I bought and tasted an Impossible Burger. I bought one for nearly $20 from the Counter, a custom burger restaurant. I and my family can confirm that the Impossible Burger looks and tastes like a real hamburger.
The Impossible Burger is about the same when compared to a regular beef burger in terms of health. The Impossible Burger tends to have more sodium and more fat (coconut fat) than regular burgers. The Vegeburgers are about ten times better on environmental impact as regular beef.
There are over 5000 restaurants selling the Impossible Burger. The cheapest version is $1.99 Impossible Slider from White Castle. There are only a few Burger Kings in the country offering an Impossible Whopper.
Impossible Foods uses soy leghemoglobin or “heme” to mimic meat taste. It is an iron-rich protein from soy plants mass-produced using yeast.
Impossible Burger just had another large funding round and has a valuation of about $2 billion.
They compete with Beyond Burger which also makes a new Vegeburger. Beyond Burger has a valuation of about $3 billion and sells burgers and meat at Target, Whole Foods and other grocery stores and some restaurants.
SOURCES – Impossible Burger, Personal Taste test
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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“The global warming crowd and the animal rights people have found common cause and I don’t deny global warming but those two pillars of the left wing agenda dovetailing so nicely is a little convenient.”
First of all that’s not an argument. Secondly vegans only make up 3% of the population, they’re hardly a pillar of anything.
Impossible Steak is next scheduled product roll-out.
While optimal intake is not exactly the same nutritionally person to person, blood levels are blood levels. If it did not matter, why does exercise reduce cholesterol? And we know that exercise is associated with lots of good stuff.
I think it is something you don’t want to get out of hand. That said, I am not convinced that the drugs that reduce it, actually improve health. I think you want it to be in their recommended range because of food choices and exercise…otherwise you are probably correcting a symptom rather than the disease. Though I am not suggesting anyone should stop taking what is prescribed, or to exercise if you are not capable.
If the drugs really are that good, I would have expected to see sizable gains in life expectancy. The reality, in the US is that it is going down…though it would probably be static if it was not for the increase in opiate overdoses.
It’s a soy burger. It has carbs and is manufactured and uses soy heme and about 50 different other ingredients (most of which are various lab-sourced yeast cultures). What the company doesn’t say is the amount of energy and materials that goes into making this stuff all the way throughout the food chain (e.g., processed potato, textured wheat, synthetic vitamins). Basically what they’ve done is try to re-create beef artificially and added a bunch of unnecessary risk and costs to a proven product.
Ground beef is beef and has animal heme. Zero carbs and naturally produced amino acids that we all need. The Earth isn’t getting destroyed by beef cattle.
Virtue signaling “food”.
Eventually someone will get an allergy from their product, or get sick or some other malady from consuming laboratory “food” and then the company will be toast.
They have flip-flopped on that. There is no good saturated fat. The coconut thing is officially dead. Though a small amount is needed. But you are just about guaranteed to get that no mater what.
The only one you generally need to supplement, or make food choices to get, is omega 3. And I personally feel that the salmon oil is by far the best way to supplement. If you are a vegi though, there are other options like walnuts and flax seed oil. I’d avoid the “toasted” walnut oil. It might taste nice but it is loaded with AGEs (advanced glycation endproducts) which appropriately accelerate ageing and disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product
“too much” AND “for whom”
Too much for one person is just right for the next and not enough for the third.
Public nutrition keeps trying to recommend the same thing for a 50 kg teenage girl… a 100 kg 65 year old couch potato and an athlete who burns through 50 km desert races.
For now, we can just go to Carl’s Jr and order a Beyond Burger with added bacon, and make a vegetarian cry.
But I have to admit that baconnaise is pretty good. If they figure out the bacon texture then we’re set.
Shhhh! All we did is figure out how to make yeast bleed…
It gets really hard to find a food and declare whether it fits in the healthy or unhealthy category these days. I guess we can still stay away from sugar.
Honestly, even if it was cheaper and healthier… I eat more steak than hamburgers. Giving up “real” hamburger would affect, like, 10 lbs of my meat consumption a year. Or less. And I’m not giving up steak just because I can get plant burger at a fast food joint. Fast food will kill you.
A wise man once said if we weren’t intended to eat animals they wouldn’t be made out of meat.
That said, I’d be happy to try an impossible burger, but the only place around here that sells them is White Castle and I sure as hell don’t need to be eating sliders.
Like literally everything else, it is a problem only when too much is consumed. The line where “too much” lies is hotly debated, and highly variable based on thousands of factors.
Yes, lots less.
Bulk of the contents are wheat/soy protein, coconut oil and potato protein, heme and lots of trace stuff the “natural/chemical obsessive” folks will have a problem with.
No free lunch: highly bio available heme iron
DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-13-0733
Agreed about a lot of that but with regard to the last sentence: I don’t feel guilty at all about killing an animal to eat but factory farming is hell on earth so I’d love if a *cheap*, healthy alternative out competed and reduced it. If you don’t give a shit about that, all the antibiotic resistance factory farms are breeding should concern you.
Is high cholesterol a problem? For most demos, higher cholesterol is associated with lower all-cause mortality. We have been measuring and attempting to control the wrong things.
Saturated fat leads to higher cholesterol, which has not yet had it’s thesis challenged as strongly.
Also, it depends on the ratios. If you’re adding saturated fat in replacement of refined carbs it’s not so bad, but if it’s reducing protein, then it’s just a calorie boost that for most people’s diets is unnecessary.
It’s not like my burgers are pure beef. I use the “ultimate umami burger” recipe, slightly modified. A bit of fish sauce does amazing things for a hamburger. And you want a bit of sugar in there for the Maillard reaction.
Man, the hippies are gonna flip their shit when they find out their special burgers are genetically engineered.
What is the amino acid content breakdown?
I looked at https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list
but the impossible burger is not listed
+1 for The Counter. Great place. Good shakes.
As an ardent capitalist I believe in preserving the tasty species by eating them.
(Eating yummy critters makes a market for the yummy critters, people proceed to grow the yummy critters to meet market demands, yummy critter genome survives!)
For a long time I was rather down on the idea of meat substitutes until I realized we could make a beef substitute that tasted better than real beef. We could make a bacon that was more bacon-y than bacon.
We have the technology!
What is the proof that animal protein is more costly to the environment than agriculture? The global warming crowd and the animal rights people have found common cause and I don’t deny global warming but those two pillars of the left wing agenda dovetailing so nicely is a little convenient. I have heard scientists who claim that beef has been unfairly demonized. There is plenty of hard scrabble land unsuitable for farming but great for grazing cattle. How many acres of rainforest have been cut down for palm oil or soy farming? Does agriculture not have a cost? My guess is its highly underestimated. Beef is nutritionally dense with the right combination of minerals and amino acids that our bodies require. It is very easily digested and used by our bodies. It is well established that the modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes and likely a host of other maladies are caused by insulin resistance which is caused by excess consumption of carbs and sugar, not meat, not fat. We seem to not ever reconcile with this fact. Nothing against the impossible burger in particular but it seems to me like its not really solving a big problem unless you are a vegetarian because you don’t want to hurt animals.
LOL
Is saturated fat unhealthy? You should recheck health guidelines. Saturated fat is no longer called out as unhealthy. The whole low fat nutritional thesis is crumbling.
LOL.
Coconut fat isn’t healthy. It’s high in saturated fat.
Do these cause you to produce more or less methane than a natural real burger?
It’s not about health yet, it’s about CO2 emissions.
Have you seen the list of ingredients? If you didn’t know what the product is, would you put them in your mouth?
Agreed on the salt; That’s only really a concern for people with kidney disease. I’m not so sure about the coconut oil, though.
I grew up in the country, I am also utterly devoid of any guilt over eating animals.
I’m not sure that it is less healthy if that claim is just based on it having more fat. The burger bun is probably far worse for you than some healthy coconut fat. High sodium is also over-hyped as a health risk.
For now, the market seems to be people looking to avoid the guilt of eating animal meat but unwilling to relinquish burgers.
They would need to get a lot cheaper to threaten meat’s market. Me, I’m also willing to try it, but it has to be cheaper and healthier than meat to really convince me.
As a zero guilt omnivore, I’m not going to buy something just out of misguided guilt.
I might be interested if they got the price down to the same as regular hamburger, AND it wasn’t less healthy on top of that. I mean, if I’m going to eat a meat substitute it better be healthier than meat, I’m not paying extra for more salt and fat.
I had the impossible burger at my local panini place, the price was +$9.
The +89% global warming potential alternative was +$7
I expect it fill the usual niche role, but not a panacea.
Have tried Impossible and Beyond a couple times and am very excited about these catching on, due to their lower environmental footprint. I would think that once they ramp up in volume the price would be significantly better than beef… impossible patty Burger should be a $1 or 2 cheaper than beef burger, rather than the current case of adding about $3.50 to standard price.