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Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

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Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#31

Post by s9w »

Sawamara wrote: post #9

"Vegetable oils are terrible for you?" At that point, I knew something was up. He is one of those who consider soy harmful to you. Sheer insanity. Also, he is making an argument on a false pretense: that eating processed meat is somehow okay because its already introduced to our diet. Guess what: it is not good for people. This is a product that is designed to be an alternative to that, not to home-cooked healthy ita…

There is quite some data on vegetable oils being unhealthy. Why is that "insanity"?

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#32

Post by vfc1 »

_carl_jung wrote: post #27
vfc1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to do with the processing, olive oil is a food extract. Olives are awesome, olive oil is not, it's not a health food unlike popular belief. It's not a whole food, most of the nutrients and the whole fiber has been taken out by the processing. Olive oil only contains modest amounts of some vitamins, that can be easily obtained elsewhere. Otherwise, it's almost 100% liquid fat with little micro-nutrient content.…

I'm not sure that the above can be summarised as "oils are not good for us". If the oil was removed from olives, the resulting olives would not be healthier. If the fish oil was removed from fish, the resulting fish would not be healthier. I'm not sure how this became a debate about vegetarianism either.

Eating the oil in its natural form, together with the whole olive, is not the same as eating the oil separately.

The effect that has in your digestive system is not the same. Another example is eating fructose extract instead of a whole fruit.

Eating the whole fruit does not spike your blood sugar, unlike eating the equivalent amount of fructose. Also, it does not satiate as much.

Compare the satiety of eating 10 olives to eating a tablespoon of olive oil or two.

It's this reductionistic approach to nutrition where we try to extract these single nutrients that is harmful, because our body has evolved to eat whole foods and not food extracts.

We humans have evolved to eat the whole foods, not highly processed food extracts.

There are thousands of compounds in whole foods that interact with each other and our bodies in a million different ways, and that we are only beginning to comprehend.

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#33

Post by Lazare »

eyko wrote: post #22
Lazare wrote: post #16

A lot of fear mongering there. His argument boils down to: 1. Beyond burger has canola oil in it, and canola oil is responsible for diabetes, dementia, depression, anxiety, aggression, and kills kittens. Okay, I made the last one up, but he did claim the other ones. And they're all nonsense, except for the bit where he mentions canola oil has an unhealthy ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, which it does, but he convenientl…

On the point about canola oil, it's not so much that it's a good fat (it is), but that it becomes a trans fat when heated (all vegetable oil). Since this is not a salad with a drizzle of canola oil, but a burger, that is something you should care about.

Canola oil contains low amounts of trans fat, comparable to all other oils, and while heating it does increase the amount, it's slow. Using canola oil in a deep fryer for 7 hours per day for 7 days resulted in boosting the trans fats from 2.4% to 3.3% by weight; the canola oil in the beyond burger will be at the low end of the range. Meanwhile, actual beef fat is around 5% trans fat, meaning that if trans fats are all you care about, the beef burger probably has more trans fats than a beyond burger.

(Whether beef tallow is actually better or worse than canola oil is complex, and some suggest trans fats in beef fat are healthier in canola, etc., but OPs naive "don't swap out a beef burger for a beyond burger because traaaaaans" seems a bit simplistic. Canola oil doesn't have much, and it's comparable to other sources of oil, including animal fats.)

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#34

Post by frafra »

vfc1 wrote: post #12
frafra wrote: post #7

"unnatural ingredients". What does it mean? Are "natural" ingredients better a priori? Is a molecule that is produced by a living organism better than the very same molecule synthesized in a lab? No, there is no scientific proof of that; that is just marketing. "their most controversial ingredient is Soy Leghemoglobin. To make this ingredient, Impossible genetically engineers a yeast bacterium to produce a protein".…

Unprocessed foods or food with minimal processing are healthier. Unprocessed meaning: nothing good was removed and nothing bad was added. The act of processing removes nutrients from the food and adds preservatives and other chemicals, it modifies a lot the chemical composition of the food.

Sorry, but "chemicals" is another meaningless word. Everything is chemical, a molecule has no memory, so it does not matter how it has been produced.

Unprocessed vs processed: I was not talking about that, but your statement is not always valid, it depends from what the process does. "unprocessed milk" is more dangerous for example. My point is that reality is way more complex than "natural" vs "non-natural" and so on, and there is a lot of marketing going on which reinforces unscientific ideas.

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#35

Post by ageitgey »

aaubry wrote: post #30

I don't know why some people want vegetarian food to taste like meat. I enjoy eating meat, but the best vegetarian foods that I had did not taste like meat at all, and it is how it should be. It's like with sugar, if I want to avoid consuming it, I don't replace it with sweetener, I just don't put the sugar in and enjoy the untainted taste of the other ingredients.

> I don't know why some people want vegetarian food to taste like meat.

There are lots of reasons people want vegetarian versions of meat. Here are some of the most common:

1. Still want to eat meat, but want to reduce the environmental impact of meat production.

2. Don't want to eat meat for moral/preference reasons, but still enjoy the taste of eating it.

3. Want to eat meat, but don't like the dietary impact and want a healthier replacement.

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#36

Post by dagw »

asutekku wrote: post #3

It’s a burger. It’s not meant to be consumed daily and it switching to it or other plant based burger decreases the amount of meat consumed. No matter what it’s a much better deal than going in to a mcdonalds / whatever and getting the burger of the month from there.

If you go to McDonalds and order a burger with fries and a coke, then surely just changing the actual meat in the burger to a Beyond Meat burger is going to have close zero effect on the overall "healthiness" of that meal.

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#37

Post by _carl_jung »

vfc1 wrote: post #32
_carl_jung wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that the above can be summarised as "oils are not good for us". If the oil was removed from olives, the resulting olives would not be healthier. If the fish oil was removed from fish, the resulting fish would not be healthier. I'm not sure how this became a debate about vegetarianism either.

Eating the oil in its natural form, together with the whole olive, is not the same as eating the oil separately. The effect that has in your digestive system is not the same. Another example is eating fructose extract instead of a whole fruit. Eating the whole fruit does not spike your blood sugar, unlike eating the equivalent amount of fructose. Also, it does not satiate as much. Compare the satiety of eating 10 oli…

That's true. I agree with this in general. From your initial statement I thought you were including those oils even in the context of their natural occurrence.

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#38

Post by Lazare »

s9w wrote: post #25
Lazare wrote: post #16

A lot of fear mongering there. His argument boils down to: 1. Beyond burger has canola oil in it, and canola oil is responsible for diabetes, dementia, depression, anxiety, aggression, and kills kittens. Okay, I made the last one up, but he did claim the other ones. And they're all nonsense, except for the bit where he mentions canola oil has an unhealthy ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, which it does, but he convenientl…

I'm not sure I can follow. There is quite some data about vegetable oils being unhealthy, some of them being quoted by him. Why make this sound absurd?

There's a lot of data suggesting sugar is unhealthy. Fruit contains sugar, so clearly eating a moderate about of fresh fruit is unhealthy, right?

This stuff is difficult to reduce to a pithy tweet.

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#39

Post by dagw »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #18
ablation wrote: post #2

Regardless of veracity of OP's claims on Twitter, it's worth noting he sells "bone broth" and other animal-derived health and fitness products. There's always a dog in the fight somewhere.

Makes a lot of sense now. Read the comments in that twitter thread. There are people there who think a beef patty isn't considered a "processed food". Wow, I just don't know what to say. Also you can kinda tell people commenting kinda have an agenda when they're using terms like "fake meat".

There are people there who think a beef patty isn't considered a "processed food"

Where do you draw the line with processed? A beef patty is in essence just a steak, ground up, and mushed together. Now there are no doubt some more unsavory purveyors of beef patties that do more than that, but in itself I find it hard to argue that a beef patty (which I can trivially make myself in my own kitchen using only a chefs knife) counts as processed.

edit: that being said, I don't find his overall argument persuasive at all and it's not like he's a neutral scientist.

Re: Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods Are the Trans Fat Purveyors of Our Generation

#40

Post by frafra »

vfc1 wrote: post #26
Sawamara wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not buy this, olive oils are one of the healthiest sources of fat on this earth. Plenty of studies confirm it.

AFIK extra virgin olive oil is at best neutral for human health, while other oils are detrimental. There are the chemical compounds formed with the eating of certain oils, besides olive oil has very little micro-nutrient content, it's almost 100% fat. Whole olives are a great source of plant fat, but olive oil is not. Eating the whole food is crucial, instead of these highly processed extracts. Of course, it's much b…

They are not, different oils have just different mix of different fats, determining consistence at different temperatures. Micro-nutrients are overestimated; you do not eat olives or drink olive oil because you want to get "micro-nutrients", like you would not prefer brown sugar to white sugar just because there is a very little amount of vitamins. Every substance to have a meaningful positive or negative effect has to be in a reasonable quantity.

I use olive oil everyday (I was born in Italy, were it is widely used), but it is dangerous to fry with it, especially the extra-virgin one, because it has not been purified, and you get the known smoke at a lower temperature. This is just to demonstrate that there are different oil for different usages, there is no black and white.

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