Savvy Eating 2/27/2019: NUTS,

Nuts Linked With Lower CV Risk in Diabetes, as reported by Jeff Minerd of MedPageToday.com, 22 February 2019, based on a study at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and published in Circulation Research.

Eating more nuts — especially tree nuts such as walnuts and almonds — was associated with lower cardiovascular risk in people with diabetes. Compared with study participants who ate less than one serving of nuts per month, those who consumed five or more servings per week had a 17% reduction in total cardiovascular disease incidence (HR 0.83, 95% CI 0.71-0.98, P=0.01)

According to a CDC report on nut consumption among U.S. adults, only 38% of Americans eat nuts on any given day. The FDA suggests that a 1.5-ounce daily serving of nuts may reduce the risk of heart disease, but the report showed that only 14% of men and 11% of women ate this amount.

Food tech startup raised $90 million to make it easier to invent new plant-based meats, according to a report by Adele Peters of FastCompany.com, 26 February 2019. Motif Ingredients will provide innovative new plant proteins to new vegetarian companies, so they can concentrate on making food, not running a lab.

It took Impossible Foods years–and deep expertise in biotech–to develop a plant-based burger that looked and tasted like beef. Other companies, like Just, also have multimillion-dollar labs. But a new startup now wants to make it easier for the other companies to enter the world of plant-based or cell-grown meat, dairy, and eggs.

“There’s a clear trend of consumer interest in alternate proteins and animal-free versions of fish and burgers and chicken nuggets and all of these things,” says Jason Kelly, the CEO and cofounder of Ginkgo Bioworks, the biotech company that spun out the new startup, called Motif Ingredients. “And these companies are kind of being asked to do this impossible thing, which was like, hey, build a brand, develop a new product, and while you’re at it, why don’t you boot up a biotech R&D team to make some of these key protein ingredients that you’re going to need to actually make these things.”