Meat Alternatives
On May 1, Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a ban on the sale of lab-grown meat in Florida. (Alabama passed a similar bill on Tuesday; Arizona and Tennessee may soon follow suit.)
The new law is meant to protect Florida's billion-dollar-per-year cattle industry, as DeSantis acknowledges, but he also chose to frame what was, in essence, a business decision in terms of an epic clash between ideologies. As he said last week,
"Florida is fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish, or bugs, to achieve their authoritarian goals."
Of course. But in the real world, Florida's new law, like the ones emerging in other states, isn't a bug ban but rather a preemptive strike against an industry that isn't quite an industry yet.
In the U.S., two California-based companies, GOOD Meat and Upside Foods, currently have FDA approval to make lab-grown chicken, and, since June 2023, they have permission from the USDA to sell it. But you can't buy their product. After a brief stint on the menus of just two restaurants, sales in the U.S. are on hold owing to limited supplies. Elsewhere in the world, regulatory approval has been granted in Singapore, Israel, and the Netherlands, but cultivated meat isn't available to the public yet in those countries either. If you want to eat meat that's not meat, your most easily found options are plant-based alternatives: Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, MorningStar Farms, Amy's Kitchen, and about a dozen other brands.
Meanwhile, a battle is underway, but it's not the cartoonish, conspiratorial affair that Governor DeSantis described. Rather, it's the sort of routine, high-stakes clash you'd expect among rival industries competing for a 1 trillion dollar global market.
The cattle industry and other animal meat producers are at war with plant-based meats and, increasingly, with the nascent lab-grown meat industry. These conflicts caught my eye because data is among the key weapons. Each of the three industries wants you to know that according to the most reliable evidence, what they serve is now – or will someday be – healthiest, most sustainable, and most appealing to consumers.
I'll be describing some of the data here, including two new studies. Some of the findings may surprise you.
Here's something that's not particularly surprising though: Thanks to statistics and other quantitative methods developed in the 20th century, we have a historically unprecedented ability to understand the impact of meat products on our health, our environment, and our preferences as consumers, and yet the data driving the Meat Wars is prone to biased interpretation, cherrypicking, and other forms of misuse.
Why is this important?
Globally, demand for meat is rapidly increasing due to population growth and rising incomes – the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) projects a doubling in current demand by 2050 – but concerns have been raised about every possible approach to scaling up, including the environmental impacts of animal meat production, the ethics of animal slaughter and consumption, and the healthiness of eating meat. Other concerns are grounded in questions about the sustainability, health impacts, and economic consequences of scaled up plant-based meat production or a meaningfully large lab-grown meat industry. There are many competing narratives.
This week my focus is on disagreements about the sustainability and health impacts of animal vs. plant-based beef. Next week, I'll touch on other types of meat, including the lab-grown variety, and I'll discuss consumer preferences. As you'll see, what's most sustainable may or may not be what's best for your health, and what's best for your health may not be what you most want to eat.
A recent analysis
I want to start with a recent review of the sustainability and health data. The review was published this February in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Lead author Dr. Andrew McGregor and a team of researchers at Macquarie University reviewed the data and reflected on its production, which is to say they considered how things like funding, industry bias, and study design influence what the data tells us. They emphasize that"central to the future of plant-based meat and animal-based meat industries is the scientific evidence being assembled to promote or critique different types of meat," while also alluding to the "infodemic" of conflicting information currently available.
Although McGregor et al. themselves acknowledge funding from All G Foods, an alternative protein company, their treatment of the data is admirably impartial. I'll talk about sustainability first, then health.
Sustainability
McGregor and colleagues reviewed 36 studies on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water impacts. These LCA studies were mostly conducted in North America and Europe. Here are some key findings:
1. There's consensus that the production of plant-based meat releases less greenhouse gases than the production of animal beef. The difference is staggering. Greenhouse gas emissions are more than 85% to 95% lower for plant-based meat, on average, depending on the specific product and production methods. The difference mainly arises from methane produced by eructation (cow burps). To a lesser extent, cow farts, cow plop, and the processing, storage, and transportation of beef also boost emissions. (A separate issue is increased carbon emissions resulting from deforestation or other clearing of land to grow crops for humans as well as livestock.)
2. Consensus for land use is similarly high. Conventional beef requires 95%+ more land than plant-based beef to produce, mainly because cows need a place to graze and, often, land to grow the crops that feed them.
3. Cattle beef also tend to use much more water than plant-based meats. In addition, cow poop and, to a lesser extent, the fertilizers used for livestock feed crops, cause much more water pollution in the form of eutrophication (increased nutrients that promote algal and bacterial growth while killing wildlife and causing other damage).
In sum, beef from cows is much less sustainable than plant-based meats. This is a familiar conclusion, as it tracks with the pervasive "beef-is-bad-for-the-planet" narrative that stems from many sources – the most influential, perhaps, at least among the general public, being Michael Pollan's 2006 bestseller "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
Nuance and misrepresentation
Dr. McGregor and colleagues add some important nuances to the beef-is-bad narrative. Sustainability effects vary according to the metrics used, and both industries are guilty at times of cherrypicking evidence in favor of their own sustainability. The cattle industry isn't the only data villain in the story. For instance, plant-based meat advocates often claim that cattle use more water, which is a reasonable generalization, but the data shows that beef cattle may actually use less water when cows graze on rain-fed pastures.
There are more egregious examples. Up until recently, Beyond Meat's website claimed that 51% of greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock production. As noted in a 2019 study, Beyond Meat has cited figures like this either without references, or with links to refuted studies. (According to an authoritative, widely-cited FAO estimate, livestock production now accounts for about 14.5% of GHG emissions worldwide.)
McGregor and colleagues note that that each side may emphasize – or choose to ignore – the data that best suits their interests. As Dr. McGregor noted in an email to me, the cattle industry
"may omit or downplay some indirect emissions – eg contemporary and historical emissions from deforestation / land clearing – whereas plant-based industries may emphasise them. So these battles rage on with the appearance of objective science but reflecting very subjective interests."
I'm not sure I would describe an emphasis on deforestation as subjective. The cattle industry is implicated in an estimated 80% of the rapid deforestation occurring in the Amazon, for instance, and the environmental impacts such as increased carbon emissions are severe. But I agree with Dr. McGregor's broader point that data are sometimes downplayed or ignored. Again, it's too simplistic to dismiss the cattle industry as the bad guy. Although this industry is clearly hard on the environment, sustainability is an umbrella concept that prior studies haven't sufficiently explored. As McGregor et al. point out, many studies assume that beef production would become more sustainable if we simply revert to plant-based alternatives, but this fails to consider the impacts on farmers and local economies, or changes that would result from the expansion of new technologies used to create plant-based meats.
Health
"Beef-is-bad" narratives are often grounded in claims that red meat consumption promotes cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other adverse health outcomes. I'm persuaded by the data on this. Overconsumption of beef and other red meat is clearly risky, although, as I've discussed elsewhere, it's not clear how much constitutes too much. (In the U.S., a widely-recommended maximum is about 350 to 500 grams per week – 18-24 ounces uncooked; 12-18 ounces, cooked. In the U.K., the National Health Service recommends no more than 630 grams of per week. These figures are well below median levels of consumption.) Still, it doesn't automatically follow that plant-based meat is healthier.
McGregor and colleagues reviewed 13 studies that compared the nutritional content of animal beef to that of plant-based beef. Plant-based beef products varied widely in composition, but some clear trends emerged:
–Plant-based beef tends to be lower in energy, protein content, fat, iron, and zinc, and it's cholesterol-free.
–Plant-based beef tends to be higher in carbohydrates, fiber, and sodium, and it often contains food additives.
Arguably there's no "winner" here but rather trade-offs whose importance depends on a person's overall diet. For a given quantity of beef consumption, plant-based beef might be better for someone who needs more fiber and less cholesterol, but not if that person has an urgent need to cut back on sodium. Since the products vary so much in composition, health-conscious consumers should be reading the labels.
To illustrate: Beyond Meat burgers have about 35% less saturated fat than 80/20 lean beef, but the same can't be said of Beyond Meat sausage links. (Beyond Meat doesn't say whether their sausage is intended to be a substitute for beef or pork – a wise move on their part, since it doesn't taste like either one.) An uncooked Beyond Meat sausage link has 6g of fat per 100g link, which is almost the same as the amount contained in 80/20 beef. (At the other extreme, Lightlife's Smart Ground plant-based crumbles have zero saturated fat, and very little sodium or carbohydrates, because the product mainly consists of water and soy protein concentrate. This raises a semantic issue I'll discuss next week: "plant-based meat" is a term widely used within the industry and among scientists, but you might question the logic of calling it meat as opposed to, say, "plant-based protein".)
Nutrient analyses are informative, but we also need data on the effects of consumption. McGregor and colleagues only identified one experimental study that systematically compared health outcomes among people eating each type of beef. This study, published in 2022, was funded by a plant-based meat company, and the researchers expected to find that plant-based beef is healthier. Instead, no clear differences were observed. (The fact that the data runs counter to the funders' interests doesn't prove that it was a strong study, but it does at least seem to rule out conflict of interest effects.)
A new study
The results of the 2022 study are corroborated by a new experiment published last month in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers at Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation asked 89 healthy, meat-eating adults with slightly elevated blood sugar levels to spend 8 weeks eating fixed quantities of animal or plant-based meats. (The animal meats were not restricted to beef.) The focus of the study was on biomarkers of cardiovascular health; the researchers predicted lower LDL cholesterol and other favorable results among those who consumed the plant-based meats.
Once again, we have a team of surprised researchers. At the end of the 8-week period the two groups showed no significant differences on key outcomes, including LDL cholesterol levels. What makes this finding particularly surprising is that the plant-based meat group was presumably eating much less cholesterol.
It's tempting to conclude, on the basis of these two studies, that plant-based meats are not generally healthier than animal meats. Rather, what's best for each person depends on their dietary needs, and no industry should be advising the entire population to eat more of their particular version of meat.
Unfortunately, even this conclusion is a bit overstated. Both studies were small (36 and 89 participants, respectively). Both lasted only 8 weeks. And both succumb to a perennial problem in nutrition research that I've discussed in in other newsletters: If you don't know exactly what people are eating, it's hard to know how diet impacts their health over time.
The problem here is mostly logistics: Researchers can't control exactly what people eat for an extended period (e.g., 8 weeks), and it's difficult to obtain accurate records of literally everything each individual consumes. In the new study, people recorded what they ate for four 3-day periods, which meant that researchers acquired consumption data for 12 out of the 56 days of the study, or 21% of the study's total duration. Even if the records were precise (they weren't) and completely accurate (that's unknown), the researchers would still lack data on the majority of what participants ate. For instance, it's unclear whether or not the plant-based group compensated for the reduction in cholesterol through other food choices.
Data is only as good as the measures used to acquire it, and good statistics can't make up for weak measures. I wouldn't conclude anything from this study other than the notion that any health effects of switching from animal to plant-based meats are not likely to be dramatic.
My gut (no pun intended) tells me that plant-based meats tend to be healthier if you're consuming healthy amounts of protein and other key nutrients across your entire diet – i.e., not too much, not too little. But I don't think the data allows for such a plant-friendly conclusion just yet. More on this next week, including a response from the lead author to the issues I've raised here.
Final thoughts
In the 2014 Netflix documentary Cowspiracy, we're told that in terms of water use, "eating one hamburger is the equivalent of showering for two entire months." The film is larded with statistical factoids like this, and none of them are helpful.
When we ask about the relative merits of animal vs. plant-based beef, we need a close look at the data as well as the reflectiveness that Dr. McGregor and colleagues show toward the generation of data and how it might reflect industry bias and other influences. This is much more helpful than Cowspiracy factoids, or Ron DeSantis's allusions to global elites shoveling petri-dish meat (and insects) onto our plates.
I've suggested here that plant-based beef tends to be much more sustainable than animal beef, but that it's unclear which one, if any, is generally more healthy. You could take this to mean that plant-based meat is preferable, because it at least wins the sustainability battle. But not all aspects of sustainability have been rigorously studied, and, again, what's healthiest for any one person will depend on their health status and the rest of their diet.
Next week, I'll be delving into other meat alternatives, as well consumer preferences among them. I'll try not be too detailed about lab-grown meats and insect proteins, but still, if you're squeamish, be forewarned...
Thanks for reading!