[alkyon]

Mechanically separated meat is a marketing term. It's neither 100% meat (in fact it contains tons or fat and joints) nor a good quality meat (this one is sold separately). I don't buy any products that list it among its ingredients.

Ground beef its not the same thing

[UncleMeat]

Right but what is wrong with fat and joints?

When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?

[mrguyorama]

Metabolically, you will have different results eating lots of sausage vs eating lots of pork loin, even though both are "pork meat with fat"

Because the fat fraction matters.

Reclaimed chicken has lots of connective tissue and skin, which are fatty and has different makeup than say, the breast.

>When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?

In a stew, one or two chicken carcasses will leach lots of oil and fat into a large stew that fills ten bowls. Specific recipes will also explicitly call for you to remove that fat, and most consumers want soups that are fairly not fatty.

In reclaimed meats, one carcass gets you a couple nuggets. It's up to 30% fat, and unlike say 85% ground beef, will be mixed with thickeners and flour that will soak up that fat during cooking and not let it escape consumption.

Personally, I think mechanically separated meat and other sausage and "use the whole animal" systems are good and delicious. But I'm a fatty. And even I know not to eat baloney every day after one week where I ate a baloney sandwich every day and had rather negative bathroom experiences.

Fat isn't "unhealthy" like the 90s sugar industry wanted you to believe, but it is calorie dense and delicious, which drives you to eat more of it, and means eating the same volume of food will give you more calories.

One pound of skinned chicken breast is like 500 calories. One pound of nuggets is like 1000.

We aren't going to find a set of additives or preservatives or ingredients as the culprit because it's not about the chemistry. It's psychology and biology. The root of the problem is that PepsiCo makes more money if you eat chips and soda every day than if you don't. As long as PepsiCo makes more money from you eating yourself to death, that's going to be the outcome.

Plenty of you get angry about the "military industrial complex" but PepsiCo did significantly more revenue than Raytheon last year: $91 billion, and takes about a 10% profit margin.

The closest you can come in the "ingredient" dimension is things like regulating added sugar and added salt and added colors and added fats, but that's easy to bypass. Your soda wont have added sugar, it will have something like "Apple juice" as an ingredient that is almost itself entirely sugar and water.