This is true for any food though. A different line of argument would be what if 95% of your protein came from whey and all other nutrients came from other sources. As long as you get the right balance of macronutrients and micronutrients i suspect you will be fine. Unfortunately studies on diet are very difficult to actually implement so we don't have the data to be certain.
Obviously most ultra processed food is low in nutrition, high in sugar, and high palateability so it makes sense that ultraprocessed foods are associated with bad health outcomes but I think it's a step too far to say that all ultra processed food is bad (it's probably a good rule of thumb for most people however).
What? I've had >100g of protein from whey protein shakes every day for months now. I don't know what you're trying to imply.
"According to international consensus, the daily reference intake of protein for the healthy adult population is 0.8 g/kg body weight. However, individuals who engage in physical activity may require more protein, ranging from 1.2 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight. To fulfill these requirements, many athletes and active individuals opt for whey protein (WP) supplements to increase their protein intake. The appropriate amount of WP intake for individuals depends on their objectives, current level of physical activity, and body composition. Research suggests that a dosage of 20 to 25 g/day of WP provides the desired benefits, while amounts >40 g/day may lead to adverse effects on the body"[0]
People who eat a lot of protein die sooner than people who eat less, but that is probably because plentiful protein prevents the body from entering a state called "autophagy". Intentionally inducing autophagy for 5 days every other month (by using Valter Longo's protocol) while eating plenty of protein the rest of the time is probably better for most people than a consistently low-protein diet as long as one is avoiding red meat (provided the people can afford the protein which will be the case for almost everyone in the developed world).
I definitely feel a bit better, and have a much easier time building muscle.
If you run the numbers, you can actually eat a shocking amout of protein (300g+ / day) from lean meat while maintaining a calorie deficit.
And if you buy frozen chicken breasts from Costco, I think it’s actually cheaper than whey!
That said - you do you, whey has its place in many lifestyles.
How do you make that taste good though
And that’s assuming it contains (only) what the label says. Our caveman ancestors did not eat fillers.
Beyond burgers have no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. They’ve got significantly lower saturated fats. Studies have shown that swapping out regular burgers for Beyond burgers lowers your LDL cholesterol and TMAO.
I’m not going to pretend they’re as healthy as a burger made out of black beans and carrots. But if concerns about UPFs are your primary reason for avoiding them then you can relax; they’re not that bad.
People don't really consume that much "processed meat" on the daily in the form of salami or w/e.
Up thread, people are talking about using minced soy protein. I'm kind of surprised that itself is not ultra processed, given that bread flour is considered to be ultra processed.
>Everyone knows that greens are good for your health and red meat is not. But everyone would laugh if I were to propose that red foods are dangerous and green ones healthy. I could prove my thesis making use of a few additional rules, such as postulating that some shades of red, tomatoes and apples for instance, should not be counted as red.
>The Nova classification system, which sorts foods into four categories depending on the degree of processing they undergo, uses similar logic. There is no scientific justification for the assumption that the number of processing steps is of any relevance for the health properties of foods. Making “ultra-processed” popcorn or chips is exceedingly simple. Making “minimally processed” natural yogurt requires some 20 processes.
>Heating is the process that affects foods the most, but heating is afforded no attention in Nova. It does not neatly fit into the processed or unprocessed scheme. In some cases it is essential for public health, in others it may induce carcinogens. And in a blatant example of the arbitrariness of the Nova classification, putting a loaf of bread into a bag moves it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category.
>The flawed, but intuitively easy to grasp, label of ultra-processed food is a handy justification for blaming food-related health problems on profit-hungry food companies. And it enables politicians to divert funding from serious research to meaningless eye-catching interventions.
>Petr Dejmek
>Emeritus professor of food engineering
>Lund University
>Lund, Sweden
Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.
Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate?
Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it?
If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?
They have a different definition of "no culinary use" than I do!
I am curious what items in the list differ for you. When's the last time you grabbed your isolated fructose and maltodextrin to season your steak?
The way I think of it is if I were to cook a chicken breast or bake a loaf of bread and then write down the ingredients, they'd be chicken, oil, salt, pepper; or flour, water, yeast, salt. Now go look at the ingredients of a chicken breast (raw, marinated, or cooked) and a loaf of bread in the grocery store and note the differences between the ingredient list. If the ingredient list for an item from the store includes things a household wouldn't have at home, like fructose or maltodextrin, that item would be considered ultra processed.
I'll note that I don't eat as healthy as I should, people should do what they want, and it's possible to still be unhealthy while avoiding ultra processed foods.
- think about what would happen if something is simply left undone
- can I do the same task with fewer steps
- if I relaxed the definition of success a little, does it get a lot easier?
- can I farm it out to a person or a service? (Like bill autopay, or Instacart)
I don't see anything in the Beyond Meat ingredients which is a scary chemical. It's just various plant proteins, starches, and oils that we've been eating for millennia already. Plus some fruit coloring, vitamins, and the like.
That's not to say it is automatically healthy or a useful product (e.g. one can certainly argue about too much "tropical oils"), but that also doesn't make it automatically dangerous either. That is called the naturalistic fallacy.
The processing is done with a purpose.
> All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption
Source?
Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
While true, this is also the case with all cooking, which makes it difficult to separate the various other things.
Don't get me wrong, the older I get the more negligence I see in corporations promoting their new things, so I'm now absolutely on-board with a cautious and conservative set of testing requirements for novel foods.
This is just to say that the boundary condition for such novelty isn't what most people think it is.
Like ultra processed american bread is not so good comparing with european wholegrain sourdough bread.
Bread, the example they used, is a particularly stark example where Americans are subjected to stuff that is rightly banned in most of the rest of the world.
When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria.
Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
That wasn't the point they were making. They made a purely pedantic point about the meaning of the word 'chemicals' in this context.
> Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
I never said they are.
Besides which, I pay a premium for organic for that very reason. Glyphosate residue is a serious problem. And then there's all the agricultural runoff, biosphere contamination, chemical interactions, etc.
Less 'chemicals' is generally better; safer and healthier. It's super weird that people take issue with this simple statement, whether for pedantic reasons or through false equivalancies.
And didn't they teach you at school to soak all vegetables for a couple hours in water after buying them and before storing/using them? As for injected hormones, in my part of the world (Asia and Europe), we reject such produce if we're trying to eat healthy. My family literally grows pineapples in our backyard (which I bring to Europe) because industrial pineapples are injected with ripening stimulators.
> When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria.
In most of the civilized world, we typically ensure humane conditions as much as possible even in industrial farming, so that chicken need not be drugged and bleach washed. Like basic hygiene and humanity such as animals not being made to live in their own shit.
> Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
Again, in most of the civilized world, we don't take issue with preserving minced garlic with citric acid. In fact, I regularly preserve a lot of veggies and sometimes even fruit this way. But I do have an issue when some industrial company decides to add sodium benzoate to their pickle to preserve it for months on end.
Anyway, since “we all know”, why don’t you go check out the ingredients for beyond burgers, and report back which “chemicals” you think are so disastrous.
European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory.
Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns.
Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.
> In the US, this color was listed in 1939 as Ext. D&C Red No. 10 for use in externally applied drugs and cosmetics. It was delisted in 1963 because no party was interested in supporting the studies needed to establish safety. It was not used in food in the US.
> Azorubine has shown no evidence of mutagenic or carcinogenic properties and an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0–4 mg/kg was established in 1983 by the WHO.
Wikipedia's article on E180 is a stub. Wikipedia's article on E105 says it's now banned in both the US and EU, but it doesn't say when it was banned: did the US ever approve it?
I don't know if it's reciting the pledge every day or the lack of experience on what good bread actually feels like; or if the health effects of eating US bread are just taken for granted because it's eaten daily, but American bread is bloody scary and should be recognized as such.
But we still have to listen to complaints that the only choices available are Wonder, Lipton, and Budweiser. Not true—literally for decades now.
I didn't say you can't buy quality bread though. I know it's possible to find nice bread.
I said it's mostly inferior, and it is. The vast majority of bread in America is stuff that I would rather go hungry than eat.
... Thanks for proving my point about getting weirdly defensive.
Decent, non-toxic bread ought to be available even to people of "limited means". Even, I would assert, to people of no means at all. The US is the wealthiest nation of all time, and there is no excuse for there to be so many people hungry, much less poisoned. It's so wild that this needs to be said.
And, products that toxic shouldn't be sold at all; at least not without large warning labels in multiple languages.
Edit: why disagree?
The problem with processed foods is not their individual construction per se, but how overall bad diets are easily enabled by them.
As far as studies go, I can't give you one that directly controls. But look at the "30 plants per week" topic, which suggests that overall diversity of fiber consumption is more correlated to health than any specific details of the diet.
So based on the studies around your 30 plants topics, even they make the point about choosing whole food or minimally processed sources.
- Partially hydrogenated oils (most margarines in the US for a while) were pushed as a healthier alternative to butter, but turns out those are terrible for you due to trans fat. And the main difference between a trans vs cis fat is that cis fat have a kink in molecular chain and trans fats don't. Small change, but huge health difference
- The sugar industry paid food scientists in the 60s to downplay sugar's impact on heart disease and play up fat and cholesterol (Check out the "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents" published at UCFS). This lead to food companies replacing health fats with sugars in much of their food over the last 60 years, resulting in much worse health outcomes based on bias, paid for research
- Apples and other fruit generally have a higher fructose to glucose ratio than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). But, all of the sugar is surrounded by other nutrients and fiber, which make apples a healthy food choice and HFCS pretty bad for you.
One of the common patterns is that new processes introduced harms that were unknown at the time. Food companies have very little incentive to proactively look for harms that occur over a longer time horizon. And one thing has consistently been true: that closer a food is to how we've eaten it historically (chopped/crushed, cooked, boiled, fermented, and filtered), the less likely it is to have an unknown harm
You can always say something is fine "as part of a healthy diet."
Clearly the problem is when people eat too much of their diet from processed foods. Because they are high in calories, low in micronutrients, and designed to stimulate appetite so people overeat.
But to say that any processed food (like Beyond Burgers) is automatically bad because they are processed is simply and example of the naturalistic fallacy.
I don't know much about Beyond Meat's specific processes. I wanted to like their burger, but they smelled too much like dog food when coming and tasted worse than cheaper black bean burgers. Aside, from my personal preferences, they could be totally fine.
But, of someone is trying to go through their life eating relatively healthy without having to try to keep up on the latest research, less processing is the way to go. You'll cut out things that are perfectly fine (e.g. there's a small backpack against Xanthum gum that currently makes no sense to me), but you'll also avoid a lot of the cutting edge garbage that gets added and then recalled.
Whole fruits, veggies, nuts, grains, and meat is always a solid choice. I have trouble faulting people for using that as a heuristic
This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"
In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary.
The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".
Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
Hydrogen peroxide in particular is a common hair bleach, hence "peroxide blonde"
> This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"
No, a better equivalent would be injecting a single PFAS atom in your drinking water. You don't know where it's going to end up, but you do know that it's going to cause some issues wherever it goes if accumulated in quantity.
> The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".
Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules.
https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox
Around the 1:30 mark.
Mixing up atoms and molecules is not a great start as comebacks go.
> Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules.
You're literally describing "cooking" with that sentence. Not metaphorically, that is literally what cooking does to the proteins in food.
For example, bread dough is at a minimum flour and water, which you then knead.
Water partially unfolds the gluten (collective name for a category of various protein) molecules, the mechanical force then encourage the gluten proteins into a different configuration, and it polymerises: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...
Then you heat it.
On a related note, when you say:
> Are you seriously comparing something used to trigger an infrequent immune response vs something that we take in on a daily basis to run our bodies? The latter being things that are transformed and transported to every part of the body.
A lot of proteins are both of those things at the same time. The gluten in your bread, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_immunochemistry
Beyond Meat is apparently gluten-free, I picked bread because it's one of the least-processed foods you can get without it being raw.
Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction…
When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
When you're cooking a piece of fish, you're not changing its structure using heat and pressure so that globular plant cell structures are transformed into stuff resembling fibrous animal cell structures.
https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox
Around the 1:30 mark.
You are if the fish ate any plants before they died (and you cooked with heat, I'm vegetarian so am unfamiliar with the other poster's a la Ceviche).
And even if the fish didn't eat any plants, you're still changing the protein structures — this is even part of the point of cooking, as amongst other things this does, changing the proteins inside the food is a process that kills any bacteria and other parasites.
Try it with dried cranberries and sunflower seeds for a great salad! (Don’t forget the salt, pepper, and garlic)
Being a vegetarian, after having suffered colon cancer twice, I now too eat only burger patties I've made myself (similar recipe to the one above), and also use only real mayo and sour cream, so as to avoid those emulsifiers.
Edit: Downvote, why? Because I am a vegetarian?
- protein to fat (which is roughly 1.4 in Beyond Meat (20g protein / 14g fat in 100g) versus 2.5-3.5 in beef (30±5g protein / 12.5±2.5g fat in 100g)) - protein to mass (20% vs ~30%) - micro-nutrients to mass (a very wide variety of minerals, vitamins, and other unknown nutrients present in beef) - carbohydrates (not present in substantial amounts in meat and around the same amounts in tofu/tempeh as in Beyond Meat; but I don't think it's as major a statistic as previous ratios)
I eat chiefly vegetarian, and refuse to see why Beyond Meat exists beyond 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.'
The industrial overhead of producing Beyond Meat and all the effort that went into creating it simply doesn't make sense to me compared to beans and plant-based protein friends like tempeh/tofu/seitan. Latter are an order of magnitude more scalable than both Beyond Meat and Regular Meat.
All the processing plants and factories built to make this ultra-processing possible, the logistics and supply chains set up to bring all the necessary additives and components together, the grandiose packaging and marketing efforts... I don't get it. It's not a product made for a real audience.
That's a noble goal in and of itself. Every step to reduce environmental impact and animal cruelty has value.
Beyond and Impossible were my "off-ramp" from eating meat every meal to exploring vegetarianism and veganism. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
The idea that normal, healthy people are going to eat ultra processed vegetarian slop so they can pretend they are eating meat was never going to work.
Apply huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to grow corn, badly contaminating the Mississippi river and creating a dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico, feeding animals in CAFO where discarding of the manure is a problem and that's something different.
Real life systems are a little more complex than that as a cow might be grown up on scrub land and then fattened up at a CAFO for the last few months. Who knows what the long term fate of land that is cleared in the Amazon rain forest is.
Most land is scrub. You can like leaving more of it that way, but no one else will notice in percentage terms.
The type of food you get from animal agriculture is nowhere near the same thing as what you get from large scale plant agriculture.
On top of that, what you harvest from plant agriculture needs enormous amounts of processing and requires a whole lot of modern machinery and a very complex supply chain. And at the end of it the nutritional profile of your output is not at all the same, you can get closer by adding even more processing, that requires even more supply chain wizardry, more energy and more secondary input but suddenly you are not really more efficient than the animal farm; how shocking...
They are a for-profit vegetarian company in a capitalist market, not Nestle's trying to sell African mothers on powdered formula.
As someone doing weightlifting, this is the primary reason I don't bother with vegetarian meats. They actually taste pretty good IMO, but they don't offer nutritional benefits commensurate with animal meat.
It's a shame, really. I'd gladly incorporate them if I could get a similar protein : calorie ratio.
From spending quite a lot of time with those people, my opinion is that they generally are pretty dishonest and will deny the truth to fit their ideology.
But yes, I could try some more references to see if there is something decent. I very much doubt so because the fundamentals are not aligned for this.
Luckily, I am relatively small and I do triathlon training, not weight training so I don't care as much for volume and mass. Yet the need is still there though and it is very noticeable when I fail at balancing the diet (it is extremely easy to indulge in the pleasurable carbs, that are systematically cheaper as well). I need at least 80g of protein per (training) day and it's more challenging than it may look.
So, I try to balance things with various sources but animal meat is by far the easiest to work with. For example, I like nuts a lot but they carry a shit ton of fat with their protein, so it becomes hard to get enough carbs in the caloric budget. Of course, at this rate meat becomes just another thing you have to eat and is not really special or a pleasure. But the thing is that it's much less terrible than a protein shake, there are also plenty of things that you get from animals' meat that I doubt are truly replaceable with today's limited knowledge. I already have to pay close attention to what I eat and cannot indulge too much in some things, I'm not really keen on making my food experience completely miserable; I wish I could because it would be much cheaper/easier this way.
But I think people presenting meat as a pleasure are ideologically motivated. I dont think killing/eating animals is something humans ever did for "pleasure", it was done out of necessity and not much else. I was never a big meat eater, particularly in my youth I was very addicted to sugar and would rather avoid eating meat as much as possible. It contributed to a small frame/build. Now that I'm older and training hard I eat meat not because I like it that much but because I have to.
If you ask me, I would be stoked if I could survive just on chips, candy, nuts, or even just flavored pasta. Those things I can eat unlimited amount with no problem at all. Turns out it's not really what's needed...
If the craving for bullshit food (chips, candy, pasta etc) doesn’t stop, that’s either a signal for nutritional deficiency of some kind (your body is still searching for something), OR a signal that you’re not hungry enough, to eat the healthy options. I spend regularly months-long periods eating the exact same ultra-basic food every day: steamed vegetables (not even salt) and home made biscuits from grains, nuts and seeds. I don’t struggle with cravings for other foods, because all my nutrients are in there and it satiates me. If I don’t feel like eating my food, then I wait until I’m hungry enough to want it. My diet is extreme, but it proves a point.
Yes, many athletes with large metabolic demands do eat mostly meat. Gross or not, it is functional. I eat for function. Choking down chicken breasts is not fun, but it works very well for results.
I don't care much about the macros of each individual meal (or any individual ingredient). When dinner comes around, I'm cooking whatever meal will let me hit my targets for the day. If I already got most my protein in, I'll happily eat something with "bad" protein/calorie ratio.
Granted, 99% of people don't track food intake, so yea, probably makes sense to optimize food nutrition for the average person eating an average meal looking for an average balance of macros on a per-meal basis.
I guess my point is there's a time and place for virtually all foods (including junk food... bodybuilders regularly snack on things like sour patch kids during workouts).
Critiquing beyond burgers for their macro breakdown doesn't make sense to me. But criticisms around the level of processing is 100% valid IMO. The last package I opened up quite literally smelled like dog food.
Edit: Also FWIW, I'm a vegetarian (although eat meat maybe once every 1-2 weeks, sometimes beef). Despite that, I'm easily able to get 200+ grams of protein a day. If I took protein powder out of my diet completely, I'd still be able to hit 150g/day at least without really trying.
For instance, eating lentils, which is one of the most proteinated vegetable, bring 18g of proteins per 100g, along with 40g of carbs. You also have to eat a comparable amount of cereal to get a full protein chain.
Given that amount of proteins you mention, this requires eating a very large volume of food (cereals and graminacae swell with water during cooking).
I always wondered how vegetarians could reach a highly proteinic diet as a result!
I wish I could tell you one food, but it’s not primarily from 1 source.
Egg whites, chickpea salad, Greek yogurt - lots of stuff has protein in it.
On the flip side, I’ve never understood how meat eaters can hit their protein goals without frequently exceeding 50-100g fat per day.
For vegans it's extremely hard, a lot of them that I know are proper skinny fat. Rarely overweight (or just a little bit) but with a terrible body composition.
I simply prefer not eating a lot of meat.
Next time I’ll say majority-vegetarian minority-carnivore?
They're selling a meat replacement. Replacing the meat in my diet with their product does not work for my goals without additional planning to compensate. Therefore it's not a good replacement for me. A criticism need not apply in all cases to be valid.
> I'd still be able to hit 150g/day at least without really trying.
What are your calorie goals? If you're in a surplus, maybe. But I'm currently in a deficit with 150g protein / 1600 calorie. I do not find that I can hit this goal "without really trying", _especially_ without protein powder.
And to clarify, it's 100% possible to hit my goals eating vegetarian/vegan. But with meat in my diet it's much easier because their high protein content gives me more flexibility with the rest of the diet. If I wanted to do it vegetarian, I wouldn't use beyond meat because it'd be even harder than other options.
Over winter/sprint I was targeting 1900-2100 (180g P). It would have been near impossible to do it without protein shakes.
It's god's food: high prots, fibers, iron, vitamins, unsaturated fats. Low carbs and sodium. Super digestive.
Super versatile: from burgers to bolognese to barbecue to everything, even sweety for the courageous. My easy goto is a dip of whatever open sauce I already have and 1 min micro wave heating. A bit more time ? Fried on the pan with soy sauce, olive oil and some herbs afterwards.
And while we're on the subject, Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization gives soy protein high marks for body builders. Good macros, good price, and highest amino acid profile score after milk/meat/eggs. Having tofu on hand is definitely helpful during a bulk.
I can drink milk but feel the same as you do with beans. When it’s fermented cheese I’m totally fine.
Can you eat falafels, tofu or slip peas? If so the hull may be the cause. Also beans trigger gaz on many people because they don’t eat much insoluble fibers, but after a while of regular consumption it comes back to normal. Don’t hurt yourself through, take care.
I can eat a block of cheese a day and feel great. same with extremely lean chicken. When I try plants only without the problem foods, my energy and recover drops. I get depressed and I have huge protein cravings. If I try to squash that hunger with fats or carbs, I get fat. Just never been able to find a sustainable solution for my body
All I see are tiny overpriced plastic packets.
So yeah, this is what you get. At the price sold, whether you are vegetarian, vegan, or anything else is largely irrelevant; you have to be rich first and foremost.
And if we are talking about the product "qualities", it does not make a lot of sense: as a meat eater I cannot fathom people who pretend it's anywhere near close to the real thing, it's much dryer, does not have the burger flavor and disintegrate much like vegetables do.
And the nutritional profile isn't very good as well, as you explain. If I have to eat a lot of fat and associated carbs with my protein, it might as well be cheaper beans/veggie stuff.
All that being said, I'm not a very big fan of the plant-based protein (like tofu) stuff either. It's rarely cheaper than meat, always has a chewy like texture (sometimes it feels like you are eating rubber) and can only taste what you prepare it with. I have a friend who worked at high-end restaurants who became vegetarian and prepared it many times for me, it has never been any good. It's also heavily processed and requires a lot of water/heat to make (it also requires a lot more energy/effort than meat to prepare afterwards) and lacks many other nutrients meat naturally has.
I doubt meat is cheaper only because of subsidies, to me it seems like nature is extremely efficient and we have a truly hard time competing with it.
Like for example the other day I made a vegan version of my pasta and meat sauce recipe but instead of trying to use a meat alternative like beyond meat, I reached for some mushrooms and end up having my guests ask if I accidentally made the dish with ground beef because the texture and consistency was so similar.
It's not that beyond meat is bad but why reach for something that's had god knows what done to it versus: mushrooms, where the only "processing" is ripping them out of the ground and washing them.
Burgers aren't processed, fried chicken isn't processed. And, you don't need to process food to make it "addictive". People who think you need chemicals and additives to make addictive food are just stupid, frankly.
Take whatever food, douse it in salt, deep fry it in fat, and boom: you have a 2,000 calorie meal that sets off every dopamine receptor in your brain. All natural. No processing needed.
The real harm isn't processed foods, it's hyper-palatable foods. Foods that are extremely delicious, addictive, and easy to overeat. Some are processed, some are not.
Take, for example, high-fiber tortillas. Those are ultra-processed, those aren't from God. But, 98% of Americans do not eat enough fiber. Fiber can lower your risk of obesity and heart disease. The high-fiber tortillas can be a great addition to your diet. They're not hyper-palatable - you're not gonna sit there and crave them like a drug and then eat 2,000 calories worth of high-fiber tortillas.
Sugar derivatives such as glucose-fructose syrup are well-known to cause various problems, among which the fat-liver disease that is skyrocketing in the rich world. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/abundance-of-fru...
1. Ultra-processed foods contain a lot of hyper-palatable foods. You have to understand that UP foods is an absurdly broad category.
When you measure the harm of UP foods, you're not measure the harm of UP foods - you're measuring the harm of hyper-palatable foods, because naturally those are the foods people gravitate towards. Because they taste good and are easy to eat and overeat.
You also have to understand that UP foods are associated with poorer people, which get significantly worse medical care and just have overall worse lives. What you could be measuring is that poor people are more depressed - which, yeah duh.
The key problem here is that nutritional studies are almost always observation, NOT double-blind. Because following people for decades in a double-blind study where you control their diet is very, very, very hard and expensive.
If you just replaced all the UP food with burgers and fried chicken, would those people be better off? No. So you shouldn't be so confident you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
2. All sugar is bad, period. It's not HFCS that's causing liver disease, it's sugar in the absence of fiber. We know sugar causes liver disease.
If we want to decrease this, we must lean into Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. They are better than sugar, period. Straight up, Aspartame is healthier than any sugar, including table sugar you put in your morning coffee.
2. Second article says it's fructose specifically. And the ultra-processed form allows instant assimilation of it, far from the classic forms found in nature. They also allow to add much more of it. See: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-hig...
Which means they are looking at people who already don't eat UP foods and comparing them to people who do. But UP foods are more likely to be hyper-palatable.
So you're comparing foods that are likely to be hyper-palatable to those that aren't. That's what you're measuring.
If you conduct a double-blind study where you compare UP foods that are NOT hyper-palatable to non UP foods that are NOT hyper-palatable you won't find a difference. Such a study does not exist, because it's almost impossible to do.
People who are already health conscious will be healthier. You're not forcing anyone to eat healthier, so you're not measuring anything valuable.
2. HFCS is 60% fructose, sugar is 50% fructose. Does that 10% increase make a difference? Yes. But it's miniscule. If you replace all HFCS with sugar, you lower your fructose intake only a tiny bit.
Also appeal to nature is stupid. It's just dumb and nobody cares about that.
Besides the study doesn't studies obesity (it is a control), but depression, which isn't linked to food being palatable or not.
2. Sugar is itself a highly processed food. HFCS contains more fructose, which saturates faster the intestine's absorption capacity.
Sugar is mostly derived from beetroot and sugar cane. Of course you can get diabetes from fruits or sugar beets alone, that said it's much harder than from eating UP foods.
Since we started agriculture in the fertile crescent, we have been making stuff like beer and flour-based bread which are based on processing of various cereals.
Depending on the variable, the glycemic index isn't that good. And yes, it is pretty easy to overeat bread, as long as you have something decent to use with (it can be as simple as dipping it in olive oil).
Your opinion is just hysteria indeed, and it is just that. There is absolutely no logical explanation/evidence that all the problems linked to food come from "ultra-processing" instead of just good old regular abuse and mis-use.
In all the studies you talk about, if you were to correct for exercice/activity and lifestyle you would find a nothing burger (sometimes just living in a poorer neighborhood will give worse outcome, because of the water quality).
The problem is mostly abundance, which is very often something other species also have to deal with. If you leave a pony/donkey in an area with lots of young sugary grass and don't make him work for it, he will overeat until he is so fat that it becomes a problem for his health. But I guess the grass is too "ultra-processed" or something...
Why on earth is that a problem? People only eating fresh food is absolutely fine. Any processing on top should be met with skepticism.
Again, is eating burgers and fried chicken the solution? Those are not processed. So if you just tell people to not eat processed foods, you haven't helped them at all.
For many people, a healthy and achievable diet will include processed foods, such as high-fiber bread alternatives. A diet of only whole foods is not achievable for most people, so it's not good advice.
You don't even need to prepare food for it to be extremely delicious and easy to overeat: nuts are SO good that before you know it, you ate your full daily caloric requirements (for not very active people). At around 600kcal per 100g it is really easy.
The thing is that in nature you have to collect and get the nuts out of their shell, so it's a time and labor-intensive thing, it would be much harder to abuse it "naturally", but it still possible with time/patience (but I would venture that if it took that much effort to get it ready, you would rather avoid wasting it by overeating).
I don't like "ultra-processed" food that much but that's mostly because I find them too expensive for what they bring and the taste/texture is generally too caricatural and one dimensional, not exactly very interesting or satisfying. But people buy this because it's cheaper than the good stuff and they would rather not put the effort into preparing the good stuff.
That alone is a good enough reason to avoid highly processed foods in many cases. It’s not always true, but it’s more often true than not.