— Lisa Akbari

I'm not, you know, too up on the wide array of plant-based meat alternatives right now. Um, I've certainly tried many of them. I just don't know, you know offhand, which of those brands are gonna fit that requirement that you have for fat and the sodium requirement. I do know that a lot of the major brands are not trying to be low fat or low sodium. They're not part of the value proposition for people. They're really trying to create, in many cases something that that mimics, um, you know, a, a product that you'd see at a supermarket fast food or quick service type restaurant or something that really as a stand-in for some of these, um, otherwise processed foods. Um, I'm sure there are people making, you know, lower fat, lower sodium alternatives. I'm just not as tuned into, um, some of those commercially made products. Now, if you were looking to make your own vegan meats, right, you could do any number of things depending on what you wanted to use as a base. So, you know, old school from the seventies, you'd use something like textured vegetable protein, you grind it with some, you know, roasted cauliflower and maybe some toasted walnuts. And that could be, you know, ground up together and be a really unique, you know, soy plus veggie plus nut kind of ground meat option. Uh, you can also just make, you know, lentils, you could just take like red lentils or other sorts of lentils and give 'em a mash. And that can be a stand in, in like a lentil bologna. And some people find that little bit of a lentil bite to be, you know, close enough to like little bits and pieces of ground meat, let's say within like a bologna or tomato sauce. Uh, so it really depends on what, what it is you're trying to do, uh, with these meat alternative options and how you see it in a final product and so on. Um, but you know, I'm sure if you were to do a search, uh, or even just do kind of an analysis, a survey of some of the package products available, uh, you might number one quickly see that a lot of them are not low fat or low sodium, but you might find those brands that are giving more of that brand promise around, you know, plant-based but also not high fat, low, you know, high sodium type of thing. I'm sure someone's out there doing it for sure.