Danish scientists concoct fat-free whipped cream out of lactic acid bacteria | Hacker News Reader

Danish scientists concoct fat-free whipped cream out of lactic acid bacteria

arstechnica.com

25 pointspseudolus27 comments

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but why is the saturated fat in regular whipped cream bad, assuming it is not consumed in excess? This seems to be the main selling point in the article, so I'm genuinely curious.

Any experts wanna chime in?

Perhaps it is a bit like setting your mobile phone to grayscale, to try to make it less addictive.

Less charitably, you can't patent the saturated fat in regular whipped cream, but you can patent a lack of it, and make a lifetime of rewards licensing the process to do so. That's why the saturated fat is bad.

It's a well trod business formula - demonize a certain common nutrient and sell the alternative. First it was fats, then it was sugars, now there's a bitter war amongst alternative sweeteners to prove the other ones cause cancer, since they're not even a nutrient and can't be demonized with the 'you'll get fat!' play. Of course there's all the tangent battlegrounds like the aluminum in baking powders meme. I actually think that one predates the fat-free obsession.

I think we're all worse off from these nested cycles of chicanery.

There seems to be no reason to try to reach 0 dietary saturated fats. If whipped cream is making up enough of your diet to have any measurable negative health consequences, eat less whipped cream (but my god, you'd have to be eating a lot for it to matter), otherwise, live a little.

If you feel the need to make some kind of "fake" food to be healthy, just eat something else. If you feel like the occasional lump of whipped cream on a dessert is going to ruin your life or really have any negative consequence at all, reevaluate your base assumptions.

Personally, I’d say it seems like neither standard whipped cream or this artificial substitute are going to be particularly good for a person to eat a lot of.

Combining saturated fat and sugar is unhealthy. Also, the sugar industry has been very successful in convincing people that any fat, including the fat from animals, is bad for you.

The calorie density, for one. Four calories per gram of carbohydrates vs the nine calories per gram of fats.

Except, at least in my case as discovered on an HFLC diet, the sated effect from fats is far far greater. You simply eat much much less, so if it takes unit of fat to satisfy me vs 5-6 units carbs, any caloric benefit that carbohydrates cause on a per unit basis gets erased quickly.

It's absolutely ridiculous in Denmark, how much "fat-free" is still provided in the shops and even the doctors still talk about it. This nonsense was rebuked long ago, yet they doesn't seem to know!

> concoct fat-free whipped cream out of lactic acid bacteria

and (FTA)

> a little bit of milk protein, and a thickening agent.

I thought we realized the stupidity of fat-free nonsense in the late 90s. Snackwells anyone?

Talk about a solution in search of a problem

In the United States, Cool Whip[1] is the most popular 'whipped topping', demonstrating an incredibly high demand for imitation whipped cream. Possibly higher than real whipped cream. 130 million consumers in 2020 of Cool Whip. [2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Whip

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281278/us-households-mos...

The fact that there is high demand for industrial sludge doesn't make it any better.

I don't disagree with you philosophically but the fact is that this is a solution with an obvious problem: how to make gobs of money.

By the way, by your argument that cool whip is sludge, wouldn't making something better than it, that still meets the demand, be worthwhile?

I take your point, but I actually don't think that making money and meeting demand are always worth doing. The pornography and drug industries are two obvious examples.

I mean there are several companies trying to make plant-based cream alternatives for coffee. This could lead to a plant-based whipped cream alternative. Most plant-based creamers don't have the fat content to be good as quality creamers. The more successful ones use coconut and fava beans. (Successful as in achieving quality texture, not economic)

Plant-based substitutes for animal products are a total fail. Just look at margarine and "Beyond Meat". I'll pass in on this Frankenstein experiment as well.

Margarine is a multibillion dollar industry.... And has been around since the 1800s...

don't confuse being unaware of an industry with there being an apparent lack of applications for this.

Ok dude

That's a pretty snarky response. Between the popularity of dairy products (and whipped cream in particular), the problems caused by obesity, the environmental impact of dairy cattle, and a growing segment of the population that has a moral objection to raising them for food production. You really need someone else to spell out the practical applications of an advance in growing something like this in a lab?

To be fair, the are already whipped cream substitutes that don't rely on milk proteins (which this product does).

Aside from the reduced calorie angle, the new product is inferior to plenty of existing products for the rest of your criteria.

Edit: not to mention they only replicated the texture, not the taste. Getting a whipped cream flavor with the same or similar sweetness (not something lactic bacteria are good at) is probably going to undermine whatever health benefit you would get.

You think growing synthetic bacteria cream in a lab is going to be better for the environment and people's health than getting the real stuff from a dairy farm?

Reminds me that I want to make a keto dessert sometime. Whipped cream with high-cacao chocolate sprinkled on top. Maybe with almonds!

There's always a cost somewhere...

It is the same cost for all excessively industrialized foods. It is near impossible to predict long term effects.

Most common and low processed food have been long enough around for humans to adapt to their usage (milk and related foods, for example) or that are essentially guaranteed to be near harmless by human selection of those foods (e.g. apples, carrots, meat).

Personally I believe that there is substantial evidence that highly processed foods (most importantly those created in large parts by chemical laboratories and produced in factories, with low or minimal input from actual food) play a significant part in an obesity crises affecting hundreds of millions of people, especially in the US and Europe.

> These experiments were primarily to demonstrate proof of concept, and the resulting foams were evaluated primarily for texture and desirable foamy characteristics—not for taste.

Foam, I wouldn't really want to evaluate it for taste either....

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