Low nutritional quality in vegetarian meat

Agreex, if the burger patty is just prime ground beef or black beans and quinoa or something it's probably ok. But people like to eat food that is nice sometimes and so it's everything else, the mayo, the ketchup, the toppings, the bun, the fries, that are part of the mise en place of the burger experience and the same goes for other vegetarian meat substitutes, e.g. sausages or bacon.

One ingredient is neither healthy or unhealthy. It's only diet/lifestyle that is healthy. A healthy diet can include a variety of ingredients.

Associating a particular food with health or illness is an incorrect thing to do, at least I think so.

> Most vegetarians are such for ethical reasons, knowing it's harder to get adequate nutrition, and planning accordingly.

Getting adequate nutrition as a vegetarian isn’t difficult at all. Pick a random grain, a random legume, and a random vegetable, maybe throw in a salad, and you’ll average out to everything you need nutritionally.

It’s only a problem when you try to transform vegetables into non-vegetables. There’s nothing natural about eating massive amounts of a single part of any fruit or vegetable.

The same logic applies to explain why most juice is bad for you. It’s simply not evolutionarily sound to consume just the liquid portion of an entire bag of oranges or apples.

It applies to meat as well. A diet of only pork rinds isn’t going to work too well.

> knowing is harder to get adequate nutrition

It's really not, though. Not any harder than in a meat eating diet. Maybe if you're following a vegan diet. Or if you have specific health concerns (like low iron absorption). But then, you should probably have to be careful if you're eating meat, as well.

> The whole point of vegetarian burgers is so people following those diets can fit into social settings where others are eating burgers.

I do not think so. I eat meat, but does not go for burgers in general. I have yet to encounter social situation in which me not eating burger would in any way be an issue. It just does not happen, never. Being vegetarian poses social issues I think, but you never need a burger specifically.

It is more that people including vegetarians (excluding me I guess) like burger form and like the bun taste.

>The beef itself is arguably one of the healthiest foods available.

What are you talking about? Are you just going to say this without any citation whatsoever? What do you mean by 'healthy'?

That's an issue of labelling regulation which applies to every product. And, I've never seen such a label.

Are the patties high in iron and are they making that claim? I don't know.

Orange juice is also high in vitamin C and makes that claim so low information consumers think it's ok to have their children drink litres of the stuff since it's "healthier than soda". The problem you're highlighting has far more to do with the negative aspects of a capitalist food system (marketing and branding) and is far broader than whether these particular patties that are primarily selected on the basis their contents didn't die in terror surrounded by the stench of death with a boltgun through the skull have insufficient zinc or whatever.

Like sure proper labelling and branding is important, for all foods, but I'm reacting to the perceived broader campaign on behalf of the meat industry to single out meat replacements on the basis of them not being, I don't know, as healthy as a prime cut of wagyu beef prepared in the healthiest oil with a side salad of greens (no dressing).

A loaf of bread covered in butter is "perfectly healthy" if it satisfies your macronutrient requirements without going well beyond what your body is going to use. But that doesn't fit in with the average person's diet. Eating a 1200 calorie burger (that's high in fat) if your body burns 2000 calories a day likely isn't a healthy choice for most folks who aren't tracking what they eat, especially if they do it regularly.

That’s a misleading question.

Is Meat nutritious even though it lacks vitamin C?

How nutritious food is really depends on context. Potatoes cover a larger percentage of our nutritious needs than Bananas. Bananas however cover a few things lacking in normal western diets so we think of them as nutritious.

I do regular blood work and I only eat plants, and I only supplement D3 and B12. My iron and zinc levels are great.

I suppose the answer would be no, we would get sick and die without those. But it seems like you’re implying that we can’t get them without meat. If that’s correct, I’d say that’s a false assumption — I am doing great, and the rest of my family is as well.

Although some nutrients appear less bioavailable in plants when tested in labs, evidently this is not true in situ. My gut feeling (ha) is that bioavailability (even with foods we consider highly available) depends quite a lot on healthy gut flora. There is some great and some more tenuous evidence of this depending on the food and nutrient in question, and I suspect it’s why some people don’t thrive on plants.

> People who exercise regularly also have higher needs, about 1.1–1.5 grams per kilogram. People who regularly lift weights, or are training for a running or cycling event need 1.2–1.7 grams per kilogram

That's a quote from your article, which matches what gym bros tell you that you need. It's actually pretty hard to get that much even if you eat meat whilst trying to eat only 2-3k calories.

The protein craze is not a marketing gimmick and your own article disproves what you say here

Yes. That’s why I posted my bafflement on a website dedicated to curiosity in a discussion thread on the topic. Have you got any ideas on the subject?

Are there many vegans who do want to cause unnecessary suffering and/or kill?

The guy who killed those 4 students in Moscow ID is a vegan. Was wondering if there was any correlation.

> Raising animals takes a huge amount of resources, so in order to sustain the number of people we have in the planet, we need to find other ways to make food that don’t require so many resources.

Is that really true? Livestock farming can be entirely sustainable using renewable inputs. The per unit resource usage might be high by some simplistic arbitrary metrics, but when those resources are basically sunlight and its natural products, what’s the problem? In any event we’re nowhere near the planet’s renewable carrying capacity.

I’m against foolish, cruel, and unsustainable “factory farming” practices, but the existence of a bad method of doing something doesn’t mean there aren’t good ones.

> People clearly like to eat meat, so if we can replace a lot of it with something plant based that also satisfies those needs, then why not do it?

People clearly like to drink sugar water too. So we replaced sugar with food science experiments like aspartame and sucralose that can’t be metabolized. But now we’re learning they’re endocrine disrupters with significant side effects.

That's a myth. We can easily produce food for 20-30 billions of people using our current farming methods (and that includes meat production). The reason people are starving in Africa is because they do not have enough money to buy food (for various political reasons), not our inability to produce enough of it.

I strongly agree that more of my diet than I'd like is a food science experiment. That doesn't mean I want to add more food science experiments. Otherwise, I do what I can to get both meats and fruits and vegetables, including processed meats like sausages, from sources that are personally known to me and that use traditional natural methods and ingredients. I'd say over half of the meat I eat is from animals that I personally saw when they were alive and I know they were both raised and slaughtered humanely. I'd like to get that number considerably closer to 100%. It's a lot harder to do with vegetables since I've not yet gotten good at preservation besides freezing, and there's only so much space, so in the off season I'm mostly stuck with supermarket produce.

> Sometimes you just need a burger-like product to take to the company BBQ so that Todd from accounting will shut the fuck up for once about how vegetarian food is all "rabbit food".

I've always preferred "thats not food, that's what food eats." I don't see how fake meat is going to solve a gap in senses of humor though.

> Sometimes you want to make one of the many dishes you grew up with, but you want to live consistently with your ethics, so you want a simple replacement.

I would be quite interested in hearing a consistent and rigorous herbivore ethical system. All of the herbivores I've personally encountered mistake their emotional revulsion for an ethos. But, in all charity, I can at least imagine the existence of a consistent ethos one might hold with respect abstention. In fact, there's one that's part of my faith tradition, but it's considered an exceptional penance and not a moral obligation. Somehow I don't think that's your motivation though. If it is a penitential act though, then you have my sincere admiration. That said, eating highly processed food science experiments that we have no actual data on the long term effects of consumption of is inconsistent with my ethics. Naturally, that is orthogonal to eating a complete diet that's as consistent as possible given practical constraints with what H. Sapiens evolved to eat. Incidentally that's the basis of my ethos with regard to food: I want to eat what my body is best able to use.

> Sometimes you want something that freezes easily so that when you've had a long and stressful day you have something quick and easy to reach for.

I don't understand this, I've never had trouble freezing the vegetarian dishes that I've made.

> Most meat-eaters don't make hamburgers a "major part of their diet" -- and most vegetarians/vegans don't make veggie burgers a "major part" of theirs either. But as an occasional thing, it's very useful to have these meat substitutes, for a variety of reasons. You don't have to eat them for every meal in order to find them useful.

I certainly agree that even eating supermarket meats it's hard to eat a complete diet. Organ meat is basically impossible to find in your average supermarket, but it's of vital importance for getting nutritionally available dietary micronutrients. I'm sure that you know, as an educated herbivore, that it's considerably more difficult to get bioavailable micronutrients from plants due to our digestive system not being evolved to process phytates. Fortunately thanks to human ingenuity there are some workarounds, like fermentation and other forms of processing that neutralize the natural defensive poisons that plants produce. Because, believe it or not, just like animals plants also prefer not to be eaten!