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Beyond Meat fights for survival

foodinstitute.com

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Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#621

Post by seec »

evrimoztamur wrote: post #303
mgraczyk wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you believe it's not healthy? Because of the processes food hysteria stuff?

Besides ultra-processed foods 'hysteria,' basic ratios I consider here are: - 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 amo…

Well it's a VC backed venture by and for rich SF people. There are plenty of products like that posted on HN, the kind that only make sense if you really make a shit ton of money and have already "solved" most downstream problems in your life (it goes for business stuff too).

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.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#622

Post by seec »

bluebarbet wrote: post #521
throwpoaster wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animal agriculture converts scrub land into carbon sinks that produce food.

This is a regionally-contingent oversimplification that obscures the much more essential fact that animal agriculture always requires substantially more land than arable agriculture to produce the same amount of food. Land is very much a finite resource and I personally would prefer to see a bit more of it left to nature (or "scrub", as you call it).

You are the one making an oversimplification.

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...

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#623

Post by seec »

unlikelytomato wrote: post #595
9dev wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether people dropped being vegan doesn’t have anything to do with the absolutely validated fact that a vegan diet can sustain muscle growth. Professional athletes might want to put some additional work in calculating nutrient intake, but that’s the same for any kind of diet.

The research on optimal protein for athletes is pretty well established. I weigh all of my food and track every macro. If I ate the recommended amount of protein from plant sources, I would be grossly overweight from the additional carb and fat calories. I try plants based every year or so. It just doesn't work for my body. Not to mention the dramatic IBS-like symptoms I get even after forcing it for weeks on end to…

I came to the same conclusion. I always wonder if they are completely delusional and ignore every issue to favor their bias or just don't have the problems that we get.

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.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#624

Post by seec »

Saline9515 wrote: post #497
cj wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. I track macros religiously with daily protein/fat/carb targets for weight lifting. 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,…

Out of curiosity, how do you get 150g/day of full proteins? 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 cooki…

For vegetarians it's much easier, they just go for animal derived products (eggs and milk based), so it's a bit bullshit if you ask me.

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.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#625

Post by seec »

const_cast wrote: post #441
graublau wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processed food concerns are hysterical is a unique take

It is, mostly, hysteria. The problem is that we're just assuming processed foods are bad period, but even if you don't eat processed foods you can eat a very poor diet. 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 sal…

Yeah I'm amazed people with a functioning brain can even entertain that kind of bullshit. Then again, I'm assuming they have a well-functioning brain, maybe that's the real issue.

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.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#626

Post by seec »

Saline9515 wrote: post #538
const_cast wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. No actually it does hold - these are still observational studies. 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…

1. If most UP foods are hyper-palatable and this is the problem (not for instance, the fact that most have very high glycemic indexes, among other things), then it's fair to use UP as a proxy. It's fair to say that, when addressing obesity, it's better to avoid UP foods as they are too palatable for our archaic body. Besides the study doesn't studies obesity (it is a control), but depression, which isn't linked to fo…

What you say is nonsense because by this definition pretty much everything we eat since MULITPLE millennia is ultra processed.

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...

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#627

Post by ben_w »

fakedang wrote: post #609
ben_w wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures. 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 "addin…

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. > 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 kno…

> PFAS atom

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.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#628

Post by ben_w »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #225
mgraczyk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.

> clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed 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 duoden…

> Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested.

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.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#629

Post by merry_flame »

9dev wrote: post #407
thom wrote: post #356

Hate these burgers. As a dairy-loving vegetarian, first the vegans came along and ruined everything by evicting most of the tasty options from restaurants, and then the meat eaters somehow wanted vegan food that tasted of animals and that became the default option on many menus. Vegetarians (who I grant you are difficult to pity as the centrists of the food world) got utterly screwed.

If you’re consuming lots of dairy, and became vegetarian to avoid animal suffering, you can just as well eat meat. Not much of a difference ethically.

Ridiculous. Dropping meat is upwards of 90 pc of the welfare impact.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#630

Post by ben_w »

fakedang wrote: post #606
cpfohl wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, so do cows and chickens. 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 “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.

> 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.

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.

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