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Comment by toddh | Hacker News Reader

No mention of the nutritional value. Which is my concern with Beyond Meat as well. It's great that it's not meat from factory farming POV, but it's not nutritious food either.

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I mean, it depends on your definition of nutritious, and what you're expecting from a burger.

Should you eat one for every meal? Probably not. I don't think "a burger for every meal" has ever been on anyone's nutrition plan.

Is it reasonably nutritious compared to a meat burger? Yeah.

Compared to ground beef, a Beyond Burger is pretty equivalent in terms of fat and calories. The Beyond has a few more carbs (but far fewer than most veggie meat alternatives), but also a few grams of fiber.

The Beyond burger has quite a bit of sodium, but probably most ground beef would by the time you got it ready to cook.

I think the beyond et al ranks worse after you cook it. When I cook with this stuff it has no fat inside to render out, so it soaks up cooking oil like a sponge to reach equilibrium. It's osmosis. I put in some olive oil in my pan to get some browning, and it's been soaked up dry in 30 seconds and I have to add more before the patty fuses to my pan. I can't help but think I'm eating a lot more grease. Not to mention you still need to use your salt and pepper and other seasonings, because it is quite bland. Probably intentionally to be widely palatable.

Beyond meat isn't lab grown animal cells, right? This is actual salmon.

Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat are imitation meat made with plants, aka "Meat Substitutes". This company is what's known as "Lab Grown Meat" where the end result is basically meat at the molecular level.

So theoretically this will have a very similar nutritional profile to farmed or caught salmon. At least thats one of the goals of the lab grown meat sector.

It fact, it might even have a better nutritional profile because it won't be exposed to ocean contaminants like mercury and plastic.

My doctor recommended BeyondMeat as an alternative to my soy-heavy diet because it's based on pea protein. What exactly makes BeyondMeat something that's not nutritious?

I mean, just because one thing is preferable to another doesn’t mean that both are good. Hitting yourself in the head with a smaller rock is preferably to hitting yourself with a larger rock.

I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, but it appears that processed food has a host of negative effects according to recent studies (for example https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find...). Now you can pick apart these studies, but ultimately we “know” very little about nutrition for certain, which is why there are so many conflicting studies.

What concerns me about fake meat products and why I won’t consume them is that they are heavily processed. In my limited experience, eating whole foods from fresh, organic suppliers is the way to go. I’ll let someone else be the guinea pig for processed foods.

We don't need to pick apart the study, but let's skim it so we know if it applies.

This system considers foods “ultra-processed” if they have ingredients predominantly found in industrial food manufacturing, such as hydrogenated oils, high-fructose corn syrup, flavoring agents, and emulsifiers.

I believe the study, even though small, reasonably shows that ingredients like hydrogenated oils or high-fructose corn syrup are bad for you.

That doesn't mean food that has gone through a process is bad, it means industrial scale food production often uses foul ingredients to reduce costs.

Processing != bad, But, mass market, massive scale, processed food production correlates with the use of bad ingredients. So just read the ingredient list on Beyond Meat or whatever processed food you want to try and see if there is stuff in it you don't want in you.

Maybe sodium? It tastes unusually salty.

Careful how much oil you use to cook it, I find it soaks it up like a sponge and I tend to use a lot more than for cooking, say, ground chuck or other meat.

What's your concern about the nutritional content of Beyond Meat? Its macros are comparable to that of the product it replaces.

Isn't it high in saturated fat, cholesterol, and sugar?

It's not high in sugar. The macros are comparable to those of meat.

They're still highly processed products.

We got used to vegetarian = healthy because for a while it meant grain, veggies and fruits. But today half of the vegetarian/vegan processed food is as bad as regular processed food.

I'll take an halloumi/spinach patty burger over a beyond meat burger every day

Why are processed foods automatically bad so long as the macronutrient / sodium profile is otherwise in line?

Because absorption and bioavailability are complex thing and even few missing micro can alter the nutritional value whole; processed and synthetic for trend to miss out on that fairly often

Not automatically, but macros aren't everything, a lot of additives they add to make up for nature's magic tricks are concerning (I don't know about beyond meat specifically, but for most processed food it is the case)

If all that mattered in nutrition were prots, fats, carbs and sodium it would be muuuuuuch easier but sadly it's infinitely more complex than that.

To replicate the mouthfeel of beef, you have to replicate all the negative qualities of the meat too. They are full of saturated fat.

Why would it have less nutritional value than a slab of muscle cells grown inside of a fish vs cells from that fish induced to grown in a tank?

I imagine wild grown flesh is going to have tons of micro nutrients available (although also pollutants). That type of nutrition is hard to emulate in a lab setting.

>That type of nutrition is hard to emulate in a lab setting

I would assume it is easier to control that type of nutrition in a lab setting.

Unless you are implying that full grown salmon (and other meats) contain some nutrients which are crucial to human survival, not inherent in the salmons biology, and currently undiscovered.

The nutrients would be typically provided through diet. Indeed a lab could just amend the meat like they feed cows particular B vitamins. But those inputs have costs.

This is all just theoretical. Once a nutrient profile is published we can talk more seriously.

I would guess nutritional value depends on what nutrients are fed to the fish (or the cells). The big benefit IMO is it shouldn't contain any mercury or other heavy metals that are present in some fish.

Which is fine as far as I'm concerned. We live in a world of nutrition surplus not deficit

We have a calorie surplus, certainly. The nutrition content is more complex.

It's true that for most people, the main malnutrition is a surplus of calories. If they're deficient in something, it's likely to be dietary fiber, and perhaps vitamin D. Salmon has none of the former, but it would be interesting to know how this stacks up in the latter.

It avoids the mercury ;)

Impossible burger has better nutritional profile than real meat burger.

Define better. Define real meat.

I would imagine the imitation meat patties are worse in some ways than a turkey patty.

I heard the same about vegetable oil and margarine replacing butter 15 years ago. That didn't bode very well...

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