Live data from Hacker News

Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

arstechnica.com

1–10 of 109 posts

Re: Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

#3

It'll be interesting to see what effect this stuff has on people after 20 years of use. Until then, I'm not touching it. There are plenty of other tasty meat substitutes out there with more tried-and-true ingredients.

It's an analog of hemoglobin. What kinds of dangers can it possibly pose?

Re: Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

#4
post #3

It'll be interesting to see what effect this stuff has on people after 20 years of use. Until then, I'm not touching it. There are plenty of other tasty meat substitutes out there with more tried-and-true ingredients.

It's an analog of hemoglobin. What kinds of dangers can it possibly pose?

And prions are regular proteins just folded a bit differently but they give you mad cow disease. Biology can be tricky and even small differences can matter.

Re: Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

#6
post #3

It'll be interesting to see what effect this stuff has on people after 20 years of use. Until then, I'm not touching it. There are plenty of other tasty meat substitutes out there with more tried-and-true ingredients.

It's an analog of hemoglobin. What kinds of dangers can it possibly pose?

I can't tell if you're joking or not. Smoking used to be considered healthy, leeches were healthy, letting blood was how you got over sickness, drinking a mercury-based concoction was once thought to be an elixir of immortality. Maybe coffee is good, maybe it's bad. Maybe wine is good, maybe it's bad. How often are diets shown to not do the things they are supposed to? Humans are wrong about nutrition (and health) a lot. Saying that this is definitely not dangerous seems rather arrogant. With that said, we do the things that seem like the best idea at the time with the knowledge we have, and this does seem pretty safe.

Personally, I'm going to keep eating meat, but I'm kind of old-fashioned

Re: Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

#7
Interestingly the concern from the FDA was not whether or not soy leghemoglobin is safe generally, but whether or not it’s a potential allergen. Given that chemically equivalent ingredients are found in all kinds of food already, it’s a shame this got held up so long in a process that a lot of food additives skip entirely. But I’m happy that really solid beef alternatives are starting to become available.

Re: Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

#8
They're baking up soy hemoglobin in yeast and purifying it to add to non-meat burgers. This is particularly neat considering how complex the human heme synthetic pathway is. I suspect even in soy, it's more than just producing a "pre-(a-)"protein-- you'd have to make a few other enzymes along the heme synthetic pathway and provide an environment conducive to them working.

It does make me wonder, why soy? Corn and rice hemoglobins, unlike soy hemoglobin, are basically ubiquitous in our diet as far as I know. I suppose soy hemoglobin may be more meat-like or easier to produce.

Re: Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

#9
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an analog of hemoglobin. What kinds of dangers can it possibly pose?

I can't tell if you're joking or not. Smoking used to be considered healthy, leeches were healthy, letting blood was how you got over sickness, drinking a mercury-based concoction was once thought to be an elixir of immortality. Maybe coffee is good, maybe it's bad. Maybe wine is good, maybe it's bad. How often are diets shown to not do the things they are supposed to? Humans are wrong about nutrition (and health) a…

Are you seriously comparing smoking and bloodletting to a veggie burger? What sort of insanity is this

Maybe HN has jumped ship and I need to simply move on.

Re: Impossible Burgers’ key, bloody ingredient gets long awaited nod from FDA

#10
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an analog of hemoglobin. What kinds of dangers can it possibly pose?

And prions are regular proteins just folded a bit differently but they give you mad cow disease. Biology can be tricky and even small differences can matter.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN