The Impossible Burger: A Medical Perspective
/The new meatless, meat-like product is getting pretty good reviews. And while it is cool and ethical, from a medical perspective, there is no reason to call it “healthy”.
This week, we’re taking a break from digesting the latest big clinical trial to take a bite out of a new product that has, overnight it seems, popped up everywhere – the meatless burger. But I don’t want to focus on the taste or texture or bloody appearance. I’d like to focus on the science, and the implications for medicine.
Ok we’ve had Veggie Burgers forever, but they don’t taste like hamburgers.
Macronutrient breakdown of the impossible burger - looks a lot like a burger!
But there is something new under the sun, it seems. We now have the “impossible burger” by impossible foods.
What sets these patties apart from the typical veggie burger fare is two things. First, on a macronutrient level, they are really quite similar to beef patties. Take a look at the breakdown of protein and fats in the impossible burger compared to your typical veggie burger and an 85% lean hamburger.
You can see that in terms of protein, fat, and total calories, an impossible burger looks a lot like a regular old hamburger.
Mmm… leghemoglobin
But the secret sauce in all of this may be this little molecule called leghemoglobin. So called because it is a hemoglobin-like molecule that comes from legumes.
You’ll recognize heme – that little iron-binding molecule at the center of hemoglobin and myoglobin. It’s what gives meat some of that bloody, iron-y meaty flavor and appearance. Leghemoglobin was initially derived from soy bean roots, where it is used to supply oxygen to those nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the root nodules to do their nitrogen-fixing business. Impossible foods actually has transgenic yeast producing their leghemoglobin.
In July 2019, leghemoglobin was approved as a food color additive by the FDA – it’s red after all, and that opened the impossible burger to the mass market, hence the hype.
Is it safe? Probably. A bioinformatic study suggests leghemoglobin shouldn’t be allergenic, and rat-feeding studies didn’t show any worrying findings. And of course, we’ve been ingesting bits of this stuff whenever we eat legumes. But to be fair, there’s really no long term data.
So I’m assuming non-toxic, but most vociferously NOT assuming healthy. While technically, this is a veggie burger, it is not trying to be healthy or low-fat, it’s simply trying to be meatless, and that, it achieves.
As physicians, then, we should not recommend this to patients over meat for health reasons. There are a lot healthier plant-based foods to eat. But if a patient wants to limit their meat consumption for ethical, environmental, or other reasons, with the power of some biochemistry the challenge seems not quite so impossible.
This commentary first appeared on medscape.com.