You don't need salt and spices to make a burger, it can be 100% beef with no additives. A pinch of salt can be like 0.3g/burger and you're fine as well.
I don't eat that these days, my burgers are actually 25% beef and 75% lentil/seasoning. Still under 0.5g/100g
I remember working in a restaurant many years ago, where it was part of new hire training to demonstrate the importance of salt and pepper to a burger's taste. We would make 3 burgers, one no seasoning, one poorly seasoned, and one properly seasoned to the spec, and then we would taste test them all. The difference in taste was so night and day I was shocked the first time I participated in the test. Yeah I guess you don't technically need salt and spices, but not adding them or using just a pinch is not the same thing at all.
I think the problem is lot's of people here don't have much kitchen experience and underestimate the effect.
But anyway, I think a pre-seasoned vegan ready made burger patty should only be compared to a pre-seasoned meat burger patty. It's an Apples and Oranges comparison with little meaning.
If you compare the high sodium of a vegan ground beef replacement with ground beef, that's fair game. The one from Beyond here is actually a good example of too high sodium. I won't judge. I only care about the comparison, not the company.
Let me assure you that you're in the vast minority if you add little or no salt at all to your home-made burger patties.
I was going to edit the comment with this but in Canada we have a company called Metro(grocer) and they often sell 4x fresh beef patties for ~$4 which is 1lb(454g) of ground beef and exactly nothing else.
It's good to eat sans salt on bbq with your desired (typically salty) toppings.
I know people salt the patty while cooking, but the topic at hand is Beyond and their patties.
....which should be compared against other premade patties and how people make and serve beef patties, not against the theoretical option that people could choose to omit salt.
The whole "salt" angle is bikeshedding - no one advocated Beyond for salt, they pick it for all of the other health benefits (fats, cholesterol)
Salt, among the ingredients in the average burger is the most likely to cause you problems. Calling it bikeshedding is a massive stretch. In a talk of the importance of the contents of your diet related only to burgers, salt is the exact opposite of bikeshedding.
Nothing whatsoever is stopping Beyond from removing salt and allowing people to salt their own burgers, as they already do.
The contribution of salt in hypertension and other issues is overblown in popular media.
I'm on blood pressure meds. I regularly check in with doctors on things. No, you shouldn't be eating unlimited salt, but sugar and cholesterol are killing (and debilitating) many more of us.
I avoided needing medicine by altering my diet to tone down salt, unhealthy fat, and sugar intake. My doctor was surprised as "everyone just takes the meds."
Still meat is very low sodium, it is weird to say plant based alternatives have less sodium since both have as much salt as you add since there is almost none naturally.
But then you're comparing apples an oranges: meat is low in sodium in its unprocessed form, but so are all the ingredients of the plant-based alternative before adding salt.
What matters is not so much the natural form, it is how the product is typically consumed.
But of course I see your point that with home made meat-based patties, you are in control of how much salt you want to add, while with factory made patties, you have to take what you get, it's typically not possible to "take away" salt. Mind you, though, the latter argument holds for both plant-based and meat-based factory-made patties.
The difference is you CAN'T get Beyond meat to make patties without preservative-levels of sodium. You CAN get ground beef and make patties without preservative-levels of sodium.
Beyond sells a ground beef substitute which has about 3x as much sodium as lean ground beef.
Did you get the point about how you usually season meat (with salt) before you eat it? Beyond Beef has 230mg of sodium per 100g (according to their website), even a pinch of salt you add for seasoning easily contains 10x that amount.
Also, do you expect the vegan alternative to have exactly the same nutritional values as their meat counterparts?
Look, I don't even know why I'm defending Beyond here, I'm certainly not a fan (as a matter of fact, I don't like their beef patties). But I think the arguments you've made are not entirely fair.
The sodium content is about 3x higher. It doesn't taste 3x higher.
If you're salting your recipe with traditional ground beef, you're doing the same with Beyond. If not, same.
I do not expect or even encourage the content of any alternative to match the nutritional value of the real deal.
A typical pinch of salt is 300mg. Not 2300mg.
When the base product has 3x as much sodium, that is a problem. It doesn't need that much because as you stated, you can add salt during cooking. As a great example, let's take a use case for Beyond which is taco meat. I add taco seasoning (my own which is about 30% sodium compared to a traditional) and now the Beyond version is still roughly 250% the sodium content.
I can't remove the sodium they add. It's not a product I like or desire. It's more expensive. It's less healthy (note how often I mention reduced salt) for myself.
Also, I have been a strict vegan in life for about 5 years. I still didn't eat Beyond (aside from tasting it) during that period (it was available).
I'm not really trying to attack Beyond here, it's all personal preference at the end of the day. I make 95% of my food, from bread to tomato sauce to pickled peppers and hot sauce. When I am reaching for a vegan protein, I reach for lentils.
Yes, sorry, you're right - I made a mistake looking up how much salt is in a pinch.
The GP is talking about health conscious folks