science

14812 readers

121 users here now

A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.

rule #1: be kind

<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.

2024-11-11

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Algae as a surprising meat alternative and source of environmentally friendly protein (www.worldhealth.net)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

With more of us looking for alternatives to eating animals, new research has found a surprising environmentally friendly source of protein -- algae.

The University of Exeter study has been published in The Journal of Nutrition and is the first of its kind to demonstrate that the ingestion of two of the most commercially available algal species are rich in protein which supports muscle remodeling in young healthy adults.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (5 children)

One of the problems with large scale algae farming afaik is the algae getting contaminated by other algal species that are toxic and outcompete the edible algae. I'd like to see the solutions to that issue

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I guess the production could take inspiration from the pharma industry and use strict increasingly clean zones and sterile environments the closer you get to the core production. After sterilising everything and sigeling out the alge you want you should in theory be able to run more or less indefinitely. And if a contamination of found it just a matter of sterilizing everything with steam and reboot the system.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Keeping things sterile is very labour and energy intensive, even in the Pharma industry, where the profit margins are orders of magnitude above what you can do in the food industry.

Look this will sound harsh, but it's not, really.

Your reasoning is good if you compare it to an hypothesis a student of Pasteur or Koch could have thought of 150 yrs ago.

Thus I have to ask you, why did you think you have a good take on this?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Did you read what i wrote? i said "take inspiration from" not "should copy 1:1 also i work i pharma so yes i have a good take on this.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

When you're working with coproducts like algae-derived pharmaceuticals (see Lumen biotech in Seattle) that sell for 6 figures/kg you're correct, much more stringent pharma-like ideas do get implemented because the down time is costly. This is seen in indoor reactor setups where you can grow under artificial light year round. Outdoors, the cost to implement more sophisticated systems doesn't translate in your TEA especially when growing things like protein which is cheap in comparison.

load more comments (1 replies)