Seaweed for Healthier Humans
The Seaweed Company produces all kinds of products based on seaweed to support a healthier, more sustainable planet — ranging from plants and soils, over humans and animals, to oceans and coastal regions. Last article, we focused on plants and soils. This time, let’s dive into the benefits seaweed can have for humans. In an interview with Dr. Sylvia Strauss, we dive into her love for cooking with seaweed, how seaweed can benefit humans, and what obstacles seaweed in food currently faces.
Introducing SeaMeat
One of the first things that is apparent from a conversation with Sylvia about food is her love for cooking with seaweed — if you ask her, “it’s just a miracle plant”. Indeed, seaweed can be used for food in many ways. Just like with vegetables, some species can be eaten straight from the sea, while others need to be cooked or processed. Seaweed can also be used as a spice, as dried flakes sprinkled over dishes for example. Most interesting for us, though, is its potential to replace other ingredients to make food items more nutritious.
The Seaweed Company has developed SeaMeat®, a blend of different dried seaweed species which can be easily integrated into meat products — such as burgers, meatballs, or sausages — to create hybrid meat products that are healthy, tasty, and impactful.
In fact, including SeaMeat® in burgers not only has an immense positive impact on the environment, it can also greatly improve their nutri-score! How is that possible? Let’s unpack.
Unveiling Seaweed’s Seven Superpowers
Seaweed offers a multitude of health benefits when incorporated into food. The main seven advantages it provides encompass: its richness in high-quality proteins, its diversity of minerals, its potential to reduce the addition of salt, its optimal levels of iodine, its abundance of dietary fibers, its antioxidant activity, and its omega-3 fatty acids.
Proteins
Seaweed is a very high quality protein source. Sylvia explains, “as it contains all essential amino acids, there is nothing missing like in some other vegetables”. Although replacing part of the meat with seaweed — in a burger for example — slightly reduces the overall protein content, it adds a very good protein type.
Minerals
Seaweed is also very rich in minerals including calcium, potassium, magnesium, and iron. Although they are essential to maintain healthy body functions, many of these minerals are not found in such high levels in other vegetables.
Salt
Next to their healthy properties, seaweed minerals also contribute to its salty taste. The salt usually used for cooking is sodium chloride, which is not healthy when consumed in too high concentrations. However, thanks to the salty taste from other minerals such as magnesium or potassium, food prepared with seaweed requires less addition of sodium chloride. This is beneficial for blood pressure and cardiovascular health — more benefits, with the same taste!
Iodine
Speaking of minerals, seaweed also contains iodine — an essential nutrient which is often lacking in the diets of much of the population. Iodine deficiency can have severe health consequences for the thyroid gland and is affecting brain development during pregnancy and in babies. Seaweed is a natural iodine source, and the unique blend of different species in SeaMeat® ensures that it contains optimal levels — not too little, but also not too much!
Dietary fibers
Seaweed has more dietary fibers than most terrestrial vegetables. These fibers promote a healthy gut and its microbiome — and as Sylvia emphasizes, don’t underestimate the power of a healthy microbiome! “It keeps your immune system healthy and lowers inflammation. That has positive effects for the prevention of other diseases, from coronary heart diseases to high blood pressure and high blood glucose levels. It even has a positive influence on your brain!” In short, “pretty much everywhere you can think of, a healthy gut and microbiome is beneficial”. Great news for us, as seaweed is perfect food for our microbiome.
Antioxidant activity
Next to these advantages, seaweed also scores bonus points thanks to its high antioxidant activity. In case you’ve only encountered this word on the packaging of fancy fruit juices or green tea, here’s what it boils down to. Antioxidants are substances that scavenge free radicals, which are compounds that cause oxidative stress and harm to the body if there are too many of them. Antioxidants, found in foods such as berries, green tea, or seaweed, attack these free radicals. Thereby, seaweed can help reduce the risk of cell damage.
Omega-3 fatty acids
To round off the list of seaweed superpowers, the sea plant is very low in fat. The fat that it does contain “is the best fat you can imagine, as it’s full of omega-3 fatty acids”, which are a type of polyunsaturated fatty acids. These reduce the risk of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases, such as diabetes.
Overcoming Seaweed’s Culinary Challenges
Alright, alright, so seaweed has all these fantastic health benefits — but eating seaweed is kind of weird… right? No! In fact, seaweed improves the taste and texture of the food it is included in.
We’ve talked about the amino acids in seaweed making it a very high quality protein source, but they also do much more than that. Some of the free amino acids influence the taste of food including seaweed as they are responsible for umami flavor. Umami, Sylvia explains, is “the core fifth taste you can sense on your tongue, next to salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. It is a meaty, savory taste, which makes every food more delicious. The Japanese know this very well. They use Dashi — a broth made from seaweed — in almost every dish just to intensify the taste of the other ingredients.” ‘Intensifying the taste’ are the key words here — when SeaMeat® is mixed with meat, the meat doesn’t suddenly taste like sushi — in fact, the seaweed is barely noticeable! Instead, the taste of the meat itself is improved by the addition of umami.
Next to the taste, seaweed also influences the texture of food. Sylvia explains, “When seaweed comes out of the sea it holds a lot of water. The same happens in your dish when you mix it with your meat: it holds much more water. This makes the food more moist or juicier, which can be quite nice.” Indeed, who doesn’t like a juicy burger?
If seaweed has all these benefits, why are we not using it more in Western countries? According to Sylvia, this is mainly due to a cultural barrier. “Seaweed products are not widely available in Western countries yet. Because seaweed is not known as part of our diet or seen anywhere in shops, people don’t consider it as food and see it as a strange thing to eat. I hope it will change in the future, that we will see more and more products with seaweed, so that people get accustomed to seeing it as an ingredient and don’t feel appalled when they see it dried in a bag or as an ingredient in a product.”
The first step to cooking with seaweed, however, is of course knowing what to do with it. Any advice from Sylvia? “I cook almost every day with seaweed in some way, and with different kinds. Sometimes only as a little seasoning on top, or sometimes I use it as a real ingredient, and quite a substantial amount. I like Japanese cuisine a lot, where seaweed is included in almost every dish. You can use seaweed to make Dashi, pesto-like spreads, you can shape up your Bolognese for pasta, use it as a main ingredient in soup, improve pasta or bread, make a salad, and many more” … or of course, you can enjoy the “miracle plant” in a healthy seaweed burger!
For more information on SeaMeat® or how seaweed can be used to develop healthy, tasty, and impactful hybrid meat products, please contact Lieneke Hohmann, Business Development Lead Blue Health at The Seaweed Company. lieneke.hohmann@theseaweedcompany.com
About The Seaweed Company
The Seaweed Company was founded in 2018 and specializes in the development of high-value products for humans, animals, soils, and plants and in the cultivation of traceable seaweed species on a commercial scale. The Seaweed Company has its own seaweed production locations in Ireland, Morocco, India and The Netherlands and has developed products that contribute to sustainable agriculture. The Seaweed Company is actively involved with innovative research around applications in the medical field (Alzheimer’s and diabetes), functional food (alternative proteins), sustainable materials (natural composites) and sustainable seaweed cultivation methodologies. The Seaweed Company has a strong focus on Blue Farming, where we use the blue strength of the sea to support our land. Our TopHealth Plants product is an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides.
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