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Comment by joegahona | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at a food/recipe publication and had a similar experience -- users constantly complained that they wanted more healthy recipes, but those types of recipes always performed poorly. Meatloaf and other comfort foods dominated traffic.

This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.

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Is meatloaf really unhealthy?

I suppose that depends on the meat you use and how else it's prepared.

Use a high fat ground beef and bread crumbs that'll soak up that fat, and I'm sure many would consider that unhealthy.

Use lean meat and something else as filler (oatmeal is common when trying to fill out meat) and it would be less unhealthy, but far more prone to error, resulting in perhaps a tasteless brick.

Never read on meatloaf, but I'm sure a publication would go the "easier but fattier" route.

I wouldn't call it unhealthy, unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy. It does retain most of the fat from the ground beef which would cook out of normal burgers or hamburger steak. But it's also more filling than either of those due the fat and the inclusion of bread crumbs or oatmeal as filler.

> unless you're of the mindset that red meat is inherently unhealthy

It's not a mindset, any more than gravity is a mindset.

Too binary. Red meat is "unhealthy" like spinach is unhealthy, using your logic.

A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.

The comment before mine set the binary condition. I'm not writing a dissertation here.

> A moderate amount, especially lean, is considered a net health positive by the vast majority of the relevant professionals.

I don't think that's true, but how do you define "net health positive". My understanding is that you are better off without it, but a little won't kill you.

I suspect as with many things the quantity plays a factor.

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