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

A lot of fear mongering there. His argument boils down to:<p>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&#x27;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 conveniently forgets to mention that it&#x27;s one of the healthiest vegetable oils by that metric. (He incorrectly slams &quot;seed oils&quot; as being especially bad, but most non-seed oils at worse, and one of the only oils which is better - flax seed oil - is also a &quot;seed oil&quot;.)<p>2. Impossible Burger uses engineered bacteria to produce soy leghemoglobin, and even though that&#x27;s perfectly healthy, engineered bacteria are kinda weird, and uh, something something Nassim Teleb, don&#x27;t put &quot;foreign ingredients&quot; in your body. Or in other words, it&#x27;s probably <i>healthy</i>, but it&#x27;s icky and violated his sense of taboo.<p>Meh.

Regardless of veracity of OP&#x27;s claims on Twitter, it&#x27;s worth noting he sells &quot;bone broth&quot; and other animal-derived health and fitness products. There&#x27;s always a dog in the fight somewhere.

I don&#x27;t think anyone is arguing that these burgers are healthier than eating salmon and broccoli. Just healthier and more environmentally friendly than ground beef.<p>His complaint is &gt; 8&#x2F; My larger concern on both of these burgers is that - at minimum - they are HIGHLY processed products with lots of stuff that doesn&#x27;t lead to healthier humans: vegetable oils, soy, protein isolates, additives, all non-organic. They are not real foods. (cough, Soylent)<p>Mainstream science doesn&#x27;t think vegetable oil is worse for you than burger fat.<p>It doesn&#x27;t think soy is bad for you<p>It doesn&#x27;t think orgamic is healthy for you.<p>He doesn&#x27;t specify which additives are bad for you and I&#x27;m too lazy to go through all the additives.<p>And I have no idea what science thinks about protein isolate but I doubt it&#x27;s any worse for you than other forms of protein.<p>He just stringing together a bunch of friends truisms and pretending it&#x27;s a rock solid case.<p>P.s. I don&#x27;t understand why they&#x27;re getting so much hate for a fairly innocuous product that is trying to do some good.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;s like with sugar, if I want to avoid consuming it, I don&#x27;t replace it with sweetener, I just don&#x27;t put the sugar in and enjoy the untainted taste of the other ingredients.

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.<p>No matter what it’s a much better deal than going in to a mcdonalds &#x2F; whatever and getting the burger of the month from there.

It seems OPs major complaint is that they are not healthy. But unless I&#x27;m mistaken, healthy isn&#x27;t even part of their marketing. Their main thing is how it&#x27;s better for the environment.

Are these really considered healthy? I always looked at them as being competitors to regular meat, sans the suffering and environmental impact. If they do that, without being more unhealthy than regular meat, then I don&#x27;t see the problem - so how do they compare to regular meat?

&quot;Vegetable oils are terrible for you?&quot;<p>At that point, I knew something was up. He is one of those who consider soy harmful to you. Sheer insanity.<p>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 italian meatless alternatives.

So he points to glyphosphate in the impossible burger and canola oil in the the beyond meat burger as being unhealthy. It seems a bit dubious though as the glyphosphate is within fda approved levels and canola oil doesn&#x27;t have a firm concensus of being unhealthy

&quot;unnatural ingredients&quot;. What does it mean? Are &quot;natural&quot; 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.<p>&quot;their most controversial ingredient is Soy Leghemoglobin. To make this ingredient, Impossible genetically engineers a yeast bacterium to produce a protein&quot;. So? What is the problem with that? It is scary because is made by a bacterium like most of the industrially produced vitamin C? Or is it because the bacteria has been genetically modified, like the ones who produce insulin for people suffering from diabetes? And what about &quot;natural&quot; meat produced from animals being fed with GMO soy then?<p>&quot;In general, I think unwise to mess with the complex system of human biology by introducing large qts of foreign ingredients&quot;. Again, &quot;foreign&quot;? What do you mean with that?<p>Then it continues with &quot;all non-organic&quot; and so on, like the process is relevant, while the final result is not, similar to homeopathy.<p>I am very skeptical about this kind of criticisms.

I expect the meat lobby to craft many a vile hit-piece over the next 15 years as their market share is (ironically) carnivorously devoured.

I always assumed fast food was unhealthy and full of artificial ingredients, even real patties can have negative health effects. I would not consider those meat replacements to be healthy but they surely are good enough to replace fast food patties.<p>Also I re-read his tweets and I can&#x27;t find the part where it&#x27;s clearly stated that transfat are used, I just see oil being mentioned in those ingredient lists.

One of the motivations for vegetarianism is to reduce one&#x27;s carbon footprint. Highly processed products packed in plastic thwart this goal.

These fake meat products shouldn&#x27;t be much healthier than pink slime burgers made of ground beef and fat.<p>Most burgers are made of 20 to 30% fat trimmings anyway, and the rest is ground beef.<p>All types of oils are not good for us, oil in general is not a health food, no even extra virgin olive oil.<p>The backlash against these fake meat products will come slowly but surely, these are not heath foods and should only be eaten sparingly.<p>Whole foods are the way to go, as opposed to highly processed foods like this plant-based burger.