Comment by vanilla-almond | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanilla-almond | Hacker News Reader

Here's an example of vegan, plant-based foods from another UK supermarket called Asda (their own-branded range).

https://groceries.asda.com/cmslisting/content/event?N=102737...

I have tried their 'Vegan Vegetable Fingers' and they are quite nice. However, I suspect many of these foods still count as 'processed foods'. Some consumers might mistakenly think they are healthy because they are plant-based (and the packaging will re-enforce that).

Here are the ingredients for the 'Vegan Vegetable Fingers' - would you buy these based on these ingredients? Or would the ingredients put you off?

- Vegetables (51%) [Carrots, Sweetcorn, Peas, Onions, Potatoes]

- Fortified Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin (B3), Thiamin (B1)]

- Water

- Sunflower Oil

- Potato Flakes, Maize Starch, Wheat Gluten

- Salt, Sugar

- Rye Flour, Yeast Extract

- Pea Fibre

- Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Yeast, White Pepper, Tomato Powder, Red Pepper Powder, Parsley, Flavouring, Sage, Black Pepper Extract, Sage Extract

https://groceries.asda.com/product/nuggets-fingers/asda-plan...

> However, I suspect many of these foods still count as 'processed foods'. Some consumers might mistakenly think they are healthy because they are plant-based

Looks fine to me. I recognise all the individual ingredients and many home cooking recipes have ingredient lists as long as this (a chicken curry might have 20 ingredients for example).

I'm not really sure what problem you're implying there is here. It seems like a poor example if you're trying to say "not everything vegan is healthy" which nobody is saying anyway. Nobody eats vegan chocolate trying to lose weight, but they might do it to help with climate change and reduce animal suffering.

That list doesn't look terrible.

I personally wouldn't eat it in place of meat (or at all) because of the wheat/gluten content. We do have some meat substitutes in the US that are gluten free (Impossible Burger) that tastes ok and has reasonable mouth-feel.

+1 for Impossible Burgers!

Nothing particularly sinister there. Not even palm oil, a common scourge of cheap processed food.

From what I understand, it's not always the ingredients that make processed food much less nutritious. Even if it doesn't have additives and preservatives, a lot of the nutrition is stripped out during the industrial cooking processes necessary to get them to market at scale. Therefore, while they may not be more processed than their meat-based counterparts, you're still better off avoiding them in favor of whole foods, since you need more to get the same nutritional value.

> Even if it doesn't have additives and preservatives, a lot of the nutrition is stripped out during the industrial cooking processes necessary to get them to market at scale.

The main place where this might be a concern is canning (similar to using a pressure cooker).

I'm not sure I get the whole "processed food" scare. If I cook an egg, have I not "processed" it with a thermal treatment, and made it better and safer than raw egg? What is this "processing" exactly that everybody is so scared about?

In a literal sense of the word, yes cooking and egg is processing it. However, when people are talking about processed food, it's usually in the context of the industrial processes involved. For instance, boiling a ton of vegetables in a giant vat, then draining the water that all the nutrients leeched into during the cooking process, and only using the vegetables sans nutrients. Sure, they're still vegetables, but they're less filling, leaving the body more hungry, which can lead to overeating.

I boil vegetables and tip them into a strainer when cooking at home. I don't see how the same process done at a larger scale would be worse for nutrition.

It's not, if you boil them and then throw out the water. That's one of the worst ways to cook vegetables. Most people steam their veggies to get the full nutritional value, unless they're making a soup or something, where they'll be keeping and using the broth.

Besides, like I said, that's just one example.

The literature seems to agree with you on the effect of boiling vs steaming.[1] But that paper is from 2009, and the references are not much older. Older people's cooking habits were formed before this was well known, so I'm not so sure that "most people steam their veggies". I don't even own the equipment for steaming, and I had no idea about the benefits.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722699/

> Most people steam their veggies to get the full nutritional value

You're correct. I should have said, most people steam their veggies when they're looking to get the full nutritional value.

I see nothing here that would put me off. What’s the one you were implying to be negative?

What's your issue with the ingredient list? It looks great.

Yes, this ones is a healthy option comparing to for example Beyond Meat burger which is mostly different oils (Palm oil :( ) and pea protein and sodium - very tasty comparing to other brands but so unhealthy.

Was just going to comment on how using palm oil seems like a very stupid idea for that particular company - given their particular target audience and non-budget price point - but it seems like they don't use palm oil after all.

https://www.beyondmeat.com/about/our-ingredients/

> OUR FATS: Cocoa Butter • Coconut Oil • Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil

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