[barrell]

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.

[billynomates]

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.

[close04]

> 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.

[Avshalom]

Man, putting a burger between two pieces of bread with onion, lettuce, tomato and pickle isn't compensating elsewhere

[close04]

That's not what I meant. If you eat extra "crap" (salt, sugar, fat, palm oil, coloring, additives, etc.) in one food you can't always balance it out with another food. It's not all like counting calories, only care about the total because some things you shouldn't eat in any measurable quantity.

And if I make the effort of eating vegan also for health reasons, why would I go for the ultraprocessed vegan option? To be clear, I wasn't talking about this particular burger, just the general logic that "this food is fine because I can get what I actually need elsewhere" and that "healthy/unhealthy is relative to what else you eat". It's not, some things are objectively unhealthy and there's no option to eat something else to "balance" it.

[Avshalom]

I mean arsenic is objectively unhealthy. None of the other things in your parenthetical are

[lkbm]

What micronutrients are you getting from ground beef that Beyond burgers don't have?

[ap99]

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%.

[eeixlk]

Pea protein, avocado oil, brown rice protein and red lentil protein is poison now?

[landl0rd]

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.

[lkbm]

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.

[lm28469]

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

[barrell]

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!

[PxldLtd]

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.

[ricardobayes]

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.

[barrell]

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”.

[ricardobayes]

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.

[barrell]

What is this about “the agrolobby”? I haven’t eaten processed foods in decades. I started when I was a kid because I didn’t like eating things where I didn’t know all the ingredients. Not from marketing or lobbying or trends. I just stopped eating processed foods, felt better, and now if I eat any processed foods I get ill, so I don’t eat them.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t eat processed foods because of marketing or advertising or lobbying they’ve been exposed to. There is a solid rational to eat whole foods, and anyone I know who does not eat processed foods does it because they’d rather eat whole foods.

There is a ton of research to suggest processed foods are safe to eat. One could also make the argument these are all funded by their own lobbying groups. The truth of the matter is nutrition is complicated, there is likely more than one answer, and we definitely do not know them.

Not everyone who disagreed has been swindled by some corporation.

HCl is toxic when ingested btw. The fact it is in your body does not mean it’s safe to consume.

[ricardobayes]

My point was there is very much this kind of "whispering propaganda" when it came to vegan food, labeling it as unhealthy, "processed" and full of chemicals. Most of it was and is done by the "agrolobby", sometimes subtly, sometimes not, e.g. through full-page ads in the NYT, laying out scary-sounding chemical ingredients. The agriculture sector collectively shat its pants when something came along for the first time in centuries that could even slightly change consumer habits.

[barrell]

This is not contending with the health aspects of it though. It is highly processed and it uses a bunch of toxic chemicals to make it, regardless of what any lobbying groups say.

[samiv]

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

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[adrian_b]

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.

[TeMPOraL]

> 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.

[adrian_b]

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.

[barrell]

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.

[lm28469]

> 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...

[TeMPOraL]

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).

-

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.

[lm28469]

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

[TeMPOraL]

It's easy to blame diets and lifestyles because you don't have to be specific, and if reality disagrees with your hypothesis, you can claim the victim didn't hold their lifestyle or diet right. Diet/exercise are the ultimate "fuck off" advice.

[lm28469]

> It's easy to blame diets and lifestyles because you don't have to be specific

It's extremely specific actually: obesity, smoked meat, red meat, alcohol, cigarettes, high sugar, low fibers, nitrites and a shit loads of additives that are banned in the EU but not in the US.

> Diet/exercise are the ultimate "fuck off" advice.

No, it's a every simple and actionable advice actually, you can reduce your chances of cancer by 50-75% by "diet and exercise"

> if reality disagrees with your hypothesis

It does not disagree with "my" hypothesis (which is the universal consensus btw)

> you can claim the victim didn't hold their lifestyle or diet right

It's your life, do as you please, you're a big boy, you'll be the only one paying the price ultimately. I don't exercise and eat clean because it makes me invincible, I do it because it makes me feel better, improve my odds at pretty much everything in life and increase my health span dramatically, even if I die of cancer next month I am already benefiting from my actions every single day.

> tobacco, diet, infection, obesity, and other factors contribute approximately 25–30%, 30–35%, 15–20%, 10–20%, and 10–15%, respectively, to the incidence of all cancer deaths in the USA

researchgate.net/publication/5225070_Cancer_is_a_Preventable_Disease_that_Requires_Major_Lifestyle_Changes?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6Il9kaXJlY3QiLCJwYWdlIjoiX2RpcmVjdCJ9fQ

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Cancers-that-have-been-l...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-role-of-genes-and-en...

[lkbm]

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.

[oblio]

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" :-)

[Marha01]

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?

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[oblio]

Is that comment trying to be intentionally dense? They're talking about E123 & co, synthetic ones.

[TeMPOraL]

"E123 & co" are descriptors covering both "organic" and "synthetic" substances, because their role is to add precision and clarity to an engineering process, not entertain the pseudoscientific naturalistic bullshit masses buy into (which by itself is just a way for another industry to make money - or do you think people come up with those fitness/healthy eating fads all on their own?).

[oblio]

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.

[rdn]

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.