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Comment by tester13894059 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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