EP. 124: IMPOSSIBLE FOODS — FEEDING THE FUTURE

WITH PAT BROWN

Aug 8

WITH PAT BROWN, MD, PHD

A physician and founder of Impossible Foods — a leading producer of plant-based meats — shares how he hopes to inspire a cultural shift towards more sustainable eating habits and ensure a healthier planet for future generations.

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Episode Summary

When Impossible Foods released its first product, the Impossible Burger, in 2016, it was met with equal parts curiosity, skepticism, and excitement. This plant-based “meat that bleeds” was seen as a novelty item. Today, Impossible Foods’ expanded line of offerings, from sausages to chicken nuggets to Italian meatballs, can be found in most American grocery stores at a price that rivals traditional meats.

The founder of Impossible Foods is Pat Brown, MD, PhD, a physician and molecular biologist who, after seeing the detrimental impact of animal farming on deforestation, water pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, made it his ambitious mission to create a sustainable food system by reducing our reliance on animal agriculture. He set out to develop plant-based alternatives to meat that not only matched, but surpassed the taste and nutritional value of traditional meats, harnessing biochemistry to recreate the sensory experience and culinary qualities of meat at a molecular level.

In this episode, Dr. Brown joins us to share his early career path from clinical pediatrics to biochemistry research, along the way inventing the DNA microarray, now an essential laboratory tool used to measure the expression levels of thousands of genes. He then discusses the origins of Impossible Foods, the scientific breakthroughs that have propelled its success, and how he hopes to inspire a cultural shift towards more sustainable eating habits and ensure a healthier planet for future generations.

Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD is an emeritus professor at Stanford and founder of Impossible Foods. Dr. Brown received his BA, MD and PhD (in Biochemistry) at the University of Chicago and completed a residency in pediatrics at Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital. As a graduate student with Nicholas Cozzarelli, he discovered the mechanism of type Ii topoisomerases. As a post-doctoral fellow with Mike Bishop and Harold Varmus, he investigated the mechanism by which HIV and other retroviruses incorporate their genes into the genomes of the cells they infect.
At Stanford, Dr. Brown and colleagues invented the DNA microarray, a technology that enabled the activity of all the genes in a genome to be read for the first time. With Harold Varmus and Michael Eisen, he founded the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit scientific publisher that has transformed the publishing industry by making scientific and medical research results freely available to the public.
Pat is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine and recipient of the National Academy of Sciences award in Molecular Biology and the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor. He has published more than 250 scientific articles.
In this episode, you will hear about:
• 2:41 - How Dr. Brown was initially drawn to a career in medicine
• 7:54 - Why Dr. Brown chose to transition from clinical work to biomedical research
• 14:05 - How Dr. Brown’s drive to tackle the biggest problems of humanity led to the creation of Impossible Foods
• 24:19 - The scientific approach that Impossible Foods takes in creating its products
• 30:17 - Whether plant-based meats are too highly processed
• 38:40 - Dr. Brown’s vision for the future of food
Henry Bair: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:02] And I'm Tyler Johnson.
Henry Bair: [00:00:04] And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered what makes medicine meaningful. Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build health care institutions that nurture the doctor patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:27] In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and healthcare executives those who have collected a career's worth of hard earned wisdom probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging and enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.
Henry Bair: [00:01:01] When Impossible Foods released its first product, the Impossible Burger, in 2016, it was met with equal parts curiosity, skepticism and excitement. This plant based meat that bleeds was seen as a novelty item. Today, the expanded line of offerings from Impossible Foods, from sausages to chicken nuggets to Italian meatballs, can be found in most American grocery stores at a price that rivals traditional meats. The founder of Impossible Foods is doctor Pat Brown, a physician and molecular biologist who, after seeing the detrimental impact of animal farming on deforestation, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions made it his ambitious mission to create a sustainable food system by reducing our reliance on animal agriculture. He set out to develop plant based alternatives to meat that not only matched, but surpassed the taste and nutritional value of traditional meats. Harnessing the power of biochemistry to recreate the sensory experience and culinary qualities of meat at a molecular level. In this episode, Doctor Brown joins us to share his early career path from clinical pediatrics to biochemistry research, along the way inventing the DNA microarray, now an essential laboratory tool used to measure the expression levels of thousands of genes. He then discusses the origins of Impossible Foods, the scientific breakthroughs that have propelled its success, and how he hopes to inspire cultural shift towards more sustainable eating habits and ensure a healthier planet for future generations. Pat, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:02:40] Thanks.
Henry Bair: [00:02:41] So many know you as the founder of Impossible Foods, but what they may not know is that you started your journey in medicine. Can you tell us what initially brought you to medicine?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:02:54] Yeah. You know, it's kind of, uh. I'm not the most introspective guy. So a lot of the course that my life took, it's not as if there was this identifiable moment of contemplation and so forth. But I've been a scientist pretty much since I was born, and I was interested in a whole lot of things, including medicine, but not necessarily as a career. And when I was in college, I was actually contemplating even just going into fundamental mathematics, which then I had a change of heart because I even though I feel like fundamental science and math and things that have no particular direct application are incredibly important just for understanding the universe, but also, um, just for the beauty of the things that you learn. But I decided that in a way, I felt like I wanted to have a more, bigger impact on the world and, you know, making people's lives better and stuff like that. And it seemed to me that this is a terrible trivialization, but it was kind of like doing crossword puzzles for a living that, you know, it's incredibly fun and interesting intellectually and stuff like that, but you're not necessarily going to have a huge impact on people's lives. So I changed my mind about that.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:04:18] And then I went into focused on more biology direction, thinking I'd probably want to be a scientist, but there's also sort of interested in medicine. And then when it came down, you know, in my senior year to figure out, okay, what am I going to do next? I applied to Md-phd programs, you know, and I was very interested in medicine. I feel like that's a very tangible way of of helping people and viscerally rewarding in a way that, you know, no matter how impactful your science is, it's a few degrees of separation away from the direct impact on people. And and that was something that I liked. So anyway, so I went that route and I loved it. And I loved medical school, I loved it, you know, I loved the whole shebang. And also in graduate school back in those days, you know, in the Md-phd program, you were kind of expected to, you know, finish the whole shebang in six years.
Henry Bair: [00:05:13] Nowadays it's, what, eight at least. Right? Nowadays. Yeah, yeah. With many more people. People actually, I know plenty of classmates of mine who took like ten years, you know, or more.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:05:21] I know a guy that just for his PhD who was in the pH program, took nine years, way back in the day. But he was a crystallographer. This was before crystallography got easy. But anyway, so I did that. And what happened was, um, I met my wife, we got married and she was out of phase with me. So when I finished, she was in medical school and had just started. So I decided to do a three year residency because in part it would get me in phase of my wife, and then we could move somewhere together and so forth.
Henry Bair: [00:05:56] You would finish residency at the same time that she finished medical school?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:05:59] Exactly. Yeah. So I decided to do a residency in Chicago. There was a very good children's hospital associated with northwestern, and I was interested. I was leaning toward pediatrics, increasingly unpopular profession. But for me it was very rewarding. And yeah, so I did that and I worked. It was just a pure clinical kind of residency, you know, very intense because it's a, you know, an urban hospital serving a very large, underserved population. Plus it's a tertiary care center for with a catchment area of like several states. So so you saw everything. And you know, on a typical call night, you might have between half a dozen and, you know, as many as ten admissions on a call night. And it was every third night call. And I've essentially maybe two nights out of the three years I got any sleep whatsoever. But I love that. I mean, I felt like, geez, if I'm going to do this, you know, I want to be all in.
Henry Bair: [00:06:55] Wait, you loved the call nights in the moment? Or was it more in hindsight that you liked it, that you realized how valuable it was?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:07:01] No, I enjoyed it. I mean, there were times when I was just, you know, totally wiped out and I felt like I was barely able to write my notes or anything like that because I was so, you know, exhausted because you have these 36 plus hour days nonstop at the end of which you're, you know, not in the best cognitive shape. But no, I mostly really loved it. I loved the challenge of it. I felt like, you know, I liked being able to help sick kids. And like I said, I felt like, hey, if I, you know, this is why I signed up for it. And, you know, I, I want to do this. So there are problems with it as a system because, you know, it's obviously it's well known that people who are sleep deprived are impaired in making big decisions, don't want that for your patients, but as a training way to get get training. It was awesome.
Henry Bair: [00:07:54] Wow. Well, I mean, I'm glad that you found joy and meaning in pediatrics clinical pediatrics. But as we know, you didn't stay in the clinical world very long, right? You ended up pivoting towards doing more of a research. Was it a fellowship that you did?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:08:09] I did a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF. Yeah.
Henry Bair: [00:08:12] What was that transition like? I mean, you're going from, you know, doing this clinical work that you really enjoyed. And then to did you have any patient facing role in this postdoc fellowship?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:08:22] No. The reason I wound up deciding to go in that direction is of course, this is still true. I haven't solved every problem by a million miles. But the thing that you know was heartbreaking about practicing medicine, you know, especially when when you're when you're taking care of a lot of very, very sick people is that you come across a situation where you desperately want to help someone who's got a bad medical problem, and you just don't know how and nobody knows how. And that that is heartbreaking. And I sort of came to the conclusion that if I really wanted to have the biggest possible impact, you know, even though I like taking care of patients, it was basically doing the research to figure out how to solve important problems that we hadn't solved. So this was right around the time when, you know, HIV emerged as an infectious disease during my my residency. And actually there were a couple of patients hemophiliacs that that developed it. And at that time there were no tests for it. But, you know, I would say I was extremely confident that diagnosis.
Henry Bair: [00:09:36] Sorry. These hemophiliacs contracted through transfusions.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:09:40] Yeah.
Henry Bair: [00:09:41] Okay. Just to clarify that.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:09:42] Yeah. So anyway, I decided I was going to work on that and I my work as a graduate student was figuring out how an enzyme called DNA topoisomerase works, which is, um, you know, without getting technical, but basically DNA topoisomerases are probably the number one target of antimicrobials and one of the major targets of, of anticancer drugs, because they're just essential for every round of cell division and so forth. And nobody knew how they worked at the time when I started. And I was just curious because they just do this incredible thing. So I was I knew a lot about biochemistry and DNA enzymology and stuff like that. So I figured, okay, I'm going to try to figure out how retroviruses integrate their DNA into the host genome, because that was not known. So I went to UCSF because there was a pair of scientists, Harold Varmus and Mike Bishop, who are best known for work on oncogenes. They want a Nobel Prize for that.
Henry Bair: [00:10:37] But we actually had Doctor Varmus on on the show. Um. Oh, really? Over a year ago. Yeah.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:10:43] Oh, yeah. He's on. He's one of my best buddies. Yeah. So he was effectively my official mentor is Mike, who is a wonderful guy. But I wanted to work on retroviruses. And Mike had more or less switch completely to oncogenes, and Harold was still interested in retroviral replication. So I worked on that. And then then I moved to Stanford so that, I don't know, you were asking me about the transition. It was there was never any angst about the transition, really. I mean, I felt like, you know, okay, I can't do everything. And this is this is the direction I have to go. And and I actually wrote a postdoctoral fellowship my last year of my residency, so I was I could hit the ground running.
Henry Bair: [00:11:22] It's really interesting to contextualize your work within the broader history of biochemical and genetic research. You invented the DNA microarray, which today is used in labs everywhere to measure the expression of thousands of genes at a time. Anyone who has done biomedical research, including myself, will be aware of how integral this technology is, which, you know, makes me think that science you were doing at the time in terms of what you had available, must be so different from the science of today.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:11:54] Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. In terms of, let's just say the technical tools and it's advanced a lot. And I started my PhD program basically the year after the first recombinant DNA molecule was created and DNA sequencing was developed. During the time I was doing my PhD. So and during my postdoc is when PCR was first introduced and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So a lot of the kind of tools that really greatly amplified, you know, your ability to solve interesting problems, you know, were developed during the time I was postdoc and grad student and then starting at Stanford.
Henry Bair: [00:12:30] And your role at Stanford was purely as a researcher. Right.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:12:34] Well, it's a complicated story. I don't want to go into the whole thing, but the idea was that they had this new program and they were looking for people who were sort of doing clinical and basic research. And so I was hired with a joint appointment in pediatrics and, and biochemistry. And I thought maybe, you know, I would, you know, do some attending and stuff like that. But what I quickly realized is at that time when I started my faculty position, I had my wife and I had had twins, preemie twins, and they were about a year old, and my wife is doing a post-doc. And I just decided that, okay, I can of the three things that I would love to be able to do, one is take care of patients and practice medicine, and the other one is do basic research. And third is be a good husband and parent. And I could only realistically do two well. And so I decided, okay, well, I'm going to have to drop the clinical stuff because basically, well, you know, when you're responsible for patients, it's 24 hours a day basically. And you know, that has to be your top priority. And, you know, you don't stop thinking about it. You know, when the school bell goes off or whatever, it takes a huge toll on your attention. And, you know, so I figured, okay, that was the thing that was going to be most difficult to navigate around. And so anyway, I just decided, okay, I'm going to bail on that. And didn't go over too well with the pediatrics department. But so eventually then I switched to just having my appointment, being in the biochemistry department.
Henry Bair: [00:14:05] Yeah, I think it can be hard for those not in medicine, specifically those who haven't gone through residency to really understand how all encompassing clinical work is. I thought being a medical student was rough, but on most rotations, you got to go home at 5 p.m. or 7 p.m. and you often had your weekends off as an internal medicine intern. Last year, I was easily working 12 hours to 14 hours on most days, six days a week on average, with some, uh, 25 to 26 hour shifts sprinkled in there for good measure. It consumes your life. I often think that medicine draws from people with so many talents and interests, but being a full time clinician forces you to sacrifice all those other aspects of yourself because it can be so hard to truly do well, to be a great clinician while juggling those other things. So I resonate with your dilemma there. Back to your story, though. So you're at Stanford and you eventually create this company, Impossible Foods. Let's talk about that. On the surface, this seems so different from what you were doing with the biochemical and genetics research. How did the idea of this company come about in your mind?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:15:17] Well, just to preface it, I think a big mistake that people often make is to accept a label that limits the scope of what they can do. If anyone asked me what kind of a scientist I was or something like that, I'd just say, are you kidding me? I'm. I'm a scientist. I'm not even. You want that label? I'm a human being trying to do my best. You know, I didn't define myself as well. I'm just a scientist, so this is someone else's problem. I've always just felt like, no, if I see a problem and I, it's important enough and I think I can help solve it, well why not? So with impossible, you know, I was at a stage where I, where I thought, okay, what what am I going to do next? And because in a sense, some of the stuff I was doing was kind of getting to be too easy and routine, even though it was still impactful and there were still lots of interesting, cool stuff to do. But I felt like, okay, I want to step back and think about what to do. And I decided I'm going to look for the most important problem in the world that I can contribute to solving. And I figured it was something to do with his, you know, global environmental problems, climate change and collapse of global biodiversity. And very early on in looking into that, I realized that by far the most destructive technology that humans have ever invented is the use of animals to make food.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:16:41] Okay. Nothing comes close, and I'm not going to go through a long spiel about that, but let's just say it's almost entirely responsible for the collapse of global biodiversity because of the huge land footprint, the huge amount of land, but 45% of the ice free surface of Earth that has been cleared, either for grazing animals or feed crops. It's the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon in sub-Saharan Africa. I also realized that if we could phase out animal agriculture globally, I'd done back of the envelope calculations that it would have this almost miraculous ability to turn back the clock on global heating. In fact, I published a paper about this like a year and a half ago. But basically, the recovery of biomass on that huge land area that's used for animal agriculture has the potential, and this is based on other people's published work to, um, pull out of the atmosphere 800 gigatons of CO2. Okay. Put that in perspective. That's about the equivalent to half as much CO2 has been released by fossil fuel emissions in human history. So huge negative emissions. And the interesting thing about animal agriculture is it's greenhouse gas emissions are essentially all reversible. So the clearing of land is reversible by allowing the biomass to recover and you get all that CO2 back. Methane the one of the other greenhouse gases. Huge problem for animal agriculture, has a half life of nine years. So as soon as you stop emitting it, you get a negative emissions. And on a big scale. Same is true of nitrous oxide. You know, a large majority of nitrous oxide emissions come from animal agriculture.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:18:24] And so the bottom line is you unlock massive negative emissions, sufficient actually to within a very short period of time offset all ongoing greenhouse gas emissions, even if they continue at our current trajectory for 30 years. So basically, you would create a 30 year pause in global heating if you could phase out that industry and you would reverse the collapse of global biodiversity and would increase the world's fresh water supply by 50%, because it's responsible for about a third of fresh water use and pollution, and it's completely unnecessary for global food security. Just to give you one example, this year is soybean crop contains two and a half times as much nutritionally equivalent protein as all the meat produced in the world. And it's grown on less than 1% of Earth's land area. And it's well established that no animal products are required for optimal human health. A lot of people are surprised by this fact.
Henry Bair: [00:19:21] It's very controversial. The whole the whole like plant protein, animal protein thing is so controversial. I mean, even if the science is out there, you can point to peer reviewed articles. But if you just polled like random people off the streets, I think fewer than half would probably believe that you don't need any animal sources of protein or vitamins, of course.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:19:40] And a lot of that is because there's a very well funded disinformation campaign from the the Slaughter Cartel and, you know, the the dairy industry that is trying to miseducate people to believe this. Okay. And of course, it's not. It's not it's not helped by the fact that so much of the scientific literature is not open access. So I was going to say, oh, you could just look it up, just read, you know, an actual well done research study. Don't take their word for it. But actually, no, unfortunately, they're still non-open access journals. So anyway, the point was, okay, this is doable. And since it's doable and no one is really doing it seriously trying to solve this problem at scale, I felt like, okay, I've got to go all in on this and you're not going to solve it by policy, because if you ever try to tell people what they could or couldn't eat, you'd be out of office the next day And you're not going to solve by education because there's plenty of educational materials out there about the problems that that industry causes, and it's being completely unnecessary. But education doesn't solve the problem. So I just realized that no, the way you solve the problem is you recognize that the problem isn't that people love to eat and meat and milk and fish and stuff like that. It's we're producing them the wrong way. We're using this incredibly inefficient, destructive, prehistoric technology to turn plants into meat and fish and milk.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:21:09] People are going to continue to want those products that don't waste your time trying to tell them not to. You just have to find a way to produce them without the collateral damage. I realized, like, compared to some of this stuff that we're trying to solve, that's like clearly a completely solvable problem to be able to make foods that outperform the products we use animals to make today. And if we could do that, and especially if we could make them cheaper, you know, nobody loves the fact that their meat comes from animals. I mean, they love the fact that tastes delicious. It's, you know, familiar, it's good source of protein, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don't love. In fact, they really try to avoid thinking about the way it's made. And we had very good data and impossible foods about this. But anyway, that if you could produce an identical product, even at at parity price, and the only difference was it was not made using animals, a large majority of consumers would prefer it for that alone. Okay, so anyway, the bottom line is clearly a solvable problem. Is a science and engineering problem, not a political problem. And you know, if you can solve the technical problem, the free market will take care of the rest. Okay. So that's that's why I left and found it impossible foods.
Henry Bair: [00:22:27] I just have to remark, first off, that the fact that you looked at climate change, which is arguably the greatest existential threat to humanity's existence, you look at that problem and then you think to yourself that the solution is to change how humans have consumed food for millennia. And your response to that is that that's a solvable problem. Let's do it. It's just that, I mean, I hats off. You know, I can't believe that was your response.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:22:57] But I mean, the thing is, it's just if you can just be rational and just look what look at break down the problem. What are the pieces that that need to be solved? There are all things that, you know, compared to like all kinds of research that's going on. By far not the hardest.
Henry Bair: [00:23:12] Yeah, I do want to dive a little bit, you know, take a dip into, uh, the technology aspect of it. But, you know, I just also want to remark on the fact that your whole strategy, I mean, there's there's a lot of insight there, right? Because your strategy was not necessarily like a lot of, uh, there are a lot of plenty of vegetarian meat options companies out there, but they're competing against other vegetarian meat options. They're trying to capture the attention of people who already eat plant based foods.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:23:38] Exactly. That's the whole mistake.
Henry Bair: [00:23:40] Yeah. Whereas your insight, it sounds like, is that. No, no, no, you're going to compete with the actual meat. You're going to try to make a plant based product that tastes so good and tastes such like meat, that people who eat meat have no excuse not to eat it, right?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:23:54] No, it's not even they have no excuse not to eat it. It's that basically this is the best tasting, best nutritional profile, most affordable, you know, burger or steak or whatever out there. You're not going to go, oh, no, I'd much rather pay more to have an inferior version that was made from the corpse of an animal. It's just. No, that's not how markets work.
Henry Bair: [00:24:19] Yeah. So now can you tell us, you know, what is the core insight or the core technology that makes Impossible Foods products that much better?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:24:29] Okay. There's a lot of science and technology that had to be figured out to be able to make the products that that impossible currently makes, and the ones that in the future, it's not one problem. Okay? You know, you have to get a lot of things right. And it's not just the entity itself. Among the things you have to get right is you have to make sure that the ingredients all have a scalable supply chain, that the costs are right, that that you're tracking the environmental impact and stuff like that. But food product wise, you have, okay, the flavor, the aroma, the dynamics of cooking it, which is very dynamic transformation, the texture at different levels of doneness, these things are all different. Also the juiciness, all this stuff. And you have to realize that your target consumer is a hardcore meat lover. If you don't check all the boxes, they'll just say, well, too bad for you. So there's a bunch of problems to be solved. But anyway, having said that. So the core thing I would say the core technology, so to speak, was basically recognizing that this is the most important scientific problem in the world because of the impact of solving it, is to understand how meat works and fish and dairy foods too. But, you know, in molecular terms, and to treat it as a hard scientific problem that requires not just people who know how to fool around with food, but people taking a very rigorous scientific approach and starting with understanding it.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:26:05] It's like, you know, yeah, okay, we want to cure this disease, but you don't come up with a cure for a disease by just saying, okay, well, we'll just try a few things and see what works. You have to start by having a deep understanding so that you can be very deliberate in solving it. So that was, I would say, the way I would frame what's important. Now one of the things that we discovered was this thing that sort of gets most attention, how meat flavor works. Okay. So meat is very different from broccoli. When you cook broccoli, it gets mushy and, you know, turns brown or whatever. But when you cook meat it undergoes this amazing transformation. Something spectacular happens. Okay. You know, well, for one thing, the texture changes and it exudes juice and stuff like that. But the main thing that happens is that an explosion of chemistry produces this intense characteristic aroma profile and then flavor profile, and completely transforms the flavor from relatively mild, bloody tasting to, you know, intensely meaty tasting and stuff like that.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:27:14] So, you know, an obvious question we need to ask was, why does meat taste like meat? And and so distinctly different from anything in the plant world? The answer and I sort of I had the hypothesis this is going to be it. But then it was, you know, actually established, you know, at impossible that every living organism on Earth contains this molecule, heme, which is, um, the molecule that's most familiar as the thing that carries oxygen in your blood and makes your blood red and stuff like that. Animals contain way more heme than essentially any plant, and the reason is because it's it's involved in all these transactions with oxygen, as well as other things that are essential to the respiratory chain and stuff like that. And because animals are so much more metabolically active, they have much higher levels of heme and um. Well, okay. Heme is also known to be one of the best catalysts in nature. For example, you know, the enzymes in your liver that metabolize caffeine use heme as the catalytic element. Okay. Um, many of the enzymes that are involved in steroid biosynthesis and making, you know, cortisol and testosterone and estrogen and blah, blah, blah, use heme as the catalytic element okay. It's a great catalyst. And so okay, here you have this food that when you cook it it has an explosion of chemistry that's just screaming there's a catalyst here okay. And the fact was that there was literally nothing in the scientific literature, in the popular literature, in the patent literature that said that he made anything to do with meat flavor.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:29:03] And that shows me something about, um, a huge opportunity in the food system in a way, which is that there's been virtually no curiosity and no innovation devoted to food. People just think, well, it just is what it is, and it just shows up on your plate or, you know, grows in the farm, whatever. All someone had to do was to ask the question, like, what's the catalyst for all this chemistry? And it was kind of obvious. Okay. So anyway, that was just kind of a real eye opener to me about like, well, frankly, what an opportunity there is to make the food system better in every way because there's been so little innovation, so little research, so little curiosity. It's the most important system on the planet, in a way, because, you know, we need food to keep us alive. And it's the major driver of the biodiversity collapse. And and it's the best opportunity to turn back the clock on, on global heating. And yet the amount of scientific attention, research funding, anything devoted to it compared to like renewable energy is like a fraction of a percent. But I mean, hopefully that's going to that's going to change. And there's so much about that system that can be made better.
Henry Bair: [00:30:17] It's absolutely fascinating. And, you know, the passion that you have for the biochemistry, for figuring out the genotype of why foods taste like they do and not just the phenotype. You know, that really it's inspiring. So thank you very much for that. So I want to touch on something that I've heard, uh, almost like a criticism or concern and see how you would address that. So I will grant you that, I think because of how health conscious people are, there have been, in addition to Impossible Foods, I'm seeing a lot of innovation in terms of trying to make plant based foods more palatable. I mean, the things that people are doing with pea protein and chickpea flour, I don't know, you can you can make wonderful tasting desserts, you can make dessert bars that have, you know, that have no dairy in them. You can make plant based butters that taste amazing. But one thing I have heard, almost like a counter reaction to all this rise and all this technology, is that all these foods are hyper processed, and they'd much rather go back to whole foods, right? Whole animals, unprocessed meats. What are your thoughts about that? Is that a valid concern, these foods being too hyper processed.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:31:20] So all food is processed okay. So process is is absolutely the wrong word. The fact that what's on your plate didn't just fall off a tree is not a problem per se. And you know, people sometimes say, oh yeah, but it's got too many ingredients. Like, well, think about the tossed salad that you made last night. How many ingredients did that have? Or if you make a fresh loaf of whole grain sourdough bread. How many ingredients does that have? And what is the process? It's you denature the protein by kneading the dough. Okay. That's critical. Part of the process. You inoculate with, you know, yeast and sourdough culture or whatever. You expose it to high heat to cook it. Every culture, most of their food is processed. Okay. Processing is not the problem. The question is, are you doing something to it that loses some nutritional value or creates a nutritional issue? That's the question. And there are a lot of mass produced foods where the specific process that was used, but maybe equally important, if not more, the choice of ingredients in those foods produces a very, let's say, nutritionally unhealthy product. Okay. For example, you know, high salt, high glycemic index, you know, putting, you know, simple starches and sugars in it and so forth. Uh, high calories, low micronutrient content, stuff like that that differentiated from a lot of what people think of as, as, you know, whole simple foods. And that's legit. Okay.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:33:07] A Twinkie. Yeah. Not a good dietary choice. Pepsi-cola. Mhm. But now when you talk about and I'll just focus on Impossible's products because I don't, I don't really want to represent someone else's. But, but you know a lot of it the same stuff applies is what actually goes into it. First of all, look at the nutrition label, okay? People care about the protein in their meat. How does the protein content compare? It's basically equivalent to the animal product replaces. How about calories? Well, our calories are lower than the product that the impossible product replaces. So saturated fat there's no cholesterol. We make sure that the micronutrient content is equivalent. It's got higher fiber. Okay. So from nutritional standpoint, it's by any reasonable measure. And it's not as if we don't understand the essentials of nutrition very well. So you can make a reasonable assessment of what is the nutritional profile here and how does it how does it compare. And then what's been the process. Well, the major protein component in our products is soy protein, which a lot of people don't realize, but it's basically by the standard measure of protein quality equivalent to beef protein quality in terms of digestibility and amino acid composition.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:34:24] But anyway, it's isolated from a soybean, you know, just like flowers isolated from a wheat grain. And then it is put through an extrusion process which is very much like making bread actually, which denatures the protein and aligns the denatured protein to some extent, which gives it a two year texture. Okay, now it's known that that process actually enhances the protein digestibility. Okay. In fact, interestingly enough, most of the soybean protein in the world is used to feed livestock, pigs and chickens mainly. And and they typically get fed soy protein that goes to that process and is extruded. And believe me, all they care about is optimizing the essential nutrients for those pigs. So it actually improves. They do that because it actually improves the digestibility. It comes down to it. The bottom line is processing is an integral part of almost every food that's made and shows up on your plate. Okay? And for that matter, science. Like the food we eat today, you could say it's a collaboration between science and nature. It's always been people discovering what's edible, what's delicious, what foods go together, how you can process things to to make them better nutritionally. If you ate cassava straight from the plant, you'd be dead because.
Henry Bair: [00:35:54] It's poisonous, right?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:35:54] You have to process it to get rid of the cyanides. So basically the point is I didn't get into this because I want to be a food business guy. I only care about making the world better and one of the core principles. And my wife actually was an MD, PhD also, um, was ahead of health and nutrition, had Impossible Foods, and she was completely conscientious about we're only never going to sell a product unless we believe it's by the best scientific evidence available, better for the consumer than what it replaces. And I think we've totally lived up to that. But the processing thing is because because when people hear processed, they don't think, oh, okay, that's like making bread or making mashed potatoes or something like that. No, they're thinking Twinkies. And it's used as a pejorative term and completely inappropriately. But then in the popular imagination, it kind of gets completely conflated with unhealthy foods. And there's a big disinformation campaign that's placing articles and stuff like that. That's basically saying plant based foods are ultra processed and bad for you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're ghostwritten and they get put in these checkout counter magazines and so forth. And it's all funded by the Slaughter Cartel and actually the pharma industry, which makes huge profits selling, you know, antibiotics and growth promoting drugs to the animal ag industry. And they see the plant based foods as a looming threat, which it is. And they're spending many millions of dollars with this mass disinformation campaign to get people to think you need meat, and these foods are unhealthy and stuff like that. The truth will out.
Henry Bair: [00:37:45] Yeah, I mean, I the mission is is truly admirable. I'm just, uh, you know, I, I mean, I don't know how much, how big the meat industry is, but it's got to be one of the biggest ones out there. So they're gonna they're gonna try to fight. Mhm. I'd like to close with, with a question. So you created Impossible Foods and I think it's safe to say it might be the most well known producer of plant based substitutes for meat products around the world. Even people who haven't tried it have heard of it. Burger King has a product that uses your your meats. I remember when it first was released, it sounded like this mythical thing that would be really hard to get your hands on. Like this thing that's only available to like, the elites, whatever that means. I remember that because I was in college when I first when I first heard about the Impossible Foods, and at this point, now I can walk to my neighborhood like grocery store and pick up your products. I have several bags of, like, sausage patties from impossible in my freezer.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:38:40] Thank you.
Henry Bair: [00:38:40] I. I should say, for the listeners out there, I have no financial disclosures. That's Impossible Foods, is there? I'm not receiving anything. Any compensation for this. I'm just mentioning it because it genuinely tastes really delicious. But so you have achieved a great degree of success, but you're not there yet in terms of, you know, transforming everyone's relationship to food. But I'd love to just hear your vision like, what is the future of food in relation to environmental sustainability? What would you like to see happen to the world?
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:39:10] Well, that's a nice short answer question, isn't it? I think there's there's two things. First of all, we have to completely, as completely as we possibly can, uh, eliminate the use of animals of food technology. I'm not talking about, like, taking the chicken away from some poor farmer in Burundi. I'm talking about, you know, here's just an interesting fact. What fraction of the world's meat do you think is consumed in low and lower middle income countries?
Henry Bair: [00:39:36] I'm gonna say not a lot, because I think most low income countries are actually largely plant based.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:39:43] And you would be correct. So less than 2%. So the low and lower middle income countries account for about 45% of the world's population. This is world Bank classification, and they consume less than 2% of the world's meat. And the same is true less than 2% of the world's milk anyway. So the point is, if you just address the problem in global markets, you've essentially solved the problem. So when I say I want to as completely as possible eliminate the use of animals as a food technology, that's what I'm talking about. And that requires continuing innovation, because basically it's possible. You know, when we released our burger product, we'd only been working on it for like, I don't know, six years or something like that. And I'd been working on for, you know, 100,000 years and it's still not very good at making meat. But, you know, in six years we were basically running even with the cow, but we're still getting started.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:40:36] I mean, there are so many things that are obvious to us, ways that we can make it, make the products better, make them cheaper, make them even healthier. There's huge opportunity for continuing innovation, and every bit of that will drive the mission forward by giving people more and more incentive to switch to a superior plant based product and so forth. So that's got to happen for sure. And that will happen absolutely. Without question. I mean, at this point, Impossible Foods has proven we have data from blind taste tests and, you know, all kinds of things that we can make, meat products that mainstream meat consumers would actually prefer over the animal product. Okay. And most consumers ever buy our products become repeat customers, and most of them are meat consumers. But we still have a small share of the overall market. And so we can never be complacent, and we know we can make the products better and better and better and better and frankly, more power to anyone else who wants to work on this. I mean, I'm I feel like there's lots of opportunity out there. It doesn't just have to be impossible. And so that's going to happen for sure. The other thing is, okay, what do you do now when you don't need all that land and water and other resources to produce this ridiculous food? And that's a really important question. And what about the livelihoods of the people who are currently making a living raising, you know, animals for food? What happens to them? Well, actually, that's a solvable problem too. And it's amazing.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:42:07] It's almost like trivially solvable in a way, because the people who are farmers and animal agriculture make a terrible living. By and large, the slaughter cartel makes out like bandits and the farmer industry that sells antibiotics and growth promoters to livestock make out like bandits. But the farmers are struggling. And in fact, in the US, for example, every recent US census of agriculture, more than 70% of beef cattle farmers lost money. Okay. And the same is even more true in the EU and the EU. More than 100% of the income of beef farmers in the EU comes from governments. More than 100% more than 100% of income, because the governments cover their losses, because they lose money on their business and then provides their income. Okay, so without subsidies, that industry is dead as a doornail and even with subsidies, they're barely scraping by. Okay? They're not. These guys are not rich by a long shot. Big opportunity here because. And you can calculate what the total gross income of those farmers is. You look it up actually of, let's say beef and dairy farmers. It's, um, on the order of $800 billion. Okay. That's not chump change, but it's way less than we're spending every year on renewable energy research. And it's way, way less than, uh, economists estimate the impact on the global economy will be if we continue in our current climate trajectory, way less more than an order of magnitude less. So here's a thing that could happen, which is that governments, just like you pay teachers and firefighters and police and stuff like that, pay the farmers who are currently chasing cows around to instead either actively restore native ecosystems and then manage them as healthy, self-sustaining ecosystems and get paid for it.
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:44:09] The amount you would have to pay to make them way better off than they are today. Them and their communities. Because the communities that where they spend money and stuff like that make them way better off is a pittance compared to what it's going to cost to switch to a renewable energy system. If we can ever pull that off and what it will cost if we don't. So I think that that's going to be part of the trajectory is that, you know, we take for granted this like the biosphere, is kept alive by all these self-sustaining ecosystems that we've totally trashed. Here's an interesting fact that you may not know. The cows on earth today outweigh every wild terrestrial, vertebrate mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian left on Earth by more than a factor of 15. Okay. Cows alone outweigh every remaining wild terrestrial vertebrate by more than a factor of 15, which is just an illustration of the degree to which we have replaced nature with cows and the plants that can survive trying to coexist with cows and that cows like to eat. So anyway, the point is that we have to realize that we have to take care of these ecosystems that keep our biosphere viable. Okay? And that's just as valuable as being a first grade teacher and well worth, you know, governments paying relatively small amount of money way less than the military budget to, uh, you know, people who live on that land and to take care of it.
Henry Bair: [00:45:41] You've offered us so much to think about. Pat, I want to thank you again for for taking the time to join us for sharing your story. I mean, it's been a remarkable story, from clinical medicine to biomedical research to inventing one of the most important tools in genetic research to now trying to solve one of the biggest and most challenging problems facing all of humanity. You know, I if nothing else, the story is inspiring in terms of encouraging us to rethink creatively about what. Solvable means. You know, a lot of times we look at a big problem. It's like, oh, well, they tried that. They tried that. You know, I'm not going to try anything else. But, you know, I just I'm going to be thinking a lot about your response to seeing that great big problem of climate change and then saying to yourself, like, I can do this. You know, so -
Dr. Pat Brown: [00:46:28] That's the biggest thing that holds back. Solving problems, honestly, is that people talk themselves out of it like, no, it's not my job, it's the UN's job, it's the government's job. Well, I'm just a geneticist, and this is really an engineering problem or whatever. They count themselves out for no good reason. If you see a big problem in the world, there's no reason why you should talk yourself out of taking it on.
Henry Bair: [00:46:50] Well, on that encouraging note, you know what? We'll end this conversation. I think it's a wonderful place to end a hopeful note. Uh, rousing call to action. So thank you very much, Pat, for for taking the time to join us in conversation. Thank you for joining our conversation on this week's episode of The Doctor's Art. You can find program notes and transcripts of all episodes at the Doctor's Art.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tyler Johnson: [00:47:24] We also encourage you to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy the program. And if you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in healthcare who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.
Henry Bair: [00:47:38] I'm Henry Bair
Tyler Johnson: [00:47:39] and I'm Tyler Johnson. We hope you can join us next time. Until then, be well.