Comment by TeMPOraL
6 days ago
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.
While you are right that industrial producers could deliver high quality healthy food, when I go to any supermarket and I look at the huge variety of food offerings, after I exclude the raw food ingredients, like fresh or frozen vegetables or fruits or meat, various kinds of seeds or flour or oil, etc., from what remains 99.99% contain various kinds of garbage that I do not want in my body.
Even when such food products are intended to resemble food that I used to eat at home, based on traditional recipes, the modern industrial recipes are very different, with all expensive ingredients substituted completely or partially with worse but cheaper alternatives, and with many extra additives that do not provide any nutritional benefit, but they just improve the texture and taste to resemble that of products made with more expensive ingredients or with ingredients that cause a shorter shelf life.
So in practice, the food producers could, but they don't.
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.
Strange, every single source I can find blame diets and lifestyles, but you might be right and everyone else is wrong, we just "talk more about it"... you have a good source of copium my friend
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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?
Also:
> many additives and ingredients that are not typically used in home cooking, such as preservatives, emulsifiers
Since when? Salt is a highly effective preservative, egg yolk is a powerful emulsifier, and they're largely used for those exact purposes.
The amount of bullshit in "healthy eating" and fitness fad space never ceases to amaze me.
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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.