The calling cards of faux meat products such as Impossible Burger are better ethics and less harm to the environment and not their impact on human health. To understand why requires understanding the relationship between food processing and chronic inflammation.
Inflammation itself isn’t a problem per se. After all, it’s an evolutionarily conserved natural process that alerts the body to some serious perturbation in its physiology. Process and not an outcome, inflammation has done its job if the body resolves it quickly and with minimal damage to itself. However, feedback loops that sustain inflammation, prolong its duration and render it chronic are connected to ill-health (1).
Ability of foods to cause chronic inflammation is largely a function of their processing – more processed a food, greater its propensity for causing chronic inflammation such as metabolic syndrome (2).
Meat itself could be minimally processed or ultra-processed.
- A deer one kills, skins and processes oneself is minimally processed meat.
- Burgers, hot dogs, sausages and processed meat fingers, nuggets or sticks made from extruded remnants of meat mashed up together in industrial facilities and then processed with all manner of additives (binders, bulkers, colors, emulsifiers, extracts, concentrates, flavors, preservatives, stabilizers, sensory enhancers, solvents, sweeteners, thickeners, etc.) are ultra-processed meat designed to increase their palatability and make their consumption habit-forming.
By now, the vast majority of meat eaters in countries such as the US are hooked to the latter ultra-processed variants which are highly addictive and therein lies the link to chronic inflammation and ill-health.
Nothing about this phenomenon is happenstance. Rather it’s the culmination of ~50 years of food industry innovation that set about altering taste preferences from unprocessed food to ultra-processed food not just in the US but also among entire populations the world over (3).
This takeover by ultra-processed food has been so stealthy, seamless and seemingly invisible that nutrition research has been left behind at the starting block. Even the study of the effect of different types of processed foods on human health is in its infancy, such foods having been subjected to rigorous systematic analysis only over the past decade. Several such epidemiological studies suggest that ultra-processed foods such as Western pattern diet – Wikipedia are associated with poor health outcomes (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).
Below are a table and some examples of different types of processed foods from 10, 11.
Note below the different forms of minimally processed and ultra-processed meats (12).
Ultra-processed food dominance is the reason unprocessed or minimally processed foods tend to occupy just ~20 to 25% of the floor space in a typical US grocery store chain (below from 13). The rest is aisle upon aisle of processed or ultra-processed food-like substances in cardboard boxes, plastic wrappers, trays and containers and of course, plastic bottles and aluminum cans (14). Supply meets deliberately engineered demand.
Using the processing yardstick, faux meat products such as Impossible Burger are clearly ultra-processed food (15, below from 16).
“Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract, Cultured Dextrose, Food Starch Modified, Soy Leghemoglobin, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E), Zinc Gluconate, Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C), Niacin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12.”
This is because they’re made using similar extrusion and addition processes designed to (below, modified from 14).
1. be mass produced.
2. be consistent batch to batch.
3. be consistent country to country.
4. have specialized ingredients from specialized companies.
5. have virtually all macronutrients pre-frozen, which means that the fiber is usually removed.
6. stay emulsified (fat and water don’t separate).
7. have long shelf-life or freezer life.
While their impact on human health may be similar to their real meat counterparts such as burgers and sausages, i.e., not particularly healthy, they are certainly more ethical and much better for the environment.
Bibliography
1. Hotamisligil, Gökhan S. “Inflammation and metabolic disorders.” Nature 444.7121 (2006): 860. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/gsh-lab/files/2012/10/2006.12.14_Nature_Inflammation-Metabolic-Disorders_Review_GSH.pdf
2. Sonnenburg, Justin L., and Fredrik Bäckhed. “Diet–microbiota interactions as moderators of human metabolism.” Nature 535.7610 (2016): 56. Diet–microbiota interactions as moderators of human metabolism
3. The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
4. Statovci, Donjete, et al. “The impact of western diet and nutrients on the microbiota and immune response at mucosal interfaces.” Frontiers in immunology 8 (2017): 838. The Impact of Western Diet and Nutrients on the Microbiota and Immune Response at Mucosal Interfaces
5. Zinöcker, Marit, and Inge Lindseth. “The Western diet–microbiome-host interaction and its role in metabolic disease.” Nutrients 10.3 (2018): 365. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/3/365/pdf
6. Srour, Bernard, et al. “Ultra-processed food intake and risk of cardiovascular disease: prospective cohort study (NutriNet-Santé).” bmj 365 (2019): l1451. Ultra-processed food intake and risk of cardiovascular disease: prospective cohort study (NutriNet-Santé)
7. Schnabel, Laure, et al. “Association between ultraprocessed food consumption and risk of mortality among middle-aged adults in France.” JAMA internal medicine 179.4 (2019): 490-498.
8. Rico-Campà, Anaïs, et al. “Association between consumption of ultra-processed foods and all cause mortality: SUN prospective cohort study.” bmj 365 (2019): l1949. Association between consumption of ultra-processed foods and all cause mortality: SUN prospective cohort study
9. Lawrence, Mark A., and Phillip I. Baker. “Ultra-processed food and adverse health outcomes.” (2019): l2289. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Phillip_Baker4/publication/333483796_Ultra-processed_food_and_adverse_health_outcomes/links/5d47afc0a6fdcc370a7c53ea/Ultra-processed-food-and-adverse-health-outcomes.pdf
10. Moubarac, Jean-Claude, et al. “Food classification systems based on food processing: significance and implications for policies and actions: a systematic literature review and assessment.” Current obesity reports 3.2 (2014): 256-272.
11. Monteiro, Carlos A., et al. “NOVA. The star shines bright.” World Nutrition 7.1-3 (2016): 28-38. https://worldnutritionjournal.org/index.php/wn/article/download/5/4
12. Hall, Kevin D., et al. “Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain: an inpatient randomized controlled trial of ad libitum food intake.” Cell metabolism (2019). https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdfExtended/S1550-4131(19)30248-7
13. The secret to America’s most “disruptive” supermarket—fruits and vegetables
14. http://www.nutritionhub.org/food/real-vs-processed-food/
15. The rise of meatless meat, explained