instead of calling people stupid, perhaps you should spend some time reading up on the issues at hand. You can read about what the body needs and what is provided in lab-grown meat vs animal meat. You could learn about markets and where this is likely to end up in the market. You could learn about the actual process used and what the developers consider the risks and rewards.

It doesn't work this way - first, you have to prove that these micronutrients actually matter. For some, we know they do. For most, it's more likely they simply don't matter much or at all. There are tons of examples thru history, and modern, of the benefits of simple enriched foods from iodized salt to Golden rice that do not have the whatever mythical natural balance of iodine and vitamin A. There are people living entirely on food substitutes, both due to poverty/medical conditions and because they are tech hipsters. As someone mentioned there are vegetarians/vegans who do just fine without these nutrients; hard to imagine they'd do worse if they also ate a fake burger.

Your comment is a simple example of natural-is-good fallacy. For all you know those natural micro-nutrients in meat could be net harmful (there are studies that some types of meat have negative health effects, and I say it as an avid steak eater - as far as I know, they don't have a good handle on specific causes, so it could be that the fake steak won't have them and only the "natural" one does :)).

But margarine was such a healthy alternative to butter, all the advertising agencies told us so for decades!

I have no problem with them trying it, although I worry about weird prion based diseases cropping up that would make a living breathing creature non viable and die, when it wouldn’t be noticeable in something lab grown until far too late (i.e. after humans have consumed it).

Basically the fact that a creature is not dead might mean that its constituent proteins are likely suitable for consumption? Obviously not bulletproof, as mad cow exists, but lab grown meat might have a much wider homeostatic range, since it doesn’t have a brain how would you know it has prions that could negatively affect brain function? How could you even test for such a thing?

Mainstream diet advice is garbage and more and more people are waking up to this.

This fake meat produt has THE SAME ISSUE AS MARGARINE HAD: people think it's safe because a few "experts" say so. This is what happened to margarine.

In reality artifical food is always a bomb waiting to go off inside of you.

So this artifical meat is the modern equivalent of what "margarine is healthy for you" was ~60 years ago.

> This fake meat produt has THE SAME ISSUE AS MARGARINE HAD: people think it's safe because a few "experts" say so. This is what happened to margarine.

Sometimes experts are wrong, that does not mean that they are not still our best hope of being right about things. Otherwise we may as all just listen to the village idiot's twitter account and inject bleach.

> In reality artifical food is always a bomb waiting to go off inside of you.

It really isn't any different than "real" food just because it is made in a lab. It may not have the same exact qualities as its natural equivalent, but "natural" by no means is the same as "safe" or "healthy" anyway. Do you want me to show you pictures of giant puss-filled cysts in a cow carcass? Or should we talk about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? There is nothing inherently good about "natural" and evil about "artificial", as your posts seem to imply.

> There is nothing inherently good about "natural" and evil about "artificial", as your posts seem to imply.

Well put. I tried to find these words and failed.

What exactly do you mean by artificial food here? Anything substantial? Or is this a 'GMO BAD' type argument? Does enriched rice count as artificial? Modern bananas? Modern corn? Modern cows and pigs? Do vegan meat substitutes count as artificial food?

All these things listed above are very viable and healthy options for people to eat. The proof is in the pudding (XD) as people eat this stuff constantly, and at massive volumes, worldwide, without dying or whatever.

Also, who are you speaking on behalf of? Who thinks lab-grown meat is so safe? Who doesn't have concerns about the safety of this meat? It seems you're making ridiculous claims not based on any of the relevant literature.

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