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.

  • pezmaker @sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • atro_city@fedia.io
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          5 months ago

          Thank you for that insight. Kind of hilarious they didn’t figure that out during product testing.