[Lazare]

A lot of fear mongering there. His argument boils down to:

1. Beyond burger has canola oil in it, and canola oil is responsible for diabetes, dementia, depression, anxiety, aggression, and kills kittens. Okay, I made the last one up, but he did claim the other ones. And they're all nonsense, except for the bit where he mentions canola oil has an unhealthy ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, which it does, but he conveniently forgets to mention that it's one of the healthiest vegetable oils by that metric. (He incorrectly slams "seed oils" as being especially bad, but most non-seed oils at worse, and one of the only oils which is better - flax seed oil - is also a "seed oil".)

2. Impossible Burger uses engineered bacteria to produce soy leghemoglobin, and even though that's perfectly healthy, engineered bacteria are kinda weird, and uh, something something Nassim Teleb, don't put "foreign ingredients" in your body. Or in other words, it's probably healthy, but it's icky and violated his sense of taboo.

Meh.

[eyko]

On the point about canola oil, it's not so much that it's a good fat (it is), but that it becomes a trans fat when heated (all vegetable oil). Since this is not a salad with a drizzle of canola oil, but a burger, that is something you should care about.

[Lazare]

Canola oil contains low amounts of trans fat, comparable to all other oils, and while heating it does increase the amount, it's slow. Using canola oil in a deep fryer for 7 hours per day for 7 days resulted in boosting the trans fats from 2.4% to 3.3% by weight; the canola oil in the beyond burger will be at the low end of the range. Meanwhile, actual beef fat is around 5% trans fat, meaning that if trans fats are all you care about, the beef burger probably has more trans fats than a beyond burger.

(Whether beef tallow is actually better or worse than canola oil is complex, and some suggest trans fats in beef fat are healthier in canola, etc., but OPs naive "don't swap out a beef burger for a beyond burger because traaaaaans" seems a bit simplistic. Canola oil doesn't have much, and it's comparable to other sources of oil, including animal fats.)

[orwin]

I thought all vegetable oils were bad when heated (and also provide few nutrients, unlike animal-based grease/fat).

[Lazare]

If you heat them past the smoke point, yes, they lose a ton of nutrients and become quite unhealthy. In normal use, no, not really. The impact of heating them is quite small. And comparing them to animal fats...they're clearly slightly better in some ways, but slightly worse in others. How you balance those factors...I don't think we remotely have good data on yet.

For now I'd just try and eat in moderation and look askance at people making sweeping assertions about any food being all good or all bad.

(On the other hand, we have much better data about the environmental impact of vegetable versus anaimal calories.)

[liamcardenas]

I think the trans fat thing was a metaphor (impossible burger doesn’t even have canola oil). His main point that the beyond burger is not very nutritious — it’s just protein isolate and oil with a bit of fiber and flavoring.

[s9w]

I'm not sure I can follow. There is quite some data about vegetable oils being unhealthy, some of them being quoted by him. Why make this sound absurd?

[Lazare]

There's a lot of data suggesting sugar is unhealthy. Fruit contains sugar, so clearly eating a moderate about of fresh fruit is unhealthy, right?

This stuff is difficult to reduce to a pithy tweet.

[Konnstann]

That's not a very good analogy, given that the only reason fruit is healthy is because of all the fiber that slows down sugar absorption. If you drank the same amount of sugar in a moderate amount of fruit as juice it would be unhealthy.

[cannonedhamster]

Which is kind of his/her point. You can't just say x is unhealthy because it contains y like the Twitter twit does. You have to take into account actual usage criteria in which case the entire Twitter storm falls apart because it's comparing beef and vegetables.

[dagw]

Slightly off topic, but what is actually "canola oil". I thought it was just the US name for Rapeseed oil, but the reputation it has in the US seems extremely negative. Rapeseed oil is equally common throughout much of Europe and I've never heard anybody here say anything particularly negative about it here, certainly nobody claiming that it's categorically worse than any other oil.

[Lazare]

Yes. Canola is, basically, the edible type of rapeseed oil. The name was originally a trademark, but is now a generic term. Australia and NZ also call it "canola", but it's the same oil either way, and it's fairly decent, as far as vegetable oils go.

[dfrage]

Per Wikipedia, "the name was a condensation of "Can" from Canada and "ola" from other vegetable oils like Mazola".

[polyfather]

Thanks for this. For most of my life I thought it was a sort-of acronym for "CANada Oil, Low Acid" (as it's lower in acid than other rapeseed oils). Your etymology is the correct one.