Beyond Burger ingredients:
Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
> humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
That could be mostly true of some things like the starches, but with the caveat that the industrial processes used today aren't always the same as what was done traditionally or what I might do in my kitchen, and often involve new/synthetic/potentially toxic compounds.
Pea starch might be the most benign of all of these. I'm not making an argument that pea starch is bad either, just that it's not quite the same as peas, and isn't quite the same as home-made pea starch, and we don't really know if this is a problem.
For example, with pea starch, they use defoaming agents like siloxanes, as well as sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and others. And, because it's a concentrate of just part of the plant, you might get a heavier dose of pesticides or heavy metals depending on what part of the plant these bind with. (Sure, if you eat equal portions of each part of the plant, extracted, this factor would balance out.)
There's a spectrum of course with these things. Some things like refined oils might be far more harmful than the extracted starches based on the chemistry I've looked into. I'm not particularly afraid of pea starch but I just don't buy or eat processed food generally unless I'm in a pinch.
The dose makes the poison.
People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.
I would like to point you towards the industrial processing of soybean into tofu, soymilk, tempeh, and soy sauce in Asia that has been going on for a long time.
Are people being intentionally dense here? We're talking orders of magnitude difference here. Widespread, worldwide transition to ultra processed foods, synthetic emulsifiers, synthetic flavors, etc (the ENNNs), supermarket chock full of things that can't be named food sold as food ("cheeses" that can't be sold as cheeses, etc).
There are tons of products where the base ingredients are at least 2 steps away from actual traditional ingredients. Sometimes (frequently) the base ingredients aren't even food, they're purely petro-chemical based. My dad used to joke that the same plant that makes ingredients for paint and tires makes articial flavors for food :-)
Bah, I withdraw from this discussion. It's full of people that can't see the forest (ultra processed food everywhere destroying people's health through its addictiveness) for the trees (technicalities about some ultra processed foods being available in the pre-industrial era, on a much smaller scale and in much smaller niches).
There is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historically eaten them. Evolution does not select for avoiding the health problems facing modern-day humans such as cancer or heart disease.
No reason? How about financial incentives?
Uhh I don't think that financial incentives are a valid reason to believe something is healthier or safer than an alternative. Unless I have missed some sarcasm.
I mean there is a financial incentive to use byproducts of industrial processes that would otherwise be wasted, as food ingredients, and as there is no requirement to rigorously show that new ingredients are safe to consume in the US, this happens all the time and makes up a big portion of the average modern US diet.
But the list of allegedly questionable foods above are all foods we already eat, just with some things removed (e.g., avocado oil is just avocado with the flesh removed; pea protein is peas with the carbs removed). It is not obvious to me how you would conclude these are unhealthy.
Study Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo...
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.
But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:
1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.
3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.
4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.
5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.
6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.
> There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods
By this logic, you shouldn't eat modern meat, as its very different from the one our ancestors were eating. Modern meat is mostly fat
I agree it's probably healthier to eat wild meat or homegrown meat grown on healthy pasture than it is to eat feedlot meat grown on whatever they feed them there. There are lots of differences between them.
Not particularly because it has more fat though. While it's true that wild deer for example especially in warmer climates can have very little fat, there are plenty of animals that were traditionally eaten all over the world that have much higher proportions of fat. Fish, geese and ducks and many kinds of birds, whales and seals and lots of aquatic mammals, bears, etc.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of industrial beef at all I'm just trying to say that natural animal fat isn't necessarily unhealthy. (I really want to know actually if it is, because I do eat a lot of it, and have for much of my life. As far as I can tell I'm very healthy but I'm always open to learning. I have not yet found any compelling evidence for natural animal fat being bad.)
> There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
This is an argument that no white people should be eating pineapples, mangos, bananas, kiwifruit, etc. Hell, probably not even apples.
No it is not.
Different kinds of fruits from around the world may well have more in common with each other than categorically new synthetic compounds which are found in processed food.
Pretty much all people ate real foods - plants, animals, and fungus, and ferments of these, all over the world. There are categorical chemical differences between this stuff and much modern food.
They will be fine, white people have, as everybody, African ancestors.
I'm responding to someone alleging dietary adaptation/evolution over the course of a few thousand years.
White people's African ancestors are over 50,000 years ago.
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> I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history.
I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.
I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.
The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
Potato != extracted potato starch
Peas != extracted pea protein
They're not the same thing.
I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.
It doesn't actually say 'extracted' though, are we sure 'protein' actually implies that (i.e. separated it from other elements) vs. just being marketing copy to make 'yellow pea' et al. more exciting to certain people? (Protein, grr. Meat replacement, protein, grr, yeah.)
Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.
FWIW pea protein as used in beyond burger is extracted from peas in an industrial process - it isolates the protein from the rest of the pea.
Your point on cooking is fair. And, I'd still argue that modern processes introduce new types of chemistry that didn't exist in human food until very recently.
the issue with wild meat is going to be all parasites in the animal, at least according to friends who hunt (and when they managed to get something, which doesn't seem to be a given).
> every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years
what absurd scaremongering! Do you know how yellow pea protein, for example, is "refined"?
You take dried peas and grind them into powder. Pop in a centrifuge to separate protein from starch. Not exactly pumped full of "toxins"!
> Avocado Oil
You literally press avocado flesh. It's been done for centuries. It's not some crazy refinement process.
> brown rice protein
This is just ground up rice mixed with amylase or protease to isolate the proteins. There's nothing scary here. We've been eating it for millennia.
etc
Study Finds 82 Percent of Avocado Oil Rancid or Mixed With Other Oils
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo...
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
If I see "avocado oil" as an ingredient, sure it could be simply pressed avocado flesh. But it could also be a rancid hexane-refined oil potentially cut with other stuff, and I'd bet that's more likely because it's probably a lot cheaper for the manufacturer.
I don't know as much about how the starches and proteins are extracted, I'd bet it's more benign, but there are added chemicals - even if they are considered safe, it's still not quite the same as eating actual peas and rice.
Reminds me of a joke I read online. "Plant Based Meat" is not Plant. It's not Based and it's not Meat.
About as funny as complaining "oil" is used to refer to petroleum-based lubricants, avocado oil, etc. since the etymology of "oil" is strictly a reference to olive oil only.
I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk."
Not really a dig at you, sorry.
No problem. I didn't take the original comment too seriously either. Just a passing chuckle at some wordplay.
TBH, I haven't heard the complaints about the use of "oil" in that context.
GP isn't saying people do complain about oil, they're saying by the same logic people ought to, if they wish to be consistent, which seems silly.
Huh.
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> Have you tried dog meat?
I'd like to try one day. But I don't think I'd easily find a butcher selling it here in Western Europe
You could kill a stray! Or is it better to have someone else handle that "natural" part, or would the animals have to be brought into life on a farm to be eligible for killing?
well, I'd be wary to eat meat from stray dogs, because I don't know what parasites and illnesses they might carry.
> would the animals have to be brought into life on a farm to be eligible for killing?
Well, I'm not against (regulated) hunting, so no. Though I don't think that dogs are allowed to be hunted here.
Dog meat is pretty good.
(It also amuses me when vegans retreat to xenophobia as their Motte.)
Since when have vegans used dog meat in a xenophobic way? The entire point of the dog meat comparison is to highlight that meat consumption is cultural and that other cultures eat animals we consider to not be food even though they are an animal that has equivalent intelligence to animals we do eat.
Dogs are the perfect example, not because of xenophobia, but because they are such a plain example of hypocrisy that can be refuted on every point.
Vegans are constantly using dog meat in a xenophobic way, presenting it as an absurd choice that is meant to demonstrate the supposed depravity of meat eaters, even though it's wholly a cultural preference. Enough of this Motte and Bailey crap.
Of course xenophobia is nothing new to most internet veganists, their whole thing is being intolerant to the culture of billions of people around the world, so a little additional intolerance to a few Asian countries (and a few Swiss people) probably seems like no biggie.
That's patently absurd. For almost every vegan, Veganism is predicated on the belief that all animal lives should be treated equally, that there is no difference between livestock and pets except cultural!
Saying that dog meat is an example of "depravity of meat eaters" makes no sense because the "depravity of meat eaters" is demonstrable... with any meat? That's the entire point of veganism! If a vegan believes that meat eaters are depraved, they believe they are depraved whether they eat cats, dogs, cows or pigs.
You may find some xenophobic people who are vegans but what you're much more likely to find is meat eaters who think that eating dog meat in Wuhan is depraved while eating pigs in New York is totally acceptable. Who do you think is signing the "end dog meat" petitions? Western meat eaters!
I have personally never met a vegan in person or online who thought that dog meat was more depraved than pig meat. The go to argument that vegans make is that pigs and dogs are of equivalent intelligence, that you could raise a pig as you raise a dog and have the same bond. Framing the dog meat argument as xenophobic makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and requires either a wilful ignorance or... I don't know. I cannot even understand how you contorted yourself into believing this.
Vegans are constantly using dog meat in a xenophobic way
You apparently have never heard or seen the fairly widespread 'the only difference is your perception' line of vegan merchandise which uses dog meat it in the opposite way: it calls out the hypocrisy of all meat-but-not-dog people. Not of a select group of people eating dog meat.
This seems off to me... Curious why you are so avidly against veganism? Most of them are not doing any harm to others, would you be against a charity that aimed to reduce harm to children?
> That there is sufficient evidence that red meat causes cancer in humans
By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list.
> You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal
Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do?
> Have you tried dog meat?
No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
> No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.
Interesting! If that's true, maybe it is because carnivores are less healthy.
No, if anything plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet.
Ideally animals with a fairly high energy budget need to be omnivores, like for example humans. If you look at animals of comparable weight, all the herbivores are ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful.
Even fairly small horses, for example, have a really bad time trying to get enough nutrition from their diet and if they eat a tiny bit too much or too little they pretty much just die an agonising death from stomach problems. This is after thousands of years of us trying to breed the strongest healthiest horses we can, incidentally - the very earliest horses were the size of cats and lived for a year or two at most judging by the fossil record. Even at the dawn of agriculture horses were horribly fragile creatures.
Just going to address a few points here in case people believe this!
> plant-eaters are less healthy because they have a less diverse diet The idea that herbivores have a "less diverse" diet is rubbish. Lots of herbivores (like elephants or deer) eat hundreds of different plant species.
> "ruminants, or woefully unsuccessful" This is also rubbish. Horses, Rhinos, Elephants, and Rabbits are all highly successful non-ruminants.
Oh and the reason horses can die from too much is because they have a one-way digestive valve, so if they eat something toxic/gas-producing, they can suffer from colic, which can be fatal. Saying they only lived "a year or two" is pure speculation btw and they aren't "fragile" because of evolution, they are "fragile" because humans have bred them for extreme speed and aesthetics, at the cost of general health etc.
I don't know where you get your information from, but it all seems very biased or hyperbolic to fit a certain viewpoint.
> they are "fragile" because humans have bred them for extreme speed and aesthetics, at the cost of general health etc.
Very much the opposite.
Every single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat".
I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.
I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.
If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.
I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.
I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.
Hardly anyone is eating raw flesh of the animal they just hunted down, so no, there's not going to be many studies to find, because approximately no one has been eating non-processed food for the past several thousands of years. Not even the "health conscious" folks so deathly afraid of the sin of "processing"; they just don't realize that washing and cutting and boiling are sins too.
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Please don't post snark like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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That's not any less contemptuous and juvenile than your previous comment.
To whom am I showing contempt? Please explain.
(Remember: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.)
The entire comment was a quotation of something written by someone else, which made me wonder whether you felt that the person you were replying to did not deserve the effort it would have taken to express yourself in your own words.
Being something written for another context with no words added by you to explain how it fits into the current context puts more work on the reader, which implies that the reader needs to put in work to continue to hold up their end of the conversation (whereas you don't need to put in much work or at least don't need to indicate to us that you are putting in work) which in turn tends to put you in the position of a teacher assigning us something to read as homework.
Its being longer than the average HN comment tend to carry the same implication.
Although the comment only weakly implies contempt, your previous comment also implied contempt. If you want me to, I can explain that one, too.
I concede that it is impossible for me to tell whether you actually felt any contempt while writing your 2 comments, but many readers react negatively to even weak signs that contempt might be present.
More importantly, if people see you get away with comments like those 2, that acts as a sort of informal invitation for them to do likewise.
>The entire comment was a quotation of something written by someone else
Kinda the whole point of a koan. Doing my own would be cringe.
>did not deserve the effort it would have taken to express yourself in your own words
Not gonna argue with a mod myself. Nope.
>Although the comment only weakly implies contempt, your previous comment also implied contempt. If you want me to, I can explain that one, too.
Nah I definitely implied contempt to the guy who thought avocado oil is an unhealthy thing invented in the past 50 years.
>More importantly, if people see you get away with comments like those 2, that acts as a sort of informal invitation for them to do likewise.
Part of the point of my koan was to talk about what kind of things people might be invited to post here.
As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.
I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.
My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o
EDIT: grammatical cleanup
I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore
This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.
Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.
There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5
I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients