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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

If you're worrying about the health aspects, look more at the sodium (500% as much as real pork). It's true that the jury is still out on how bad sodium is for you, but it's definitely not great to have 5x as much sodium as the real thing.

I would probably try to counteract this with lower-sodium pasta sauce, or less soy sauce.

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> If you're worrying about the health aspects, look more at the sodium (500% as much as real pork)

People probably add salt when they cook pork, though.

It is much closer to a finished product than raw pork though. You generally add a decent amount of salt to pork while cooking/preparing it. For Impossible Pork you don't add any(?). Looks like the stats are decent for Impossible. Higher iron, less saturated fat, less total fat, more fiber.

What makes you say this? If this were true, I would think the company would be mentioning it in order to improve the optics around the sodium content (which is about 25% of the RDA). Have they (or anyone else) made any claims about the need to add seasonings?

The jury is out on sodium? There's convincing evidence high sodium intake can cause stomach cancer.

Stomach cancer is the most adverse. Increased sodium is proven to drastically increase blood pressure, which in turn increases many cardio vascular and renal diseases.

Edit: surprised by the downvotes on what are well established facts [1]

[1]: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/salt-and-sodium...

The link uses much less extreme language and acknowledges that some studies don’t fully support the conclusion.

Good link though.

Research shows that the relationship between sodium intake and high blood pressure is much more complex than just saying that increased sodium increases blood pressure (let alone claiming it does so "drastically").

Too much sodium in the bloodstream causes the body to retain extra water to dilute it. This can cause swelling of the blood vessels, which can cause them to harden over time. That hardening raises blood pressure and makes the heart work harder. When this has happened, reducing sodium intake will help reduce blood pressure by reducing the volume of fluid the heart has to circulate.

But if your blood vessels haven't hardened, there are other ways of helping to regulate your salt levels in addition to, or instead of, decreasing sodium intake. Drinking more liquids will help your kidneys process more sodium, and regular exercise will also help.

There's currently a difference of opinion between the WHO who say that healthy people consuming reasonable amounts of salt don't need to worry about reducing it, and the US who say that they do.

The traditional criticism of salt was that it raised blood pressure and was related to heart disease. I think that line of thinking is being questioned - but nutritional science seems to be a mess and guidelines changes as often as the JavaScript ecosystem.

And thw WHO stated that processed meat causes cancer

What about for the pig?

The pig won't exist at all if it's not raised for food.

Some will say that's preferable (for multiple reasons). That's partially opinion though. We'll need to get the pig's input on existence to be certain.

Maybe we'll get our shot at that question in a hundred years when AI is ruling over us: better to live in the service of the AI's ends, or better to not exist at all.

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