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"Processed foods" are not inherently hazardous. In fact, nearly all food we eat is processed food. I presume you're referring to tertiary processed food.

The Soylent FAQ[0] has a good way of describing this:

> A box of instant macaroni could be unhealthy because it contains low levels of important vitamins and minerals while containing excess amounts of salt, cholesterol, and saturated fat. The macaroni is not inherently unhealthy because it was manufactured in a factory, it’s unhealthy because it lacks vital nutrients that the body needs.

[0]: https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002689323-What-...

Yes. But there's a strong enough correlation for it to be beneficial. Most processed foods are processed to add sugars, fats, and sodium to make them more tasty, and to remove fiber to make them easier to eat.

You're right that a person shouldn't pre-judge a good based solely on its having been manufactured. But it's also true that someone who generally avoids processed foods will end up avoiding the most unhealthy foods available.

> A box of instant macaroni could be unhealthy because it contains low levels of important vitamins and minerals while containing excess amounts of salt, cholesterol, and saturated fat

What macaroni contains cholesterol and saturated fat? And seems unfair to compare macaroni, a plain ingredient usually combined with others, with a complete meal.

From the "instant", I assume they're referring to mac n "cheese", with whatever is passing for the latter containing both of those.

Oh right I guess that's a dish made with macaroni then, and not just the pasta itself, so that's confusing.

No one on earth eats plain macaroni. You have it mixed with something. lol

Yes it's combined with a sauce or something - meat, tomato, cheese, etc. But then that gives you wildly different nutrition profiles. Just saying 'box of macaroni' doesn't tell you anything.

Colloquially, in the US where San Francisco is based, a box of macaroni would mean craft mac and cheese just like kleenex means tissue.

Egg Macaroni

>> "Processed foods" are not inherently hazardous.

Research suggests they are:

Ultra-processed food causes weight gain – firm evidence at last

https://theconversation.com/ultra-processed-food-causes-weig...

Apparently, the important ingredient lost during processing is dietary fiber- not vitamins and minerals.

I'm vegetarian primarily for animal well-being reasons, and environmental second. Health is merely a nice plus for me.

That said, the Beyond Meat burgers and sausages have impressive satiety -- probably due to the high amount of saturated fat. (I only tried the Impossible Burger once, but I assume they're similar.)

There's not much evidence, from what I've seen, that being "processed" is a health issue. The main thing is that highly-refined foods frequently have a high calorie-to-satiety ratio and/or are "high-reward", both of which result in over-eating. Beyond Meat, at least, does the opposite for me.

I frequently bike 20+ miles on Saturday and/or Sunday, and one thing I've found is that if I eat some Beyond Meat fake meat, I'll later realize that I've burnt 2k+ Calories, eaten maybe a thousand, and still not feel particularly hungry. I actually have to pay attention to eating enough, whereas normally my body is quite eager to ingest 5k+ Calories if I choose the wrong foods. (Veggie soup is maybe more filling, but I can be full and still crave food.)

Kielbasa was the meat I missed most when I became vegetarian, and the Beyond Meat italian sausage is the first thing I've had that approaches it. If Impossible Foods can beat that, that's exciting to me.

I tried Beyond Meat last night for the first time and was surprised how un-filling it was for me. I ate one and a half burgers with plenty of toppings and was still hungry after. And I'd been snacking before dinner, so I wasn't famished to begin with.

The taste was pretty good, but I have to figure I'm eating two burgers ($6 in patties) at a minimum.

EDIT: mind sharing why you're downvoting this? Is my experience not relevant?

I weigh 140lbs, and eat meat probably 2-3 times a week on average. I eat a regular burger probably once every 3 months or so and it usually knocks me on my ass and makes me feel an extreme level of full as well as very tired (I usually have fries and a beer at the same time). A Beyond burger with cheese and fries shocked me with how similar I felt afterwards, I had it around 7p and struggled to stay awake another 3 hours. I even had a similar feeling of still being satiated when I woke up the next morning like I get from eating a big fatty burger.

YMMV! But my 110 lb wife wasn't full after one burger, which is pretty much unheard of for her. Also, my five year old finished hers, which had never happened with even smallish (in and out) burgers.

I actually find that ingredient list surprisingly tame.

And I think typically the hazards of processed foods are that they’re made from low quality ingredients, then inundated with salt, sugar, and fat to make them anything from palatable to addictive. Plus a bunch of preservatives for shelf stability.

> Beef is pretty much as natural as it can come

Prions are natural as well. It was recently discovered that Alzheimer's is a double prion disorder but there's no link to meat. Also, a newly discovered prion disease, CWD is killing deer, elk and moose.

>> Beef is pretty much as natural as it can come, while the 2.0 meat comes from a lab.

More to the point, you can subsist just fine on a diet of mostly plant food without having to eat processed stuff that mimicks meat.

For instance, check out the many variations of rice and beans eaten around the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_and_beans), that are nutritious, filling and delicious and made from ... rice and beans (though rice is often processed, to be fair).

Delicious is subjective. My wife is vegan, so I'm vegan adjacent. I don't really like food (at all) but the things I do like tend to fall into rather simple categories like "meat with salt." I don't enjoy cooked vegetables (raw with ranch, please), don't like cooked fruit (pie... I'll never understand it...), hate tofu in almost all configurations and am really not into beans and rice. It makes my wife's life difficult (I'm always amazed she puts up with me) because she's not only vegan for ethical reasons but she genuinely likes eating that way. The Impossible and Beyond are a blessing. I can eat a burger that tastes pretty close and I don't run afoul of her ethics. Win, win.

my own intuition on this is that making food using complicated industrial processes isn't bad or good in itself. but it is more profitable for many reasons to make food that is sweet, salty, fatty, and calorically dense, and modern manufacturing lets you do this on an unprecedented scale, so it just ends up that in practice "natural", "whole", "slow" etc foods end up being better for you.

it seems possible, although likely less profitable, to make highly-processed food that is reasonably healthy.

Its about animal cruelty for many people.

> Beef is pretty much as natural as it can come, while the 2.0 meat comes from a lab.

Not just from a lab, but those powders which it contains may come from China, where regulations may be lacking.

If you're going to be worried about that, you should be worried about normal sausage too.

As a random aside, I picked up a meat grinder for my stand mixer and making my own sausage from super high quality ingredients then freezing a ton was an awesome way to get preservative free, delicious pork and lamb sausage for about three months in a single afternoon.

It was maybe a bit much to try ten pounds grinding my first time making but the results were very yum.

The cows your beef comes from are probably eating powders from China in the form of vitamins and antibiotics.

Ok, but that is 1 biological filtering step away from eating them directly.

Or perhaps one biological concentrating step.

I'd float the idea that health-conscious && (environment-conscious || animal-conscious) often go together. And if you're going to eat "meat", this is a much more environmental and animal friendly option than beef.

For the purely health-conscious, the best option is probably neither, but that's not my main point.

> Beef is pretty much as natural as it can come

It being natural doesn't have any bearing on how healthy it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

Thank you. For some reason people tend to think the natural world and the human body are 100% optimized to each other, when the truth is it's still very much an evolutionary work in progress...

Natural doesn't necessarily mean anything, but time-tested does.

It's too long to explain here, but people who have read both Michael Pollan and Taleb probably understand what I mean.

Nutrition isn't a science on solid ground, and food isn't a linear combination of its nutrients.

It's true that "natural" beef might be raised in ways that aren't time-tested (in fact it's very likely given modern farming). But something like Impossible Burger is also guaranteed not to be time-tested. That isn't to say I wouldn't try it, but it's definitely an important difference.

> Natural doesn't necessarily mean anything, but time-tested does.

Being “time-tested” helps, but it’s not necessarily the only thing to keep in mind. Consider that lead was “time-tested” for thousands of years.

I don't really know the history of lead, but I suspect it illustrates the point.

There are no traditional foods with lead in them, because people who ate lead would have died, ensuring that the custom didn't survive.

However lead paint was a relatively new thing. People didn't have painted walls for thousands of years. It was used for awhile (not sure how long), and then the test of time figured out that it was poisonous.

Is there some history you know of where the test of time didn't work? It's almost tautological to be honest. (And tautological does not mean "untrue" :) )

Lead might have been "bad" by modern standards in the past, but there were also hundreds of other things that were worse for mortality, so maybe lead use in certain applications just got noticed in the last century or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition

A link isn't an argument... but briefly, an appeal to tradition can be right or wrong. In this case it's closer to right, because human biochemistry hasn't changed nearly as much as the Western diet has.

Diets were completely changed in the last 70 years -- how much evolution do you think happened in that time?

No but it means one less potential conflict of interest. If a company is processing food for you then they get to make sub-optimal decisions that increase their bottom line at the expense of your health.

I haven't seen anyone promote these products as healthy. I see it as more of a treat for people with ethical or environmental concerns with meat. I share these concerns so I try to cut back on meat and these products just give me more options.

My experience has been different. Me and most of my meat eating friends have been trying and enjoying the Impossible Meat, not for ethical reason, but based on the knee-jerk perception that eating non-meat is healthier than eating meat.

They'd feed us sawdust if we'd pay for it. As a matter of fact, they used to try just that.

the ingredient that gives it the 'meat' 'blood' taste is from genetically modified yeast furthermore, more than 40 other proteins, which are byproducts of the GMO yeast process, which make up part of the soy leghemoglobin product have never been tested on human beings and their safety has never been established. As reported by the NY times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/business/impossible-burge...

You should not use your gut and microbiome as a petri dish. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fda-casts-doubt-on-safety-of-... This is only the tip of the iceberg with this franken-food https://livingmaxwell.com/impossible-foods-burger-misleading...

I think from the ingredient list it's pretty clear that it's not healthy:

  methylcellulose

an indigestible emulsifier and stool softener

  cultured dextrose

fermented sugar used as preservative

  soy leghemoglobin

Actually not from soy, but biofactured by genetically engineered yeast. I don't know all the reasons for its inclusion, but leghemoglobin can be used as red food coloring.

I don't consider burgers particularly healthy, but I wouldn't consider the Impossible Burger as a healthy alternative.

methylcellulose "an indigestible emulsifier and stool softener"

You have to be joking. Normal cellulose makes up a huge amount of most healthy and completely unprocessed vegetables, is considered great for you, and is also an indigestible emulsifier and stool softener.

You can't just name some use that sounds icky and declare that something is bad for you.

It's possible that methylating it causes a problem, but these specific reasons are nonsense.

"fermented sugar used as preservative" So is alcohol, and it looks like this kind of fermentation typically uses normal cheese bacteria. Shouldn't be an issue for most people.

"Actually not from soy, but biofactured by genetically engineered yeast." So what?

> I think from the ingredient list it's pretty clear that it's not healthy

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

leghemoglobin... I don't know all the reasons for its inclusion

It's in all the older news about the company and on their website -- that's what makes it look, cook, and taste like meat.