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Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

nytimes.com

461–470 of 663 posts

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#461
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cholesterol in = blood cholesterol fallacy is one of the greatest nutrition crimes in history. Low fat/high carb diets are the primary culprit, along with genetics. Replacing meat and dairy with vegetables may have environmental and ethical benefits, but it doesn't have health benefits.

> Replacing meat and dairy with vegetables They weren't replaced with vegetables, they were replaced with sugar made from cheap overproduced corn, and hydrogenated oils. Neither of those is a vegetable. We wouldn't have nearly the diabetes problems we have now if they were replaced by more fresh vegetables.

Cutting dietary fat and replacing it with overly processed sugar, grains and seed oils is horrible for mankind, and a blight spread across the globe from U.S. agriculture industry.

For the most part vegetable intake is fine. Though excess fruit consumption year round, and in particular juice is pretty much inline with straight sugar. Your pancreas and liver don't care that it's "natural sugar" a term which irks me to no end.

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do Jews not eat beef? I thought it was mainly pork?

The prohibition is against meat and dairy simultaneously. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_and_meat_in_Jewish_law

Speaking as a Jew, while this is accurate, it’s not that common in the US among non-orthodox families. There was a poll of American Jews a while ago that found less than a quarter keep kosher.

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#463
post #187

The most interesting thing about this particular announcement is that it may normalize plant-derived meat-substitutes among the typical fast-food-burger eating population, and not just the mostly-vegetarian folks (like myself) who will spend $10 on an Impossible Burger at a fancy sports bar. Within a decade this might just be normalized, and nobody will make much of it.

I agree, this could be big. The health implications could be a driver of this, consider how many people there are with high cholesterol that should be eating less beef. And then think about how many health driven alternative products there are, eg diet soda, margarine, alt-milks, etc that really can take off in the mainstream once big budget marketing gets behind it.

There is no correlation to dietary cholesterol and blood serum cholesterol. It was a misdirection bought and paid for by the sugar industry. The same goes for saturated fats (more so the vegan religion than big sugar).

As to margerine, it is emphatically NOT better for you than real butter or lard/tallow. Seed oils are probably third in line behind sugar and grains as the biggest causes of human dysfunction.

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beef only is responsible for 3% of greenhouse gasses in America. I'm not sure an "emission" tax would really affect the price all that much. In addition, you have to account for and tax the emissions produced in plant production (fertilizer, agricultural soil, transportation, etc...). Agriculture is a total of 9%, whereas livestock only accounts for 3% of that. I work for agriculture companies, and a lot of animal fe…

> Beef only is responsible for 3% of greenhouse gasses in America. I'm not sure an "emission" tax would really affect the price all that much. Are you only talking about directly? Because there is a huge amount of indirect costs, such as feed, transport, manufacturing.

Plant based products have similar transport & manufacturing impact so I am not including that.

In addition, for feeding often this comes from by-products of plant production (sugar by-products, etc...). The only reason corn is so popular imo is because it is so heavily subsidized by our government making it dirt cheap. But grass fed beef is a thing and it's on par or even quite a bit cheaper price wise than fake meat.

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So heart disease is the #1 killer because people don't eat enough meat? This is nothing but a conspiracy theory that somehow became popular in HN. Mainstream science continues to support that a diet high in whole plants is the best way to prevent heart disease.

Not because people don't eat enough meat. Because people eat too much sugar, and refined carbs (pasta, flour) are effectively sugar. That's where body fat and cholesterol come from. Meat is largely neutral in this regard. Cholesterol in your blood is produced by your liver. Only a trivial amount of dietary cholesterol becomes cholesterol in your body. When people replace meat with low-fat, high-carb, vegetable-derive…

To those downvoting the above comment... The following video is a bit long, but does go over quite a bit of the misdirection/misinformation from the large pharma and agriculture industries. A lot of this has been relatively well documented.

There has never been any reliable study or controlled experiment indicating that dietary cholesterol or saturated fat are the causes of anything negative. Sugar and refined grains have a MUCH higher correlation (higher than even early smoking studies). High fructose intake in particular has been a leading issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=jcnd3usdNxo

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#467
post #69

White Castle has had Impossible Burgers available for about a year now. Just interesting to see the trend emerging from what I would consider the "bottom-most" market segment. I suppose they had the most to gain from drawing in a meat-averse audience. Whatever your feelings on this particular product, it seems that the perhaps-inevitable decline of the traditional meat industry is going to take place on many fronts (…

If it's cheaper than real meat... it doesn't surprise me at all.

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer just more humane animal farming vs. fake meat. It may be more expensive - but if we incentivized humane farming of animals as much as we subsidized corn and/or wheat it might not be that bad (or just got rid of subsidies altogether). I also think the environmental cost of plant farming is vastly underrated.

But you do realize that the environmental cost of animal farming is guaranteed to be >10x the cost of plant farming, correct? Each step up the food chain wastes roughly 90% of the energy, meaning that you need to grow more than 10 kcal of plants to raise 1 kcal of animal. So feeding animals is 10x as expensive as growing plants, in addition to the costs incurred by actually raising the livestock.

Most cattle feed isn't digestible by humans, so it doesn't matter. Replacing grass with more human-edible crops would probably introduce new problems of similar scale.

You might ask, can we just process the grass into something humans can eat? Well, that's what cattle are for.

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the implications are even bigger than that, because the normalization and adoption will drive costs down. And when meat-substitute burgers are cheaper than meat burgers, and taste as good, they will become the default, and that is going to make a huge dent in the animal industry, which is all sorts of awesome, because the animal industry is all sorts of terrible. Right now, I'm seeing Beyond and Impossible substi…

You forget that in America, we'll just bail the farmers out and start shoveling subsidized overproduced meat everywhere we can.

That cuts both ways. Corn farmers get massive subsidies which amount to subsidies for soy as well due to the popularity of corn/soy rotation (soy, being a legume, has nitrogen fixation properties that improves soil quality.)

Re: Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, this could be big. The health implications could be a driver of this, consider how many people there are with high cholesterol that should be eating less beef. And then think about how many health driven alternative products there are, eg diet soda, margarine, alt-milks, etc that really can take off in the mainstream once big budget marketing gets behind it.

The cholesterol in = blood cholesterol fallacy is one of the greatest nutrition crimes in history. Low fat/high carb diets are the primary culprit, along with genetics. Replacing meat and dairy with vegetables may have environmental and ethical benefits, but it doesn't have health benefits.

It's true that diets with high added / refined sugar are unhealthy. But diets with lots of beef and dairy and low on vegetable fiber are also unhealthy.

The link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol is much weaker than previously hypothesized, that's true, but there's ample evidence of the superiority of a vegetable rich diet.

The medical and scientific consensus is still that diets high in saturated fats - especially animal fats - as well as trans fats increase your risk of heart disease and high cholesterol. Other lifestyle risk factors are obesity, lack of exercise, smoking and diabetes.

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