Alternative meats are finally hitting the mainstream

Beyond Meats IPO success signals meat alternatives here to stay

Alternative meats are finally hitting the mainstream.


Stephen Johnson
02 May, 2019

Image source: Beyond MeatsTECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Beyond Meats began trading publicly on Thursday under the ticker BYND.

Beyond Meats and Impossible Foods are two alternative meat companies that've been dominating the space in recent years, with investors such as Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Alternative meat companies could significantly help the U.S. food industry cut down on environmentally harmful practices, namely the raising of cattle.







TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Beyond Meats began trading publicly on Thursday under the ticker BYND.

Beyond Meats and Impossible Foods are two alternative meat companies that've been dominating the space in recent years, with investors such as Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Alternative meat companies could significantly help the U.S. food industry cut down on environmentally harmful practices, namely the raising of cattle.


Shares of Beyond Meat soared on Thursday as the plant-based food company began trading publicly for the first time. The stock was trading at $68 (as of 2:30 p.m. E.T. Thursday) — more than three times higher than what the company expected.

The takeaway? Meat alternatives are quickly hitting the mainstream, and they're bringing in big money. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are currently the two biggest names in the meat alternative industry. You can find Beyond Meat hamburgers in restaurants such as Carl's Jr., A and W, Del Taco and T.G.I. Friday's, while Impossible Foods offers meatless burgers in some 7,000 U.S. restaurants, as well as Burger King, which recently released the Impossible Whopper.

In a market test in St. Louis Burger King restaurants, the Impossible Whopper performed so "exceedingly well" that Burger King wants to offer the vegetarian sandwich nationwide. One problem: Impossible Foods currently doesn't have enough supply to meet demand.

The company said in a statement that it "recognizes the inconvenience that this shortage is causing and sincerely apologizes to all customers, particularly those who have come to depend on the additional foot traffic and revenue that the Impossible Burger has generated."

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are doing well, to say the least. But with large food suppliers, such as Tyson and Purdue, also developing meatless food products — don't expect these two names to be the only vendors in the alternative meat space for long.

"There's a sense that there's a movement going on that's much bigger than any one company," Beyond Meats CEO Ethan Brown told Vox in April.

​The environmental effects of the meat alternatives industry

Raising animals for the meat that ends up in our restaurants is an extraordinarily resource-intensive process. Globally, livestock farming accounts for 15 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, cattle exact a heavy toll on the environment through the large amounts of food the animals require, the land used to grow that food, and, most importantly, the methane they produce. After all, methane is a greenhouse gas that's 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide.


Of course, there are many other problems with the U.S. food industry, including, to name a few, the antibiotics given to animals (and the consequent antibiotic resistance they build up), the energy consumed in the maintenance and transport of meat products, and the ethics of killing animals for meat — especially in the context of factory farms.

Meat alternative companies could help the nation cut back on all of these environmental stressors. A 2018 study from the University of Michigan — which, to be sure, was commissioned by Beyond Meat — compared the environmental costs of producing meatless and traditional beef burgers, finding that producing meatless burgers takes:

99% less water

93% less land

90% fewer greenhouse gas emissions

Nearly 50% less energy

Link:  https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/beyond-meat-ipo

Should ‘ultra-processed’ foods include health warnings?

Ultra-processed danger Should ‘ultra-processed’ foods include health warnings? STEPHEN JOHNSON  30 May, 2019

A growing body of research, including two recent studies, shows how ultra-processed foods can lead to multiple diseases and shorten lifespan.

Ultra-processed foods include soft drinks, packaged snacks, reconstituted meat, pre-prepared frozen meals, and more.

Other research suggests that warning labels on food can affect what people choose to eat.


The U.S. government requires sellers of cigarettes and alcohol to include health warnings on the labels of their products. Should vendors of "ultra-processed foods" be required to do the same?

New research has some saying yes.

This week, the BMJ published a pair of studies that show how diets high in ultra-processed foods are linked to significantly higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, and death.

The findings build upon decades worth of evidence showing that processed foods can be devastating to long-term health.

In the four groups that make up the NOVA food classification system, ultra-processed foods are ranked as the unhealthiest. They include "soft drinks, packaged snacks, reconstituted meat, pre-prepared frozen meals," with ingredients like "sweeteners, colors, preservatives, and food-derived substances like casein, lactose and gluten."

These foods are unhealthy not only because they contain bad ingredients or lack nutrients, but also because they undergo processes like extrusion, molding, and milling.

"The nature of the cause is associated with the physical and chemical changes that happen to the food as a result of this high degree of industrial processing," Mark Lawrence, who co-wrote an editorial on the pair of recent studies, told Australia's ABC News. "It's an independent risk factor irrespective of the presence of, say, sodium or added sugar in the food."


Lawrence said the recent studies, along with the solid body of research on ultra-processed foods, have multiple implications for policy.

"I think the front of pack labelling is the most tangible one at the moment," Lawrence said. "It could be something as simple as, is this an ultra-processed food or not."

​Junk food warnings


Would requiring makers of ultra-processed junk foods to include such labels on food be government overreach? Provided that you're okay with the warnings the U.S. government currently puts on tobacco and alcohol, there seems to be little reason why we shouldn't place the same labels on ultra-processed food. In fact, there may even be more reason to include warnings on junk food, as noted by David Katz for Time:

". . . unlike tobacco or alcohol, food is supposed to be good for us. It is supposed to be sustenance, not sabotage. You can't smoke tobacco and avoid tobacco. You can't drink alcohol and avoid alcohol. But you can eat food and avoid junk. There is, in fact, an impressive range of overall nutritional quality in almost every food category — so we could abandon junk food altogether, and quickly learn not to miss it."

There's some reason to think junk-food warning labels would be effective in affecting what people choose to eat. In a 2018 study from the University of Melbourne, researchers found that warning labels — particularly graphic, negative warnings — encouraged people to exercise self-control when selecting meals.

"We can really see a signature of deploying this self-control to resist unhealthy choices," study co-author Stefan Bode of the University of Melbourne told Australia's ABC News. "This is something we're really excited about to follow up and see how this happens."



Link: https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/processed-food-warning

Vapes are full of flavors—and fungi

THE DICE


HEALTH
Vapes are full of flavors—and fungi


Your lungs could be the ones to suffer.

By Kat Eschner April 24, 2019

The list of health concerns about vaping grows longer.


Deposit Photos


When they first came on the market, industry advocates originally touted vapes—electronic nicotine delivery systems such as a JUUL—as a smoking cessation aid. In the time since, they’ve exploded in popularity among young people, leading to worries that brands like JUUL are contributing to a new and dangerous nicotine addiction epidemic among teens who would never have thought to light up a traditional cigarette. E-cigarettes have public officials concerned, and a new studyfrom Harvard researchers suggests there are two more reasons to worry: the presence of fungi and bacteria in vape juice and e-cigarette cartridges.




In the study, David Christiani and his colleagues tested 75 e-cigarette products in total for two contaminants: endotoxin, which is part of the cell walls of a class of bacteria, and glucan, which is part of the makeup of fungi. Chronic exposure to endotoxin is linked to asthma and reduced lung capacity; while the form of glucan they found is known to cause inflammation, which is a big problem in a sensitive system like your lungs. Both microbial products are found in many places out in the world. The issue here is that they’re in a substance that’s inhaled—and inhaled frequently.

Of the products they tested, of which about half were e-cigarette liquid and half were cartridges, they found endotoxin in 17 products, or 23 percent, of products. Eighty-one percent, or 61 products, contained glucan. Even though Christiani says the concentrations of these two microbial products “are not very high,” knowing they’re present “adds a couple more agents to the already long list of exposures from e-cigarette products,” Christiani says.








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E-cigarettes work by heating up a nicotine-containing liquid so it vaporizes and can be inhaled by users. This liquid also contains flavorings, from the traditional (mint) to the avant-garde (banana.) The flavors are thought to be one of the reasons that e-cigarettes have become so popular among young people. Nobody really knows what happens to the juice chemically when it’s heated up.. Many compounds break down into dangerous chemicals when heated, and the researchers still don’t know very much about what’s in e-cigarette fluid.

Experts do know that some flavorings are linked to heart and blood vessel damage.) And there is a body of evidence showing that e-cigarettes product harmful carcinogens and other chemicals, as well as exposing users to metal byproducts from the devices themselves. However, because e-cigarettes are loosely regulated, with a huge diversity of products in the marketplace, it’s hard to definitively state what’s in them. It doesn’t help that the e-cigarette industry, like the traditional tobacco industry, has a stake in obscuring the health risks of their addictive (and lucrative) products.

This new study, which looked at brand-new products, also points to the fact that e-cigarette products are getting contaminated with microbes somewhere in the production process. In the case of cartridges, he speculates that the presence of microbial products may be the result of contamination on the cotton wicks that are part of the cartridge. But nobody knows yet, though his team is going to try and find out in further research.



Sanjay Sethi, a professor of medicine who specializes in lung health at the University of Buffalo, says the findings are “interesting, but not surprising.” Sethi was not involved with the study. He would like to see further research elaborating on how the levels of endotoxin and glucan in e-cigarettes stack up against those in traditional cigarettes, which he says would give the results more context. However, he agrees the current study’s findings are another reason for concern about e-cigarettes.



tags:
e-cigarettes
vaping
asthma
lung cancer
lungs
cigarettes
health


Link: https://www.popsci.com/vaping-fungi-bacteria