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SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
AUGUSTARX.COM
POSSIBLE/IMPOSSIBLE Have you tried Burger King’s Impossible Burger yet? If so, what was your opinion? If you haven’t, it may only be a matter of time before you sample something that pretends to be meat. Plant-based foods that masquerade as meat are about the hottest thing going in the food industry these days. In fact, just down the road late last month in Smyrna, Georgia, a KFC restaurant was repainted green & white instead of the typical red & white color scheme. The occasion: test marketing “Beyond Fried Chicken,” veganfriendly chicken-free fried chicken. And just like the pandemonium that was unleashed when Popeye’s rolled out a new chicken sandwich (made from actual chicken), the KFC experiment was greeted with lines so long that police had to be called out to direct traffic. Nutritionists and dietitians have been encouraging us all for years to make our diets more veggie-centric. Longer life and better health is clinically proven to be linked to plant-based diets. The media hype suggests that this is a pivotal moment. A corner has been turned in the direction of healthier eating. Or has it? If you take a look at the nutritional profile of a regular Whopper versus an Impossible Whopper (see below), it’s a lot like the two burgers pictured. CAL
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12
SAT FAT (g) TRANS FAT (g) CHOLEST (mg) SODIUM (mg) CARBS (g) FIBER (g) SUGAR (g) PROTEIN (g)
SCRB19012CR-Medical Examiner-SEPT-outlines-PRINT.pdf
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Which one is beef and which one is a plant-based patty that merely looks like beef? It’s not easy to see a significant difference, either in the photos or the nutritional data. (And if you’ve noticed, we’re not telling.) As our in-house no-nonsense nutritional consultant, Warren B. Karp, Ph.D., D.M.D., has pointed out (see his newest column on page 8), even if the Impossible Burger is significantly better from a nutritional standpoint than a regular beef burger (which, again, it is not), by the time you add cheese, French fries and a Coke (a Diet Coke, of course), you’re back where you started. As Dr. Karp has said, the real issue is not that Joe occasionally has a Whopper and Jack occasionally has the Impossible version. No harm, no foul. The issue is what Joe and Jack (and you and I, for that matter) do day in, day out. Our entire eating pattern is the key to success or failure, not the Glutton’s Pork Platter or the alfalfa spouts entree we only rarely feast on. So when you hear wild claims that the Impossible Burger is riddled with carcinogens or that it’s science project food created by mad scientists, you can rest easy knowing that it doesn’t hold a lofty enough place in your personal food pyramid to amount to a hill of beans — which, ironically, it’s made from. +
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