Real Meat or Food-like Product?

‘Milk’ has been a subjective term in the past few years. Real milk comes from dairy cows and has lactose, a sugar.

The milk industry has been affected with products like ‘milks’ made of almonds, coconut, oat, rice, soy, hemp, cashew, flax, pea, peanut, and many more.

Echoing this product paradigm shift, the beef and chicken industries have seen the introduction of nonmeat ‘meat’ products.

Consumers, companies like Beyond Meat and Memphis Meats say, are looking for a product that reduces the emission of greenhouse gasses as well as improves nutritional content, as opposed to traditional meat products.

Michael Pollan is a professor at Harvard University who not only teaches, but also lectures on food, agriculture, health, and the environment. He has written countless books on the subject of food, and many documentaries have been created around his radical concept of real food.

WebMD published a list of seven rules for eating, adapted from Michael Pollan’s words to the CDC. His seven rules are:

1. Don’t eat anything your great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce.

3. Shop in the middle of the supermarket, where real foods tend to be.

4. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually decay, a good example of which is Twinkies. An exception is honey.

5. How you eat is important, too: Always leave the table a little hungry.

6. Regular meal times with families or friends around a table are tradition, and a good way to prevent snacking between meals.

7. Don’t buy food where you buy your gasoline. 20% of US food is eaten in the car, almost none of which could classify as real food.

Pollan goes on to speak on his new book, In Defense of Food, about American food. A quote from his book discusses the difference between what Americans are increasingly consuming compared to what our great-great grandmothers would recognize as food: “…Most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone- is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances”- no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy.”

A food-like substancethat could be the new name for fake meats like the Impossible Whopper or a Memphis Meat cell-cultured patties.

Introduced by Representative Roger Marshall of Kansas, M.D. This congressman is not only a member of the legislative arm of the United States of America, but he is also a doctor.

It’s understandable, then, that Representative (Dr.) Marshall would be concerned about food and the way it’s labelled, sometimes misleadingly. “Consumers should be able to rely on the information on food labels they see on the shelves to be truthful and not deceptive,” Rep. Marshall says. “For years now, alternative protein products have confused many consumers with misleading packaging and creative names… With this bill, consumers can be sure that the meat products they are buying are indeed real meat.”

His co-sponsor, Representative Anthony Brindisi, echoes his sentiments. “American families have a right to know what’s in their food. This bill is about safety and transparency, and will make sure that meat-lovers and vegans alike have the transparency and honest labels that can allow consumers to make their own decisions.”

The Real Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully Act (or Real MEAT Act) will seek to accomplish three things:

1. Establish a federal definition of beef that applies to food labels.

2. Clarify the imitative nature of alternative protein products and eliminate consumer confusion.

3. The FDA will have to notify the USDA if an imitation meat product is misbranded. If the FDA fails to begin enforcement procedures within 30 days of notification to the USDA, the Secretary of Agriculture (currently Sonny Perdue) is granted authority to seek enforcement action.

This bipartisan bill highlights the importance of such a piece of legislation, and consumers seeking to stay away from ‘food-like substances,’ as Michael Pollan calls them, will be better able to avoid protein substitutes when seeking the real thing.

The NDSU Collegiate cattlewomen did a nutritional comparison between ‘meatless meats’ and the real thing. The group concluded that real meat has fewer calories, much less sodium and carbohydrates, and more protein. Real beef also packs a superman-like nutritional punch where vitamins and minerals are concerned: Vitamins B12, B6, zinc, selenium, iron, niacin, and phosphorous are just the major players, in addition to all the essential amino acids. “Essential amino acids” are those that our bodies can’t build themselves, and we must eat them in order to be able to make proteins the way our bodies should. Proteins made from compounds like essential and nonessential amino acids function in growth, energy, immune function, and nutrient absorption. We can’t live and thrive without them.

“Meatless meat,” by comparison, contains some vitamins and minerals like those found in beef, but what the industry won’t tell you is that they are all added. Eating a meatless meat burger is akin to both consuming a textured meat alternative and popping a multivitamin at the same time, although Beyond Burger patties have only vitamins A, C, calcium, and iron in them, compared to the long list of nutrients found in real beef.

Many studies that came out in 2018 from the University of Minnesota, the Cleveland Clinic, and several others showed that taking multivitamins increased risks of various cancers, heart disease, and shortened lives. Taking a multivitamin of added nutrients is exactly what consumers of meatless meats do when they’re eating a Beyond Burger or any similar products, and various sciences now have reasonable doubt as to the healthiness of multivitamins, and indeed, multivitamins and their health benefits may be ‘unhealth benefits,’ causing illnesses rather than curing or preventing them. Eating a balanced diet is the best way to obtain the necessary nutrients- the natural way.

Registered nutritionist Jenny Rosborough also worries about the vegan or vegetarian meat substitutes and their perceived healthiness: Nutritional deficits can and do result from consuming highly processed foods, which is exactly what vegan meat substitutes are.

Meatless “meats,” therefore do not live up to their claims of perceived healthful advantages over the real thing. In fact, they severely lack much of the health and nutritional content that real meat has, with the addition of more salt and less vitamins and minerals, all wrapped up in an ultra-processed package.

Ingredients for the Beyond Burger are as follows: Water, pea protein isolate, canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, cocoa butter, mung bean protein, methyl-cellulose, potato starch, apple extract. Salt, potassium chloride, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, sunflower lecithin, pomegranate fruit powder, and beet juice extract.

Ingredients for the real thing, beef, are as follows: 100% beef.

The Beyond Burger violates Michael Pollan’s most important food rules: Not to eat anything with more than five ingredients, and not to eat anything that your great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. An unpronounceable ingredient list like that of the Beyond Burger is the very definition of a

“food-like substance.”

Congressman Marshall continued on to say of meatless meats “There’s no science behind…pink goo. We have no idea, the longterm impacts of it.” He also questions the safety of meatless meat: “We have no idea of the safety this product is going

through. Does it need to be refrigerated? If so, what temperature? What happens if it gets too cold? What happens when you freeze it? There’s a protein breakdown. What does that protein become? I’m a biochemistry major. I think there are a lot more questions than answers.”

Animals that we eat, especially beef cattle,

are primary consumers. They take land that is unfarmable and eat the grass that is an annual product of the land, keeping the area in a biological balance as it would have historically been. Beef cattle can take what we can’t eat (grass) and make it into a protein-, vitamin-, and mineral- packed product that fills our bodies with what they need in order

to grow and be strong, immunologically or otherwise.

If the meat substitute industry is not telling we consumers the truth about nutritional content of their products, what else are they not coming clean on? Cellcultured meats especially try to tell us that cell-cultured meat substitutes are more sustainable than traditional

beef systems. Do they really believe that their fossil-fuel-using facilities, which include the necessary lights for employees, incubators for their products, and shipments needed for feeding their cell cultures all add up to less fossil fuel use than the beef industry?

The Real MEAT Act, if it passes, will address consumer questions on

specific products as to what is real meat and what is not.

However, consumer questions concerning the nutritional and longterm health impacts, as well as environmental concerns with manufacturing of these foodlike substances, stand unanswered, as alone as a cow out of the fence, away from her baby, and twice as crazy.