Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 102 posts

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

#41

Post by DanBC »

dagw wrote: post #39
anonymous5133 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

> A beef patty is in essence just a steak, ground up, and mushed together.

Some beef patties are ground steak.

Others use mechanically recovered meat, where the bones left after butchering are sprayed with high pressure water to blast off any remaining scraps of meat.

One country had significant health scare where MRM was thought to be the highest risk product: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1482140.stm

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

#42

Post by dagw »

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…

Slightly off topic, but what is actually "canola oil". I thought it was just the US name for Rapeseed oil, but the reputation it has in the US seems extremely negative. Rapeseed oil is equally common throughout much of Europe and I've never heard anybody here say anything particularly negative about it here, certainly nobody claiming that it's categorically worse than any other oil.

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

#43

Post by orwin »

Lazare wrote: post #33
eyko wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I thought all vegetable oils were bad when heated (and also provide few nutrients, unlike animal-based grease/fat).

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

#44

Post by dagw »

DanBC wrote: post #41
dagw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

> A beef patty is in essence just a steak, ground up, and mushed together. Some beef patties are ground steak. Others use mechanically recovered meat, where the bones left after butchering are sprayed with high pressure water to blast off any remaining scraps of meat. One country had significant health scare where MRM was thought to be the highest risk product: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1482140.stm

Can you still buy MRM beef patties in the US? From what I can find the process has been banned since 2004

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

#45

Post by Lazare »

orwin wrote: post #43
Lazare wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I thought all vegetable oils were bad when heated (and also provide few nutrients, unlike animal-based grease/fat).

If you heat them past the smoke point, yes, they lose a ton of nutrients and become quite unhealthy. In normal use, no, not really. The impact of heating them is quite small. And comparing them to animal fats...they're clearly slightly better in some ways, but slightly worse in others. How you balance those factors...I don't think we remotely have good data on yet.

For now I'd just try and eat in moderation and look askance at people making sweeping assertions about any food being all good or all bad.

(On the other hand, we have much better data about the environmental impact of vegetable versus anaimal calories.)

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

#46

Post by dagw »

Sawamara wrote: post #13
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".…

He has several a-prioris built into his argument, the most important hidden one is: - Meat is inherently superior because we keep eating it (nevermind that we keep eating lentils and peas just fine for thousands of years) - That your gut somehow cannot be introduced new things to it because the science is not clear on the long-term effects (regardless of how clear science are on the long term effects of processed red…

The actual most important hidden one is: - Meat is inherently superior because my company sells meat based products.

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

#47

Post by asutekku »

dagw wrote: post #36
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.

I’m not referring only to healthiness. It’s also better for the environment and cows didn’t need to be slaughtered for that.

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

#48

Post by Lazare »

dagw wrote: post #42
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…

Slightly off topic, but what is actually "canola oil". I thought it was just the US name for Rapeseed oil, but the reputation it has in the US seems extremely negative. Rapeseed oil is equally common throughout much of Europe and I've never heard anybody here say anything particularly negative about it here, certainly nobody claiming that it's categorically worse than any other oil.

Yes. Canola is, basically, the edible type of rapeseed oil. The name was originally a trademark, but is now a generic term. Australia and NZ also call it "canola", but it's the same oil either way, and it's fairly decent, as far as vegetable oils go.

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

#49

Post by vfc1 »

frafra wrote: post #34
vfc1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Our body had evolved to eat whole foods and not some distilled version of it, like oils or protein extracts.

Our bodies react not only to the presence of a given molecule but to the other types of molecules that were ingested at the same time, the amount, and how those molecules react to each other.

A whole food has thousands of different compounds in it, that interact in ways that we can only now begin to image, together with undigestable compounds such as fiber that pass right through us but that feed bacteria in our gut that then produce nutrients that we also need, in a symbiotic (or sometimes parasitical) relation.

The meaning that a food is a whole food, does not mean that is not made of the same molecules as an extract, but that it is provided in the relative amounts and in the right combination with other molecules that our bodies (including our gut bacteria) have evolved to consume.

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

#50

Post by eridan2 »

_carl_jung wrote: post #11
vfc1 wrote: post #5

These fake meat products shouldn't be much healthier than pink slime burgers made of ground beef and fat. Most burgers are made of 20 to 30% fat trimmings anyway, and the rest is ground beef. All types of oils are not good for us, oil in general is not a health food, no even extra virgin olive oil. The backlash against these fake meat products will come slowly but surely, these are not heath foods and should only be…

> All types of oils are not good for us, oil in general is not a health food, no even extra virgin olive oil. I don't buy this. Omega 3 is the obvious counter example, but I don't even believe that olive oil is outright bad for you.

Actually Omega 3 is bad if consumed in large quantities, AHA recommends a limit of 3 grams per day
Post reply on HN