Beyond Meat: Fake Meat So Good It Will Freak You Out | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Meat: Fake Meat So Good It Will Freak You Out

slate.com

88 pointskrschultz178 comments

I love how every time something like this comes out they ask someone who hasn't had meat in 10 years if it's just like meat. Yeah, because they would know.

My biggest problem, though, is if I'm having ingredients that aren't meat, I'd like to have them be good. I've never had fake meat that I would call appetizing.

I've had lots of vegetarian dishes that were delightful, but not one included fake meat.

I am not vegetarian.

I think an inescapable problem is that it's hard to get past the framing. A product might actually be a very good food that easily stands up on its own merits. But if it's being carefully processed in a way that attempts to mimic all the cosmetic characteristics of chicken, being labeled as "chikkin", and being served lightly breaded with honey mustard on the side, then it's perpetually doomed to just be an imperfect imitation of chicken.

I'm an omnivore, and if this stuff was equivalently expensive, and sufficiently chicken-like, I'd buy it instead. Real Chicken isn't exactly some holy grail of food, it just tastes good.

I believe that regulations exist to prevent the food industry from marketing non-genuine food items as the real thing. I have heard that chicken wing shaped chicken products cannot be sold as 'wings' but must rather be labeled 'wyngz'.

From the article - "New York Times food writer Mark Bittman mistook the fake stuff for the real stuff". So it seems like it really does taste like chicken.

For those who aren't familiar, Mark Bittman is kind of a foodie god; I'm pretty sure organic wheat springs up under his feet when he walks around. Here's the part of Bittman's article about the fake chicken, from back in March (linked from the Slate article):

... at least one new product is a better-than-adequate substitute for chicken in things like wraps, salads and sauces. I know this because Ethan Brown, an owner of Savage River Farms, came to my house and fooled me badly in a blind tasting. (A pan-European “LikeMeat” project appears to be making progress on a similar product, and others are in the works.)

On its own, Brown’s “chicken” — produced to mimic boneless, skinless breast — looks like a decent imitation, and the way it shreds is amazing. It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem; both are about texture, chew and the ingredients you put on them or combine with them. When you take Brown’s product, cut it up and combine it with, say, chopped tomato and lettuce and mayonnaise with some seasoning in it, and wrap it in a burrito, you won’t know the difference between that and chicken. I didn’t, at least, and this is the kind of thing I do for a living. Brown does not see his product as a trendy meat replacement for vegans but one with more widespread use. (His production is at an early stage, but Whole Foods is planning to start using his products in prepared food soon. Retail sales of his “chicken,” which does not yet have a trademarked name, are expected to begin this summer.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/finally-fak...

So it sounds like this is a complete substitute in dishes where you chop up the chicken and add strong flavors, and not really intended to be a substitute otherwise. It's not 90% of the way there in all dishes -- it's 100% of the way there in 75% of dishes. And it's cheaper and takes probably a quarter of the resources to produce. Given the size of the total market, that's a huge deal.

This almost sounds too good to be true. I wish they would release more nutritional information about the "chicken." And give it a good name.

"I can't believe it's not Chicken"(R)

Click on the link in the first sentence of the article. The page it goes to has a complete (USA spec) nutrition label on the right hand side.

Compared it to the NutritionData info for "USDA commodity, chicken fajita strips, frozen", it stacks up about like this:

  - 13% fewer calories (100 vs 114 in a 3oz serving)
  - 75% less fat (1.5g vs 6g)
  - 100% less cholesterol (0mg vs 75mg)
  - 72% less sodium (190mg vs 670mg)
  - 67% more carbohydrate (5g vs 3g - but 3 vs 0 of that is fiber, so from an 'Atkins' perspective it's a lower-carb food)
  - 27% more protein (19g vs 15g)
  - And a good bit more calcium and iron.

Don't know about the amino acid breakdown, but judging by the ingredients list it does have all the essential ones.

Less fat, less net carbs, more protein, more vitamins. . . at least judging by the label, this stuff beats the real thing pretty solidly in the nutrition department.

> It doesn’t taste much like chicken, but since most white meat chicken doesn’t taste like much anyway, that’s hardly a problem;

This. I know good chicken (3 hoorays for the countryside) and I know the stuff they sell in many places taste nothing like it.

Selling fake chicken to meat lovers won't work, selling frozen vegetable chicken nuggets rather than frozen pseudo-chicken nugget would.

"I’m not a vegetarian, and I love real meat, but for various health and ethical reasons, I’ve long tried to cut down on eating animals."

He eats meat, just not as often as your average person.

Maybe it's orthogonal, but this article doesn't discuss at all the nutritional advantages and disadvantages of eating meat. It may taste like meat, but the nutritional profile is nothing like meat.

Also, I'm curious what the actual impact of it is. One of the main arguments against meat is that it takes a great deal more energy and work to create 1 pound of plant food than 1 pound of meat. From what I've seen, beyond meat uses some sort of manufacturing process to create it. How much energy does it take to ship all those materials and run that factory?

Maybe you can view it as an intermediate step, the next being in vitro meat.

It's about 6 times more energy intensive to order chemicals from new jersey and stir them in a vat than it is to ship live cattle to a slaughter house and butcher them.

Essentially all the cost of feeding and cleaning the cattle is very low, and storage of raw meat after slaughter is very cheap.

Alternatively storing the raw products for fake chicken are incredibly complicated. Furthermore, once the product is produced there is a ton of regulation about its care and handling. What's perhaps most troubling is the risk to workers while producing the product. They require fairly risky industrial tools, and not every manufacturer is really dillagent about providing good guards for people's hands.

Sources?

Anyway, the "chemicals" going into this are a relatively small part, the bulk being the vegetable protein.

And how can you argue that storing beans and additives is more complicated than storing cows???

The raw products for fake chicken are mostly soybeans or chick peas, hot water, and a mineral coagulating agent. The biggest energy input is for boiling the water and growing the crops.

Cows require 50 times more protein from grain as input than they provide after being slaughtered (you can google this, it's research from Cornell). You are 180 degrees wrong on that point, the cost of feeding them is _very high_. Unless you can genetically engineer them to have more efficient metabolisms, this is a fundamental problem for beef.

I can't tell if you're serious about the last paragraph. Citations would be great, because it's hard to believe that real meat is less regulated than plant-protein based fake meat or that the risk to workers that make it is less than to those working in an industrial slaughterhouse.

I'm not even a vegetarian...

> Cows require 50 times more protein from grain as input than they provide after being slaughtered (you can google this, it's research from Cornell).

I suspect that you're referring to the research summarized at http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug97/livestock.hrs.htm... .

I'm not sure that it supports the conclusions that you (and its author) make. For example: (quoting)

"> For every kilogram of high-quality animal protein produced, livestock are fed nearly 6 kg of plant protein."

6 << 50. And, a lot of that "plant protein" isn't available to people.

"More than 302 million hectares of land are devoted to producing feed for the U.S. livestock population -- about 272 million hectares in pasture and about 30 million hectares for cultivated feed grains."

Much pasture land is pasture because it isn't all that suitable for other purposes. Unless you eat grass/hay....

"THIRSTY PRODUCTION SYSTEMS. U.S. agriculture accounts for 87 percent of all the fresh water consumed each year. Livestock directly use only 1.3 percent of that water. But when the water required for forage and grain production is included, livestock's water usage rises dramatically. Every kilogram of beef produced takes 100,000 liters of water. [wheat and potatoes take much less]"

It appears that he's counting rain as "use". While technically true, that water can't be used elsewhere. (Grain land is rarely irrigated and pasture almost never is.)

Is this sarcasm? It has to be sarcasm.

The main point of making this in the first place is to save energy and resources.

The chemicals you're talking about are pea powder, soy, carrot fiber, and flour.

The slaughtering houses have some of the worst working conditions you can find anywhere in the U.S.. I don't think you'll find any casualties for workers who mix some ingredients together in comparison to chopping up cows.

Sorry if it was just joking, but it was kind of hard to tell.

"One of the main arguments against meat" is not the energy that is required in the production process; it is the way in which the meat is produced.

Not defending the article's glossing over the subject, but the nutrition facts don't look completely different from one randomly selected meaty equivalent. Both have protein, fat, sodium, iron and carbs in similar proportions, plus or minus a brick.

http://beyondmeat.com/products/

http://www.perdue.com/products/details.asp?id=535

"Protein" and "carbs" and "fat" are useful as high level indications of what you're eating, but e.g. the different compositions of amino acids making up the protein can be drastically different and is known to have substantially different impacts on your diet in various ways. It may or may not be different enough to matter, but it'd need a lot more detail to be able to tell (to the extent we even known enough about how to compose the "right" diet).

Is there any real evidence to suggest that real meat is bad?

These guys have me pretty convinced there isn't: http://goo.gl/eoDaF

> The problem with observational studies like those run by Willett and his colleagues is that they do none of this [test their hypotheses with real randomized controlled experiments]. That’s why it’s so frustrating. The hard part of science is left out and they skip straight to the endpoint, insisting that their interpretation of the association is the correct one and we should all change our diets accordingly.

> Moreover, this meat-eating association with disease is a tiny association. Tiny. It’s not the 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer that pack-a-day smokers have compared to non-smokers. It’s a 0.2-fold increased risk — 1/100th the size.

I think the main argument in favour of vegetarianism is neither nutritional nor ethical, but environmental.

I disagree. The vegetarians I know are more concerned about the handling and treatment of animals than the environment or their own health. And veganism's whole premise is based on the reduction of suffering.

20% increased risk of death or disease over the span of a generation is not worth getting excited about? For someone who's healthy, it may seem insignificant when the baseline risk is low, but for someone who develops a chronic disease, in hindsight a 20% reduction may be very appealing. Minimizing regret is important.

As for scientific validity of those studies, doing proper scientific studies of diet is so difficult it might as well be impossible. What kind of person is going to volunteer to have someone else dictate their diet? What kind of person is going to comply with that diet long-term? If you want to do a blind study, you have to turn all food into unidentifiable mush. You can't have people seeing broccoli florets or pork chops.

There is a proposed theory for why red meat has those effects: Neu5gc consumption causing persistent low-level immune response. Less conclusive dietary studies have noted a difference, but without doing a scientific study giving one group Neu5gc supplements and another placebo, how can we know? Ethics boards might have a problem with that, since Neu5gc can be demonstrated in vitro to trigger an immune response.

Perhaps the most general and plausible theory is that it has nothing to do with inherent unhealthiness of red meat or meat in general. Rather, more meat consumption means less dietary fiber, fewer fruits and vegetables, assuming the same total caloric consumption. Meat consumption probably also correlates to excess calorie intake, which is a risk factor for a variety of chronic diseases.

> 20% increased risk of death or disease over the span of a generation is not worth getting excited about? For someone who's healthy, it may seem insignificant when the baseline risk is low, but for someone who develops a chronic disease, in hindsight a 20% reduction may be very appealing. Minimizing regret is important.T

You should read the article; the rest of the paragraph is as follows:

> So with lung cancer we could buy as a society the observation that cigarettes cause lung cancer because it was and remains virtually impossible to imagine what other factor could explain an association so huge and dramatic. Experiments didn’t need to be done to test the hypothesis because, well, the signal was just so big that the epidemiologists of the time could safely believe it was real. And then experiments were, in effect, done anyway. People quit smoking and lung cancer rates came down, or at least I assume they did. (If not, we’re in trouble here.) When I first wrote about the pseudoscience of epidemiology in Science back in 1995, “Epidemiology Faces It’s Limits”, I noted that very few epidemiologists would ever take seriously an association smaller than a 3- or 4-fold increase in risk. These Harvard people are discussing, and getting an extraordinary amount of media attention, over a 0.2-fold increased risk. (Horn-blowing alert: my Science article has since been cited by over 400 articles in the peer-reviewed medical literature, according to Thomson Reuter’s Web of Knowledge.)

The point is that we don't know if there's a 20% increase of risk if you start eating more red meat. We only know that the people who elected to do, and were sampled in the study (the top quintile), did have a 20% increase. There's a big difference here; statistics is subtle.

> As for scientific validity of those studies, doing proper scientific studies of diet is so difficult it might as well be impossible.

I agree, but then we should refrain from telling people that meat, and red meat in particular, is what's killing them. Especially when there are much more likely targets, like sugar.

If you blame sugar, you get the sugar lobby making similar arguments about poor scientific data for the proposition "sugar increases risk of diseases" that you're making against the proposition "red meat increases risk of diseases".

I think I read about this stuff in an earlier article and I'm still wondering: How does it actually chemically respond to heat, water, oil, etc etc. I mean, I suppose its alright if it just works like chicken in a single context (grilled maybe?), but it's not really a meat replacement unless you can rely on it to behave the same as meat for the purpose of recipes.

Don't take that as criticism of the product, I'm just curious what it's properties are and if you'd need to revamp your recipes if you wanted to use this stuff.

I've tried this at home. I made chicken noodle soup with it and it worked really well. I sauteed it in olive oil in a pan first, then added it to the broth later.

It withstood both form of cooking fairly well. It browned in the pan and absorbed some liquid in the broth, but it didn't break down.

However, I don't know if this stuff would be grillable. It's not a big chunk like a real chicken breast. It comes out of the package in small chunks. So it'd work great for some recipes but not for things like chicken piccata.

However, I highly recommend Gardein for recipes like those. It comes in the form just like chicken breasts, and works great for recipes that require a large flat piece.

Interesting. I wonder if any molecular gastronomist chefs have figured out what its parameters are.

Anyone wanna try ice cream with frozen chick-a-like chunks?

Practically, different meat substitutes are good at mimicking different prepared forms. So instead of trying to find one that substitutes for chicken in all its forms, it's much easier to find one that substitutes for stewed meat in all its forms and that can be textured / flavored like chicken, beef, etc.

Ingredients in Chicken (that isn't factory farmed): Chicken

Ingredients in this: Water, Soy Protein Isolate, Pea Protein Isolate, Amaranth, Natural Vegan Chicken Flavor (Maltodextrin, Yeast Extract, Natural Flavoring), Soy Fiber, Carrot Fiber, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Dipotassium Phosphate, Titanium Dioxide, White Vinegar

So, it's not terrible but it's just more fake pseudo-meat. What's so hard about buying a soy protein (firm tofu, tempeh, etc.), and just cooking it with spices and herbs like you would a regular piece of meat? Fake food sucks.

Have you been to any Buddhist country (Vietnam,Thailand India,etc) and tried any of the faux-chicken/beef/pork/fish dish? It isn't as real as Beyond Meat probably (since it is not made by scientists but thousands of years of practicing vegetarian) but is quite delicious.

We went to a Chinese restaurant the other day that is known for having vegetarian versions of almost every regular American Chinese restaurant dish. They used some kind of fibrous fake meat for the General Tsaos chicken that was very convincing. Maybe seaweed based?

My guess is seitan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_(food)

I don't doubt it. They are probably just taking simple soy proteins and cooking them with whatever, just like we would cook meat. Not produced in some lab. I have nothing against this and appreciate it.

It seems the goal is in part to replace the animal-sourced sort-of-fake meat that's already a significant part of the world's diet, with a non-animal source that may be more environmentally friendly to produce.

A roasted chicken or a steak is one thing, but a lot of uses of "meat" really only call for some kind of processed product that has a certain taste and texture. Chicken patties at McDonald's, for example, are not actual cuts of chicken meat, but mechanically separated meat that's reformed into a patty that attempts to mimic a certain meat-ish texture. If you can mimic that same chicken-patty texture with a non-animal sourced set of ingredients as the input, I don't see it really as any less natural.

(Alas, it does me no good personally, because I'm allergic to soy protein.)

it's a worthwhile goal, but feel if we're in the business of making fake food, why not make it as nutritious as possible too? Environmentally friendly should be secondary.

This is a crappy argument. Chicken inherently has thousands of "ingredients". I think this product actually seems quite simple, considering the complexity of what they're trying to replicate.

EDIT: Although I agree -- I'd always prefer foods taken for what they are rather than substitutes. Then again, I'm not vegetarian.

Industrial chicken meat has lots of junk in it (e.g., http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/meat/safe/over...)

To counter Botulinum toxins, frozen meat contains Sodium nitrate, a known carcinogen(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrate#Health_concerns).

I never said factory meat was good :)

The point of this product is to serve as a replacement for factory farmed chicken, not the whole chickens you buy at your local farmers market raised in somewhat sustainable conditions, so your point of comparison is moot. If you compare the ingredients of this fake meat to what you find in factory farmed chicken this clearly wins out (no antibiotics or hormones, no cholesterol, higher proetin and carbs, etc).

"Just buying a soy protein" and cooking it that way tastes nothing like chicken. That is what is wrong with it.

If you like it, great. In some dishes I find tofu nice. For the most part, though, I dislike the consistency and find that outside a few types of dishes it can't compete on taste at all. I love chicken in a wide range of forms. I have no qualms about eating chicken. That it's the result of murdering animals does not disgust me the least.

In that context, it would have to offer something other than not being chicken as a benefit before I'd consider buying it. That is where there's a huge opportunity: Competing on price, taste or health factors with the actual animal products in the segment of the market that want something that tastes at least pretty much like the animal products.

Whether or not it is "fake" is irrelevant. Nature does not have a monopoly on making things good. What matters is how it stacks up with what it replaces in your diet. For most of us what it would replace is presumably chicken.

Their target audience is not tofu eaters, it's chicken eaters. They put that stuff in to make it close to meat, that was the whole point of the article.

I've been a vegetarian for 4 years and stopped about a year ago. This sounds great, but it still consists of soy protein, which is not good for men due to estrogen.

http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/soys-negative-effects

Not too reliable of a source, I know, but there's a bunch of reputable books that I've read back in the day on this subject that said the same thing.

Soy (unfermented) is a terrible idea.

http://www.jacn.org/content/19/2/242.full

"Results: Poor cognitive test performance, enlargement of ventricles and low brain weight were each significantly and independently associated with higher midlife tofu consumption."

"We hypothesize that regular dietary exposure to soy isoflavones over many years during middle life may be associated with the appearance of accelerated brain aging in later life attributable to chronically sub-optimal neural plasticity."

This study seems to be counteracted by millions of Asian people that are living well into their 80s, 90s, and 100s, and eat a diet that has quite a bit of unfermented (and fermented) soy in it.

Those diets are rich in fermeted soy and are balanced by additional products that counter the negative effects of soy.

Surely that depends on how much of that population falls on the "low" or "high" side of soy intake as measured by the study. I don't know how much of the Asian population falls into the intake levels this study claims might be negatively affected - do you?

>We hypothesize

That's key right there, and it's all you'll ever get from a longitudinal study. You want to make strong claims about the effects of soy like "soy is a terrible idea", you're going to need a controlled trial, not a cohort study.

I would like to see a study like that controlled for cardiovascular exercise.

I am also concerned about the validity of the theory because of the trend stall in figure 2 at ages 80-89 and the stark reversal in the 90-93 age group, where high-high was at almost low-low levels.

It looks to me like there is a good chance of some unaccounted confounding variable, even beyond the possible effects of exercise (which would not explain the 90-93 group).

There are many medical articles published on peer reviewed journals to counter this myth, it has no basis in reality, and has never been proved. One of those xenophobic-anti-Asian myths from the 60s (similar to the one about MSG).

If you can't find them yourself (the Wikipedia entry is a good start), let me know and I'll provide citations.

Papers and studies sponsored by the soy industry to debunk "myths" published from reputable centers aren't really that great even if someone updated a wikipedia entry to reference one of them.

Personally, I don't touch the stuff.

It seems like a knee-jerk reaction to believe that all those papers are sponsored by the soy industry and everything saying that soy does have estrogen is coming from a reputable source.

I was a vegetarian for 9 years (vegan for 4). My personal, anecdotal and completely unscientific experience: when i switched from soy protein shakes to whey protein shakes, I immediately noticed an improvement in recovery times, not to mention less gas.

Soy is not going to be a complete substitute for meat's nutritional components. Supplemented with lots of liquid aminos, etc? Probably will work well. But the worst part for me about a vegan diet is the difficulty in getting enough fat intake. Too little fat in the diet causes depression.

Out of curiosity, why'd you stop? Difficulty maintaining healthy diet?

In my early 20's, when I was still trying to land my first "office job" out of college, I was working construction. The work was physically demanding, and no matter how much I ate, I always felt hungry and sore. Tons of tofu, tempeh, beans, it didn't matter. My buddy brought over a ton of venison which I put in the freezer. I had enough for two months of meals. I started eating it every day, and within 48 hours I noticed a huge difference. My weight went up to 195 (i'm 6'2, and it had dropped to 175) which was a much healthier weight, and most importantly, my depression (which i really didn't know i had, went away)and i just felt better, more motivated, happier, you name it.

I'm sure many, many vegetarians live great, happy lives on their diet. I'm not one of them. Years of farting all the time from soy (beano didn't do it for me), never gaining muscle, not being able to socialize with my male buddies since 90% of the vegetarians i encountered were females..... the list goes on.

Thanks for describing your experiences. This part confused me:

> not being able to socialize with my male buddies since 90% of the vegetarians i encountered were females

Did you have trouble socializing with people who didn't share your dietary restrictions?

I assure you, it confused me to. But its a reality that people on restrictive diets forget: in our society, meals are a very fundamental element of socializing. My restrictive diet made it so that when I'd hang out with buddies, when they would pick a restaurant, I could rarely get proper nutrition from the meals. This would cause me not to eat almost anything at these places. They would notice, feel bad, and then feel guilty. I would always have to hunt around for a place to grab anything to fill me up before we continued our day.

Do you have a good citation for "Too little fat in the diet causes depression"?

I did a quick search, and turned up a study in PLoS ONE[1] which found trans fatty acids correlate with increased depression, while there is a weak inverse relation to mono- and polyunsaturated fat intake. But a blog reviewing the study[2] points out some limitations. And some research mentioned at [3] apparently concluded there is a link between depression and DHA specifically, but if that's true it wouldn't affect only vegetarians: "Most people in the Western world do not get enough omega-3 fatty acids [such as DHA] in their diet."[4]

Your claim is new to me, and as someone on a low-fat vegan diet, if you have a more conclusive reference I'd be curious to see it.

[1] http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

[2] http://evolutionarypsychiatry.blogspot.com/2011/01/dietary-f...

[3] http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/fats.html

[4] http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/docosahexaenoic-acid-0003...

You can eat coconut and palm oil.

Irrespective of the concerns about the soy, the wider question is the dietary profile after their processing.

Whey protein can be used to produce biodegradable packaging material. Doesn't mean I'd be automatically willing to replace my whey protein shakes with eating boxes. Not even if they taste nice.

There is very, very little evidence that soy products are harmful to men because of phytoestrogens. The evidence is basically this:

1. Phytoestrogens found in soy are chemically related to human estrogen

2. Phytoestrogens are readily absorbed by humans when consumed

So it was a reasonable hypothesis that soy might be harmful to men due to phytoestrogens. This hypothesis has been tested, and falsified, by numerous studies.

If you can, please reference the studies were it was falisified and the studies that debunked those falsifications.

So far all the "pro soy" people have posted exactly zero references.

I would just like to check for myself.

Here is a meta-analysis: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524224

> The results of this meta-analysis suggest that neither soy foods nor isoflavone supplements alter measures of bioavailable T concentrations in men.

I would have to read the rest to find out how much soy protein or isoflavones was given, for how long, in addition to what the diets were, but from the above, that does not debunk anything... All it states is that in this particular expirement, they don't think it causes lowered T levels. This is a world away from saying that soy isoflavones don't have estrogen-like effects, nor interact or effect estrogen receptors, nor have a negative effect on the brain.

And I can't even imagine why they did not check estrogen levels.

>All it states is that in this particular expirement,

That sounds like you didn't actually read the abstract. It wasn't a "particular experiment". It was forty-seven experiments.

>they don't think it causes lowered T levels.

... or SBHG levels, or FAI.

>This is a world away from saying that soy isoflavones don't have estrogen-like effects, nor interact or effect estrogen receptors, nor have a negative effect on the brain.

Well, no, it's not a world away from that, because one of the major effects of estrogen on men is to affect androgen levels, so if these isoflavones don't do that, then it is unlikely that they are affecting the body the same way that estrogen does. It doesn't rule out the possibility that soy isoflavones affect the human body, but it puts a huge hole in the entire basis for thinking that they might.

> Well, no, it's not a world away from that, because one of the major effects of estrogen on men is to affect androgen levels

You can't say 'ohh it doesn't seem to decrease T levels, so it must not be estrogenic!' It could still product other estrogen like effects.

> but it puts a huge hole in the entire basis for thinking that they might

How so? There are so many other ways for the isoflavones to affect the body besides lowering T levels.

We already know that there are a number of people reporting feminization, health, and gastro symptoms from consuming unfermented soy products. That's hard to ignore. Something is going on.

Well, from the perspective of an omnivore, soy would be a huge improvement over chicken in the estrogen department. The hormones added to make chicken breasts plump up tend to result in fulfilling the prophecy "you are what you eat".

What is your evidence that chicken contains more estrogen-like compounds than soy?

That hormones given to chickens cause chicken breasts to "plump up"?

"but the company says it will focus on other non-soy options in the future" http://www.thekitchn.com/twitter-co-founders-betting-big-on-...

The problem with these alternatives is they are highly processed, the exact opposite of a healthy meal of vegetables, lentils, nuts...

That said, the modern industrial slaughter of animals is an ongoing atrocity on an unbelievable scale, worst than anything humans ever did to each other (and can only be deemed acceptable if you vouch for biblical notions of human supremacism). If this helps any, all the best to them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with processed food. Processed foods could only be considered "bad" if you're actually replacing healthy foods with them.

For example, a can of coke isn't actually bad for me per se, it's just nutritionally useless, and it's taking up 100something calories out of my calorie budget for the day that could be used by something with a higher amount of micronutrients in it.

I don't think any vegetarian or vegan is going to throw out all their veggies and start eating nothing but meat alternatives as soon as a viable replacement comes out.

I wonder what would happen if you tried to survive just on coke and micronutrient supplements?

You may find The Twinkie Diet interesting: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...

Great comment on that: "On the up side, he now has a shelf life of 400 years."

My wife has not eaten meat or poultry for over 25 years. I do. Once, we were out at a restaurant and she sampled my pasta+chicken dish and got a piece of chicken into her mouth by accident. She did not like the texture and the flavour, at all. As in, the innateness of both in chicken was not appetizing to her anymore.

She will be sticking to her nut and bean burgers no matter how good a fake beef burger tastes (to me).

The excessive amount of sugar in your coke kills your liver and pancreas, it's hardly harmless.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.htm...

Gary Taubes, of course. This article says nothing about "killing" your organs. It simply mentions excess consumption raises your insulin resistance, which will be the case with overconsumption of ANY carbohydrates.

Trans fats are a typical ingredient of processed foods that are actively harmful. [1]

[1] http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/GettingHealthy/FatsAndOils/Fat...

Wow, downvoted for that?

I imagine it's because 'processed foods' aren't bad in themselves. That you can add something bad to them doesn't mean they're inherently bad. If someone wants to crusade against bad foods, saying 'processed foods' is the wrong way to go.

It's like protesting against DHMO. Sure, it kills people. But it's not even a good simplification of the whole situation. (Yes, I know that DHMO is H2O, just in case anyone thought I didn't for some reason.)

It's a little disingenuous to suggest that the ingredients of a food are 'something that can be added to it.'

If processed foods tend to be bad (which they do) you can quite correctly crusade against them if you're interested in helping people not to eat bad food.

Edit: Edited for clarity.

"a can of coke isn't actually bad for me per se"

You're kidding right? There's a ton wrong with processed foods. We humans love to outsmart ourselves. Ooh, let's make our own food, screw mother nature and home-grown veggies, fruits, and animals! And then wonder why cancer and obesity rates are increasing.

And hunting and gathering? Screw that! We're gonna create higher abstract levels of work where u stare at a computer screen for 8 hours a day! Woohoo! Why expend so much energy running and walking for food when you can sit all day?!.. Then we wonder again why obesity rates keep going up.

I don't get what your point is. This sounds like a ton of hand-waving with out any kind of science. Your argument is essentially "since it's not natural, it's not good". Google "naturalistic fallacy".

I am not claiming processed foods are good, they're just not bad. Someone who eats nothing but coke and snickers all day will be unhealthy, but that's more because of what he wasn't eating than what he was eating. It's not like eating processed food somehow destroys nutrients in your body.

Obesity is an issue because of overconsumption of food, period. Granted, a lot of the food we overconsume is processed foods. They're cheap and available everywhere. Corn is heavily subsidized which makes HFCS incredibly cheap.

What about someone who has the ability to eat coke and snickers all day, AND veggies, fruits, and everything you need nutritionally? You're saying that's ok?

And no, this is not a fallacy. Most things natural ARE good because our bodies simply have evolved in those conditions. It's not a fallacy, cult, or religion... Hence why we have the Primal/Paleo diet.

It depends on what you mean by "ok".

Would this person lose weight? Sure, if they consumed less calories than they burned.

Would I recommend it? No, because snickers and coke are not satiating yet are very calorie dense. That person would probably end up consuming a lot more calories due to increased hunger, which would lead to weight gain.

Is it optimal? No, because whole foods are better at keeping you full, generally have less calories, and are richer in micronutrients.

So what approach would I recommend? That the majority (~3/4 or more) of your day's calories come from whole foods, and the rest can come from whatever you want. 100% of your food should fit into your goals, however. Junk food is not "free". If you're trying to lose weight, set your appropriate calorie goal for the day and make sure 100% of your food fits within this.

If you're interested, check out [this article](http://www.wannabebig.com/diet-and-nutrition/the-dirt-on-cle...). It has a weightlifting slant, but it's a well sourced article that goes into detail about how 10-20% of your calories can come from processed foods with no ill effects.

The paleo/primal diets are fine, but that line of reasoning behind them is not scientifically valid. If you can provide some peer-reviewed studies that prove otherwise, I'd like to see them.

It's not just a matter of gaining weight. It's also a matter of consuming things our bodies have NOT evolved to digest/use properly. I dunno about you, but I rather not consume those types of food often because they can lead to disease. There's plenty of evidence already out there that proves grains are not meant to be digested by most people.

I have to agree with both of these points. Modern society is so insulated to the ethical costs and environmental costs of meat eating. We have no problem taking our children to go strawberry picking to get their food, but how about taking them to a slaughterhouse to get their McNuggets? And then environmental costs of using 10x-50x the amount of water to produce 1lb of meat compared to 1lb of grains is staggering.

  > ethical costs

That's manufactured problem. And I'd say extremely stupid. Cannot wait till activists will go on a mission to stop other animals from eating meat. We are humans. We eat meat. How complicated is that?

And yes, I had an opportunity to witness how pig becomes bacon and tasty sausages when I was kid.

"Manufactured problem" is exactly the right phrase, but not in the way you mean it.

Other animals hunt other animals, and the ecosystem ends up in a sustainable equilibrium. Humans, however, get most of their meat from industrial agriculture, which is an extractive system that drains water tables and pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

That's very definitely an ethical problem that we have manufactured.

Yeah, so is farming. Most arable land has had its effectiveness severely reduced by salination from hundreds of years of farming. Perhaps we should stop eating farmed goods altogether?

This is not some simple ethical equation with a Pollyanna answer.

Actually it is simple: eat less meat. Meat production is vastly more wasteful than vegetable production calorie-for-calorie.

And that double-espresso fair bean organic latte is vastly more wasteful than a glass of water.

And your sharp looking clothes are far more wasteful than a peasant shirt and plain shorts.

And your smart phone is far more wasteful than a basic phone.

And a house with a yard is vastly more wasteful than a 150 sqft per person apartment.

And do you know how much wastage occurred to make that movie you watched? Or that TV show you like?

Everything can be considered wasteful by comparison. It comes down to balancing your needs/wants with energy requirements, and choosing which causes to bring up when preaching your moral superiority.

Agreed, we have a lot of things which are wasteful compared to spartan requirements. Definitely a sliding scale of luxury. So what are the real costs of meat eating? 10-50x more water for a meat diet, is that moral or practical superiority?

Nice. I saw your edit to change it from "10x" to "10-50x". Moving goalposts are of course much harder to hit.

But regardless, this is what I mean by choosing which causes to bring up when preaching your moral superiority.

None of those things cause as much greenhouse gas emissions as a high meat diet.

The level of meat consumption in rich countries is unjustifiable.

I'm not sure I agree with the "it's in our nature" argument. The thing about being human is that we're able to act according to a code of ethics and not just our base desires/traditions.

Your point about activists makes no sense. Would you accuse someone campaigning against sexual assault of going on a mission to stop male geese from raping females?

Just because we used to do it doesn't mean it's right or ehtical to continue doing so now that we can avoid it.

Then again, bacon is yummy.

Sure the taking of another creature's life to satisfy one's palate is acceptable to some, however it is unnecessary and I would argue, unethical.

I don't think the government should use my tax dollars to directly and indirectly subsidize meat eating.

Human's eat meat, is that the slogan like 'beef, it's whats for dinner'. Hardly a convincing statement.

It's not the ethical cost of eating meat, it's the ethical cost of eating industrially farmed meat. Every year, tens of billions of animals suffer for their entire lives before slaughter because we want to eat lots of cheap meat.

So by eating meat I'm an accomplice in crimes worse than the Holocaust, the atomic bombs, the Soviet gulags, the Rwandan genocide, 9/11 and so on?

I wouldn't say you're an accomplice in that most likely you were raised to eat meat. From the time you were a small child you've been conditioned to be OK or maybe even to love eating meat. You've also had the terrible conditions of the factory farming industry hidden from you. Because of this I don't think anybody can be blamed for eating meat. But I do think that once those conditions and factors are brought to your attention that people should have a long think about the situation and really spend some time deciding if they want to continue to support such practices.

Visit a slaughterhouse and make up your mind. Cruelty to humans is bad, but cruelty to animals is ok?

Shouldn't we respect consciousness and the living force even in less developed creatures?

Also, unless you/re eating organic most modern meats could be considered highly processed. Chicken for example used to be a healthy meat, but now most of the chicken you'll find in supermarkets is a high fat food.

And turns out, that "evil fat" is a myth too.

1: Being processed doesn't in and off itself make it the "exact opposite" of vegetables, lentils and nuts.

2: The ethical justification for humans eating animals has exactly nothing to do with the bible.

For the record, I'm no fan at all of battery chicken, and if that market can be displaced by a cheap non-meat substitute, that's clearly a big win.

The plan to have it sold at the meat counter is cute in terms of confidence, but suicidal if they want to market to vegetarians. Once you stop associating raw meat with food, it starts looking, well, gross and violent, and the smell is off-putting. Most vegetarians I've known, myself included, try to avoid that section of the grocery store entirely.

So while I applaud them trying to compete with meat directly and potentially sniping some carnivorous business, I hope they will also keep a few boxes for me in the hippie section.

I'd think that the market for "I can't believe it's not dead chicken" for vegetarians would be a tiny trickle compared to if they can sell it as "good conscience, and healthier too" to the section of us meat eaters who also find the meat counter off putting.

It's a bold move, to be sure. Nobody has ever had a fake meat product they were confident enough in to market to meat eaters, and as an ethical vegetarian, I certainly hope it works.

As a meat eater who happily eats pretty much whatever animal part I'm offered, I hope they succeed too, because I'd love to see a market for meat substitutes that are good enough that I get more delicious meat-like products to choose from that eventually taste better than the real thing.

As a voracious meat eater, I am actually intrigued by the idea of a healthier chicken meat that takes the environment into consideration. If it tastes like chicken, even looks like chicken, is healthier than chicken, and has less of an impact on the environment/climate/conscience, why wouldn't you eat it? Now beef on the other hand...I still am on the fence there. What can I say, I like a nice medium rare, well-marbled, ribeye slightly charred on the outside. I don't think you can ever replace that.

In that case, the second best thing would be cutting down on beef consumption and treating it as the luxury it is. So eating that nice medium rare once every two months instead of once a week.

(I don't know anything about your consumption, just making a point.)

once a week?! whaaat? I want real beef, every day. No fake stuff please. Yes, be nice to the animals, raise them cage free yadda yadda. But I want the real thing.

Appreciate you're possibly joking, but the problem is that it is not possible to support the entire world in this manner.

Assuming we all share the goal of a famine free world, with its people living lives of relative equality, then the excessive consumption of meat in the west is a problem which needs to be addressed.

As the parent suggests, treat high quality meat like the luxury it is, and enjoy other foods instead. It's better for you, and better for your fellow humans.

I see a future where lab grown meat, and meat substitutes make up the majority of our consumption, and hand-reared, high quality meat is saved for special occasions.

Yeah with the health concerns over eating a lot of red meat (my side of the family has a history of colon cancer) and the fact that it keeps getting more expensive, we've relegated ribeyes to birthdays and our anniversary. So we get a package of ribeyes from Costco maybe 3-4 times a year (we celebrate as many birthdays and anniversaries as we can). Other than that we eat a lot of chicken and pork. We do consume a fair bit of ground beef for hamburgers and spaghetti however. In that case, I probably wouldn't notice the difference between fake beef and the real thing.

My wife and I run a small farm and one of our products is organic, pasture raised chicken. All of our birds spend the majority of their lives out on fresh grass in the sunshine and our never exposed to any antibiotics, pesticides and herbicides.

The difference that a bit of exposure to green forage in an outdoor environment makes, both to the flavour and texture of the chicken, is AMAZING. Industrial broiler barn chicken pales in comparison.

I'd encourage anyone seeking to buy a more environmentally friendly chicken to try to make contact with a local organic farmer who's able to raise his birds outside and in a humane fashion.

How would you say your pure chicken would compare to a USDA Organic chicken I can buy at the store?

I live in Canada so I can't compare directly to a USDA Organic chicken. However, based on a chicken one could get from Whole Foods, for example, our bird has a much richer flavour and a firmer, less rubbery texture. This part is very subjective, of course, but in a side-by-side comparison you would definitely be able to taste and feel the difference.

We also raise our birds to be much heavier than a store bought bird - on average about six pounds after processing vs three-ish pounds in the store. I'd wager that your meat-to-carcase ratio is probably higher for one of our birds, giving a better value. (Actually, it's better value regardless - we sell our birds for $4/lb vs $5/lb for the broiler barn organic birds in the store.)

Environmentally, there's less concentration of pollutants. All of the chicken manure goes straight on the grass and is a primo source of nutrients for subsequent hay crops. For me it's a win - I don't have to apply fertilizer nor clean out chicken barns.

Coming from an animal welfare standpoint, just because you're buying "organic" chicken in the store, doesn't mean they've been raised in a humane fashion. I carry no guilt in eating our chickens. They're not overcrowded, debeaked or in a dusty, foul smelling environment. They live as well as I can provide up until the day they go for slaughter.

This man has it right. Once you taste what chicken is meant to taste like you realize that 99% of the chicken you eat doesn't even taste like chicken!

In Asia, there is a delicacy called dog meat. To maximize profit, cooks use pork instead (sometimes from sick or dead pigs) Then they fake it by adding fermented rice, ginger, shrimp paste to make it look feel and taste like real dog meat. For more info (in Vietnamese) http://goo.gl/g07yF

Hong Kong has restaurants where they have items that are clones of chicken, shrimp,fish etc. but are not actual meat. I tried and it was great.

EDIT: Funny thing is that the menu has item names such as "vegetarian chicken" and I am not kidding.

Yup- the secret sauce in most of those clones is something call TVP - textured vegetable protein - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textured_vegetable_protein

In the UK, I've never found an imitation of fish or prawns, let alone a great one.

There are crabsticks, an old Uk favourite. They are pretty horrible though....

I believe crabsticks are made from reformed fish. Agreed on how horrible they are though.

This sounds very promising. As a vegan, it's pretty hard to find decent alternatives to meat, which I still crave once in a while - I went vegan for health reasons, not ideological ones.

This has been getting better with time, but unfortunately a lot of fake vegetarian and vegan meats tend to be unhealthy. In order to get some decent taste and texture, some odd ingredients are often used. Vegan does not equal healthy in all cases. This one sounds pretty good, hope they find their way to Canada and branch out to different meats, too!

I've tried a couple of beef and chicken alternatives that were splendid. The trick was to cook it to my liking. Crispy, wet, etc.

I imagine these kinds of foods are ok for transitioning into a vegan. However, I was vegan once, and I took it as an opportunity to discover all kinds of new vegetables and fruits. It was interesting learning to cook with no meat. I had discovered a whole new world of food.

Eating fake meat seems a bit nostalgic tbh.

There is also Šmakoun, it's basically just pressed egg white. Here is the inventor describing it

The slice is made of pure egg white, that is albumin, which is a source of the most valuable proteins, necessary in metabolism of organs of living organisms. New modern technology of processing of the hen egg white has been developed in the Czech Republic and patented. This technology turns the white into a porous material further processed in pressurised steam chamber. That produces a compact belt of thin layer of material, composed of microscopic fibres. The belt is then rolled into the shape of cylinder, cut into smaller pieces. These are then pressed into the final form of 100-gram slices. Finished slices are vacuum packaged in plastic bags. As final treatment, each bag is re-sterilised in special equipment.

from http://www.iufost.org/publications/newsline/Newsline55.html

This could be because we have such low expectations of what actually counts as meat. For example, Jamie Oliver on how chicken nuggets are made (in the US) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2OK6xDd7Hs

Why would a person who is vegan want to eat fake meat? I find it odd a person who is a vegans who finds even vegetarianism too relaxed would even want to eat fake meat.

I wonder if the opposite could be done to create a fake carrot made entirely out of meat?

Beyond Meat's website has "without the bad stuff (no saturated or trans fat, no cholesterol, no gluten, no antibiotics, no GMOs...and no meat)". How is gluten "bad stuff" unless you have celiac disease?

> Why would a person who is vegan want to eat fake meat?

I understand what you're saying, but the short answer is because fake meat is not meat. I don't think it's about not eating what tastes good but it's about not eating meat (or any animal by-products).

I don't get it. You want all the benefits of eating meat without actually eating meat? I understand people have moral objections to the meat industry, but if you are doing it for health reasons you might as well just eat real meat. Research has shown quite conclusively that pre-historic humans survived on a diet rich in animal products, particularly animal fat.

Out of curiosity, what was the average life expectancy of said humans?

That's a good point. You really cut to the heart of the matter—no oversimplification here!—and I applaud you. None of our distant ancestors suffered from poor hygiene. Not was there ever famine, and they never fought among themselves. Life was pretty much perfect back then, if we disregard that fatty and meaty diet.

18 years. Obviously then they did not die of old age. I wonder then, how did the mechanism of dieing of senility evolve?

I really wish people would stop comparing our current 100-year lifespan with pre-historic humans where someone my age (31 years old) would have been considered an elder (if even still alive!).

"Fake" meat tastes and looks like the real thing, but it has none of its downsides (look up "Forks over Knives" for some decent documentary on that. take with a grain of salt).

Wrong. You are simply misinformed. Infant mortality skews the average lifespan severely. Take out infant mortality and people lived long and robust lives, without the help of modern medicine.

So you're suggesting we compare how old people live by ignoring all those people that died? In 500 years if the average life-span is 200 years will we ignore the people that died during this era in their 70's?

no, it's a common misunderstanding of the lifespan metric. mberning is pointing out that the 'maximum' lifespan hasn't really changed. The change has primarily come from infant mortality so one possibility is once infant mortality is eliminated we would no longer see gains in life span.

So on one hand you are saying that a pre-historic diet leads to an early death, but you also want to count deaths that have nothing to do with said diet? Not so fast.

Infant mortality has everything to do with medical care and very little to do with the diet. That's why infant deaths should be thrown out when talking about the diet.

If I have 3 people, one died at age 0, one died at age 50 and one died at age 60, the average lifespan is about 36.5. Clearly misleading. I don't think people realize just how high infant mortality was prior to the advent of modern medicine.

I think you missed the point of the previous commenter.

If you have 5 people who are born on the same day, 4 of which live till 80, 1 of which dies shortly after birth, the average lifespan will be 64 even though 80% of the people lived until 80.

His point was that most of our increase in average lifespan can be attributed to the reduction in infant mortality rather than people living to higher ages.

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy) which pulls its source for "Life expectancy variation over time" from Encyclopædia Britannica and other sources, life expectancy in the Neolithic was about 20 years old. And that does account for infant mortality, but not pre-natal mortality. Do you have a source for "long and robust lives"?

Here you go, should whet your appetite:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11817904

> And that does account for infant mortality

Though it doesn't account for general childhood mortality or death during childbirth, both of which were pretty big factors.

I don't think that maximum human lifespan has increased as significantly as it seems, but rather infant mortality rates have shrunk so much that our 'average life expectancy' has increased dramatically.

The article spells it out pretty clearly:

"Brown’s long-term goal is to offer a product that can satisfy the world’s growing, and largely unsustainable, demand for meat, especially in ballooning markets like India and China."

"Meat is environmentally toxic and colossally inefficient, ethically dubious (even if you’re OK with killing animals, raising and slaughtering animals in factory farms is hard to defend), and it’s unhealthy (that’s even true if you don’t eat it—there’s good evidence that the rampant use of antibiotics in livestock production has given rise to drug-resistant infections)."

The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.

Ok, so rather than feeding people the genuine article let's feed them some laboratory created faux-meat. That sounds like a great way to be healthy.

I don't disagree that we need to find more sustainable ways to feed ourselves, but we also need to be feeding ourselves quality food that matches our biological needs. Not whatever is most conveniently and cheaply produced.

You're making the assumption that the laboratory meet will somehow automatically be worse, and that it is whatever "is most conveniently and cheaply produced".

I eat a lot of meat. I could not conceive of giving up meat. Not going to happen. I don't care if I have to slaughter the animals myself to get it.

But if there was a high enough quality "laboratory meat"? I'd try it. I'd even be willing to pay more for it in certain circumstances:

- Consider custom-adapted marbling. - Arbitrary sized cuts. Want a fillet larger than any real animal? - New types of "meat"? Yes please. - Healthier versions? If they can come up with variations that taste as nice while being better for me, sure, I'll pay a premium for that.

While there undoubtably will also be attempts to make cheap replacements, there's no reason to automatically assume that the fact it is "faux-meat" means it can't be just as healthy - or better - than the real thing.

There is not enough farm land to provide 7 billion people a western diet including 1500+ calories from beef every day. The only way to get close to that is to replace most farm land with solar panels supplement that with a lot of nuclear and wind energy and then factory farm plant matter using LED lighting in buildings and feed that to cows in another building.

Is it possible, sure but economics just a question of what your willing to sacrifice for what you want. And significant quantities of fake meat is probably a much better option for everyone involved.

> The amount of resources required to raise an animal to the age at which it can be slaughtered for use as food is a very real problem as the natural resources of the world are strained by population growth.

For beef, sure. But chickens are very quick to produce (2 months).

I couldn't read the article because the font size is too small and the left "share bar" gets over the text when magnified.

Anyway, to reply to the "statisfy China" thing, let me tell to the author of this "invention" that he is solving a solved problem: China has a long track record of feeding its numerous populace with doufu (tofu) instead of meat. I was very impressed the first time I saw a countryside market. They were selling big doufu pieces in different street shops, and only one butcher was selling a few pieces of hanging meat.

The trick is to actually use little pieces of pork in a doufu-based dish, and many spices, like the delicious Mapo doufu.

Even when eating meat-based Chinese dishes, like Huiguorou, you will eat much less meat than in a classic Western course.

So, in fact, the solution to the possible future problem of Chinese people eating too much meat is not to feed them with that chicken ersatz, it is to avoid Westernization to go that far.

I have a few proposals in this direction that should be common sense:

- Stop using hamburgers as the logo for food in games, apps and other places. Only a very tiny part of the world regularly eat these nocive things.

- Stop displaying actors eating snacks in movies. (We already stopped showing them smoking, except for the villains). Going at any time to the fridge and eating something out of it is a very recent and nocive habit that should not be shown as the normal "American Dream" life in successful mainstream movies.

- Stop this cliché about disgusting intestine-based dishes or other "un-noble" parts. I am no vegetarian, but I think animal we kill for food should be eaten to the last piece of eatable tissue. In China, we (yes, me too) eat tendon, kidneys, fish tripes and heads, duck tongues, pig feet, everything, and cooked in hundres of different manners. It is healthy: eating meat or fish becomes a pleasure by its diversity, not by its volume.

I can't say I know if vegetarianism is more or less healthy than being an omnivore, but I feel pretty confident in saying that we won't find the key to health in slavishly attempting to copy the habits of people who weren't anywhere near as healthy as we are.

Pre-historic humans, for example, had a life expectancy of about 30.

That number (30) was mostly due to infant mortality rates. It's a very misleading metric.

I've always wondered what the number would be if you eliminated everyone who died before, say, the age of 5.

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...

There are some life expectancy-related habits of pre-historic humans that no-one is aiming to copy - e.g. attacks from wild animals, frequent warfare with neighbouring tribes, lack of sanitation and lack of modern medicine including antibiotics, anaesthetics, midwifery and general understanding of germ theory.

Aside from moral reasons, it will be interesting to see if creating fake meat is more energy efficient than existing farming methods.

According to the Water Education Foundation, it takes 2,464 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef in California. In contrast, only 25 gallons of water are needed to produce one pound of wheat.

Beef produces 130 kilocalories/square metre/year.

Chicken produces 190 kilocalories/square metre/year.

Rice produces 1250 kilocalories/square metre/year. I assume soy is similar.

There are many other similar calculations to be made regarding demands placed on the land. With 7 billion people and counting, they're important numbers.

Source: http://www.woodrow.org/teachers/bi/1991/land.html

Exactly. Vegetarian diets are the most efficient use of natural resources.

If you only take into account caloric production yes, meat is not very efficient. But there is a reason humans started to eat and domesticate animals. They provide us with fur, an other byproducts (fertilizer, etc...)

I understand the need to find some substitute with 7 billion people in the planet, but i think grown-in-a-lab meat will probably be a better alternative in the near future.

When people fly airplanes across the world, do they not look out the window and see what I see? LOTS of unused land. As in, most of the planet.

There's plenty more room out there for everything we need. Only political borders (placed by us humans) prevent us from using all available land/resources to provide for all of humanity.

It seems like collectively changing our diet is just rearranging chairs on the Titanic. Our population will continue to grow exponentially as it has for the last several million years no matter what we eat. If somehow we avoid a massive die-off as has happened with other species due to, say, rapid climate change, a meteor, or a super virus, and actually survive to the point where the acreage of food producing land has a significant effect, then our population will be so large that one or two generations of growth will overwhelm the efficiency gains we make due to diet.

Put another way, if food producing acreage is the limiting factor for humans then as omnivores we may grow for 150,000 generations, as herbivores we may make it to 150,005 generations. Either way, growth will have to stop and we will have wiped out massive numbers of other species.

I've also gathered some conclusive evidence: I don't eat meats, and I haven't died (not even once!).

But seriously, the fact that 10,000 years ago human-type creatures ate a lot of meat should be like number 76 on your list of arguments in the sustainability of diets debate.

Sorry, I'm greedy when it comes to my own wellbeing. Do I really care how sustainable my diet is if I have to suffer for 20-30 years with ailments the can be chalked up due to the deficiency of the diet itself?

"Research has shown quite conclusively that pre-historic humans survived on a diet rich in animal products, particularly animal fat."

No, it really hasn't. It just hasn't. This is one of those crazy truisms that becomes difficult to even debunk because it has no science behind it...but the people pushing it do so with such gusto and such complete confidence that people simply believe their unfounded assertions. It's a tiny sect of science deniers that selectively choose evidence and ignore everything that conflicts with their particular preference. The "paleo diet" is based entirely on a fictional retelling of human history, and it's about time it stopped being promoted as "research" or "conclusive".

Just the most recent article on the subject, but there have been dozens or hundreds of others: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/hu...

Yes, it has, and a blog post linking to a paper about neanderthals does not count as proof of your assertion. I don't know about you, but I haven't seen any neanderthals walking around lately, so the fact that they may have subsisted on plants doesn't say much about homo sapiens.

"Yes, it has" is not a very good citation.

The evidence of human diets spans millennia, including pre-humans and early human populations. There are a very few bits of evidence of isolated populations eating what could be called a "paleo diet" by modern definitions (with a lot more bugs and grubs and nasty stuff like brains and organs from rats), but on the whole, humans have always been omnivores, eating anything remotely edible within their grasp, including mammals, reptiles, plants, fish, insects, fungus...if an alien landed during early human times, they'd have probably tried to eat it, too. But, most populations in most places were eating plenty of plant matter, including grains, and some of the oldest food evidence we have includes grains.

The idea that the early human diet was nearly all meat is a highly selective reading of the evidence; picking and choosing from only those populations in those locations where meat was the only available food source. I don't want to attack your deeply felt beliefs, as you seem to have a personal investment in the paleo cult, but it's simply not borne out by science.

Also, I strongly recommend not taking ones anthropology lessons from fad diet book authors.

Citations:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/full/news.2010.549.ht...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/...

And a fun discussion of the woo factor of the "paleo diet":

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet

Note that I'm not arguing that people should be consuming a bunch of white bread and refined sugar. Knowing the paleo diet is based on junk science doesn't mean I think the modern first world diet is sane.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one that feels a little cheated with this article. It reads like PR for the product and Manjoo buries that Stone's Obvious Corp is an investor in BM in the the middle of the text even when he uses Stone's quotes at the beggining.

I've had seitan "beef" tips at a good veggie restaurant that would convince almost anyone. Yes, heavily sauced, but the right color and a nice char on them. (And I'm just dating a vegetarian, so I have a good point of reference for real meat.)

Why aim to make something indistinguishable from real meat? Instead of stopping when you hit "100% as good as meat" you can keep going, and make something 120% as good, and beyond.

"I forgot I was eating something that didn’t come from a living creature": Does fungus not live?

Are you trying to imply that consumption of animals and plants/fungi is the same? What's the point of that argument? I mean, come on, I'm vegetarian and I kill mosquitoes ...

Never undersestimate HN's penchant for being pendantic

I think it's the same, but then again I'm not a vegetarian. What I'm really trying to imply is that what people decide they're allowed to eat is based on (mostly arbitrary) social norms. Is there anything morally different between being vegetarian and keeping kosher?

Aside: Anyone who figures out how to make salmon produce pork will have a license to print money (kosher pork!).

Beyond Meat is people! It's people!

Great more fake stuff, just what we need.

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