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Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation
- ablation 7y agoRegardless of veracity of OP's claims on Twitter, it's worth noting he sells "bone broth" and other animal-derived health and fitness products. There's always a dog in the fight somewhere.
- anonymous5133 7y agoMakes a lot of sense now. Read the comments in that twitter thread. There are people there who think a beef patty isn't considered a "processed food". Wow, I just don't know what to say. Also you can kinda tell people commenting kinda have an agenda when they're using terms like "fake meat".
- dagw 7y agoThere are people there who think a beef patty isn't considered a "processed food" Where do you draw the line with processed? A beef patty is in essence just a steak, ground up, and mushed together. Now there are no doubt some more unsavory purveyors of beef patties that do more than that, but in itself I find it hard to argue that a beef patty (which I can trivially make myself in my own kitchen using only a chefs knife) counts as processed. edit: that being said, I don't find his overall argument persuasive at all and it's not like he's a neutral scientist.
- DanBC 7y ago> A beef patty is in essence just a steak, ground up, and mushed together. Some beef patties are ground steak. Others use mechanically recovered meat, where the bones left after butchering are sprayed with high pressure water to blast off any remaining scraps of meat. One country had significant health scare where MRM was thought to be the highest risk product: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1482140.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1482140.stm
- dagw 7y agoCan you still buy MRM beef patties in the US? From what I can find the process has been banned since 2004
- DanBC 7y agoThe US still allows "pink slime", which is a different form of MRM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime#Current_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_slime#Current_use
- closetohome 7y agoAlso this gem > Spoiler alert - I am incredibly skeptical, and am short $BYND So...sells his own bullshit superfood, and is short on BYND. Welp, I'm convinced that he's completely unbiased and only interested in the greater good.
- asutekku 7y agoIt’s a burger. It’s not meant to be consumed daily and it switching to it or other plant based burger decreases the amount of meat consumed. No matter what it’s a much better deal than going in to a mcdonalds / whatever and getting the burger of the month from there.
- dagw 7y agoIf you go to McDonalds and order a burger with fries and a coke, then surely just changing the actual meat in the burger to a Beyond Meat burger is going to have close zero effect on the overall "healthiness" of that meal.
- asutekku 7y agoI’m not referring only to healthiness. It’s also better for the environment and cows didn’t need to be slaughtered for that.
- ryandvm 7y agoI would be totally fine with that. The goal here isn't to force feed everyone healthier food, it's to inch us closer to a more sustainable and humane nutritional pipeline.
- closetohome 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
- Vinnl 7y agoAre these really considered healthy? I always looked at them as being competitors to regular meat, sans the suffering and environmental impact. If they do that, without being more unhealthy than regular meat, then I don't see the problem - so how do they compare to regular meat?
- vfc1 7y agoBased on the ingredient list they are not healthy eaten in large amounts, for an occasional treat why not. The science seems to point to whole plant foods as being the way to go in terms of optimal health, and this is highly processed food. It sure helps to reduce the environmental impact of meat, so I'm all for them as long as people are well aware that they are not healthy.
- vfc1 7y agoThese fake meat products shouldn't be much healthier than pink slime burgers made of ground beef and fat. Most burgers are made of 20 to 30% fat trimmings anyway, and the rest is ground beef. All types of oils are not good for us, oil in general is not a health food, no even extra virgin olive oil. The backlash against these fake meat products will come slowly but surely, these are not heath foods and should only be eaten sparingly. Whole foods are the way to go, as opposed to highly processed foods like this plant-based burger.
- _carl_jung 7y ago> All types of oils are not good for us, oil in general is not a health food, no even extra virgin olive oil. I don't buy this. Omega 3 is the obvious counter example, but I don't even believe that olive oil is outright bad for you.
- Sawamara 7y agoYou should not buy this, olive oils are one of the healthiest sources of fat on this earth. Plenty of studies confirm it.
- vfc1 7y agoAFIK extra virgin olive oil is at best neutral for human health, while other oils are detrimental. There are the chemical compounds formed with the eating of certain oils, besides olive oil has very little micro-nutrient content, it's almost 100% fat. Whole olives are a great source of plant fat, but olive oil is not. Eating the whole food is crucial, instead of these highly processed extracts. Of course, it's much better than other foods such as saturated fat, but still it's not a health food.
- frafra 7y agoThey are not, different oils have just different mix of different fats, determining consistence at different temperatures. Micro-nutrients are overestimated; you do not eat olives or drink olive oil because you want to get "micro-nutrients", like you would not prefer brown sugar to white sugar just because there is a very little amount of vitamins. Every substance to have a meaningful positive or negative effect has to be in a reasonable quantity. I use olive oil everyday (I was born in Italy, were it is widely used), but it is dangerous to fry with it, especially the extra-virgin one, because it has not been purified, and you get the known smoke at a lower temperature. This is just to demonstrate that there are different oil for different usages, there is no black and white.
- UberofXplsgo 7y agoSo he points to glyphosphate in the impossible burger and canola oil in the the beyond meat burger as being unhealthy. It seems a bit dubious though as the glyphosphate is within fda approved levels and canola oil doesn't have a firm concensus of being unhealthy
- frafra 7y ago"unnatural ingredients". What does it mean? Are "natural" ingredients better a priori? Is a molecule that is produced by a living organism better than the very same molecule synthesized in a lab? No, there is no scientific proof of that; that is just marketing. "their most controversial ingredient is Soy Leghemoglobin. To make this ingredient, Impossible genetically engineers a yeast bacterium to produce a protein". So? What is the problem with that? It is scary because is made by a bacterium like most of the industrially produced vitamin C? Or is it because the bacteria has been genetically modified, like the ones who produce insulin for people suffering from diabetes? And what about "natural" meat produced from animals being fed with GMO soy then? "In general, I think unwise to mess with the complex system of human biology by introducing large qts of foreign ingredients". Again, "foreign"? What do you mean with that? Then it continues with "all non-organic" and so on, like the process is relevant, while the final result is not, similar to homeopathy. I am very skeptical about this kind of criticisms.
- vfc1 7y agoUnprocessed foods or food with minimal processing are healthier. Unprocessed meaning: nothing good was removed and nothing bad was added. The act of processing removes nutrients from the food and adds preservatives and other chemicals, it modifies a lot the chemical composition of the food.
- frafra 7y agoSorry, but "chemicals" is another meaningless word. Everything is chemical, a molecule has no memory, so it does not matter how it has been produced. Unprocessed vs processed: I was not talking about that, but your statement is not always valid, it depends from what the process does. "unprocessed milk" is more dangerous for example. My point is that reality is way more complex than "natural" vs "non-natural" and so on, and there is a lot of marketing going on which reinforces unscientific ideas.
- vfc1 7y agoOur body had evolved to eat whole foods and not some distilled version of it, like oils or protein extracts. Our bodies react not only to the presence of a given molecule but to the other types of molecules that were ingested at the same time, the amount, and how those molecules react to each other. A whole food has thousands of different compounds in it, that interact in ways that we can only now begin to image, together with undigestable compounds such as fiber that pass right through us but that feed bacteria in our gut that then produce nutrients that we also need, in a symbiotic (or sometimes parasitical) relation. The meaning that a food is a whole food, does not mean that is not made of the same molecules as an extract, but that it is provided in the relative amounts and in the right combination with other molecules that our bodies (including our gut bacteria) have evolved to consume.
- jedberg 7y agoIt seems OPs major complaint is that they are not healthy. But unless I'm mistaken, healthy isn't even part of their marketing. Their main thing is how it's better for the environment.
- anonymous5133 7y agoAlso when stacked next to a processed beef patty, Beyond Meat patties are by far healthier without a doubt.
- geowwy 7y agoHow do you figure that?
- defeomike 7y agoWell, processed meat is a known carcinogen https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/known-and-probable-human-carcinogens.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/kno... Doubt these processed plant based foods are very health promoting, but we at least don’t know for a fact that they’re carcinogenic.
- cr1895 7y ago>processed meat I'm pretty sure what they're getting at here is something like a salami or cured bacon. Not simply ground beef.
- disgruntledphd2 7y agoYup, I did a literature review of this 5+ years ago, and that is normally how the term is defined in the literature. I suspect that frozen burgers may be included in this (depending on ingredients), but ground mince converted into burger patties definitely isn't.
- Sawamara 7y ago"Vegetable oils are terrible for you?" At that point, I knew something was up. He is one of those who consider soy harmful to you. Sheer insanity. Also, he is making an argument on a false pretense: that eating processed meat is somehow okay because its already introduced to our diet. Guess what: it is not good for people. This is a product that is designed to be an alternative to that, not to home-cooked healthy italian meatless alternatives.
- s9w 7y agoThere is quite some data on vegetable oils being unhealthy. Why is that "insanity"?
- closetohome 7y agoThe insanity is claiming that the oils in Beyond are somehow as bad or worse than the fat found in red meat.
- tracker1 7y agoThe fats found in red meat are pretty well balanced fats that we, as humans can readily metabolize and use. The risks of saturated fats were never substantiated and walked back significantly in the past decade, and as to cholesterol is actually beneficial to one's numbers (also, see: cholesterol hacking). Now, the nutrition profile of naturally fed animal sources is very different from garbage/feed fed livestock. Which is another issue at hand. Personally, I'm allergic to legumes so can't really handle any of the vegetarian options out there.
- Lazare 7y agoA 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 7y agoOn 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 7y agoCanola 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.)
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- JamesBarney 7y agoI don't think anyone is arguing that these burgers are healthier than eating salmon and broccoli. Just healthier and more environmentally friendly than ground beef. His complaint is > 8/ My larger concern on both of these burgers is that - at minimum - they are HIGHLY processed products with lots of stuff that doesn't lead to healthier humans: vegetable oils, soy, protein isolates, additives, all non-organic. They are not real foods. (cough, Soylent) Mainstream science doesn't think vegetable oil is worse for you than burger fat. It doesn't think soy is bad for you It doesn't think orgamic is healthy for you. He doesn't specify which additives are bad for you and I'm too lazy to go through all the additives. And I have no idea what science thinks about protein isolate but I doubt it's any worse for you than other forms of protein. He just stringing together a bunch of friends truisms and pretending it's a rock solid case. P.s. I don't understand why they're getting so much hate for a fairly innocuous product that is trying to do some good.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoHe hates on it because it impacts the profits of the products he sells. That's it. Never trust someone who is motivated by profit to believe a particular narrative.
- undersuit 7y agoAren't the producers of Beyond Burger also motivated by profit and therefore just as suspect?
- closetohome 7y agoI don't see Beyond Burger talking shit about Justin Mares.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoI'm going to say yes. You should be just as suspect of health claims and sustainability claims of a plant based burger. But there's generally science to back up that a plant based diet it both better for the environment and better for health reasons than a meat based diet. Does that mean you shouldn't eat meat? I mean, you do you, but if you care about the environment or health generally the veggie burgers are more likely than not to be more supportive of your belief system. If you don't care about either of those things, then I suppose you would choose on taste and that's a personal preference.
- Jedi72 7y agoI expect the meat lobby to craft many a vile hit-piece over the next 15 years as their market share is (ironically) carnivorously devoured.
- t4ko 7y agoI always assumed fast food was unhealthy and full of artificial ingredients, even real patties can have negative health effects. I would not consider those meat replacements to be healthy but they surely are good enough to replace fast food patties. Also I re-read his tweets and I can't find the part where it's clearly stated that transfat are used, I just see oil being mentioned in those ingredient lists.
- geowwy 7y ago> Also I re-read his tweets and I can't find the part where > it's clearly stated that transfat are used I don't think he's saying Beyond Burgers contain trans fats. I think he's saying Beyond Meats are doing the same thing Crisco etc did when they marketed hydrogenated vegetable oils as a replacement for animal fats. It seems like a valid comparison.
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- aaubry 7y agoI don't know why some people want vegetarian food to taste like meat. I enjoy eating meat, but the best vegetarian foods that I had did not taste like meat at all, and it is how it should be. It's like with sugar, if I want to avoid consuming it, I don't replace it with sweetener, I just don't put the sugar in and enjoy the untainted taste of the other ingredients.
- ageitgey 7y ago> I don't know why some people want vegetarian food to taste like meat. There are lots of reasons people want vegetarian versions of meat. Here are some of the most common: 1. Still want to eat meat, but want to reduce the environmental impact of meat production. 2. Don't want to eat meat for moral/preference reasons, but still enjoy the taste of eating it. 3. Want to eat meat, but don't like the dietary impact and want a healthier replacement.
- pnongrata 7y agoAs a complement to your list, I'd say it's more marketable AND makes the transition for some people more smooth.
- cannonedhamster 7y agoBeyond burger does not taste like meat, it's just good tasting (to my family). Impossible tastes meaty and I don't like it, nor does my family. I've been a vegetarian for over 15 years and seen veggie burgers go from hockey pucks or green mush to what we have today. The ability to use these replacements means less changes in ingredients for recipes, easier for everyone including meat eaters when planning large get togethers, and less comments when in public. Believe it or not I really don't enjoy explaining to everyone why I choose to eat the way I do, these make it easy. When you're a minority in a society, there more options to seamlessly blend into that society, the easier life is. You also seem to be in the minority of people who don't want a sugar replacement. Diet soda is popular for a reason.
- Aromasin 7y agoI also thought this when I was still eating meat, but changed my tune rapidly when I went vegan. Frankly, if I'm craving a comfort food like a beef burger, I want something that hits as close to home as that beef burger without being a beef burger. I can have a bean burger, or some other food that doesn't try to be meat, but that's not what I need to fulfil my current craving. It's not trying to be this "best vegetarian food that you had that did not taste like meat at all, how it should be". It shouldn't be like anything. Both food options can co-exist. You're completely misinterpreting the niche it's filling. If I want tasty food, I'll eat something that's veg-based and tasty, not mock-meat. 90% of my diet is curries, chillies, stews or stir-fry's and I'm more than satisfied - but if I crave something that I can't/won't eat, you bet your arse I'm going to go for the worse tasting, greasy, salty, crave fulfilling option, be it an Impossible burger or some crappy cardboard tasting mock-meat.
- BrendanD 7y agoOne of the motivations for vegetarianism is to reduce one's carbon footprint. Highly processed products packed in plastic thwart this goal.