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Beyond Burger ingredients: Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Star
by lithocarpus 7mo ago
Beyond Burger ingredients:
Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
- viccis 7mo ago[flagged]
- haraldooo 7mo agoI‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore
- djtango 7mo agoAs someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods. I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis. My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o EDIT: grammatical cleanup
- californical 7mo agoThis is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways. Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome. There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-for-you https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5 I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients
- tomhow 7mo agoPlease don't post snark like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- viccis 7mo ago[flagged]
- hollerith 7mo agoThat's not any less contemptuous and juvenile than your previous comment.
- viccis 7mo agoTo whom am I showing contempt? Please explain. (Remember: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.)
- hollerith 7mo agoThe entire comment was a quotation of something written by someone else, which made me wonder whether you felt that the person you were replying to did not deserve the effort it would have taken to express yourself in your own words. Being something written for another context with no words added by you to explain how it fits into the current context puts more work on the reader, which implies that the reader needs to put in work to continue to hold up their end of the conversation (whereas you don't need to put in much work or at least don't need to indicate to us that you are putting in work) which in turn tends to put you in the position of a teacher assigning us something to read as homework. Its being longer than the average HN comment tend to carry the same implication. Although the comment only weakly implies contempt, your previous comment also implied contempt. If you want me to, I can explain that one, too. I concede that it is impossible for me to tell whether you actually felt any contempt while writing your 2 comments, but many readers react negatively to even weak signs that contempt might be present. More importantly, if people see you get away with comments like those 2, that acts as a sort of informal invitation for them to do likewise.
- whakim 7mo agoThere is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historically eaten them. Evolution does not select for avoiding the health problems facing modern-day humans such as cancer or heart disease.
- dataflow 7mo agoNo reason? How about financial incentives?
- KAMSPioneer 7mo agoUhh I don't think that financial incentives are a valid reason to believe something is healthier or safer than an alternative. Unless I have missed some sarcasm.
- lithocarpus 7mo agoI mean there is a financial incentive to use byproducts of industrial processes that would otherwise be wasted, as food ingredients, and as there is no requirement to rigorously show that new ingredients are safe to consume in the US, this happens all the time and makes up a big portion of the average modern US diet.
- KPGv2 7mo agoBut the list of allegedly questionable foods above are all foods we already eat, just with some things removed (e.g., avocado oil is just avocado with the flesh removed; pea protein is peas with the carbs removed). It is not obvious to me how you would conclude these are unhealthy.
- lithocarpus 7mo agoStudy Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avocado-oil-rancid-or-mixed-other-oils https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo... "In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil" You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it. Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
- croes 7mo ago> I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time. I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then. The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
- lithocarpus 7mo agoPotato != extracted potato starch Peas != extracted pea protein They're not the same thing. I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.
- OJFord 7mo agoIt doesn't actually say 'extracted' though, are we sure 'protein' actually implies that (i.e. separated it from other elements) vs. just being marketing copy to make 'yellow pea' et al. more exciting to certain people? (Protein, grr. Meat replacement, protein, grr, yeah.) Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.
- lithocarpus 7mo agoFWIW pea protein as used in beyond burger is extracted from peas in an industrial process - it isolates the protein from the rest of the pea. Your point on cooking is fair. And, I'd still argue that modern processes introduce new types of chemistry that didn't exist in human food until very recently.
- 7mo ago
- noufalibrahim 7mo agoReminds me of a joke I read online. "Plant Based Meat" is not Plant. It's not Based and it's not Meat.
- KPGv2 7mo agoAbout as funny as complaining "oil" is used to refer to petroleum-based lubricants, avocado oil, etc. since the etymology of "oil" is strictly a reference to olive oil only. I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk." Not really a dig at you, sorry.
- noufalibrahim 7mo agoNo problem. I didn't take the original comment too seriously either. Just a passing chuckle at some wordplay. TBH, I haven't heard the complaints about the use of "oil" in that context.
- OJFord 7mo agoGP isn't saying people do complain about oil, they're saying by the same logic people ought to, if they wish to be consistent, which seems silly.
- s5300 7mo ago[dead]
- unfitted2545 7mo ago[flagged]
- lithocarpus 7mo agoEvery single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat". I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us. I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is. If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know. I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not. I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoHardly anyone is eating raw flesh of the animal they just hunted down, so no, there's not going to be many studies to find, because approximately no one has been eating non-processed food for the past several thousands of years. Not even the "health conscious" folks so deathly afraid of the sin of "processing"; they just don't realize that washing and cutting and boiling are sins too.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo ago> That there is sufficient evidence that red meat causes cancer in humans By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list. > You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do? > Have you tried dog meat? No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
- chabska 7mo ago> humans never ate until within the last ~50 years Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
- oblio 7mo agoThe dose makes the poison. People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
- chabska 7mo agoI would like to point you towards the industrial processing of soybean into tofu, soymilk, tempeh, and soy sauce in Asia that has been going on for a long time.
- oblio 7mo agoAre people being intentionally dense here? We're talking orders of magnitude difference here. Widespread, worldwide transition to ultra processed foods, synthetic emulsifiers, synthetic flavors, etc (the ENNNs), supermarket chock full of things that can't be named food sold as food ("cheeses" that can't be sold as cheeses, etc). There are tons of products where the base ingredients are at least 2 steps away from actual traditional ingredients. Sometimes (frequently) the base ingredients aren't even food, they're purely petro-chemical based. My dad used to joke that the same plant that makes ingredients for paint and tires makes articial flavors for food :-) Bah, I withdraw from this discussion. It's full of people that can't see the forest (ultra processed food everywhere destroying people's health through its addictiveness) for the trees (technicalities about some ultra processed foods being available in the pre-industrial era, on a much smaller scale and in much smaller niches).
- lithocarpus 7mo ago
- KPGv2 7mo ago> every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years what absurd scaremongering! Do you know how yellow pea protein, for example, is "refined"? You take dried peas and grind them into powder. Pop in a centrifuge to separate protein from starch. Not exactly pumped full of "toxins"! > Avocado Oil You literally press avocado flesh. It's been done for centuries. It's not some crazy refinement process. > brown rice protein This is just ground up rice mixed with amylase or protease to isolate the proteins. There's nothing scary here. We've been eating it for millennia. etc
- lithocarpus 7mo agoStudy Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo... "In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil" You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it. Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.) If I see "avocado oil" as an ingredient, sure it could be simply pressed avocado flesh. But it could also be a rancid hexane-refined oil potentially cut with other stuff, and I'd bet that's more likely because it's probably a lot cheaper for the manufacturer. I don't know as much about how the starches and proteins are extracted, I'd bet it's more benign, but there are added chemicals - even if they are considered safe, it's still not quite the same as eating actual peas and rice.
- eeixlk 7mo agoHuh.