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Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm. I know it’s a bunch of stuff to make it look like meat, but it’s basically cow meat vs a burger containing 50 random items and chemicals that is worse or equal in nutritional content then cow.

Like one impossible vs cow is 14g of fat vs 16g of fat. 370mg of sodium vs 90mg of sodium.

They are not even that much better for you.

Rather than trying to get meat eaters to eat a sort of cow type burger. Just make the regular veggie burgers better and cheaper. If people go to the store and see cow for $15 and a delicious veggie that is not sawdust for $10 some will buy the cheaper. And that’s all it takes is some. Slowly and over generations it could change to be predominantly.

You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

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> I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm.

If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb. Proteins, fats, sugars, enzymes, hormones, antibiotics (quite likely with factory farming), microorganisms... it's just our labelling laws that mean they get to be lumped together as "meat". They're still chemicals assembled by organic nanotech.

We know some of them are bad. E.g. there's a link between red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, and nitrites in bacon etc. also increase cancer risk.

> Slowly and over generations it could change to be predominantly.

Slowly over generations is really not the approach we need for tackling climate change though.

> You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

And I don't think anyone is doing that.

The chemicals in every plant and animal are a long, complicated list. If, as you suggest, we elaborate them out, "mushroom," "fig," amd even "carrot" get really weird. The point of the ingredients list is to backtrack from the food in front of you to a list of known safe components. Like it or not, "cow" is one of those - humans have been eating cow meat for millions of years.

1. Humans have not been eating cows produced by modern methods for millions of years. Cow diet, genetics, and lifecycle is quite unnatural at this point. (This is the overwhelming bulk of cow consumption, of course your local micro farm produces cows more similar to ancient cows)

2. Humans haven’t been eating cow (or meat generally) on this scale ever before in history.

3. Even despite the above, we genuinely don’t know to what extent baseline human health is dependent on traditional diet. It’s not impossible that there exists a modern radical diet that greatly improves health and longevity without including any “natural” foods.

> If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb.

No, I don’t think so. Most of my beef has a single ingredient: grass. Some have two ingredients: grass, grain (there may be different grains though).

Even if you listed the molecules, the ingredient list for beef is much shorter than beyond burgers.

And plastic. And other contaminants that have entered the food chain.

The naturalistic fallacy doesn't somehow become a good argument because you also don't understand microbiology.

I am certainly not saying red meat is good, I don't eat red meat. I'm just saying that the whole make a plant burger like a meat burger and bam climate change solved is not going to work. Advertising it as a meat burger won't either, cause it's not. And that just makes meat lovers angry.

It would be better to focus on making veggie burgers better. Not making a terrible copy of cow.

> Slowly over generations is really not the approach we need for tackling climate change though.

I'm certainly not arguing that climate change does not need immediate action, and I am certainly not undermining that it has helped even a little bit. I hope that came across in my statement.

I AM saying that red meat is good -- both for your health and for the environment.

Wanting something to be true, doesn’t make it true.

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2021...

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/eating-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7256495/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eating-less-red-m...

You're going to need to put more effort into that assertion.

I notice that you haven't actually brought up any arguments. I'm especially curious if you can find any arguments at all for your second assertion.

> If you listed the "ingredients" in a cow, you'd also have a list that was as long as the proverbial limb.

The thing is, a lot of have been making plant based patties for years using almost no ingredients. All you need for a convincing non-meat burger is quality mushrooms in the patty. Sure, it might not taste exactly like beef but once you consider it like any other meat it's not an issue (pork burgers don't taste like beef, chicken burgers don't taste like pork, vice-versa).

I understand that they have to have some preservatives, but some other products are only there for the novelty or to attract meat eaters. We don't really need to have an entire formula that adds fake blood.

For example, my favourite store-bought one is from Good Butchers and it's simple ingredients that are very similar to what you would make yourself at home:

Wheat gluten, Onion, Organic black beans, Organic mushrooms, Barley, Apple juice, Organic carrots, Organic beets, Water, Organic sunﬂower oil, Organic celery, Tahini, Oats, Organic garlic, Nutritional yeast, Apple cider vinegar, Organic mustard, Natural smoke ﬂavour, Salt, Balsamic vinegar, Natural ﬂavour, Dried shiitake mushrooms, Dried porcini mushrooms, Herbs, Spices.

Meanwhile some other brands have a lot of additives, preservatives and chemicals.

> I’d feel better if the ingredients list wasn’t as long as my arm

Cow meat has a long list of ingredients that aren't disclosed either: antibiotics, growth hormones, etc.

> They are not even that much better for you.

I don't think they're going for the health angle - this is junk food, just not from a live animal. No one is saying you can live off plant-based burgers exclusively, they're an indulgence, and they're aiming for the "close enough" crowd that doesn't mind indulgences.

> Just make the regular veggie burgers better and cheaper.

It'll be hard to compete in price until they reach a certain scale, and there's the whole point of livestock subsidies: https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=00000&progcode=live...

> You can’t just shove a fake meat product down a meat lovers throat and call them a bad name if they hate it.

Not sure where the shoving and name-calling is taking place, but there's actually good feedback from meat eaters for a lot of Beyond Meat products, for example.

> I don't think they're going for the health angle - this is junk food, just not from a live animal. No one is saying you can live off plant-based burgers exclusively, they're an indulgence, and they're aiming for the "close enough" crowd that doesn't mind indulgences.

Wait until the big players like Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle & co. enter the party, and see major lobbying to promote this ultra-processed food as healthy because #PlantBased, like they've done for decades with their other products.

The marketing for this stuff has already been extreme in the United Kingdom in the past couple years, with the real deal seen as vile and immoral, after being labelled as unhealthy since the 60s due to shoddy dietary science. After all, there is not much money or processed products you can make off real meat. With plant-based fake meat, the potential profits are unimaginable.

> but it’s basically cow meat vs a burger containing 50 random items and chemicals that is worse or equal in nutritional content then cow.

Is that the central north american urban choice palette?

Here in rural Australia our meat intake (albeit < %20 of total food intake) is lamb from the farm, ham from the farm, fish from the ocean, camel, kangaroo, goat.

Camel and goat are introduced feral animals that overstock and get routinely culled - they're not feed lot cattle, and anybody eating them is arguably doing the local environment a favour by denting the numbers.

Kangaroos are culled by population monitoring estimates, they have a tendancy to explode in numbers in the good years and die by the hundreds of thousands in the dry years that follow.

It's decades at least since I ate meat that didn't come from a known location, killed and butched | filleted by someone known, and passed on either directly or through a single known intermediary.

That said - kangaroo, camel, and goat make an interesting alternative to beef - the meat is lean and comes at a much lower environmental impact.

> A healthy, active adult needs between 200 and 500 mg of sodium per day.

(https://www.lifespan.org/lifespan-living/how-much-sodium-day...)

> Adults should eat no more than 2.4g sodium a day

(https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-nutrit...)

I'm no nutritionalist, but doesn't that suggest you could eat nothing but 6 of these burgers every day and still be within the recommended sodium intake? Sure, nobody's eating nothing but these burgers, but nobody (I hope) is eating 6 of them every single day — in and of themselves, their sodium content may seem scary relative to cow meat, but it's not really that bad.

As I understand it, most of the ingredients are just extracts from or purifications of natural products. I'm not just saying this to defend plant-based meats - it's true of many chemicals with scary-looking names in other foods. "Calcium pantothenate", for instance, is just a salt of the essential vitamin B5. "Ascorbic acid" is vitamin C. And so on.

And it's worth bearing in mind that the ingredients list of a steak would be just one item - beef - but red meat consumption is nonetheless associated with increases in certain cancers and cardiovascular problems. This is even more true for processed red meat which, realistically, represents a big share of most people's red meat consumption.

Here’s the ingredient list for a beyond burger [0], I don’t think your point is relevant, as while the ingredient aren’t necessarily scary, there are many of them and the product is highly processed.

“Water, pea protein, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, dried yeast, cocoa butter, methylcellulose, and less than 1% of potato starch, salt, potassium chloride, beet juice color, apple extract, pomegranate concentrate, sunflower lecithin, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, vitamins and minerals (zinc sulfate, niacinamide [vitamin B3], pyridoxine hydrochloride [vitamin B6], cyanocobalamin [vitamin B12], calcium pantothenate).

Peas are legumes. People with severe allergies to legumes like peanuts should be cautious when introducing pea protein into their diet because of the possibility of a pea allergy. Contains no peanuts or tree nuts.”

[0] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger

The point does seem relevant. Most of the non chemical ingredients are recognizable natural or naturally derived (rice/pea protein). methylcellulose is the only odd one out.

Hamburger Pattie’s have a single ingredient: beef.

I thought it wasn’t relevant because the ingredient list is still complex compared to cow burgers. It’s nice that the long ingredient is mostly recognizable, but the point is that there’s a long list of ingredients, not that the ingredient list included toxic waste or something.

> 370mg of sodium vs 90mg of sodium.

While I agree with your comment, this is very misleading unless you eat your steak raw and unsalted.

Does the cooking itself add sodium? Salting isn't mandatory, and there are tons of spices you can add if you want some extra taste that aren't salt (i know this might be anathema to some who think seasoning starts and stops with salt and maybe pepper but it's true, try it out!).

No amount of extra spices can replace salt.

370mg of sodium is the equivalent of a LOT of salt. I assume the beyond patty has some other sodium-containing ingredient in it.

If your taste buds are accustomed to tons of salt, yes. But that's usually quite easy to adapt (over some time).

A few tiny shakes out of a salt shaker isn't going to come close to 90mg. Figure about 40mg because I use a very small amount of it when I do use it. I'd have to eat 9 of mine to get the same salt content as a plant burger sold here.

But wait, there's more! National brands of everything here load their products up with salt. Buns, condiments, fries, drinks are all packed with sodium. Under the guise of eating healthy, one can eat a loaded up plant burger w/fries and a cola and consume a day' worth of salt in one sitting.

370mg of salt in a single patty is an absurd amount of salt.

> A few tiny shakes out of a salt shaker isn't going to come close to 90mg.

Really? You're saying "a few tiny shakes out of a salt shaker" isn't going to give you as much as one 25th of a teaspoon?

I expect people salt their impossible burgers too.

I think it’s accurate and fair to list the direct ingredients rather than estimating what the nutrition content is after cooking. That gets pretty hard to follow as cooking varies substantially.

For example, I might bake my broccoli with olive oil. Does that make it misleading to only show the fat content of broccoli and not the olive oil?

There are many beef dishes that don’t add salt.

No, the impossible burgers come well salted and seasoned to hide the fakeness. I don't salt mine.

I loved the beyond burger and I’m a meat eater but after experimenting with it I also stopped eating them. The laundry list of ingredients and the contradictory information from educational institutions with respected names publishing about the impact on my body for consuming these turned me off.

It’s good to know we can create delicious plant burgers. It sucks to doubt if they are even better for us than the meat.

I eat them every now and then. Any remarkable source about the negative impacts of it on the body that you would be kind to share? Thank you in advance.

> Just make the regular veggie burgers better and cheaper.

These burgers are out there already, for what it's worth. Veggie burgers nowadays are very tasty, very healthy, and mostly made of ground/diced vegetables and legumes. But they don't have the marketing hype that comes with "plant based food that bleeds!" so meat eating individuals didn't and don't even consider them as an option.

In my experience, usually the ingredients in fake burger meat are mostly recognizable nutritious plants, at least in the stuff I buy.

The goal of the "meat replacements" that are Beyond and Impossible was never being better for you (from what I recall). It was about offsetting the footprint of raising cattle.

Even worse. If meat is not from some local farmers(and even from them), it can have a ton of antibiotics and other things to increase muscle mass, reduce fat, etc... Hell, even some vegetables like potatoes/tomatoes can have some awful chemicals in them( Sometimes I feel envy of my grandparents that grow vegetables on their land))

Pretty much this, I don't care if taste is 50-80% facsimile, but I expect cost to be so as well, and nutrition profile to be superior.

I feel so much better knowing my burger is 50% antibiotics.

Vegan food: taste, healthy, filling - pick 2

These are all three: https://www.beanit.fi/en/our-products/

It's just processed fava beans, nothing unhealthy.

Their tex-mex mince (not on the english pages for some reason) is superior to minced meat in my opinion. It keeps in the fridge for weeks (can't do that with raw meat) and the texture is pretty similar. Less fat, more protein.

Replace healthy with unprocessed then. Vegans sure love their processed foods.

Of course it's going to be processed unless you're getting it straight from the field. That website's ingredient list for their unflavored grounds:

Water, pea protein, fava bean (9 %, Finland), rapeseed oil.

Looks fairly minimal to me. "Vegans love their processed foods" is a weird take, I don't think they likely eat more processed foods than your typical American.

The ingredients aren't the main problem. The main problem is that a lot of nutritional value is stripped out during the various industrial processes. This causes one to not feel as sated as they would from the same caloric amount of non-processed food, and causes overeating.

What are the ingredients in potato fries?

American or European?

European fries are potato, oil, salt.

And since potatos are healthy, and vegans believe seed oils are healthy, surely their sum (potato fries) must also be healthy, correct?

Potatoes are healthy is not a take I see often.

Being vegan doesn't always mean eating healthy, even though people have that idea in their head.

In Finland we have a FB group called "Chips and Beer -vegans"[0] with 65k members. Potato chips are vegan, beer is vegan. You can have both and still be vegan. It's not healthy, but still vegan.

I can deep-fry my tofu in the fattiest of all vegan fats and eat them with deep-fried french fries and a bunch of deep-fried Oreos.

Still vegan.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/groups/1701571030062709

But it’s much easier to sustain a healthy diet as an omnivore, because as I mentioned, whole vegan food either lacks in satiety or taste. Which is why you typically see vegans trying to attack protein to address criticisms of satiety, or trying to defend processed foods to address criticisms of taste.

Wait what. "whole vegan food either lacks in satiety or taste" :D

Now go into the nearest Indian restaurant and order a Chana Aloo Curry. Or pick a Thai restaurant and grab any food with tofu in it. I recommend a Pad Thai.

Both 100% vegan and if they lack "satiety or taste", then come back.

In asian cuisine the protein really doesn't matter, 99% of the flavour is in the sauce. The protein just provides the texture.

In my experience it is the opposite, being that I only practice veganism every other day, I'm always looking forward to my vegan days for the variety of whole veggies and beans and grains I "have" to eat on those days. Always satisfying.

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