Can my veggie sausages save the world?

0:00Chhavi Sachdev:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Chhavi Sachdev:up at Whole Foods Market. Did America's war on terror work? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. In the words of a former U.S. official, on September 11th, 2001, the terrorists hijacked not just airplanes, but also the direction of U.S. foreign policy. 25 years on, what were the unintended consequences of the war on terror? For the full story, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:08Is that a blowtorch? Yes. Okay, thanks. I'm Chavis Ajdev, and you're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that answers the juiciest of science questions.

1:21Chhavi Sachdev:Basically, I've diced it up, marinated it with pesto. Today, I'm watching Chef Demetrius prepare a unique dish. Did you cook it or did you just... No. No, so this is just straight from the freezer? Straight from the fridge. All right, well, you're slacking off as a chef then. No, simply. Okay, so maybe the dish itself isn't that special, but one of its ingredients is... The meats are not as pliable, right? Once you handle the meat, you find the base and you find loopholes to get things done. The chicken Chef Demetrius is working with here wasn't reared on a farm. This chicken was grown in a lab.

2:09So this is a best-to-cultivated chicken. And you call it meat when you're dealing with it? To you is meat?

2:17Chhavi Sachdev:Yes, I call it meat. The reason I'm watching Chef Demetrius is, of course, thanks to a question from one of our listeners.

2:29I'm Lisa Farrant. I am a senior tutor and I work in London and I'm originally from South Africa, a small city called Port Elizabeth. Lisa has been a vegetarian for many years, but lately she's found herself wondering something. So my question is kind of twofold. So the first part of it is, is it healthier to eat sort of synthetic meat alternatives on a daily basis instead of eating real meat? And the second part is, are those synthetic meats really a more sort of ethical choice when we think in terms of climate change, etc., rather than actually just farming real meat? As a conflicted pescatarian, someone who eats fish, but no other meat, I understand this curiosity.

3:14I don't miss meat, but I know enough people who've become vegetarian that do. Lisa is one of them. Like a good spaghetti bolognese with some beef, that's always delicious, especially in winter, so then I really do crave that. Fortunately for Lisa, the food industry has seen this market opportunity and filled it. I tend to call it fake mints. So fake mints, fake sausages, fake burger patties, those are all the things that I would eat probably at least once a week. I'd have a meal that includes that kind of food. So about once a week, Lisa eats these alt meats, as they are called. These are plant-based foods that are specifically designed to mimic the taste and texture of meat.

3:56Think chicken tikka, that is actually soy. Substitutes like these fulfil Lisa's cravings. Problem solved? Not quite. Yeah, I think being a vegetarian and being able to have a burger that is kind of similar to a beef burger that's juicy and all of that, that's great. But then I do wonder afterwards, should I have eaten that? I don't know. I don't want to look too closely at the ingredients just in case it's terrible for me and then I have to stop eating it altogether. So let's talk about the nutrition aspect of that. Like what are you actually concerned about when it comes to the fake meat, as you call it?

4:36Yeah, I just wonder sometimes if maybe things like the salt is really high in those products because something's making them taste okay. I have no knowledge of like food sciences or anything. So it'd be great to sort of help get some help making sense of what all those additions are. Also environmentally, you had a question about the impact of these meat analogues as well. So what are your concerns with the environment when you're eating meat substitutes? So I feel that in order to create these strange products, they probably have big factories somewhere. How is that impacting in terms of emissions or even for the crops that go into those products?

5:20So how is that affecting the environment? What about lab-grown meat? Have you considered that? I'm sure you've heard about it. Yeah, I've heard about it. I haven't really done much research into lab-grown meats because, to be honest, when I first heard about it ages ago, I just sort of wrote it off. But I have, in the past couple of days, just been thinking about that. And maybe I just don't understand what lab-growing meat is all about. And if I learn more, maybe my mind will be changed. So Lisa wants to know if alternative meats are good for her. She also wants to know about their effect on the planet.

5:57How do they compare to actual meats? Always with that, it's not so easy if we just generalise that around the world. Charlotte Bunga is a researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, and she studies how plant-based alternatives might help with the global transition to more healthy and sustainable diets. There are very, very different ways of producing livestock. So I think it's also important when we talk about that, that we are talking primarily about this very industrial livestock production that we're having in the world. As she points out, we have to be careful about generalizing when talking about meat production.

6:33Around the world, there is small-scale farming, free-range farming. There are even programs where livestock are a crucial part of environmental initiatives. For example, when grazing helps rehabilitate degraded grasslands. But when we're talking about large-scale industrial farming, there are environmental impacts. To produce meat requires a lot of land. According to some estimates, we require up to 50 % of the habitable land to produce livestock. And that's quite unsustainable in one way. But then, of course, this land is used to produce fodder, primarily also for the livestock. And that's associated with a lot of deforestation, etc., etc., which is associated with a lot of CO2 emissions.

7:17Particularly red meat is associated with such a high environmental impact, particularly CO2 emissions, because it requires quite a lot of fodder, of course. But then also because beef in particular is associated with a lot of methane emissions from the animals. And that has also a huge greenhouse gas effect. But are alternative meat products, which are made from plants, actually any better for the environment? That's a good question. And that is, of course, also you can't generalize that because it's very, very dependent on what you compare it to. and also, of course, what the alternative is based upon, what kind of ingredient it is based upon and the processing stage.

7:59But in general, we can say that on average, these products have a way lower environmental impact than the meat is going to replace. Red meat, like if you take a red meat burger patty and to replace it with a plant-based burger that is based on some legumes, for instance, then it's about 90 % less CO2 emissions. 90 % less? Yeah, that's what some of the calculations suggest. What we often say is kind of we want to like, or what we're doing is like cutting out the animal in the middle, right? Because a lot of these legumes, they're used also to feed the livestock. If we really take it very easily visually, then we just cut out the animal in the middle and eat them directly and process them.

8:48And what is also very interesting is because a lot of these alternative burger patties are also produced by the same companies. So a lot of the infrastructure is available. It does sound like plant-based alternatives to meat are better for the planet than meat itself. But listener Lisa also wanted to know how eating these plant-based alternatives might be affecting her health. The way nutrition scientists study this is they typically look at large cohorts of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Alice Callahan is a wellness reporter with The New York Times. She also has a Ph.D.

9:26in nutrition science. They ask them about their typical diet. How many times per week do you consume red meat like, you know, steak or pork? And then they track their health outcomes over time. So how many people in that big group of people develop type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease? How long do they live? And they see when they do these big studies, they see some really clear patterns emerge that people who regularly eat, especially a lot of processed meats like sausage or hot dogs, deli meats, bacon, and then also people who consume a lot of red meat do have higher risks of these chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

10:08some types of cancers, including colorectal cancer, and they tend to not live as long. And so, you know, we translate that to mean that for many of us, you know, especially when you look at the United States or the UK, we do tend to eat probably more meat than is optimal. Meat can benefit our health in many ways. It has high amounts of protein, iron, and B-complex I started eating fish because I was anemic, and I was told that the bioavailability of the heme iron was way higher than the lentils, beans and peas I was eating. But if you are someone who follows a diet that contains a lot of processed or red meats, you could probably benefit from cutting back.

10:56But what about when you really want a burger that looks and smells and tastes somewhat like a burger? something that's a lot like meat but isn't actually made of meat, how would that affect your health? So unfortunately, we don't have the kinds of studies that I just described to you that look at people's health over many years. We don't have good measures from those studies on plant-based meat consumption. These are more highly processed kind of meat alternatives. Those products have just not been around long enough, And they're also not consumed in large enough amounts to kind of do like these big cohort studies on them.

11:38So we don't have that kind of long term data on them. So that's a real gap in the evidence. There really isn't a lot of research about how plant based meat alternatives affect your health. But this is crowd science and we don't give up that easily. My name is Christopher Gardner. I am a nutrition scientist and a professor of medicine at Stanford University, where I have been for 33 years since I started a postdoc in 1993. Christopher studies the health effects of different types of diet, and he's very interested in the question of plants versus meats. I personally have been very plant forward, plant rich since 1983.

12:18How many years is that? That's a lot of years. And wasn't actually personally interested in these. I didn't really miss meat. But boy, as a nutrition scientist, I've been frustrated to suggest, hey, everybody, less red meat, more beans, peas and lentils for decades and decades and really wasn't seeing much movement. But then alternative meats appeared on the market and started to take off, which led Christopher to the same question Lisa is asking us. How do they affect your health? So like any good scientist, he designed a study. Two months, 36 participants, Half would eat meat in the first month of the study, half a plant-based meat alternative.

12:57In the second month, the two groups would switch. Now that's a short time frame with a relatively small sample size. And there's one other fairly massive caveat. It was funded by a company that makes alternative meat. And just before we hear about this one specific company, I do have to remind you that there are a variety of alt-meat brands if you're ever thinking about which one to buy. The money did not come from the federal government. It didn't come from a donor. We looked for it. Nobody wanted to give us the money to help these commercial companies sell more of their products because they were taking off.

13:34So we actually got the money from Beyond Meat. Okay, and that's not a conflict of interest? It's total conflict. It is an absolute conflict of interest. So I'll also preface that with saying over the course of my career, I have received industry funding at least six or seven times, and every previous one was a null finding that I published. It didn't work. So when we finished the study, I was getting ready for people to slander me for taking their money. And I went on social media and I said, just so you know, I have a pretty good track record here. I've taken industry money sometimes, prefer to take federal government money or donor money that's more objective.

14:13But in this case, I have a pretty good track record. If it didn't work, I say it doesn't work, and I publish it. Caveats aside, Christopher's team looked at a few different factors when comparing the health of subjects. One was blood pressure. One was a type of cholesterol that is associated with heart attacks or strokes. And they also looked at something called trimethylamine N-oxide, or TMAO, which is also associated with a higher risk of heart attack or stroke. And so after eight weeks of two servings a day on red meat or the Beyond Meat products and switching so that everybody did both but in random order, the TMAO was lower in the Beyond Meat.

14:57The LDL cholesterol went down in the Beyond Meat. And I can explain that because there was less saturated fat and more fiber. That's easy to explain. Almost everybody was two pounds lighter on the Beyond Meat. But how much can this study tell us about long-term health? This is our wellness reporter who has a PhD in nutrition science, Alice Callahan. These are short-term trials, so they all can last about two months. So as you can imagine, we can't in two months count the number of people that develop cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes or say anything about how long they will live. It looks like more data is needed.

15:36But given what she knows about nutrition and looking at the studies that have been conducted so far, Alice will say that. Probably at least in the short term, it doesn't make a huge difference to your health, whether you're consuming plant-based meat versus regular meat. These products, they're ultra-processed. And so I would not expect them to have the same health benefits as, you know, consuming whole plant foods like beans, peas, lentils, nuts, seeds. They contain all of these interesting plant chemicals, phytochemicals, like flavonoids and polyphenols that we know have kind of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

16:19Those can often be lost in processing, you know, and they also tend to be like digested more slowly and probably just a little bit better for our bodies all around. So, you know, I don't think we can say that these plant-based meats kind of come anywhere near the health benefits of consuming whole plant-based foods. But if all this talk of studies and ingredients and food comparisons is making your head spin, Alice has a wider point she thinks is worth considering. Anything that you're consuming kind of on an occasional basis once a week, even twice a week, it's probably not going to make or break anybody's diet.

16:56Whether that is, you know, an occasional serving of red meat, despite the data that we have, you know, it also suggests that having it in moderation does not come with huge health risks. And the same is probably true for these plant-based alternative products. having them occasionally. If you don't eat meat, but you really want the experience of enjoying something like a burger, you know, I wouldn't hesitate to enjoy that. But there is another alternative to meat that's been gaining more and more traction over the last few years, cultivated or lab-grown meat. And that's what we'll look at.

17:36Chhavi Sachdev:September's always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their September stock up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavorful, nourishing food. Even better, there are hundreds of sales. Get dinner going with canned soups and veggies. Lean on frozen pizzas, pastas, and seafood everyone loves. Their Build Your Own Family Meals feeds four for just$35. Stock up at Whole Foods Market. Did America's war on terror work? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. In the words of a former U.S. official, on September 11, 2001, the terrorists hijacked not just airplanes, but also the direction of U.S.

18:19Chhavi Sachdev:foreign policy. 25 years on, what were the unintended consequences of the war on terror? For the full story, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:39You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that takes your meaty questions and gives you facts to chew on. Later in the year, we'll be celebrating our 10th anniversary. And as the show is nothing without our listeners, we want you to join in. We're putting together a special episode of the show, and we'd like you to tell us what CrowdScience means to you. Perhaps an episode of CrowdScience changed the way you thought about something or inspired you in some way. Where do you listen to CrowdScience? Is it on headphones on the bus, or with your family in the kitchen, or somewhere really exotic?

19:15We want to hear all your CrowdScience stories. Email them to crowdscience at bbc.co.uk or WhatsApp us a message or voice note to plus 44 8000 314 773.

19:33I'm Chavis Achtev, and this week we're answering CrowdScience listener Lisa's questions about the impact of plant-based alt meats on both the planet and her health. But there is another alternative to meat that's been gaining more and more traction over the last few years, cultivated or lab-grown meat. Currently, a handful of countries around the world let people buy cultivated meat in a store or eat it at a restaurant. Here in India, although commercial sales have not yet been approved, a few startups are already experimenting with the technology betting on a future where cultivated meat will be widely sold.

20:10Chhavi Sachdev:So it's basically a pesto chicken bruschetta which is on a saado. So it's pesto chicken on a saado baguette. This is Chef Demetrius from BioCraft Foods. He's offering me a lab-grown version of a meat I haven't eaten for more than 30 years. You just want to have the chicken, just take a bit and try. You want to go take it one step every time. Okay. You know, I haven't eaten chicken in so long. I'm not sure. Does it taste chickeny? Boiled chicken. Probably the salt levels would be lower. A half lower. But a partial that works. So anyway, I'm stalling. I should try this.

20:52Wow, the bread is crunchy. It doesn't taste like tofu for sure.

20:59Chhavi Sachdev:No, no, definitely. Hmm, that's as chickeny as I've gotten in a long time. But chef Demetrius and founder Kamal Nayen Tibrewal assured me no chickens were harmed or even touched for this dish. So there are two different domains for alternate meat right now. One is plant-based and one is cultivated meat. Unlike plant-based products, cultivated meat contains actual animal cells grown in a lab. The first cell that you start with, It's stored in a bank kind of environment. And that's not just one single vial. It's like multiple vials. And then you have working cell vials. So the thing is that idea is that whenever you do a batch, so you do it in a more of a continuous process.

21:39Chhavi Sachdev:Once you have added the cells and everything, if the cells have achieved certain density, you harvest it. Then again, the same thing happens every time. So you don't need to get in the mother cell every time. So cultivated meat is grown from a starter cell. And once you have these starter cells, You don't need to keep harvesting new ones. You can just grow your meat over and over again from the same initial cells. But how do you get these cells? In our case, the cells were extracted from an egg. So this was like a one-time process. And once you have done that, you never need another repeated extraction again.

22:14Chhavi Sachdev:If you have got your cell stable, stable cell lines and everything, you don't need to repeat that whole process. So that's the beauty of this. This was done many, many years ago? This was done many years ago. And not by us, but like where someone is. our collaborator, and they made this whole cell line and we got it from them. But again, we then did our own kind of process to make it suitable for our application. And no chicken has come near your product again? No, no. No chickens crossed the road for this. But the process Kamal mentions, that's the process of actually growing the meat. It differs from company to company, but it follows roughly the same pattern.

22:49Once collected, the cells are placed in a machine called a bioreactor with nutrients that help them grow. These nutrients can come from plants or they can come from serums containing animal products. Biocraft uses plant-based scaffolding or nutrients, which means they can actually control how much chicken is in this lab-grown meat. Currently,

23:12Chhavi Sachdev:percentage would place it like a 1 to 5%. That's it. We can even go 10, 15, 20 % in the morrow. But what would the benefit of that be? would it add more chewiness or some fiber or something like that or is it it will be more and more from a nutritional perspective the Korea I mean the vitamins minerals that you're talking about so that would be the first one but after a while from a fat component from again from texture component if you are now making it from a particular tissue perspective because 50 10 % now qualifies for as a tissue so now the tissue proper proper tissue is getting formed in a way so you will really get that kind of you know fiber formation much more better in that way.