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Why do you believe it's not healthy? Because of the processes food hysteria stuff?

fakedang 1y ago
It's not hysteria. Beyond Meat uses way too much processing in their food. They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.
- mgraczyk 1y ago
  What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.
  - ponector 1y ago
    Treating food with chemicals usually it's not good. Also you simply don't know what exactly are they doing. Like ultra processed american bread is not so good comparing with european wholegrain sourdough bread.
    - mistercow 1y ago
      Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
      - mandmandam 1y ago
        Particularly pointless pedantry. We all know what they mean, and are to assume the best reading of what they're saying. Bread, the example they used, is a particularly stark example where Americans are subjected to stuff that is rightly banned in most of the rest of the world.
        const_cast 1y ago
        It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals. When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria. Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
        fakedang 1y ago
        > When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. And didn't they teach you at school to soak all vegetables for a couple hours in water after buying them and before storing/using them? As for injected hormones, in my part of the world (Asia and Europe), we reject such produce if we're trying to eat healthy. My family literally grows pineapples in our backyard (which I bring to Europe) because industrial pineapples are injected with ripening stimulators. > When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria. In most of the civilized world, we typically ensure humane conditions as much as possible even in industrial farming, so that chicken need not be drugged and bleach washed. Like basic hygiene and humanity such as animals not being made to live in their own shit. > Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it? Again, in most of the civilized world, we don't take issue with preserving minced garlic with citric acid. In fact, I regularly preserve a lot of veggies and sometimes even fruit this way. But I do have an issue when some industrial company decides to add sodium benzoate to their pickle to preserve it for months on end.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        mandmandam 1y ago
        > It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals. That wasn't the point they were making. They made a purely pedantic point about the meaning of the word 'chemicals' in this context. > Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it? I never said they are. Besides which, I pay a premium for organic for that very reason. Glyphosate residue is a serious problem. And then there's all the agricultural runoff, biosphere contamination, chemical interactions, etc. Less 'chemicals' is generally better; safer and healthier. It's super weird that people take issue with this simple statement, whether for pedantic reasons or through false equivalancies.
    - birn559 1y ago
      Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general. European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory. Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
      - ayuhito 1y ago
        “Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements. For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns. Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        And there are a handful of chemicals banned in the US for health concerns that the EU is fine with.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        Individual cases are interesting. For example, Wikipedia says this of E122: > In the US, this color was listed in 1939 as Ext. D&C Red No. 10 for use in externally applied drugs and cosmetics. It was delisted in 1963 because no party was interested in supporting the studies needed to establish safety. It was not used in food in the US. > Azorubine has shown no evidence of mutagenic or carcinogenic properties and an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0–4 mg/kg was established in 1983 by the WHO. Wikipedia's article on E180 is a stub. Wikipedia's article on E105 says it's now banned in both the US and EU, but it doesn't say when it was banned: did the US ever approve it?
    - chpatrick 1y ago
      I hear they even process it with dihydrogen monoxide!
      - ponector 1y ago
        I'd rather apply hot dihydrogen monoxide to my dry lentils than use compound prepared by Beyond Meat.
    - tcbawo 1y ago
      I don’t understand the downvotes. Replacing foods that have been prepared in the same way for hundreds of years with foods treated with processes that have not yet been considered harmful is inherently risky. There are plenty of examples of unknown byproducts, isomers, and side effects that take years to flesh out.
      - mandmandam 1y ago
        [flagged]
        mixmastamyk 1y ago
        The 70s/80s want their insult back. You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it. But we still have to listen to complaints that the only choices available are Wonder, Lipton, and Budweiser. Not true—literally for decades now.
        mandmandam 1y ago
        > You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it. I didn't say you can't buy quality bread though. I know it's possible to find nice bread. I said it's mostly inferior, and it is. The vast majority of bread in America is stuff that I would rather go hungry than eat. ... Thanks for proving my point about getting weirdly defensive.
        mandmandam 1y ago
        And thanks to whoever flagged my initial comment for proving it even more, lol.
        mixmastamyk 1y ago
        If you don’t like styles of corporate bread, don’t buy them. But they work for those of limited means.
        1y ago
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed The processing is done with a purpose. > All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption Source? Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. While true, this is also the case with all cooking, which makes it difficult to separate the various other things. Don't get me wrong, the older I get the more negligence I see in corporations promoting their new things, so I'm now absolutely on-board with a cautious and conservative set of testing requirements for novel foods. This is just to say that the boundary condition for such novelty isn't what most people think it is.
  - giantg2 1y ago
    Do you have some studies proving out that control for vegetables and sugar is all that is needed? I am skeptical that just controlling for those would eliminate the risks with other processing ingredients such as cured meats. Edit: why disagree?
    - anon84873628 1y ago
      Well lumping packaged cookies and cured meats together is already part of the problem. The former is bad in excess because of the high calories and poor lipid profile. The latter because of colon cancer risk. The problem with processed foods is not their individual construction per se, but how overall bad diets are easily enabled by them. As far as studies go, I can't give you one that directly controls. But look at the "30 plants per week" topic, which suggests that overall diversity of fiber consumption is more correlated to health than any specific details of the diet.
      - giantg2 1y ago
        The 30 plants per week stuff looks like it's mostly based off one citizen science study that acknowledges that it focused on healthy adults, had underrepresented groups, and it didn't directly tie the diet to health outcomes or longevity. It looks like it was focused on the diversity of the microbiome. Other studies have looked at various microbiome related factors, but it doesn't look like any directly study the 30 plants per week part. Various sources even acknowledge that salty, sugary, and fatty processed foods can also be responsible for decreased microbiome diversity and increased levels of bacteria associated with negative health outcomes. Most also stress the whole foods point. It doesn't appear that any control for the source of the plant point related to processed foods - eg was there a cohort that ate non-fermented pickles, sun chips, potato chips, fruit wines, etc to compare with whole food plant based diets. So based on the studies around your 30 plants topics, even they make the point about choosing whole food or minimally processed sources.
  - mind-blight 1y ago
    Using the amount of processing - particularly processing that hasn't been studied - as a heuristic for health vs. unhealthy is pretty reasonable. We have lots of examples over the last 70 years of companies claiming a new processed food is better or safe, only for it to be harmful. And a lot of the changes seemed innocuous: - Partially hydrogenated oils (most margarines in the US for a while) were pushed as a healthier alternative to butter, but turns out those are terrible for you due to trans fat. And the main difference between a trans vs cis fat is that cis fat have a kink in molecular chain and trans fats don't. Small change, but huge health difference - The sugar industry paid food scientists in the 60s to downplay sugar's impact on heart disease and play up fat and cholesterol (Check out the "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents" published at UCFS). This lead to food companies replacing health fats with sugars in much of their food over the last 60 years, resulting in much worse health outcomes based on bias, paid for research - Apples and other fruit generally have a higher fructose to glucose ratio than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). But, all of the sugar is surrounded by other nutrients and fiber, which make apples a healthy food choice and HFCS pretty bad for you. One of the common patterns is that new processes introduced harms that were unknown at the time. Food companies have very little incentive to proactively look for harms that occur over a longer time horizon. And one thing has consistently been true: that closer a food is to how we've eaten it historically (chopped/crushed, cooked, boiled, fermented, and filtered), the less likely it is to have an unknown harm
    - anon84873628 1y ago
      The problem of course is looking at foods in isolation vs as part of a diet. You can always say something is fine "as part of a healthy diet." Clearly the problem is when people eat too much of their diet from processed foods. Because they are high in calories, low in micronutrients, and designed to stimulate appetite so people overeat. But to say that any processed food (like Beyond Burgers) is automatically bad because they are processed is simply and example of the naturalistic fallacy.
      - mind-blight 1y ago
        Sure, avoiding processing is just a heuristic. I just have trouble faulting people when it send to be a good one for maintaining a healthy diet. I don't know much about Beyond Meat's specific processes. I wanted to like their burger, but they smelled too much like dog food when coming and tasted worse than cheaper black bean burgers. Aside, from my personal preferences, they could be totally fine. But, of someone is trying to go through their life eating relatively healthy without having to try to keep up on the latest research, less processing is the way to go. You'll cut out things that are perfectly fine (e.g. there's a small backpack against Xanthum gum that currently makes no sense to me), but you'll also avoid a lot of the cutting edge garbage that gets added and then recalled. Whole fruits, veggies, nuts, grains, and meat is always a solid choice. I have trouble faulting people for using that as a heuristic
  - mixmastamyk 1y ago
    The term is too vague. That’s different from “hysteria.”
- ben_w 1y ago
  > They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures. This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!" In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary. The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt". Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
  - fakedang 1y ago
    Are you seriously comparing something used to trigger an infrequent immune response vs something that we take in on a daily basis to run our bodies? The latter being things that are transformed and transported to every part of the body. > This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!" No, a better equivalent would be injecting a single PFAS atom in your drinking water. You don't know where it's going to end up, but you do know that it's going to cause some issues wherever it goes if accumulated in quantity. > The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt". Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules. https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox Around the 1:30 mark.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > PFAS atom Mixing up atoms and molecules is not a great start as comebacks go. > Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules. You're literally describing "cooking" with that sentence. Not metaphorically, that is literally what cooking does to the proteins in food. For example, bread dough is at a minimum flour and water, which you then knead. Water partially unfolds the gluten (collective name for a category of various protein) molecules, the mechanical force then encourage the gluten proteins into a different configuration, and it polymerises: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814615301205 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088... Then you heat it. On a related note, when you say: > Are you seriously comparing something used to trigger an infrequent immune response vs something that we take in on a daily basis to run our bodies? The latter being things that are transformed and transported to every part of the body. A lot of proteins are both of those things at the same time. The gluten in your bread, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_immunochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_immunochemistry Beyond Meat is apparently gluten-free, I picked bread because it's one of the least-processed foods you can get without it being raw.
- cpfohl 1y ago
  I mean, so do cows and chickens. Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction… When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
  - fakedang 1y ago
    > When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures). When you're cooking a piece of fish, you're not changing its structure using heat and pressure so that globular plant cell structures are transformed into stuff resembling fibrous animal cell structures. https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox Around the 1:30 mark.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > When you're cooking a piece of fish, you're not changing its structure using heat and pressure so that globular plant cell structures are transformed into stuff resembling fibrous animal cell structures. You are if the fish ate any plants before they died (and you cooked with heat, I'm vegetarian so am unfamiliar with the other poster's a la Ceviche). And even if the fish didn't eat any plants, you're still changing the protein structures — this is even part of the point of cooking, as amongst other things this does, changing the proteins inside the food is a process that kills any bacteria and other parasites.
      - cpfohl 1y ago
        If you ever marinate broccoli in balsamic (a favorite in our household) it’s the same technique: it precooks from the acid. Try it with dried cranberries and sunflower seeds for a great salad! (Don’t forget the salt, pepper, and garlic)
makingstuffs 1y ago
No, nothing to do with hysteria. We simply have not had access to the substance long enough to be able to accurately say what the long term effects on health are and I cannot help but to assume that there has been a lot of unnatural processing in-order to turn a small, green, pea into a patty which resembles beef. Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.
- casper14 1y ago
  The more common term you're looking for is "ultra-processed food"
  - Aardwolf 1y ago
    Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not? Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate? Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it? If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?
    - harrisi 1y ago
      The term comes from the Nova classification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
      - bevr1337 1y ago
        Thanks for linking that. Their rubric for ultra-processed is easy enough to grok that folks could use this at a grocery store. We're on a kick to remove "parameters" from tasks right now, so this definition is clearer than thoughts like "stick to the outside of the store."
thoroughburro 1y ago
By “processes food hysteria stuff”, do you mean “the growing research consensus around ultra-processed foods”?
- vmg12 1y ago
  A category that includes both twinkies and whey protein powder doesn't seem that useful.
  - druskacik 1y ago
    The rule of thumb is that the ultra-processed food should not account for a too large part of your diet. The protein powder is usually taken as a supplement and in small quantities, as opposed to food like twinkies people can easily overeat on. But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
    - square_usual 1y ago
      > But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week. What? I've had >100g of protein from whey protein shakes every day for months now. I don't know what you're trying to imply.
      - FredPret 1y ago
        Whey protein is definitely among the better options, but I once did what you described, and then switched to eating a large amount of chicken breasts. I definitely feel a bit better, and have a much easier time building muscle. If you run the numbers, you can actually eat a shocking amout of protein (300g+ / day) from lean meat while maintaining a calorie deficit. And if you buy frozen chicken breasts from Costco, I think it’s actually cheaper than whey! That said - you do you, whey has its place in many lifestyles.
        tempnew 1y ago
giantg2 1y ago
It was more unhealthy in the past due to the sodium, saturated fat, and possibly some of the additives/preservatives. It was unhealthy enough that the company even changed to a new formula with avocado oil, which might be better, but I haven't looked into it.
Findecanor 1y ago
Many vegetarian meat substitutes, including the Beyond Burger, contains methylcellulose. It is one of several emulsifiers both often associated with "ultra-processed foods", and known from several studies to affect the mucus lining the intestinal wall, increasing the risk for infection and suspected of increasing cancer risk. Being a vegetarian, after having suffered colon cancer twice, I now too eat only burger patties I've made myself (similar recipe to the one above), and also use only real mayo and sour cream, so as to avoid those emulsifiers. Edit: Downvote, why? Because I am a vegetarian?
evrimoztamur 1y ago
Besides ultra-processed foods 'hysteria,' basic ratios I consider here are: - protein to fat (which is roughly 1.4 in Beyond Meat (20g protein / 14g fat in 100g) versus 2.5-3.5 in beef (30±5g protein / 12.5±2.5g fat in 100g)) - protein to mass (20% vs ~30%) - micro-nutrients to mass (a very wide variety of minerals, vitamins, and other unknown nutrients present in beef) - carbohydrates (not present in substantial amounts in meat and around the same amounts in tofu/tempeh as in Beyond Meat; but I don't think it's as major a statistic as previous ratios) I eat chiefly vegetarian, and refuse to see why Beyond Meat exists beyond 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.' The industrial overhead of producing Beyond Meat and all the effort that went into creating it simply doesn't make sense to me compared to beans and plant-based protein friends like tempeh/tofu/seitan. Latter are an order of magnitude more scalable than both Beyond Meat and Regular Meat. All the processing plants and factories built to make this ultra-processing possible, the logistics and supply chains set up to bring all the necessary additives and components together, the grandiose packaging and marketing efforts... I don't get it. It's not a product made for a real audience.
- seec 1y ago
  Well it's a VC backed venture by and for rich SF people. There are plenty of products like that posted on HN, the kind that only make sense if you really make a shit ton of money and have already "solved" most downstream problems in your life (it goes for business stuff too). So yeah, this is what you get. At the price sold, whether you are vegetarian, vegan, or anything else is largely irrelevant; you have to be rich first and foremost. And if we are talking about the product "qualities", it does not make a lot of sense: as a meat eater I cannot fathom people who pretend it's anywhere near close to the real thing, it's much dryer, does not have the burger flavor and disintegrate much like vegetables do. And the nutritional profile isn't very good as well, as you explain. If I have to eat a lot of fat and associated carbs with my protein, it might as well be cheaper beans/veggie stuff. All that being said, I'm not a very big fan of the plant-based protein (like tofu) stuff either. It's rarely cheaper than meat, always has a chewy like texture (sometimes it feels like you are eating rubber) and can only taste what you prepare it with. I have a friend who worked at high-end restaurants who became vegetarian and prepared it many times for me, it has never been any good. It's also heavily processed and requires a lot of water/heat to make (it also requires a lot more energy/effort than meat to prepare afterwards) and lacks many other nutrients meat naturally has. I doubt meat is cheaper only because of subsidies, to me it seems like nature is extremely efficient and we have a truly hard time competing with it.
_fat_santa 1y ago
I'm not personally a vegetarian though I cook for vegetarians quite often and my reason for not using it more philosophical: if you're going to cook vegetarian, stop looking at what you can't use and start looking at what you can use. Like for example the other day I made a vegan version of my pasta and meat sauce recipe but instead of trying to use a meat alternative like beyond meat, I reached for some mushrooms and end up having my guests ask if I accidentally made the dish with ground beef because the texture and consistency was so similar. It's not that beyond meat is bad but why reach for something that's had god knows what done to it versus: mushrooms, where the only "processing" is ripping them out of the ground and washing them.
graublau 1y ago
Processed food concerns are hysterical is a unique take
- anon84873628 1y ago
  Many people are clearly going overboard and using processed foods as an excuse for making the naturalistic fallacy. (Or maybe today we would say that processed foods are used as a "thought terminating cliche".)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- const_cast 1y ago
  It is, mostly, hysteria. The problem is that we're just assuming processed foods are bad period, but even if you don't eat processed foods you can eat a very poor diet. Burgers aren't processed, fried chicken isn't processed. And, you don't need to process food to make it "addictive". People who think you need chemicals and additives to make addictive food are just stupid, frankly. Take whatever food, douse it in salt, deep fry it in fat, and boom: you have a 2,000 calorie meal that sets off every dopamine receptor in your brain. All natural. No processing needed. The real harm isn't processed foods, it's hyper-palatable foods. Foods that are extremely delicious, addictive, and easy to overeat. Some are processed, some are not. Take, for example, high-fiber tortillas. Those are ultra-processed, those aren't from God. But, 98% of Americans do not eat enough fiber. Fiber can lower your risk of obesity and heart disease. The high-fiber tortillas can be a great addition to your diet. They're not hyper-palatable - you're not gonna sit there and crave them like a drug and then eat 2,000 calories worth of high-fiber tortillas.
  - seec 1y ago
    Yeah I'm amazed people with a functioning brain can even entertain that kind of bullshit. Then again, I'm assuming they have a well-functioning brain, maybe that's the real issue. You don't even need to prepare food for it to be extremely delicious and easy to overeat: nuts are SO good that before you know it, you ate your full daily caloric requirements (for not very active people). At around 600kcal per 100g it is really easy. The thing is that in nature you have to collect and get the nuts out of their shell, so it's a time and labor-intensive thing, it would be much harder to abuse it "naturally", but it still possible with time/patience (but I would venture that if it took that much effort to get it ready, you would rather avoid wasting it by overeating). I don't like "ultra-processed" food that much but that's mostly because I find them too expensive for what they bring and the taste/texture is generally too caricatural and one dimensional, not exactly very interesting or satisfying. But people buy this because it's cheaper than the good stuff and they would rather not put the effort into preparing the good stuff.
Frost1x 1y ago
There’s not much hysteria in that highly processed foods tend to give less satiety relative to both their calorie density and nutrient content (since your digestive process and signals don’t trip the same way they do with whole foods). That alone is a good enough reason to avoid highly processed foods in many cases. It’s not always true, but it’s more often true than not.
Spooky23 1y ago
Pea protein and coconut oil aren’t the greatest. Probably similar to meat.

It's not hysteria. Beyond Meat uses way too much processing in their food. They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.

mgraczyk 1y ago
What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.
- ponector 1y ago
  Treating food with chemicals usually it's not good. Also you simply don't know what exactly are they doing. Like ultra processed american bread is not so good comparing with european wholegrain sourdough bread.
  - mistercow 1y ago
    Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
    - mandmandam 1y ago
      Particularly pointless pedantry. We all know what they mean, and are to assume the best reading of what they're saying. Bread, the example they used, is a particularly stark example where Americans are subjected to stuff that is rightly banned in most of the rest of the world.
      - const_cast 1y ago
        It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals. When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria. Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
        fakedang 1y ago
        > When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. And didn't they teach you at school to soak all vegetables for a couple hours in water after buying them and before storing/using them? As for injected hormones, in my part of the world (Asia and Europe), we reject such produce if we're trying to eat healthy. My family literally grows pineapples in our backyard (which I bring to Europe) because industrial pineapples are injected with ripening stimulators. > When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria. In most of the civilized world, we typically ensure humane conditions as much as possible even in industrial farming, so that chicken need not be drugged and bleach washed. Like basic hygiene and humanity such as animals not being made to live in their own shit. > Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it? Again, in most of the civilized world, we don't take issue with preserving minced garlic with citric acid. In fact, I regularly preserve a lot of veggies and sometimes even fruit this way. But I do have an issue when some industrial company decides to add sodium benzoate to their pickle to preserve it for months on end.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        mandmandam 1y ago
        > It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals. That wasn't the point they were making. They made a purely pedantic point about the meaning of the word 'chemicals' in this context. > Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it? I never said they are. Besides which, I pay a premium for organic for that very reason. Glyphosate residue is a serious problem. And then there's all the agricultural runoff, biosphere contamination, chemical interactions, etc. Less 'chemicals' is generally better; safer and healthier. It's super weird that people take issue with this simple statement, whether for pedantic reasons or through false equivalancies.
  - birn559 1y ago
    Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general. European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory. Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
    - ayuhito 1y ago
      “Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements. For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns. Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
        And there are a handful of chemicals banned in the US for health concerns that the EU is fine with.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
        Individual cases are interesting. For example, Wikipedia says this of E122: > In the US, this color was listed in 1939 as Ext. D&C Red No. 10 for use in externally applied drugs and cosmetics. It was delisted in 1963 because no party was interested in supporting the studies needed to establish safety. It was not used in food in the US. > Azorubine has shown no evidence of mutagenic or carcinogenic properties and an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0–4 mg/kg was established in 1983 by the WHO. Wikipedia's article on E180 is a stub. Wikipedia's article on E105 says it's now banned in both the US and EU, but it doesn't say when it was banned: did the US ever approve it?
  - chpatrick 1y ago
    I hear they even process it with dihydrogen monoxide!
    - ponector 1y ago
      I'd rather apply hot dihydrogen monoxide to my dry lentils than use compound prepared by Beyond Meat.
  - tcbawo 1y ago
    I don’t understand the downvotes. Replacing foods that have been prepared in the same way for hundreds of years with foods treated with processes that have not yet been considered harmful is inherently risky. There are plenty of examples of unknown byproducts, isomers, and side effects that take years to flesh out.
    - mandmandam 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - mixmastamyk 1y ago
        The 70s/80s want their insult back. You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it. But we still have to listen to complaints that the only choices available are Wonder, Lipton, and Budweiser. Not true—literally for decades now.
        mandmandam 1y ago
        > You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it. I didn't say you can't buy quality bread though. I know it's possible to find nice bread. I said it's mostly inferior, and it is. The vast majority of bread in America is stuff that I would rather go hungry than eat. ... Thanks for proving my point about getting weirdly defensive.
        mandmandam 1y ago
        And thanks to whoever flagged my initial comment for proving it even more, lol.
        mixmastamyk 1y ago
        If you don’t like styles of corporate bread, don’t buy them. But they work for those of limited means.
        1y ago
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed The processing is done with a purpose. > All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption Source? Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. While true, this is also the case with all cooking, which makes it difficult to separate the various other things. Don't get me wrong, the older I get the more negligence I see in corporations promoting their new things, so I'm now absolutely on-board with a cautious and conservative set of testing requirements for novel foods. This is just to say that the boundary condition for such novelty isn't what most people think it is.
- giantg2 1y ago
  Do you have some studies proving out that control for vegetables and sugar is all that is needed? I am skeptical that just controlling for those would eliminate the risks with other processing ingredients such as cured meats. Edit: why disagree?
  - anon84873628 1y ago
    Well lumping packaged cookies and cured meats together is already part of the problem. The former is bad in excess because of the high calories and poor lipid profile. The latter because of colon cancer risk. The problem with processed foods is not their individual construction per se, but how overall bad diets are easily enabled by them. As far as studies go, I can't give you one that directly controls. But look at the "30 plants per week" topic, which suggests that overall diversity of fiber consumption is more correlated to health than any specific details of the diet.
    - giantg2 1y ago
      The 30 plants per week stuff looks like it's mostly based off one citizen science study that acknowledges that it focused on healthy adults, had underrepresented groups, and it didn't directly tie the diet to health outcomes or longevity. It looks like it was focused on the diversity of the microbiome. Other studies have looked at various microbiome related factors, but it doesn't look like any directly study the 30 plants per week part. Various sources even acknowledge that salty, sugary, and fatty processed foods can also be responsible for decreased microbiome diversity and increased levels of bacteria associated with negative health outcomes. Most also stress the whole foods point. It doesn't appear that any control for the source of the plant point related to processed foods - eg was there a cohort that ate non-fermented pickles, sun chips, potato chips, fruit wines, etc to compare with whole food plant based diets. So based on the studies around your 30 plants topics, even they make the point about choosing whole food or minimally processed sources.
- mind-blight 1y ago
  Using the amount of processing - particularly processing that hasn't been studied - as a heuristic for health vs. unhealthy is pretty reasonable. We have lots of examples over the last 70 years of companies claiming a new processed food is better or safe, only for it to be harmful. And a lot of the changes seemed innocuous: - Partially hydrogenated oils (most margarines in the US for a while) were pushed as a healthier alternative to butter, but turns out those are terrible for you due to trans fat. And the main difference between a trans vs cis fat is that cis fat have a kink in molecular chain and trans fats don't. Small change, but huge health difference - The sugar industry paid food scientists in the 60s to downplay sugar's impact on heart disease and play up fat and cholesterol (Check out the "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents" published at UCFS). This lead to food companies replacing health fats with sugars in much of their food over the last 60 years, resulting in much worse health outcomes based on bias, paid for research - Apples and other fruit generally have a higher fructose to glucose ratio than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). But, all of the sugar is surrounded by other nutrients and fiber, which make apples a healthy food choice and HFCS pretty bad for you. One of the common patterns is that new processes introduced harms that were unknown at the time. Food companies have very little incentive to proactively look for harms that occur over a longer time horizon. And one thing has consistently been true: that closer a food is to how we've eaten it historically (chopped/crushed, cooked, boiled, fermented, and filtered), the less likely it is to have an unknown harm
  - anon84873628 1y ago
    The problem of course is looking at foods in isolation vs as part of a diet. You can always say something is fine "as part of a healthy diet." Clearly the problem is when people eat too much of their diet from processed foods. Because they are high in calories, low in micronutrients, and designed to stimulate appetite so people overeat. But to say that any processed food (like Beyond Burgers) is automatically bad because they are processed is simply and example of the naturalistic fallacy.
    - mind-blight 1y ago
      Sure, avoiding processing is just a heuristic. I just have trouble faulting people when it send to be a good one for maintaining a healthy diet. I don't know much about Beyond Meat's specific processes. I wanted to like their burger, but they smelled too much like dog food when coming and tasted worse than cheaper black bean burgers. Aside, from my personal preferences, they could be totally fine. But, of someone is trying to go through their life eating relatively healthy without having to try to keep up on the latest research, less processing is the way to go. You'll cut out things that are perfectly fine (e.g. there's a small backpack against Xanthum gum that currently makes no sense to me), but you'll also avoid a lot of the cutting edge garbage that gets added and then recalled. Whole fruits, veggies, nuts, grains, and meat is always a solid choice. I have trouble faulting people for using that as a heuristic
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  The term is too vague. That’s different from “hysteria.”
ben_w 1y ago
> They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures. This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!" In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary. The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt". Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
- fakedang 1y ago
  Are you seriously comparing something used to trigger an infrequent immune response vs something that we take in on a daily basis to run our bodies? The latter being things that are transformed and transported to every part of the body. > This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!" No, a better equivalent would be injecting a single PFAS atom in your drinking water. You don't know where it's going to end up, but you do know that it's going to cause some issues wherever it goes if accumulated in quantity. > The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt". Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules. https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox Around the 1:30 mark.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > PFAS atom Mixing up atoms and molecules is not a great start as comebacks go. > Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules. You're literally describing "cooking" with that sentence. Not metaphorically, that is literally what cooking does to the proteins in food. For example, bread dough is at a minimum flour and water, which you then knead. Water partially unfolds the gluten (collective name for a category of various protein) molecules, the mechanical force then encourage the gluten proteins into a different configuration, and it polymerises: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814615301205 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088... Then you heat it. On a related note, when you say: > Are you seriously comparing something used to trigger an infrequent immune response vs something that we take in on a daily basis to run our bodies? The latter being things that are transformed and transported to every part of the body. A lot of proteins are both of those things at the same time. The gluten in your bread, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_immunochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_immunochemistry Beyond Meat is apparently gluten-free, I picked bread because it's one of the least-processed foods you can get without it being raw.
cpfohl 1y ago
I mean, so do cows and chickens. Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction… When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
- fakedang 1y ago
  > When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures). When you're cooking a piece of fish, you're not changing its structure using heat and pressure so that globular plant cell structures are transformed into stuff resembling fibrous animal cell structures. https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox Around the 1:30 mark.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > When you're cooking a piece of fish, you're not changing its structure using heat and pressure so that globular plant cell structures are transformed into stuff resembling fibrous animal cell structures. You are if the fish ate any plants before they died (and you cooked with heat, I'm vegetarian so am unfamiliar with the other poster's a la Ceviche). And even if the fish didn't eat any plants, you're still changing the protein structures — this is even part of the point of cooking, as amongst other things this does, changing the proteins inside the food is a process that kills any bacteria and other parasites.
    - cpfohl 1y ago
      If you ever marinate broccoli in balsamic (a favorite in our household) it’s the same technique: it precooks from the acid. Try it with dried cranberries and sunflower seeds for a great salad! (Don’t forget the salt, pepper, and garlic)

makingstuffs 1y ago

No, nothing to do with hysteria. We simply have not had access to the substance long enough to be able to accurately say what the long term effects on health are and I cannot help but to assume that there has been a lot of unnatural processing in-order to turn a small, green, pea into a patty which resembles beef. Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.

casper14 1y ago
The more common term you're looking for is "ultra-processed food"
- Aardwolf 1y ago
  Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not? Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate? Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it? If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?
  - harrisi 1y ago
    The term comes from the Nova classification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
    - bevr1337 1y ago
      Thanks for linking that. Their rubric for ultra-processed is easy enough to grok that folks could use this at a grocery store. We're on a kick to remove "parameters" from tasks right now, so this definition is clearer than thoughts like "stick to the outside of the store."

thoroughburro 1y ago

By “processes food hysteria stuff”, do you mean “the growing research consensus around ultra-processed foods”?

vmg12 1y ago
A category that includes both twinkies and whey protein powder doesn't seem that useful.
- druskacik 1y ago
  The rule of thumb is that the ultra-processed food should not account for a too large part of your diet. The protein powder is usually taken as a supplement and in small quantities, as opposed to food like twinkies people can easily overeat on. But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
  - square_usual 1y ago
    > But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week. What? I've had >100g of protein from whey protein shakes every day for months now. I don't know what you're trying to imply.
    - FredPret 1y ago
      Whey protein is definitely among the better options, but I once did what you described, and then switched to eating a large amount of chicken breasts. I definitely feel a bit better, and have a much easier time building muscle. If you run the numbers, you can actually eat a shocking amout of protein (300g+ / day) from lean meat while maintaining a calorie deficit. And if you buy frozen chicken breasts from Costco, I think it’s actually cheaper than whey! That said - you do you, whey has its place in many lifestyles.
      - tempnew 1y ago

giantg2 1y ago

It was more unhealthy in the past due to the sodium, saturated fat, and possibly some of the additives/preservatives. It was unhealthy enough that the company even changed to a new formula with avocado oil, which might be better, but I haven't looked into it.

Findecanor 1y ago

Many vegetarian meat substitutes, including the Beyond Burger, contains methylcellulose. It is one of several emulsifiers both often associated with "ultra-processed foods", and known from several studies to affect the mucus lining the intestinal wall, increasing the risk for infection and suspected of increasing cancer risk. Being a vegetarian, after having suffered colon cancer twice, I now too eat only burger patties I've made myself (similar recipe to the one above), and also use only real mayo and sour cream, so as to avoid those emulsifiers. Edit: Downvote, why? Because I am a vegetarian?

evrimoztamur 1y ago

Besides ultra-processed foods 'hysteria,' basic ratios I consider here are: - protein to fat (which is roughly 1.4 in Beyond Meat (20g protein / 14g fat in 100g) versus 2.5-3.5 in beef (30±5g protein / 12.5±2.5g fat in 100g)) - protein to mass (20% vs ~30%) - micro-nutrients to mass (a very wide variety of minerals, vitamins, and other unknown nutrients present in beef) - carbohydrates (not present in substantial amounts in meat and around the same amounts in tofu/tempeh as in Beyond Meat; but I don't think it's as major a statistic as previous ratios) I eat chiefly vegetarian, and refuse to see why Beyond Meat exists beyond 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.' The industrial overhead of producing Beyond Meat and all the effort that went into creating it simply doesn't make sense to me compared to beans and plant-based protein friends like tempeh/tofu/seitan. Latter are an order of magnitude more scalable than both Beyond Meat and Regular Meat. All the processing plants and factories built to make this ultra-processing possible, the logistics and supply chains set up to bring all the necessary additives and components together, the grandiose packaging and marketing efforts... I don't get it. It's not a product made for a real audience.

seec 1y ago
Well it's a VC backed venture by and for rich SF people. There are plenty of products like that posted on HN, the kind that only make sense if you really make a shit ton of money and have already "solved" most downstream problems in your life (it goes for business stuff too). So yeah, this is what you get. At the price sold, whether you are vegetarian, vegan, or anything else is largely irrelevant; you have to be rich first and foremost. And if we are talking about the product "qualities", it does not make a lot of sense: as a meat eater I cannot fathom people who pretend it's anywhere near close to the real thing, it's much dryer, does not have the burger flavor and disintegrate much like vegetables do. And the nutritional profile isn't very good as well, as you explain. If I have to eat a lot of fat and associated carbs with my protein, it might as well be cheaper beans/veggie stuff. All that being said, I'm not a very big fan of the plant-based protein (like tofu) stuff either. It's rarely cheaper than meat, always has a chewy like texture (sometimes it feels like you are eating rubber) and can only taste what you prepare it with. I have a friend who worked at high-end restaurants who became vegetarian and prepared it many times for me, it has never been any good. It's also heavily processed and requires a lot of water/heat to make (it also requires a lot more energy/effort than meat to prepare afterwards) and lacks many other nutrients meat naturally has. I doubt meat is cheaper only because of subsidies, to me it seems like nature is extremely efficient and we have a truly hard time competing with it.

_fat_santa 1y ago

I'm not personally a vegetarian though I cook for vegetarians quite often and my reason for not using it more philosophical: if you're going to cook vegetarian, stop looking at what you can't use and start looking at what you can use. Like for example the other day I made a vegan version of my pasta and meat sauce recipe but instead of trying to use a meat alternative like beyond meat, I reached for some mushrooms and end up having my guests ask if I accidentally made the dish with ground beef because the texture and consistency was so similar. It's not that beyond meat is bad but why reach for something that's had god knows what done to it versus: mushrooms, where the only "processing" is ripping them out of the ground and washing them.

graublau 1y ago

Processed food concerns are hysterical is a unique take

anon84873628 1y ago
Many people are clearly going overboard and using processed foods as an excuse for making the naturalistic fallacy. (Or maybe today we would say that processed foods are used as a "thought terminating cliche".)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
const_cast 1y ago
It is, mostly, hysteria. The problem is that we're just assuming processed foods are bad period, but even if you don't eat processed foods you can eat a very poor diet. Burgers aren't processed, fried chicken isn't processed. And, you don't need to process food to make it "addictive". People who think you need chemicals and additives to make addictive food are just stupid, frankly. Take whatever food, douse it in salt, deep fry it in fat, and boom: you have a 2,000 calorie meal that sets off every dopamine receptor in your brain. All natural. No processing needed. The real harm isn't processed foods, it's hyper-palatable foods. Foods that are extremely delicious, addictive, and easy to overeat. Some are processed, some are not. Take, for example, high-fiber tortillas. Those are ultra-processed, those aren't from God. But, 98% of Americans do not eat enough fiber. Fiber can lower your risk of obesity and heart disease. The high-fiber tortillas can be a great addition to your diet. They're not hyper-palatable - you're not gonna sit there and crave them like a drug and then eat 2,000 calories worth of high-fiber tortillas.
- seec 1y ago
  Yeah I'm amazed people with a functioning brain can even entertain that kind of bullshit. Then again, I'm assuming they have a well-functioning brain, maybe that's the real issue. You don't even need to prepare food for it to be extremely delicious and easy to overeat: nuts are SO good that before you know it, you ate your full daily caloric requirements (for not very active people). At around 600kcal per 100g it is really easy. The thing is that in nature you have to collect and get the nuts out of their shell, so it's a time and labor-intensive thing, it would be much harder to abuse it "naturally", but it still possible with time/patience (but I would venture that if it took that much effort to get it ready, you would rather avoid wasting it by overeating). I don't like "ultra-processed" food that much but that's mostly because I find them too expensive for what they bring and the taste/texture is generally too caricatural and one dimensional, not exactly very interesting or satisfying. But people buy this because it's cheaper than the good stuff and they would rather not put the effort into preparing the good stuff.

Frost1x 1y ago

There’s not much hysteria in that highly processed foods tend to give less satiety relative to both their calorie density and nutrient content (since your digestive process and signals don’t trip the same way they do with whole foods). That alone is a good enough reason to avoid highly processed foods in many cases. It’s not always true, but it’s more often true than not.

Spooky23 1y ago

Pea protein and coconut oil aren’t the greatest. Probably similar to meat.