Comment by frafra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frafra | Hacker News Reader

"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". 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 "natural" meat produced from animals being fed with GMO soy then?

"In general, I think unwise to mess with the complex system of human biology by introducing large qts of foreign ingredients". Again, "foreign"? What do you mean with that?

Then it continues with "all non-organic" and so on, like the process is relevant, while the final result is not, similar to homeopathy.

I am very skeptical about this kind of criticisms.

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 meat) - Also, naturalistic fallacy, like hamburgers were natural entities that grow in gardens, and you just pluck them from the trees, and its oh-so-natural

+1: If he is so worried about canola oil, just check what quality of oil burger king is using for frying his meat.

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

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.

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.

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