Comment by lambda
6 days ago
This is such a weird comment.
Why do you think that "ethical vegans" like the "taste of plants" any more than anyone else? The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals, not because you don't like the taste.
Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers. Sure, they're not perfect from a health food point of view, but they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty. So from a health conscious point of view, it's a decent substitute.
Then there are the people who just want to reduce their meat consumption overall. Maybe they're not vegan or vegetarian, but they're trying to watch their saturated fat intake, or reduce their carbon impact, or they suffer from gout and are trying to reduce the amount of meat they eat to ease that.
Sometimes you just want to go out with your friends for a burger, and the Beyond patty can make a better substitute than a black bean or mushroom patty that used to be common.
And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it, it usually costs the same as a beef patty; it just provides another option, for the days I want to skip meat. I have, for a long time, done a low meat diet; I don't avoid it entirely, but I try not to eat it at every meal. It provides a nice alternative for that.
Is it a bit of a niche market? Sure. But, not every product needs to be for everyone.
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers
Not sure what health-conscious people you know, but I'd hazard to guess that most would choose the patty made from a single natural ingredient that's been a staple of the human diet since the dawn of man over the ultra-processed slurry of starches and oils.
You may have a point about processing, but I think by talking about "most people" you have invalidated any future points you may be trying to make.
For example:
"single natural ingredient"
not every cow is only fed with grass, and what about that grass, has it been treated, etc...
also
Neu5Gc
Mammal meat contains it, Humans have lost the enzyme (perhaps over that time since "the dawn of man"), it causes inflammation.
Looking at chimpanzee diets, I don't think our common ancestor was regularly eating burgers. More likely insects and leaves...which do not contain Neu5Gc.
As a self-proclaimed "healthy person", I'm not regularly eating either of these, but unless I know where the meat comes from, I'm likely sticking to the non-inflammatory burger.
> Looking at chimpanzee diets, I don't think our common ancestor was regularly eating burgers. More likely insects and leaves...which do not contain Neu5Gc.
Chimpanzees eat plenty of meat. They particularly enjoy hunting and eating monkeys, for example.
> not every cow is only fed with grass, and what about that grass, has it been treated, etc...
the (low) possibility of mad cow always lurks in my mind when discussing things like this. I have a deep fear of prions.
The much more common scenario is the use of growth hormones in cows - to the point that pro athletes traveling/competing in Central and South America are instructed to avoid beef altogether as they later test positive in their drug tests for anabolic steroids.
I personally opt for meat over vegetarian options when given the choice to make sure I get sufficient protein (I do track and I struggle to get enough when eating vegetarian) but I still would vastly prefer more meat alternatives. I'm always very impressed by the Beyond options and I'm glad it's very slowly becoming more mainstream. I remember the first time I'd had an Impossible Burger was in San francisco about 10 years ago - a group of friends and I were talking about this "crazy meatless burger that still feels/tastes like meat" and we searched out a restaurant that offered it. The fact that national fast food chains are offering it now is indicative of the progress being made in society and normalizing the meatless alternatives.
> Looking at chimpanzee diets, I don't think our common ancestor was regularly eating burgers
Chimps literally eat other monkeys and even cannibalize other troops... They definitely eat meat.
The "dawn of man" was perhaps 100,000 years ago. Humans, in some regions, have been raising cattle for maybe 10% of that time. And for almost all of that 10%, beef was a luxury good eaten only on occasion except by the very rich. It was certainly not a staple food. Common people, when they ate meat, were much more likely to eat fish, sheep, and goats. Cattle were mostly raised for milk and as draught animals. There is absolutely nothing natural or ancient about contemporary consumption of factory-farmed beef, either in quantity or in the manner of production.
> And for almost all of that 10%, beef was a luxury good
This is simply not true. As soon as we were able, we ate almost all megafauna to extinction. Once we mastered pastoralism, peoples who engaged in it continued eating high-meat diets. Even for more settled peoples, going up to medieval or colonial times, beef or other meat was often present in a daily stew in some form.
You seem to think that the only way to eat a cow is to raise it. Humans have been hunting before a long time. Before cattle were domesticated, they were wild, and were hunted and eaten. So were other ruminants with similar meat flavors.
So yes, cattle (and their ancestors, and their relatives) have been human food since the dawn of man.
Not if you understand how Black Angus turns into that patty, or, more accurately, how Black Angus turns into Black Angus.
OTOH, plenty do attempt to source that single natural ingredient from somewhere that produces it as it was produced at the dawn of man. Unfortunately you'll find most such product claims are scams.
I stopped eating premium beef when I was old enough (5) to understand the meat packers' auction paid about the same for a dead cow we collected from the field as a live one. And ours were 100% field raised never barned, with few enough cattle rotating through fields that every field was primarily used to farm hay we sold to the mass producers.
IOW, can't get more natural, and can't get healthier cattle. If you wanted to eat one, you'd eat one of ours. And still, the packers didn't care if the carcass was alive or inexplicably dead.
"natural" does not mean healthy. "Processed" does not mean bad.
Something that feels and tastes like a reasonable substitute for meat but doesn't jack up my cholesterol is very much appreciated.
Diet has less effect on cholesterol than activity levels.
Eating cholesterol doesn't translate to cholesterol in the blood.
There are a lot of health conscious vegetarians who still like the taste of beyond burger. How is this so weird?
> the patty made from a single natural ingredient that's been a staple of the human diet since the dawn of man.
The fact that meat comes from a single source doesn’t make it automatically healthier, so is ricin, cyanide and polonium yet I wouldn’t include any of them in my diet. Plant based protein is healthier than its animal counterpart and this is proven by proper scientific studies, not by Tik-tok stars or nutrition “experts”.
>single natural ingredient
Unfortunately, it’s barely natural and there’s definitely more than one ingredient int he patty at McDonald…
I agree beyond is ultra processed. I disagree on the fact that it’s worse than most patty. Sure you have 100% organic beef patty, but in most burger places I got to, beyond still sounds like like the better choice, from a health point of view.
And let’s not forget the quantity of meat we consume, it’s too much anyway, yet another reason why a batons burger is probably better.
And finally, environmentally, also better than classic burger.
But it is true one could take a salad at McDonalds, that would be even better.
Modern industrial farming practices are so far removed from "natural" with how they are processed that an ultra-processed slurry of starches and oils is more far more "natural" by comparison.
If you want to simply go by societal resilience from biorisks then switching to more easily controllable substances like plant based meat for protein would be an absolute win.
I know a few fitness people and they've all moved past being overly worried about an ingredient list that includes words with multiple syllables. On the contrary, they usually seem pretty content to find out what all the oddities on an ingredient list mean.
Hamburger patties are processed, I don't know who y'all are kidding.
At the end of the day, red meat is bad for you. Processed red meat is in the same category as carcinogen as Alcohol and Tobacco. To put into perspective, diet coke is two categories lower. And it doesn't get much more artificial than that. Bacon is basically cigarettes in meat form, and hamburgers are just heart disease in a bun.
Believe it or not, starches and oils are genuinely healthier than meat. Meat is basically just bad for you, or at least most of it.
And before I hear more "dawn of man" stuff - uh, no. For most of human history, humans ate very little meat. It was mostly plants.
And, of the meat they did eat, it was nothing like the meat we have today. We eat extremely fatty farmed meat, they ate lean game meat. Farmed meat is a very new invention.
There is still lean meat today! Hamburgers are not it, though.
Same IARC group does not equal same risk. Group 1 just means the evidence is strong, not that the danger is equivalent. Smoking increases lung cancer risk by 2,000-3,000%. Daily processed meat increases colorectal cancer risk from around 4.5% to 5%. calling bacon "cigarettes in meat form" is wildly misleading.
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Hamburgers are pretty lean. The meat is “processed” by mixing fatty cuts with lean cuts. So it ends up leaner than what the fat cut would have been.
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"they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty"
If you buy a Beyond patty, it has way more sodium than ground beef you'd buy at a grocerty store. Comparing it with a fast food burger isn't really fair.
>it has way more sodium than ground beef you'd buy at a grocerty store
We're not comparing fairly here. A finished hamburger patty is not pure ground beef. Did you ever make a hamburger patty yourself? You add salt and spices at a minimum.
A more fair comparison would be looking at store-bought hamburger patties. That's the same category of food.
I just compared Beyond (0.75g salt per 100g) and block house American Burger (0.88g per 100g). The patties are somewhat similar in weight, too (113g and 125g). So both in absolute, and weight relative amounts the Beyond burger has less sodium.
You can make an awesome burger pattie with beef, onion, garlic, a touch of finely chopped jalapeno and some herbs and spices etc. You don't need to add salt.
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You don't need salt and spices to make a burger, it can be 100% beef with no additives. A pinch of salt can be like 0.3g/burger and you're fine as well.
I don't eat that these days, my burgers are actually 25% beef and 75% lentil/seasoning. Still under 0.5g/100g
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It means one patty has around 45% of the optimal recommended sodium intake and 30% of the max recommendation.
https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-s...
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I have made burgers hundreds if not thousands of times and I have never done more than roll ground beef into a ball ans squish it flat. Salt and spices are completely unnecessarily, who am I, Gordon Ramsey? Sliced onion on top of the patty does plenty of work.
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You're comparing a burger patty to a burger ingredient. Two different things. Not a reasonable comparison.
A burger can be made from that solitary ingredient though.
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I've never eaten a beyond burger or anything like that at home. At home the improvement in flavour over tofu or just beans isn't worth it. I can get flavour from herbs spices and other ingredients. I've only ever eaten beyond burgers at restaurants.
"Loaded with sodium" is what the agrolobby wants you to think. If you knew what goes into supermarket burger patties I guarantee you would never want to touch them ever again. Look up nitrates for starter, which is used as a preservative in some meat products: burgers, hotdogs, cold cuts.
https://bubbafoods.com/nutrition/bubba-angus-beef-2lb/
Ingredients: beef
https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger
Ingredients: a bunch
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Ground beef from the butcher does not have nitrates
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Not really - every single Burger King out there sells the beyond burger as far as I've seen.
Burger King sells Impossible, not Beyond.
If they're selling in a supermarket, it's more than fair to compare them to those offerings.
Who's buying Burger King more than grocery shopping?
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> And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it
I just did a quick search on Uber Eats in NYC. Every Beyond Burger I found was between $3-5 more than a regular burger. That’s the reason I stopped eating them, I actually quite like the texture and flavor. I just don’t like the price.
I never buy beyond/impossible at restaurants because of this.
I often have some at home and instead of having two red meat burgers have one and one of these, occasionally when they go on sale at Costco I’ll buy a bunch.
I am not vegan or vegetarian but do seek ways to reduce my red meat intake which years ago was grilling ribeyes 4-5 nights a week. I was unreasonably unhealthy and having alternate options helped balance my health out over the long run. I like both beyond burgers and impossible. I wish they were cheaper than hamburger meat, when I compare to buying hamburger meat in bulk it’s still more expensive at this point
Interesting. At Burger King in Germany, there's no such difference, last time I checked.
Eh I just decided that $3-5 extra is fine for not causing immense amounts of physical suffering to some poor animal for my burger meal.
So you've decided it's more ethical it not be born or live at all. Obviously the only reason beef cattle exist at all is because we eat them.
It doesn't seem such a clear cut ethical decision to me. Certainly there are some forms of raising livestock that are terrible (broiler chickens come to mind), but there are other forms that actually seem quite pleasant for the animals most of the time (e.g. free-range cattle).
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I'm a bit of a fence sitter so I might actually be their target market. Very athletic, a bit health concious but not crazy about it in regards to diet. If I am eating out, usually my macros are not a big part of decision making. If there is a meatless option that might actually be good for a bit of a fibre boost, considering all the other protein I am intaking.
It's important to remember also that not athletic individuals are high achieving bodybuilders with super strict macro diets. Most other sports only require a moderate attention to diet, especially at an amateur level. Bodybuilding is very diet focused, rather than strength and skill focused.
Like all burgers this is a high protein, low fiber food option. It probably has more in common with your protein shake, being high in pea and other proteins but also has a high amount of sodium. This is a splurge food like any burger is. If you are looking for fiber, vegetables have them. Also impossible burgers taste better as they smell like coconuts instead of peas when they are cooked.
a bubba burger (grocery store frozen burger) has 90mg sodium (https://bubbafoods.com/nutrition/bubba-angus-beef-2lb/)
a beyond burger has 310mg https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger
They are lower in fat and total calories but they are obviously more processed = salt. Even a mcdonalds burger patty (without the bun) has less salt.
McDonalds quarter pounder has less salt per oz, but the Big Mac / basic burger patties have more salt per oz or per protein gram.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/about-our-food/nutrition-...
thanks for the link; here are the numbers:
Basic burger without any other ingredients has 90 calories and 160mg sodium.
The quarter pounder patty alone has 220 calories and 210mg of sodium.
Big mac patty (includes "flavoring") has 190 calories and 310mg sodium.
Beyond patty is 230 calories with 310mg sodium.
Not everyone cares about processing or salt. And like the OP said it's not a comparison to a bean burger that matters, they weren't going to chose that anyway, it's the comparison to real meat
it was the first thing he called out as being healthier, which was factually incorrect.
bubba burgers are real meat, not bean burgers
FYI most beyond burgers have more in sodium not less and beyond uses coconut oil which is still fairly high in saturated fat.
If those 2 things are your barometer for healthy… it’s not a clear win.
Seems like they switched to avocado oil recently:
> Water, Yellow Pea Protein*, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
From: https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger
This is such a weird comment.
It’s ultra processed food devoid of micronutrients with low quality protein and poor bioavailability.
Health conscious folks would definitely not choose this. In fact, it’s all the things you try to avoid as soon as you start being health conscious. Folks who want to believe they are being health conscious may be convinced via marketing to buy it, but anyone seriously invested in their nutrition would steer very clear of these.
Health conscious ethical vegan here. I eat these fairly often. The protein content is fine. I get micronutrients from other sources. I track all my calories and macros, every single day. My diet is perfectly balanced, thanks very much.
Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
> I get micronutrients from other sources
Looks like agree that it's not great but you compensate elsewhere. If you chose the "hard way" of limiting your menu to vegan why not pick the options with less compromises? Even paper can be food as long as you compensate elsewhere.
> Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.
Are you maybe conflating "unhealthy" with "not explicitly healthy"? Plenty of foods are unequivocally unhealthy, anything else you eat will not compensate. You don't "compensate" for eating a lot of ultraprocessed food because some of the contents of that food should not be in your body at all. You can't always "subtract" by eating other food. Not saying this is the case for you and these burgers.
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I'm probably similar to you re: diet, but...
If I eat perfectly clean for 90% of my diet and then I consume poison for the remaining 10%, that's still doing some damage.
You can, however, be happy with the fact that 10% is better than 50%.
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Health conscious drinker here. I have a double bourbon every few weeks. My diet is perfectly balanced. Alcohol still is not healthy and the rest of my diet has absolutely zero to do with that. I am healthy in light of everything else I eat; any individual item is still healthy or not.
Yes, some harms aren't linear no-threshold in their nature. Doesn't change the fact that the unhealthy doesn't become healthy because you eat a salad for lunch.
Same. I don't see a lot of micronutrients in ground beef that the Beyond patty doesn't have. You usually don't choose meat for the vitamins.
Health conscious vege here, I'd never touch these things with a 10 ft pole when I can make a bean patty burger or halloumi burger for 50% of the price and 300% of the flavor
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However you do realize "ultra processing" here means mechanically separating whole peas to get the protein part? Not trying to correct you or make your point invalid just flagging "processing" is not the scary thing agro lobby trying to make it, in this case. In fact they probably got super scared of meat alternatives and did everything in their power to make it go away.
Beyond meat doesn't have nitrates, filler, stabilizers or "85% meat" hence it's way more healthy than most meat-based patties or meat products.
Again, agrolobby by its full-page ads in newspapers successfully turned plant-based food which is objectively, scientifically proven to be healthy, to something unnatural, "chemical" and unhealthy.
There are a lot of people who _thrive_ off of a 100% beef diet, I don’t think there is anyone who could _survive_ off of 100% beyond meat burgers. I don’t think you can say they are way healthier than beef by any stretch of the imagination.
And to extract pure protein from a pea is exactly what I would consider ultra-processed. The checmicals used to separate the protein from the pea are included in the final product. At its purest, you’re at least drenching it in HCl. At its worst, it’s being soaked with who knows what.
Sure maybe it’s cleaned well enough to “not matter” but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find that a concern and not want to consume it.
And that’s just pea protein, I don’t even want to know the aggregate of all the ingredients and manufacturing process of the “patties”.
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Maybe they're hoping there exists a non-crazy subset of "health conscious" population, i.e. people who are not panicly afraid of "ultra processed" food and generally don't consider food processing to be a sin, who don't see food manufacturing plants as temples of Satan, and are otherwise health conscious and not just playing the fitness fad social games.
There are different classes of food processing, with very different properties.
The kinds of food processing methods that remove from raw food the parts that are unhealthy or undesirable cannot have in principle any kind of harmful effect, when the processed food is used correctly. They may have only an indirect harmful effect because the availability of pure food ingredients may enable some people to use such processed food in an incorrect way, by making food that has an unbalanced composition, for instance food that has too much sugar.
On the other hand, the food processing methods that cause irreversible transformations of food, i.e. mixing various ingredients and/or using certain food treatments, e.g. heating, are quite likely to have harmful effects on food quality, when they are done in an industrial setting, instead of being done at home. The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost. So any useless or even harmful ingredients will be used if those reduce the production cost, as long as the food still looks appetizing and it has a good taste provided e.g. by excessive sugar, salt and bad quality fat.
So the problem is less that food processing methods are bad per se. The problem is that most producers of processed food cannot be trusted to use processing methods that are good for the customer, instead of being good only for the producer. Now there are a lot of regulations that prevent some of the most harmful methods of food adulteration that were used in the past, but they are still not severe enough to ensure that every producer makes healthy food.
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I haven’t been eating processed foods for several decades now. Just because it’s trendy at the moment doesn’t make it wrong, nor does it make those who abstrain game players.
I would say veganism is more trendy at the moment. That doesnt discredit anything about the vegan diet.
> people who are not panicly afraid of "ultra processed" food and generally don't consider food processing to be a sin
If you're not you should, colon cancer is becoming a leading cause of death in people under 40...
https://www.cancerresearch.org/blog/colorectal-cancer-awaren...
https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/0...
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Ultra processed foods are tied with a myriad of health conditions.
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
Please tell the British Heart Foundation that they're "the crazy kind of health conscious" :-)
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They must be panicly afraid of salt and saturated fat instead then, since that was OP's argument for "health conscious". Yet still insist on a simulacrum of a burger, instead of having a chicken breast.
This product will only succeed if its reasonably cheaper than the cheapest meat (not just beef). It is and forever will be inferior to meat as a food product for the vast majority of consumers. Perhaps in some vision of the future the dominant consumer is Hindu and they may find the product acceptable, but they'll still be price conscious.
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
I don't know man. I'm a health conscious person and I could just as easily choose normal chicken meat, or a beef steak that's not a hamburger, or fatty fish (omega-3!!). Why would I choose a hamburger substitute? I don't even particularly crave hamburgers.
I took a look at the ingredients list of the Dutch version, and it seems to be okay when it comes to amount of industrial fillers. It seems the preservative (potassium lactate) is the only problem, everything else seems acceptable. So I guess it's not that bad, but I still don't still really have a reason to choose it.
On days when I don't particularly want to eat a lot of meat, I just eat more rice, vegetables and beans. It's not that hard?
I think the OP is right: their niche seemed to be people who crave something like a hamburger or at least real meat while having an ideological opposition against meat and enough money.
It does seem like that is literally what happened.
The only people i ever hear say anything positive about beyond burger (after the novelty wore off) was meat eaters. Vegeterians, for whatever reason, tended not to like it. But meat eaters were always going to choose meat anyways, so it seems like nobody actually bought it.
I feel like I am exactly the target demographic. Love the taste of meat. Would eat it every day if there were no consequences. But I mostly cook vegetarian at home because my wife is veg and I do somewhat care about the impacts of factory farming ('ethical' meat being stupid expensive). For me Beyond burgers are a good way to scratch that itch a bit. I feel like there must be many more people like me because meat is both delicious and problematic but maybe that's my own bias.
You did such a good job of listing out reasons why niche demographics would skip a meat-free burger, without listing the actual core demographic who consumes them: Vegans and vegetarians, i.e. people who enjoy eating burgers but don’t eat meat.
Their second paragraph addresses this.
“Health conscious” !== vegan, vegetarian
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> The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals
You can agree with this sentiment (ideology?) and not be vegan, if you aren't willing to give up meat. giving up meat is what defines this demographic.
Relative to a population of people willing to give up meat, would you assume there is no difference in "liking how plants taste" versus the general population? I'd assume it correlates directly with "willingness to give up meat".
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
Maybe, but in context its a false dichotomy, why wouldn't they pick better substitutes e.g. non-average meat?
> And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it, it usually costs the same as a beef patty; it just provides another option, for the days I want to skip meat
I'm a vegetarian. I have never _not_ paid at least $2 premium to sub in an Impossible or Beyond patty. I've had tons of them, there are some in my freezer.
I think it's pretty obvious from their financial results that this company is a commercial failure, and the subset of people who consume their product on a regular basis is vanishingly small.
Do some people occasionally eat fake meat? Sure. Enough to build a sustainable business? Less clear.
Beyond Burger ingredients:
Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
> humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
That could be mostly true of some things like the starches, but with the caveat that the industrial processes used today aren't always the same as what was done traditionally or what I might do in my kitchen, and often involve new/synthetic/potentially toxic compounds.
Pea starch might be the most benign of all of these. I'm not making an argument that pea starch is bad either, just that it's not quite the same as peas, and isn't quite the same as home-made pea starch, and we don't really know if this is a problem.
For example, with pea starch, they use defoaming agents like siloxanes, as well as sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and others. And, because it's a concentrate of just part of the plant, you might get a heavier dose of pesticides or heavy metals depending on what part of the plant these bind with. (Sure, if you eat equal portions of each part of the plant, extracted, this factor would balance out.)
There's a spectrum of course with these things. Some things like refined oils might be far more harmful than the extracted starches based on the chemistry I've looked into. I'm not particularly afraid of pea starch but I just don't buy or eat processed food generally unless I'm in a pinch.
The dose makes the poison.
People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
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There is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historically eaten them. Evolution does not select for avoiding the health problems facing modern-day humans such as cancer or heart disease.
No reason? How about financial incentives?
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I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.
But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:
1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.
3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.
4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.
5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.
6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.
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> I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history.
I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.
I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.
The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
Potato != extracted potato starch
Peas != extracted pea protein
They're not the same thing.
I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.
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> every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
what absurd scaremongering! Do you know how yellow pea protein, for example, is "refined"?
You take dried peas and grind them into powder. Pop in a centrifuge to separate protein from starch. Not exactly pumped full of "toxins"!
> Avocado Oil
You literally press avocado flesh. It's been done for centuries. It's not some crazy refinement process.
> brown rice protein
This is just ground up rice mixed with amylase or protease to isolate the proteins. There's nothing scary here. We've been eating it for millennia.
etc
Study Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo...
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
If I see "avocado oil" as an ingredient, sure it could be simply pressed avocado flesh. But it could also be a rancid hexane-refined oil potentially cut with other stuff, and I'd bet that's more likely because it's probably a lot cheaper for the manufacturer.
I don't know as much about how the starches and proteins are extracted, I'd bet it's more benign, but there are added chemicals - even if they are considered safe, it's still not quite the same as eating actual peas and rice.
Reminds me of a joke I read online. "Plant Based Meat" is not Plant. It's not Based and it's not Meat.
About as funny as complaining "oil" is used to refer to petroleum-based lubricants, avocado oil, etc. since the etymology of "oil" is strictly a reference to olive oil only.
I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk."
Not really a dig at you, sorry.
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Huh.
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> Have you tried dog meat?
I'd like to try one day. But I don't think I'd easily find a butcher selling it here in Western Europe
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Dog meat is pretty good.
(It also amuses me when vegans retreat to xenophobia as their Motte.)
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> That there is sufficient evidence that red meat causes cancer in humans
By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list.
> You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal
Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do?
> Have you tried dog meat?
No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
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Every single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat".
I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.
I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.
If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.
I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.
I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.
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Please don't post snark like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.
I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.
My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o
EDIT: grammatical cleanup
I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore
This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.
Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.
There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5
I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers
Why? Carbs and processed oils bound together by stodge isn’t healthier than fried ground beef.
Nah, it definitely costs extra at restaurants.
If any of this were true they’d be doing much better and not pivoting
Trying to avoid Mad Cow disease from ground meat is a thing too.
> Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers.
I seriously doubt that health-conscious people would pick hyper-processed plants that are meant to resemble meat over plain meat+bread+vegetables that make up a non-fast-food hamburger.
But soy products contain high amounts of phytoestrogens.
Most beyond products I know don't even contain soy as protein source.
Regardless of what you think about phytooestrogens (which has very little evidence to have negative effects in normal quantities)
You're right, they contain yellow peas. But ... these are also rich in phytoestrogens.
(It is also an Asian crop, originally, maybe that has something to do with Western people, especially men, not being very well tolerant to it)
This is a way weirder comment than the one you're replying to
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Just so you're aware.
A cow releases maybe about 50 kg of methane a year.
An average human releases about 20 tons if they're in a first world nation or maybe 4 tons if they're living in the middle of fucking nowhere.
This is such a weird comment.
I have friend who was vegan for 20 years, and when we went to good restaurant and he wanted to choose between vegan patty burger and real one, he chose real one due to all chemical industrial crap they put in those veggie patties and chose a good Swiss beef instead of questionable worse-tasting content. Yes, he literally stopped being vegan at that point, although he still is on most days since then.
Its subpar product, with way too much questionable chemistry, worse taste (or more like structure&taste) and impact on environment is... questionable too, maybe less than real beef but probably not massively. What could be acceptable for environmental impact is lab grown real meat but even that seems to not go the direction one would expect.
> I have friend who was vegan for 20 years, and when we went to good restaurant and he wanted to choose between vegan patty burger and real one, he chose real one due to all chemical industrial crap they put in those veggie patties and chose a good Swiss beef instead of questionable worse-tasting content
So, he wasn't vegan then?