Bill Gates-backed startup makes ‘butter’ out of water and carbon dioxide
A California-based startup called Savor has figured out a unique way to make a butter alternative that doesn’t involve livestock, plants, or even displacing land. Their butter is produced from synthetic fat made using carbon dioxide and hydrogen, and the best part is —- it tastes just like regular butter.
Guarantee that A) it doesn’t taste just like real butter, and B) it’ll make you shit yourself and bring a return of the label “may cause anal leakage”.
Does that mean it’s not a potentially viable product? No, it doesn’t. But let’s not bullshit.
The problem with Olestra (the anal leakage oil alternative) is it’s a mixture of hexa-, hepta-, and octa-esters of sucrose with various long chain fatty acids. The resulting radial arrangement is too large and irregular to move through the intestinal wall and be absorbed into the bloodstream.
What Savor has supposedly created is chemically identical to the fatty acids in butter. It’s not made of new compounds, but made in a new way.
There was a run of fat replacement back (iirc) in the late nineties. Olestra was one of the name brands.
It wouldn’t digest at all, and it also wouldn’t mix in happily with the rest of the body waste in the colon. Hence, anal leakage becoming a phrase you would see on food labels.
And you would, sometimes, have not only leakage, but diarrhea. Sometimes violent diarrhea.
Basically, the oil was slippery enough to escape the anus no matter how tight it was. And there was a lot of it, under pressure from other waste behind it.
Fake food is going to be more healthy than the real deal?
Sure buddy
So is any meat, mayonnaise, even butter is processed. Ever went into a fast food chain? Most ingredients are processed to the bits.
You better not take any medicine, that super processed? And Coca cola or any energy drinks? Bleh, made in labs!
I guess you only eat whole grains collected by you, that must suck.
I wrote it’s not made to be more healthy, because that’s the current marketing of butter alternatives. This isn’t claiming to be more healthy. The compounds are the same as the fatty acids in butter.
It’s simply a way to get butter while reducing carbon dioxide, rather than increasing it.
“Bro”, butter is literally just a hydrocarbon. As in carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms.
Making it in the lab produces chemically identical molecules.
As in, literally the same thing. Like actually for real no difference. Including however bad or healthy it is to eat.
Any nuances in the real thing will be from impurities that would have to be added to the lab produced stuff, should you want to.
The real difference is how it is made, not in what it produces. Meaning the synthetic option can be produced without livestock, and potentially using much less energy and land.
"Bro", butter is literally just a carbohydrate.
🤡🤡🤡
If you want to be pedantic, straight out of the lab this stuff would be equivalent to “clarified butter”. Butter, from which all impurities have been removed.
Still butter tho.
I am just going with ol realiable
y'all have fun testing another "product"
Good or bad, it’s still processed food.
That’s my half-assed neutral statement. I choose not to eat processed foods. As long as there’s disclosure, I don’t care.
What people eat or don’t eat is their business.
actual margarine is getting hard to find in stores around here, and when you do it’s priced almost as high as a non-sale price of real butter. margarine has 80% fat content and similar baking and cooking properties as butter.
what’s on store shelves is a cheapened, watered down product laced with extra chemicals and fillers, ranging from 25-40% oil and can’t even make a proper box of mac & cheese. some of them don’t even melt when put on toast, hot, right from the toaster.
Carbo-LEO.
“You see, we take all that bad stuff we learned from Oleo pantshitting technology, and then we move it around. Now we have ‘Carbo-LEO’'.”
The process required at least 60 kilograms of coal per kilogram of synthetic butter.
My thought was "I doubt you can make fat only with hydrogen and carbon", but fats/lipids are literally hydrocarbons. Adding other elements changes the taste, so it isn't necessary to have mammals anywhere in the production chain.
Very interesting and probably not the first time this is/has been done. It seems quite obvious.
According to the savor team, it was quite easy for them:
“We start with a source of carbon, like carbon dioxide, and use a little bit of heat and hydrogen to form chains which are then blended with oxygen from air to make the fats & oils"
I want to guess they are glossing over a complicated enzyme they created, or other form of reagent.
Something I wondered with this, is that butter/margarine/similar need an emulsifier. They consist of basically 80% fat + 20% water, which would not normally mix, but then you add an emulsifier and they do.
There’s lots of different emulsifiers. In butter, it’s apparently mostly casein. My margarine lists lecithin and glyceride.
And well, looks like glyceride consists out of lots of H, C and O, so I’m guessing that’s probably what they’re using in this process…
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