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.
- 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.