[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.