In A 24/7 diet culture, we should all just say no to the latest fad

In response to a recent article by the APs Candice Choi about periodic fasting and weight loss, I just say, no.

No to diet culture. No to intermittent fasting. No to Paleo, Keto, WW, and all the other New diets that will work for a short period of time. Over 90 percent fail. The diets fail, not the people who try them.

Our bodies are doing what they should, and when you diet, your metabolism will slow. A quote from the article, On fasting days, people may allow themselves 600 calories, if needed. Whos body would not need 600 calories to function properly? Your brain alone needs over 500 calories from carbohydrates daily, just to basically function, never mind all of the body parts you depend on to get through the day.

If you listened to your body and ate when you were hungry, did not limit any food, you would not have disordered eating in your life. (That is what dieting is, disordered eating.) You would know that there are no inherently good or bad foods that need to limited or binged on.

Genetics play a big part in what our bodies look like, as does where we live, what we can afford, and whether we have time or knowledge to cook or bake what we want to eat. Weight stigma, how society treats fat people, also plays a big role in what we look like, and what our health is.

We all would do better to realize that all of diet culture, which is a $72 billion industry, is always promoting something new. Why? Because over 90 percent of all diets fail.

We need to find joy in our bodies and lives, eat when and what we want, and stop judging ourselves and others as to what size we are.

Faith Martian, registered dietitian

Arlington

Read more from the original source:
Fasting, diets are fads that fail most people - The Daily Herald

My NHS dietician says that January is a dangerous month for diabetics such as me. The shops are full of Christmas leftovers: those high-calorie, nutrient-light foodstuffs, now for sale at massive discounts confectionery collections, deep-filled mince pies, presentation tins of chocolate biscuits. You exert all that willpower over the festive period, and just when you think its safe to go back into the supermarkets

But in the last year Ive pretty much stopped going into supermarkets. Or takeaways. Or fast-food joints. Not that Ive stopped eating their products Ive restricted myself to hoovering up what other people bring on to the streets and squander: my own personal Deliveroo, free of charge.

From quinoa salads discarded at farmers markets to pub grub abandoned by fellow diners, it can be quite a varied regime. Park yourself in a central London square on a nice day, and the pricey rice bowls from eateries such as Itsu or Benugo, often still laden with dumplings and prawns and spicy vegetables, pile up alongside overflowing bins. Once I ate my childrens leftovers. Now I eat leftovers from strangers.

Ive fought a lifelong battle with an urban environment that encourages unhealthy eating the obesogenic environment, as it has now been defined and, after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, I seemed destined to be on the losing side. But after adopting a diet that friends and family and experts had deep reservations about, I feel transformed.

On a good day I often can take a surplus home my very own weekly shop

Friends dubbed me the Gutter Gourmet. My mum was horrified. My GP was concerned. It wasnt just that they felt I would pick up some dreadful lurgy. They were worried about my mental health this isnt what decent people did. Certainly a dose of indecency has been the most efficacious medicine I could have hoped for.

When I repurposed myself as the Gutter Gourmet, it was fuelled by anger at the criminal excesses of casual waste all around me (not as a way to save a few bob, as some who know me well contend). The governments waste advisory body, Wrap, estimates a colossal 10.2m tonnes of annual food waste. Of that the household contribution is 7.3m tonnes. My particular harvest restaurant plate waste and on-the-go squandering is more difficult to quantify. Yes, restaurants and cafes bin more than 300m meals a year. But thats before the consumers I clean up after get a chance to sink their teeth into the complacency industry. One telling survey by the environmental charity Hubbub estimated that our fast food habit generates a staggering 11bn items of mostly unrecyclable packaging waste a year, from cartons to napkins and plastic cutlery. According to my highly unscientific empirical survey, good food is binned in a third of these cartons, from Hawaiian sushi to garishly coloured meringues.

But I was also triggered by the theres nothing I can do apathy of individuals. A couple of years ago, when I was last in hospital with one of the many serious health issues Id chalked up since that diabetes diagnosis, the bloke in the next bed would order his hot meals for lunch and dinner and then ignore them when they were delivered, in favour of the grub his family brought in. I talked to him: how can you allow all these wholesome meals to go to waste, and all the effort that goes into producing them, and the nursing resources? It would be so easy not to order them every morning. All he had to do was not tick a few boxes on a form.

He was not interested. Did he not see a link between his behaviour and systemic waste? Why should he change, when it was the systems fault? It was his right to do with his food as he saw fit. Hed paid for it with his taxes. And what business was it of mine? For a minute I thought he was going to ask me if I liked hospital food. (I do.)

In that hospital stay I gave up on education and plumped for action. If I stopped ordering my own meals, could I eat the ones he ordered and left untouched? It was a deal. When I was discharged, I had an epiphany. All around me were versions of my ward mate, coming out of shops with on-the-go edibles, and discarding them after a few bites or gulps. The Gutter Gourmet was loosed upon the world.

I was diagnosed with diabetes on my 40th birthday. I tried to remedy the situation. I went jogging. I put vegetables in my morning porridge instead of sugar. Carrots. Broad beans. Spring onions. Broccoli. Kale. Spinach. If you persevere, they say your taste buds get used to anything. Mine refused to cast off the memory of crunchy brown sugar melting on hot oats. Every morning I fought the battle anew, and often lost.

I diligently swallowed the pills Metformin, Levothyroxine, Simvastatin and jabbed myself with insulin twice a day. What I needed was an injection of willpower. The iron resolve I woke up with to keep all those satanic carbohydrates and sugary treats behind me always seemed to evaporate by mid-afternoon, usually just as the refreshment trolley arrived at work. What harm can one more toffee-coated flapjack do?

Quite a lot, it turned out. Since the onset of diabetes, my compromised immune system has got me into one mess after another. The steady gain of bodily fat decommissioned my number one defence against diabetes exercise and weaponised its severity. In the past decade I have clocked up five bouts of pneumonia; recurrent raging episodes of cellulitis (a deep-tissue bacterial infection you can see racing up your legs); ulcerated shins; a general vulnerability to every opportunistic infection going; and intermittent erectile dysfunction.

A bloodstream full of sugar, as the top lung professor in my hospital trust put it, is a chemsex orgy venue for microbes. Then my GP weighed in. Unless I pulled my socks up, he warned, eyesight-robbing retinopathy, or peripheral artery disease leading to lower limb amputation, could be just around the corner.

It wasnt an idle threat there are about 7,000 lower-limb amputations in the UK each year. I recalled visiting a friend whod lost a leg in a car accident, years ago. The woman in the next bed on the amputation ward had diabetes. My doctor told me I had a choice, she cheerily informed me. Either the chocolate goes or a leg goes. And I couldnt give up my Cadburys.

If Id known as a child that my passion for Cadburys, and fry-ups and bakeries and condiments and cakes and puddings, would decades later have me hooked up to IV drips and emergency antibiotics, would it have made any difference?

Probably not. I am a child of the obesogenic revolution. Of course, they didnt call it obesogenic back in the early 70s. We still had early closing, shops were shut on Sunday, and you couldnt order so much as a pizza to be delivered.

But our local high streets were changing. In my part of south London, there was always a Wimpy bar or a greasy spoon caff around the corner.

The era of the microwave turned every corner shop into a takeaway. Vesta curries, Findus pancakes, Angel Delight for afters. Baby food for grown-ups, as we lounged in front of the TV.

The first layers of fat that would eventually entomb my pancreas and degrade its production of insulin the hormone that breaks down glucose into energy in the cells were being laid down. I am one of two and a half million people in the UK who would suffer. Boyd Swinburn, the New Zealand public health expert who gave the world the term obesogenic environment, concluded that the problem is not driven by greed or abnormal appetites, but is a normal response to abnormal environments encapsulated by the conditions he felt were responsible for the high rates of diabetes and obesity in the Arizona reservations of the Native American Pima people, whom he studied in the late 1980s.

My NHS dietician says Swinburn would have recognised similar issues in the south London I grew up in: the aggressive promotion of energy-dense but nutrient-light foods; the beginning of a discount, bogof (buy one get one free) checkout culture encouraging you to buy more than you need; high-street domination by takeaways and (relatively) fast food outlets; the ascendancy of sedentary screentime over outdoor exercise.

Although it is estimated that 60% of adults in England are now obese or overweight, we are not actually consuming more calories than we were back in the mid-70s. Indeed, there is evidence that sugar consumption is actually falling. Its the food we eat thats different. As George Monbiot pointed out, we eat five times more yogurt; three times more ice-cream; 40 times as many dairy desserts; a third more breakfast cereals; twice the cereal snacks; three times the crisps. All the things I love. Fat-, salt- and sugar-laden foods that in excess can play havoc with the bodys appetite-control systems.

If anything, after my diabetes diagnosis I found it tougher to shun these sugar-loaded foods and I was weakest when I was on my own. In company, the judgmental gaze of family or friends around the dinner table was a huge deterrent. Try helping yourself to ice-cream when your daughter insists that its going to harm you. So, as if I had a secret porn or drug habit, I would wait until everyone was asleep before guzzling digestives or a tub of flapjacks. Away from home, I would find myself slipping into shops, putting transgressive treats into my shopping basket and binge-eating them in bus shelters. At least I never had any leftovers.

Looking back at this furtive behaviour, with that pronounced element of lone gratification, it all seems very reminiscent of addiction. My willpower wilted in the face of all these temptations. All the guilt I felt about letting down all the people relying on me to stay healthy seemed to melt away. It was as if my brain had been hijacked.

Of course, many would argue that this is what the obesogenic environment does. It exists to drive addiction. What chance an individuals willpower when pitted against an industry that spends billions on coaxing us to overeat?

In London, in good weather, the food-wasters can be very generous. It helps that I work a few days a week at a very swanky magazine group, where very swanky takeaways are crammed, shockingly untouched, into the bins. Recently I extracted a punnet of soaked berry oats with peanut butter burn. Never had that before, and it made a great tea with the two doughnuts and a cucumber I found in a Puregym locker on the way home. I did wash the cucumber.

On a good day I often can take a surplus home my very own weekly shop. But not every day is a good day. Indeed, not every month is a good month. When the temperatures drop and the weather worsens, the outdoor street harvest withers. Cartons of pizza wedged into the bin slots a big summer staple lose their allure when theyve been marinaded into mush by an autumnal downpour. Its an opportunistic existence, and opportunity does not always knock. Occasionally I have to concede defeat and resort to cooking. Its a simple back-up plan: oats and bulgur wheat online. Most mornings start with porridge. One or two evenings a week, I rustle up a wholegrain mush. Its austere, but I like it. And so does my pancreas.

There are seasonal compensations. In the cold weather, people shoal under cover, clutching their comfort food and scrupulously observing the ultra-fashionable law that the real comfort lies in throwing away more food than you eat. My perspective is not very scientific. But it seems to me that people are more profligate than ever, often behaving as if the debate about waste and single-use plastics does not apply to them.

I have been accused of taking food from the mouths of homeless people. But maybe its a mark of how much surplus food there is that rough sleepers, who watch me searching for scraps, insist on passing on food items distributed to them by well-meaning shoppers. They wont take no for an answer. The regular outside my local Aldi says Im doing her a favour, because the stores food is so cheap she doesnt know what to do with all the stuff shes given.

The biggest compensation of all seems to be my health. For starters I have miraculously avoided all those forms of pestilence that my mother predicted would follow my unsanitary refuelling habits. Sorry, Mum. I feel rotten that I havent felt rotten. The real gains have been round my diabetes. Obviously Im happy that my GPs warnings that I might lose my eyesight, or a limb, have not materialised. I have lost a lot of weight a key objective for diabetics, and something I had been trying and failing to achieve for years.

How could I have done this on a diet leaning on the sort of carbohydrates white bread, white rice, pastries, noodles I am supposed to shun? My diabetic dietician had a theory. The idea that diabetics cant eat any carbs or sugary foodstuffs is misplaced. Whats important is moderation and minimising. Your exposure to over-consuming the wrong things has been massively reduced. You are generally eating a few small portions a day, and you have to work pretty hard to find your food. Thats a lot of steps you are doing, so in a way you have transformed yourself into a textbook patient.

Eureka! The Gutter Gourmet diet is actually beneficial for my diabetes: a daily regime of more exercise, smaller portions, reduced calorific input, reduced fat on the belly and abdomen. Without realising it, I have been making healthy choices. For more than a decade I had tried, and failed, to tackle my morbidity through willpower alone. In the past couple of years I have been empowered by a sense of protest. I align myself with all those people who wash their clothes, and themselves, less to save water. Who dont fly. Its all about busting consumerist norms. I dont feel enslaved, or intimidated, by food, or the food industry, any more. The Gutter Gourmet v The Obesogenic Environment? The tide has turned.

Read the rest here:
I eat only strangers' leftover food and it's the best diet I've ever had - The Guardian

The Kardashian-Jenner siblings care a lot about keepingup healthy lifestyles. The women spend hours each week working out, and theyfocus on eating healthy diets and only occasionally indulging.

Kylie Jenner has always been a bit different from her sisters in that area. She loves foods such as pizza and chicken tenders and doesnt seem to focus as much on working out or healthy eating. But the Kylie Cosmetics founder just admitted that shes been spending more time than ever in the gym.

Ever since Keeping UpWith the Kardashians first graced our TV screens back in 2007, theKardashian women have been obsessed with their bodies. Theyve become notoriousfor eating salads and exercising daily, and fans have long questioned how thewomen look the way they do. (Kim Kardashian West once hadan X-ray done of her butt to prove she doesnt have implants.)

While the women all do generally eat well and exercise often, its important to note that they have been open about using cellulite removal machines, filler, and other procedures to help improve their appearance.

The youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner family doesnteat the way the rest of her sisters do. Kylie Jenner has always loved simplefoods, such as chicken tenders and pizza, and she hates dining at fancyrestaurants. Plus, she hardly ever posts videos working out, unlike the rest ofher sisters.

Jenner tends to eat a healthy breakfast (shes posted her shakes and breakfast dishes to Instagram in the past), but she also likes to indulge. Shes showed off many of her favorite junk food snacks, such as Fritos Twists, and has generally been more indulgent than the others.

In her recently Instagram story, Jenner told followers that she has been working out more than ever. The reason? Summer is coming. Been working out every other day, she wrote on her story. Lets go summer 2020.

Jenner definitely isnt overweight and still has a very healthy looking body, and with all that money, she likely has a massive gym and a personal trainer. But still, she doesnt seem to make a rigorous workout as much a part of her lifestyle as the rest of her family.

Though Jenner has millions of fans who adore her and want toemulate her every move, there are also some who have voiced concern about herappearance. Jenners body and face have changed drastically since she wasyounger, and some fans think she is only becoming more and more plastic.

Jenner has admitted to having facial filler, though she saysshes never had any true plastic surgery. But fans recently criticized her forher massive rear end, which doesnt appear to be natural, either. One fancommented on a video suggesting Jenner was puttingherself in danger by receiving butt filler. However, the beauty mogulclearly doesnt mind what the haters say and has still apparently been workinghard in the gym.

Continued here:
Kylie Jenner Admits She's Been Working Out More Than Ever -- Here's Why - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Start (Dec. 31): 447 lbs.

This week: 437 lbs.

Lost in 2020: 10 pounds

I hate starting over again when it comes to my physical fitness, which isnt very good at the moment. Gone are the days when I was training for and competing in the Lake Placid Half Marathon in 2014 and 2015, but Id love to rekindle that level of fitness so I can walk the race again. This year? No promises; I can only try.

In order to get fit, I need to get back to the gym, specifically to the Fitness Revolution gym in Lake Placid, which has been a key ingredient of the Lake Placid Diet for the past six years. I began with the weight-loss classes for the first two years and then graduated to working out on my own.

With the weight-loss group, certified personal trainers taught us how to use a variety of machines and do many different types of exercises. That tutelage helped me get into good enough fitness to walk my first half marathon in June 2014, and current Fitness Revolution owner Jason McComber wrote up a special training regimen in the spring of 2015 that helped me walk one hour faster during that years Lake Placid Half Marathon.

After a couple of years, I was able to write my own workouts based on my level of fitness and needs at the time. Thats what Im doing now.

But its been tough. First of all, just getting to the gym seems to be a feat unto itself. Last year, with the many hours spent working multiple jobs and some physical issues, I was unable to go to the gym most of the year. This year, Ive been better so far, even though its only been two weeks.

Im starting with the basics. Walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes, about a quarter of a mile, do some stretching, 10 to 20 squats and about 25 modified jumping jacks. Its not much, but its a start. Every time I go back, I add some more exercises, and eventually Ill get back to where I was in 2015. Thats the plan, anyway.

Im eternally grateful to Jason McComber and the Fitness Revolution crew for their ongoing support over the past six years with the really high ups and the really low downs. Having that opportunity to get myself stronger is a major part of losing weight.

Continue reading here:
Fitness Revolution is helping me achieve my goals - Lake Placid Diet by Andy Flynn - LakePlacidNews.com | News and information on the Lake Placid and...

I am sitting at a kitchen worktop in the airy offices of San Francisco food startup Eat JUST. As a vegetarian, Im in angst about what is being gently turned over for me in the fryer by one of the chefs. Sitting beside me, the companys CEO Josh Tetrick tries to put my moral dilemma into perspective. Youre not my target market, he says. Its people who are eating meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The product in the fryer is JUSTs prototype chicken nugget, which costs about $50 to make. It is manufactured from what the industry calls cultured, cell-based or cultivated meat (though the outside world knows it more commonly as lab-grown meat). Not to be confused with meat that is plant derived, it is produced directly from animal cells with little need to raise and no need to slaughter actual animals. It is a technology with the potential to fundamentally change the world significantly replacing the way meat is produced now with a kinder and less environmentally damaging alternative.

Cultured meat is a colossal market opportunity says Bruce Friedrich, co-founder and executive director of the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit organisation that promotes cultured meat and plant-based meat. Even a tiny bite of the $1.4tn annual global meat market would be a lot.

No cultured meat products are on the market yet and nor has it been approved in any country but they are expected to begin trickling into high-end restaurants over the next couple of years. A plethora of companies are at various stages of scaling up production and several have done public and private tasting of various prototypes. They are working on everything from chicken to beef to fish and have both humans and pets in their sights.

The GFI estimates that since San Francisco Bay Area-based Memphis Meats the first startup was founded in 2015, a total of 60 enterprises now make up the market with cultured meat as their sole business focus; collectively they have raised nearly $140m in disclosed funding. That comes mostly from venture capitalists but also from agriculture multinationals such as Tyson and Cargill.

Should cultured meat be allowed to be called meat at allif it hasnt been harvested from a whole animal?

JUST, which isnt included in the GFIs figures because it also makes vegan egg and mayonnaise, announced it was pursuing cultured meat in mid-2017, though it does not disclose what proportion of the $220m-plus it has raised in funding it is directing to its cultured meat endeavours. Meanwhile regulators are working on the approvals process and labelling requirements. Tetrick says JUST is ready to release its chicken nuggets in some high-end restaurants in an Asian country as soon as it has the thumbs up from the countrys regulator, with whom it is in dialogue. Chicken is considered easier in part because the vaccine industry has been using avian stem cells to produce vaccines for years: there is existing knowledge to draw on.

Establishing this industry isnt easy, however. While companies work out technicalities, voices raising concerns about the technology and its implications are coalescing. It is also clear there is no agreed position on whether the material itself even counts as meat. Cultured meat is in a process of becoming, sums up Neil Stephens, a sociologist at Brunel University, London, who has been studying the area for over a decade and co-founded the group Cultivate to help build discussion of the technology. It might become a stable category as meat, but its not there yet.

To a certain extent, the science of culturing meat is relatively well understood. The process begins when a cell is taken from an animal and grown up in a lab to permanently establish a culture (called a cell line). The cells can come from a range of sources: biopsies of living animals, pieces of fresh meat, cell banks and even the roots of feathers, which JUST has been experimenting with. Cell lines can either be based on primary cells for example muscle or fat cells or on stem cells. Stem cells have the advantage that with different nutrients, or genetic modifications, they are able to mature into any cell type. There is also no limit to how long stem-cell lines can live, so it is possible to use them indefinitely to produce a product. Once a good cell line for example, one that grows fast and is tasty has been selected, a sample is introduced into a bioreactor, a vat of culture medium where the cells proliferate exponentially and can be harvested. The resulting meat cell mush can be formed into a plethora of unstructured items, from patties to sausages with or without other ingredients added for texture. Conventional meat has a variety of cell types from which it derives its flavour, including both muscle and fat, and the companies are trying to broadly replicate that.

JUST isnt specifying how the cell source for the particular nugget I am about to try was obtained it gets its cells in many ways but I am assured the process didnt involve any slaughter, which is why I think I am on safe ground eating it. For most people, notes Tetrick, it wont matter how the cell is obtained. It is also not disclosing whether it was grown from a primary cell or a stem-cell line (which it doesnt genetically modify). And I dont know the exact type of chicken cells in the final product.

When I do bite into the nugget which I am told is about 70% chicken, on a par with a premium chicken nugget it has a dense texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour that reminds me of a pressed chicken sandwich I once bit into by accident. It also contains an amount of JUSTs own mung bean protein isolate for texture along with water, oil, salt, pepper and, this being a nugget, breading.

Yet while establishing cell lines is one thing, scaling them up for mass production at a competitive price is another. The problem is that the culture medium needed for the cells to grow is expensive and animal cells can take time to proliferate. And there is no guarantee that a small operation will work at large scale.

Compounding the challenge is the need to develop good alternatives to foetal bovine serum (FBS). Derived from the blood of cow foetuses, it is often added to culture media where the growth factors it contains work their magic. But its use is a nonstarter for an industry trying to take animals out of the equation and many companies are hard at work producing their own alternatives. All of the companies have pledged that they will not sell products that involve FBS in the production, notes Friedrich.

A further aspiration of the companies is moving beyond mush. Technologies such as 3D printing and edible scaffolds may enable this and there have been early demos. But producing, say, a fillet is much more difficult than ground meat.

There is also the challenge of getting consumers over the yuck factor. Stephens notes that the people prepared to try it tend to be educated, male and young and that it is they who could help normalise it. Tetrick thinks the answer will ultimately come down to making products that are tasty and affordable and, in the early days at least, educating people about the process and the benefits, which he notes would also extend to safer products because faecal contamination would be eliminated, as would antibiotics (sterile conditions would stop bacteria and viruses taking hold, and if they did, any contaminated batches could be discarded).

For a technology with such far-reaching implications for everything from rural livelihoods to human identity, critical public discussion and debate to date have been relatively limited. But that may be changing.

The website Clean Meat Hoax was launched last year by an informal group of 16 animal rights scholars and activists. It rails against cultured meat on the grounds that it still suggests that meat is desirable, and that animals are a resource people can draw on. It contrasts with the more pragmatic position other animal rights groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) have taken in favour of the technology on the grounds that animals lives will be saved. What is incredible to me is how uncritically this technology is being celebrated and I dont think thats an accident we dont want to consider the possibility that we can stop eating animals, says site founder John Sanbonmatsu, a philosopher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

Meanwhile an advertisement in Brussels metro stations designed to undermine cultured meat contrasts a barn of cows surrounded by greenery to a meat lab surrounded by transmission towers. It is the work of the European Livestock Voice campaign set up last year by a number of European farming industry groups to stress the potential social impacts of upending the meat industry.

Other voices, meanwhile, dont reject the technology wholesale but have concerns over certain aspects.

What to make ofall the company founders who would be vegan if they didnt eat their ownproduce?

Michael Hansen is a senior scientist in the advocacy division of the nonprofit organisation Consumer Reports, which compares consumer products. He worries about the potential for bioreactor contamination but also wants more transparency from the companies on their science. How, for example, are they dealing with cells that spontaneously mutate? And what are the implications of the fact that immortal cell lines could, with their uncontrolled growth, be defined as cancer cell lines? He would also like to see data on how end products compare compositionally and nutritionally with the conventional versions. You would think they would put samples out for somebody to test but all we have are assertions, he says.

The environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth (FoE), meanwhile, is keeping an open mind but stresses that the technology must not distract from existing, proven solutions to helping the planet, such as reducing reliance on animal feed produced on cleared ecoregions, cutting down food waste and supporting healthier diets. It also notes that it is extremely energy intensive to produce cultured meat and that the sustainability claims made by the companies will also need proper assessment. (JUSTs facilities are currently powered by electricity from the grid, but it plans to be more energy efficient in the future).

Perhaps more significantly for the companies, there remains the question of whether cultivated meat should be allowed to be called meat at all if it hasnt been harvested from a whole animal. The United States announced last year that cell-cultured livestock and poultry products would be regulated jointly by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture but further detailed requirements along with labelling rules are awaited.

So far, the industry has done a good job of arguing that its products are meat. While debate continues within the cultured meat industry about exactly what adjective to put in front (clean meat was dropped because funders in the conventional meat industry didnt like the dirty connotation it gave conventional meat), the meat is a constant which asserts its claim to be either a subcategory of meat or just meat. I actually think the word meat does more work [than any of the adjectives], says Stephens. And if Tetrick has his way, using any sort of prefix wont be necessary for long. Phones were only called Smartphones at the beginning, he points out. As something normalises you drop it. At the end of the day this thing is going to be called meat.

But others dont want it to be called meat at all.

Steered by the so called barnyard lobby, which represents the meat, livestock and poultry industries, over 30 US states have considered or are considering so-called truth in labelling laws aimed at preventing words such as meat, beef or pork being used to describe cultured meat (the laws often also target plant-based products). So far, laws have been passed in 12 states. Under Louisianas new law, which takes effect later this year, meat would specifically exclude anything that was a cell-cultured food product grown in a laboratory from animal cells. While state laws will be superseded when federal labelling rules for cultured meat come in, it doubtless sends a strong message to regulators as they decide.

Yet, notes Friedrich, whose GFI is challenging various pieces of state legislation in court, the outcomes could be really bizarre if cultivated meat cannot be called meat. Some people have meat allergies Its a consumer safety issue, he says.

If meat were to removed from the name, it would be a blow to an industry that believes that being recognised as meat is the most likely way to change the world. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that last year cultured meat companies came together to form their own lobby group.

Meanwhile, whats a vegetarian to do where cultured meat is concerned? And what to make of the many company founders, including Tetrick, who would be vegan if they didnt eat their own products? For the UK Vegetarian Society, there isnt enough information yet to decide whether cultured meat can be considered vegetarian. There are still questions to answer, it says, adding that those questions centre on production, ingredients, provenance and ethics. In contrast, for the UK Vegan Society, it is definitively not a vegan product because the initial cells are taken from animals. We may need a new word for people who eat exclusively cultivated meat, says Friedrich.

Certainly, from what meat is to what it is to be vegetarian or vegan, cultured meat is blowing apart our existing categorisations. Meat cell product, anyone?

Cats and dogs consume more than 25% of the US meat supply. Pet food company Because Animals wants to see those diets replaced with meat grown in the lab. Pet food has a huge environmental footprint, says Shannon Falconer, co-founder and CEO. The company plans to launch a mouse meat cat treat made of 10% mouse cells as its first cultured meat product. It demonstrated a prototype last year. Culturing rabbit meat for dog food is next. It is a more natural diet for them that is more compatible with their digestion, says Falconer.

Wild Earth, a San Francisco Bay Area-based startup, also set out culturing mouse meat for cats but changed course after its market research showed many pet owners were alarmed by the prospect and didnt understand the concept. They thought we were killing mice and putting them into cans, says Ryan Bethencourt, co-founder and CEO. (Jokingly, Bethencourt codenamed the would-be product Jerry, inspired by Tom and Jerry cartoons.) It is now working on growing chicken and fish for dogs and cats instead. The vision is for a premium raw product in the first instance, appealing to those who feed conventional raw meat to their animals.

Bethencourt wonders whether pet food might be a gateway for cultured meat. People have shown greater willingness to be innovative with pet food, he says, citing the popularity of cricket treats for dogs. Pet food isnt so steeped in taste and tradition. The biggest market driver is expected to be pet owners wanting to avoid contaminants such as euthanasia drugs, which can get into pet food in the animal flesh that goes into the ingredients.

But cultured meat is not likely to be approved for pet food ahead of human food pet food regulators take their cues from human-food regulators. Meanwhile the industry has some advantages. Creating texture or perfecting taste is less important. And people are used to pet food being a blend of different ingredients. Percentages of cultured meat also dont have to be as high. Financially its going to be more feasible to be a pet food company, says Falconer.

Read more here:
Out of the lab and into your frying pan: the advance of cultured meat - The Guardian