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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't eating a salad of all vegetables be "plant-based"? Are you saying they use that phrase misleadingly too?

I think that's the misunderstanding here. Things like Beyond Meat aren't really any better for you than real meat. It's just another push from the capital class to co-opt the medical profession's message that we should all be eating less meat. The ingredients, textured vegetable protein and highly processed lentils, have had almost all of the really healthy stuff removed from them and they serve only as a substrate for particular flavors that mimic meat.

Insofar as it isn't recognizably an ingredient that is picked from a field and marketed as a plant or animal part, it's part of what's causing all of us to be really unhealthy in the US.

That’s fair enough, but it still has a far lower impact on the planet, for those times when someone just really wants a burger.

Pressing X to doubt

Could yoh voice your doubts?

Simple, the cost of industrial production. Is it negligible compared to meat, sure. Would it be negligible if scaled to meet the same demand? I don't think so, at all.

Fair enough, but for most people, health of themselves is way more important than the health of the planet.

It's not just the medical profession pushing a less carnivorous diet. Folk trying to save the planet are doing the same, because the meat industry is really hard on the planet.

That position is predicated on a series of back-of-napkin estimates that, among other methodological limitations, exclude emissions related to the industrial transformation of plants into bullshit like Impossible Foods from their analysis.

Again, food-industry trends are best read through the lens of capitalism, not ecology. We’re not taking about eating a bowl of beans.

Real evidence-based medicine guidelines don't call for eating less (unprocessed) meat. The studies that purport to show better health outcomes from eating less meat have been low quality observational ones that didn't properly control for confounders like the healthy subject effect. If there is an impact one way or the other then it is very small relative to more important dietary factors such as total caloric intake and macronutrient levels.

If you want to eat less meat for other reasons then go ahead. But there is no legitimate scientific consensus on this point in the medical profession.

The reason for eating things like Beyond Beef isn't for the vegetables it's to prevent the death of animals and environmental cost of factory farming.

> Beyond Meat aren't really any better for you than real meat

They aren't. Majority of meat products are also heavily processed and far from being healthy food. Sausages, cutlets, etc. The only good meat is some cut that you cooked yourself.

So from the health perspective there isn't much difference between processed meat and processed vegetables. Both aren't good for our guts. Sadly, buying unprocessed food and/or cooking is often more expensive and not scalable to cover every single individual or family on this planet.

> Sadly, buying unprocessed food and/or cooking is often more expensive and not scalable to cover every single individual or family on this planet.

I've heard this line a few times, and people say it as if there will be billions more people starving in Africa if processed foods didn't exist. This simply isn't true though, processed foods are only an issue in highly developed countries.

In developing countries poorer people eat very few processed foods. Why? Because it's cheaper to buy raw foods. People eat what is in season and often what they can grow themselves or some neighbour has grown. Yes they probably eat something similar every day, but so what, it works for them.

I live in a small, not terribly well off, European country where meals are typically prepared from scratch. In the supermarket the most processed food you will find is a chocolate bar or a bag of crisps. We don't have 'ready meals', if you want to eat say a fish pie, you need to buy the raw ingredients and make it yourself from scratch.

That's disingenuous. The problem is not plants per se (which are great and tasty), but the use of plants as input to industrial food production. I don't mean the industrial logistics of harvesting, storing, and distribution, but the industrial/chemical processing of feed stuffs for separation, purification, and recombination of foods that are miles away from anything resembling normal cooking.

I make an omelette for breakfast every day which involves a bunch of preparation, mixing and cooking, but when eating it's easy to identify the ingredients - this is a piece of pork, that's a radish, that's a piece of garlic etc. The closest thing to food product is some ground-up red pepper and other herbs that are there to modulate the flavor, but don't make up the main substance of the dish.

I've thought about buying some of these meat substitute products a few times, but for one thing they're quite expensive and for another when I look at the ingredients I can't easily conceive of what went into the product or how. I know vegetarian and vegan food can be delicious and nutritious thanks to friends who are great cooks, but again when I eat their cooking I can easily identify what I'm putting in my mouth.

ah: i see the distinction, and thanks for clarifying. the phrase "plant-based" is being bandied about misleadingly because the leaf nodes of ingredients are ultimately plants, essentially, but they don't mean "only directly plants" like i was thinking with the salad example.

I’m trying very hard to interpret this in a charitable way and coming up dry. You’re clearly not stupid, judging from your comment history, so what exactly are you playing at?

I don’t believe for one second that you cannot distinguish between salad and things like Huel.

Right : i mean it seems to be the case that "plant-based" is purposefully used to sound like a salad, though it's being used for things far from a salad in terms of direct ingredients. i think we're thinking the same thing but, yes, my phrasing on reflection kinda sucked, because it's not clear i'm saying something about tyranny of misused and purposefully misleading labels. it's true i had not realized just how misleadingly the phrase was used, though.

Ah! Okay, now it all makes sense :)

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