Comment by barrell
6 days ago
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.
Man, putting a burger between two pieces of bread with onion, lettuce, tomato and pickle isn't compensating elsewhere
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What micronutrients are you getting from ground beef that Beyond burgers don't have?
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%.
Pea protein, avocado oil, brown rice protein and red lentil protein is poison now?
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
Thank you. Bean burgers are delicious. I don’t eat them as part of my normal diet, but have no qualms with them and could always share a meal with my vegan friends.
Nowadays it’s all fake meat products which I would never put in my body, and there’s this weird social pressure where I’m being silly by “refusing to eat vegan foods”.
Fruits and vegetables and legumes are delicious, I will eat all of them.
Bring back bean burgers!
I love just blitzing oats, carrots, onions as a base and then throwing in anything else like kidney beans or courgettes. Makes great veggie burgers you can just cook in the oven. Takes no time at all and less effort to cook than a beefburger.
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”.
See that's the same thought the agrolobby used to weaponize "chemical-sounding", scary names. HCl is the same your stomach uses to digest food and used in making e.g. "organic" sea salt.
I see the same argument very often these days: that only single-ingredient, "traditional" food is good.
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These are the people who argue that soymilk and seed oils are healthy. Even if they're processed with using solvents such as hexane and stuff it's just processing, right? Your also "processing" when you peal your potatoes. Same thing !
/s
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.
> 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.
Now I'm not denying industrial players have a different set of incentives than people cooking for themselves, but it's not all evil either. They also care about appeasing regulators in countries where food regulations exist, and they may care a bit personally since they themselves and/or their family is eating that too, so I wouldn't necessarily paint them as completely disconnected from the rest of society.
Now, on the other hand, the industrial producers have a few more things going in their favor, such as they actually have quality control metrics, and they are in actual position to make good on caring about food. Home kitchens are not, regular people have neither knowledge nor appreciation of the complex chemistry involved, and even if they did, the equipment used in home kitchens is too crude to allow for consistent quality (not that we can hope for any with no supply chain control either).
(The slightly-fancy restaurants are arguably the worst - they combine all the bad incentives of a high-volume, low-margin commercial operation, with equipment and setup inadequate to guarantee any kind of process quality control. Contrast that with e.g. McDonald's - they may be serving mediocre food at best, but they do it with engineering precision, and you can be sure they aren't just microwaving you an old chicken breast and adding burn marks with an electric grill to make it look like you'd expect for a $50 menu item with a name written in French.)
So the irony is, the industrial producers may have misaligned incentives, but they're also the only ones in position to deliver actually healthy and quality food. Regular people have neither knowledge nor equipment for that, and all the "healthy eating" fads abusing real scientific terms and imbuing them with quasi-religious meaning is not helping. In reality, people just eat stuff and make up stories they don't even verify to feel good with their choices. Which, like with other such belief systems, is fine, until they believe their own stories so much they try to force others to believe in them too.
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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...
Listing "risk factors" without quantifying them is useless waste of readers' time, but even then, "diet" is only one of eight listed, with three others being the obvious ones - alcohol, smoking, and low physical activity/obesity (arguably those should be two separate ones).
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The chart you linked only talks about incidence ratio, and is more than adequately explained by improvements in access to tests, quality of tests, as well as improvements in healthcare in general, as people don't suffer and die today from what they did up to few decades ago - or anything else, really, since the world has been steadily improving across the board in every dimension.
In fact, non-linear effects of population growth alone could explain that chart: people talk more, including about colon cancer, so over time, more people in the population with access to testing would go test themselves after being made aware of the potential problem, biasing the sample.
Or, more fundamentally, the fact that medicine graduated from voodoo to proper science only around 100 years ago, would explain it too, because we're less than a century into doing proper studies about anything at all.
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Note that the risk factor of diet in your chose to highlight exactly one food to avoid: red meat.
Yeah, you should probably eat more low-processed foods like veggies, but the Beyond Burger is used as a replacement for beef, not for carrots.
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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" :-)
From your source:
> Ultra-processed foods: Ultra-processed foods typically have more than 1 ingredient that you never or rarely find in a kitchen. They also tend to include many additives and ingredients that are not typically used in home cooking, such as preservatives, emulsifiers, sweeteners, and artificial colours and flavours. These foods generally have a long shelf life.
Are there ingredients actually in the Beyond burger?
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LOL @ the downvotes. I'm sure that's why Americans are so healthy, with huge supermarkets stocked to the brim with food so ultraprocessed that there are things that pretend to be called "cheese" but can't be sold as cheese.
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.