Are Plant-Based Meat Alternatives Really Healthier Than Meat? (nbcnews.com) 211
Plant-based/meat-free entrees are coming to major fast-food chains including White Castle, KFC, Del Taco, the Cheesecake Factory, and Subway. There's just one problem, argues an opinion piece by a certified nutritionist at NBC News: "these offerings aren't actually any healthier."
The Impossible Whopper, for instance, not only has comparable caloric and fat levels as its meat-based counterpart, but it has more salt per serving; the Del Taco options are comparable. White Castle's Impossible Slider has more calories, more fat and more sodium than the meaty original (before you add cheese to either).
In fact, when you start to compare all of these offerings to their meat-based counterparts, you realize it's the same story no matter what brands you're talking about -- you might possibly save a few calories or carbs, but you'll probably get way more salt. Switching from meat-based fast foods to meat-free, then, isn't likely to help your health.
The article acknowledges that plant-based burgers may also be better for the environment, since 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to be coming from livestock. (And it also acknowledges plant-based substitutes may be better than red meat for people fighting heart disease or type 2 diabetes.) In addition, both the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger do have zero cholesterol -- while a high-cholesterol diet could lead to heart attacks and strokes.
But "If eating more realistic fake meat was about health, the offerings would be far lower in salt content, contain fewer calories and have a bit less dietary fat. None of them do..."
In fact, when you start to compare all of these offerings to their meat-based counterparts, you realize it's the same story no matter what brands you're talking about -- you might possibly save a few calories or carbs, but you'll probably get way more salt. Switching from meat-based fast foods to meat-free, then, isn't likely to help your health.
The article acknowledges that plant-based burgers may also be better for the environment, since 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to be coming from livestock. (And it also acknowledges plant-based substitutes may be better than red meat for people fighting heart disease or type 2 diabetes.) In addition, both the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger do have zero cholesterol -- while a high-cholesterol diet could lead to heart attacks and strokes.
But "If eating more realistic fake meat was about health, the offerings would be far lower in salt content, contain fewer calories and have a bit less dietary fat. None of them do..."
confused about mention of "fat" (Score:5, Insightful)
Eating fat isn't bad, that's a stupid marketing lie when food is advertised as healthier being "low fat".
Spiking your blood sugar levels high with carbs leads to insulin resistance and obesity. Eat more fat and protein, less carbs.
It's also a lie that all calories are equal (simple cars, complex carbs, fat, protein) in the effects on body.
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How dare you suggest the same thing they did in Junior high Health class in 1973?! We are much more advanced now, we know for certain that only fad dieting can provide the answers.
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We have already identified that Carnitine is the culprit in meat-related heart disease [huffpost.com]
They did not understand the entire pathway, but recently figured out that the gut-microbiome changes Carnitine to TMAO, which has been shown to cause cardiovascular disease. [mdedge.com]
It is no present in fish or chicken so that has been my protein choice lately, I do not know if they put it in fake meat.
Re: confused about mention of "fat" (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually you need both TMAO and l-carnitine, as being deficient in either has associated morbidity, and your statement about fish is also incorrect.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
There's a relationship between elevated TMAO and CVD, but the cause and effect isn't clear. There's also a relationship between kidney disease and high TMAO, but as somebody with CKD and a transplanted kidney myself, I'm well aware that most people with renal disease ultimately are done in by CVD, but that isn't necessarily due to TMAO, rather the body's inability to balance it's electrolytes (the most important role of the kidneys) over a long period of time takes its toll on your ticker.
There's also plenty of research that suggests that going to the other extreme of being all vegetarian is also worse on your body overall than what meat is hypothesised to do to your cardiovascular system. Besides that, the best answer we have on whether red meat is bad on your cardiovascular system is a "probably, but we're not so sure".
In other words, it's way more complicated than that. Also, I really like how TFS says a high cholesterol diet is bad for you, and then links to a Mayo clinic page about the effects of high blood cholesterol. Drawing such a connection, a favored argument among vegans, is a really dumb thing to do:
https://www.healthline.com/nut... [healthline.com]
Re:confused about mention of "fat" (Score:5, Insightful)
Fat, protein, and carbs are all necessary macro-nutrients. Your body uses them to rebuild and keep the power systems going.
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No all carbs are equal. Glucose is fine; frutose actually is bad.
Re:confused about mention of "fat" (Score:5, Informative)
No all carbs are equal. Glucose is fine; frutose actually is bad.
And the reason for this is because glucose is (can be) metabolized by every cell in the body, but fructose can only be metabolized by the liver. In addition, fructose metabolism produces tri-glycerides and other "bad things" and is similar to that of alcohol metabolism but w/o the self-limiting effects of alcohol consumption. This is explained in detail in the (surprisingly interesting) 1.5 hour medical lecture below:
Sugar: The Bitter Truth [youtube.com]
Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. Recorded on 05/26/2009. Length: 1:29
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Glucose is fine; frutose actually is bad.
Probably not. Eating so much fructose that you overload your normal metabolic pathways for fructose, or eating them at the exclusion of other nutrients that you need is bad, but our body has a metabolic pathway for processing fructose. We've literally evolved to be able to eat it.
The negative focus is a problem. Instead of asking, "What food is bad?" You should ask, "what nutrients does my body need right now to do repairs and generate power?" That is a much easier way of looking at nutrition.
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In any case whether or not you need them is a strawman, the main point was that none of them are bad. Furthermore I can add that the focus on avoiding nutrients is a confusing way to look at it: it's more practical to ask, "what nutrients does my body need right now?"
If your body has enough fat, then don't eat it. If your body wa
Re:confused about mention of "fat" (Score:5, Informative)
"carbs" is also too simplistic. You shouldn't chose excessive starch or sugar, but fiber is good for you, though you shouldn't be excessive about soluble fiber either.
That said, there's nothing wrong with a minimal amount of starch, and even sugar, in extreme moderation, isn't too bad.
Sugars and starches allow one to feel "fed" quickly. Fat satiates over a longer period of time. Protein is nearly best...but too much is hard on the kidneys, and it takes awhile to feel like you've eaten. I don't know that there's any evidence that dietary cholesterol is associated with level of blood cholesterol.
There's a reason dietary guides usually say "eat a variety". But commercial foods usually push sugar and starch, because they're relatively cheap, and after them fat, because it's the next cheapest.
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There is no evidence hat protein is bad for a fully-functioning, healthy kidney. There was a hypothesis, based on kidneys that were already having problems, that large quantities of protein was bad for kidneys, but it has failed to pan out in studies.
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Nor does "cholesterol" that you eat change your circulating (blood) cholesterol level. Nothing that you eat can possibly affect the amount of cholesterol circulating in the bloodstream. The amount of cholesterol circulating in your blood is solely determined by the manufacturer of that cholesterol -- the liver -- and the various biofeedback mechanisms that control the amount of cholesterol produced by the liver.
The fact that you are alive today indicates that your ancestors had the genetic mutation that a
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We really don't know and we still are learning. it was not that long ago when we were told we had to drink milk so our bones would grow strong. We then learned that the high protein content of milk impeded absorption of calcium, so it was really just a lie created by the dairy industry to sell milk to kids, kids who in the US pop
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But "If eating more realistic fake meat was about health, the offerings would be far lower in salt content, contain fewer calories and have a bit less dietary fat. None of them do..."
That's called "salad".
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First thing that came to my mind as well - while there are differences in the health impact of foods in their original state, how they are brought to market makes a big difference. I suspect the only "benefit" to the plant-based meat alternatives is they should contain little or no additional hormones, antibiotics and other drugs found in most factory meat. On the other hand, plant-based meat alternatives are likely to have (possibly significant) traces of pesticides, fertilizers and the other chemicals u
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So, the best foods are the ones you kill yourself? Because ALL foods are "processed" unless you pick it off the shrubbery or cut it out of the animal yourself....
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That's complete non-sense. A number of vegetable fats contain nasty shit, like trans fats. ALL fats are loaded with calories. Got high blood pressure? Maybe it's about time to lose weight, eat less processed food, and work out. Not eating animal fat won't save you. Consumed in moderate amounts, animal fat is healthy and delicious.
And in fact, you can't cook a good steak or a hamburger without a good quantity of fat. A good hamburger should have about 20% fat, add or subtract. It cracks me up when I see "lea
The real case... (Score:5, Insightful)
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humans are the only thing that matter. Raising livestock is an ag engineering issue, nothing more. the people have earth already decided we'll keep doing it, there are no insurmountable problems
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the biosphere will not collapse though, that is alarmist nonsense.
Re:The real case... (Score:5, Insightful)
the biosphere will not collapse though, that is alarmist nonsense.
The thing is, the biosphere doesn't have to collapse to cause humanity real problems. Just having it change enough that human agriculture is no longer economical in, say, 20% of the places where it is currently practiced, would be enough to put billions in danger of starvation, with all of the political instability, refugee flows, etc, that come with that.
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Just having it change enough that human agriculture is no longer economical in, say, 20% of the places where it is currently practiced, would be enough to put billions in danger of starvation, with all of the political instability, refugee flows, etc, that come with that.
Desertification is being reversed [youtube.com] by changes to animal husbandry, which incidentally will also make more food available to humans. Eating more meat, by the way, is how you prevent those billions from starving. As Dr. Savory states, and as should be commonly known, marginal pasture can support edible animals but can not support edible crops. The animals are not substituteable in human diets in a large part of the world. And as you'll see in the video, large herds of ruminants are essential for stopping a
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And that's a real problem, particularly for hominids whose Naturalism worldview offers no material basis for being other than quasi-human.
I encourage you to continue to argue in your self-interest, per how you "self-identify".
Actually... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the real case is that some very noisy people don't want you to eat meat. The volume and quality of noise varies from source to source, but you did hit one or two of them.
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Actually the real case is that some very noisy people don't want you to eat meat.
Finally a genuine ad homenim! These people are $BADTHING therefore by implication their argument is wrong.
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It's not wrong. I just don't give a fuck.
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It's not wrong. I just don't give a fuck.
That's nice but since you're not the OP, your "opinions" aren't really relevant to what he said.
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You don't give a fuck about the planet you are dependent on for sustaining your life, and the life of your family and children and everyone you care about. OK.
Anyway this is good, we might get replicators out of it one day.
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Meat is nothing more than concentrated vegetables.
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... against animal meat isn't human health, it's against quasi-sentient murder and overtaxing our as-of-yet-irreplaceable life support system.
People might have a different opinion of cows after seeing them behave more like dogs ...
Cow Plays Fetch Just Like A Dog [youtube.com]
Cows Acting Like Dogs & More [youtube.com]
Or simply Google: cows like dogs [google.com]
Re:The real case... (Score:5, Funny)
Great. Now I'm hungry enough that I could eat a retriever.
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone has room to range animals on extremely marginal land without fertilizer.
A lot of meat is fed from arable land which could simply produce nutrient dense plant food we can consume directly. Animals in Europe for instance are generally raised on arable land, which is fertilized.
Also I suspect the acceleration of the nutrient depletion of rangeland will eventually cause problems too, you are taking phosphorous and micronutrients out of the soil and not replenishing it. Some nutrients always wash out to sea and have to be replenished by geological processes, but rangeland grazing increases that rate ... perhaps to the point where nature won't be able to keep up.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all bullshit.
I grew up working on small farms. Cows, pigs, chickens, geese, dogs, cats, what-have-you... They recognize particular people. They recognize their own names if treated consistently. They have clear emotional states. We had a working ox that recognized my dad on sight at a county fair a decade after he'd sold him.
The amount of religious spaghetti-logic that people have to put up to try and avoid this always astounds me.
You're post implies we only feed animals (Score:5, Insightful)
And That's before we talk about how much water goes into beef vs plants. No, water is not perfectly recyclable. It has to be made potable if it isn't already, and it's not potable when a cow's down with it.
Plant based (and artificial) meat are much less demanding. They use far less resources.
That said, there's plenty of other ways we could approach solving the climate problems we have. You giving up cheeseburgers isn't going to make up for the 100 or so corporations that account for 70% of greenhouse emissions. All this talk of plastic straws & hamberders is just a distraction meant to keep you and me at each other's throats while the 1% laugh at us all the way to the bank.
I'm just kidding, it's 2019, nobody goes to the bank anymore.
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And there's no sentience issue involved. That's a fallacy of generalization and anthropomorphization.
A projection of human traits onto animals by generalizing certain traits like "can sense pain" into "therefore sentience".
Because being human comes with mental issues like existential angst regarding eating other animals - which is a problem unique to humans, out of all living things in nature.
I'm cool with being an omnivore. I've killed animals and eaten them. But pretending that human intelligence is fundamentally different from animal intelligence is ridiculous. It's a totally unfounded viewpoint. We just happen to have become dominant first. Some other ape might as well have done, some of them are using fire now.
when controlled for bacteria in mayonnaise and on the hands and utensils of food preparing humans...
Regardless of levels of salt, fat and whatever in "Plant-Based Meat Alternatives" - veggie burgers probably ARE healthier than those made from cows.
At least you don't have to worry about the quantity of mad cow meat in your burger.
If you're eating out, you are dramatically more likely to get sick from food contaminated with feces during assembly than whatever pathogens might be on the ingredients, because they
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Lol, Wut?!
Let me guess - you were told animals were not sentient by someone on a sunday and you believe in an imaginary (and non-existent) being in the sky that created the world and you, and which you believe is responsible for the results of your actions and inactions, don't you?
Animals, especially mammals are definitely sentient. Maybe with a really low IQ by human standards, but a cat has the mental capacity of about a 4 year old child, sometimes more. I had a cat that haven't seen me eat at home for a
No. (Score:4)
And I don't care. If I'm eating a burger I'm not eating it to be healthy but to fill me up and make me feel good. The Impossible and Beyond Burgers do that in multiple ways.
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More importantly, these fake burgers are engineered recipes, not an "as is" product. They can and will tweak them and make different versions.
It would not be really hard to slowly reduce fat and salt by tiny increments once the market share is really there. Our taste buds are surprisingly shitty. Once we think we know what something tastes like we can be pretty easily fooled by a very similar product.
Heme was the big breakthrough, and being able to get yeast to spit it out was the major technological feat t
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Heme ingestion is strongly associated with colorectal and esophageal cancers. Heme is what gives these fake meats the "true meat flavor". I just find it difficult to believe that the FDA will continue to allow these producers to inject a known carcinogen into their products. I'm frankly a bit shocked that the media has not picked up on this aspect.
One can find several scientific studies at nih.gov regarding heme's cancer risk.
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Only impossible uses a Soy Heme source.
Beyond just puts in some beet juice to make it red.
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Actually that's a good reason to care - if there is demand they will keep developing their burgers to be more healthy, and one day healthy food might fill the fast food role.
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Yup. Agree. The little ants that showed up in my kitchen act just like you. The gobble the yummy sticky stuff, eat it, carry it back to their nest and feed it to their larva and queen. It contains borax, which slowly poisons their nervous system and kill them. But what do they care; it fills them up and make them fill good.
Is this supposed to be a case for or against these veggie burgers?
I know what meat is, and humans have been eating meat since there have been humans, so it's been proven to be safe. This veggie burger is something that supposedly tastes good (I haven't tried it and likely will not), fills people up, makes them feel good, but it might contain something that could be quite dangerous.
I'm certain that the powers that be did everything they could in testing this to prove to themselves that these veggie burgers
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> humans have been eating meat since there have been humans,
If I may point out, humans eat _everything_, especially now that we have knives to harvest it and fire to cook it.
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We're extremely selective about the grasses and roots we eat, and really don't consume anything cellulose-based at all. We also get sick and often die if we eat any food that's been dead too long, unless frozen.
Individual humans range from fairly versatile eaters to complete whack-a-doodles. Like that kid who went blind.
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Selective? I think not. The human liver and digestive system are *very* robust in what they handle as food. Cellulose is a major component of many plant foods. Celery, asparagus, and carrots are lauded or the "fiber" they provide, which is mainly cellulose. It's not digested for energy, but it's a common and even critical part of our diet to avoid constipation.
I'm afraid that fact that we can and historically do eat rotten food. Yeast pre-processing our food is key to the bread, cheese, yogurt, and booze in
Missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)
Come back when you know the answer. And why the answer matters.
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A lot of that depends on government policy. If land use is restricted to protect some pet endangered species, then cattle grazing is forced onto smaller remaining pastures*. And needs to be supplemented with farm grown feed. Likewise, if you switch to soya based beef replacements, that will increase the demand for Amazon rain forest to be converted to agricultural use.
*The ideal use of livestock is to graze on grass land that is little improved over its natural state. But to do that, you have to spread the
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That's a different question. Maybe an interesting one, but has nothing to do with health.
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That's a different question. Maybe an interesting one, but has nothing to do with health.
Still missing the point.
Stay obsessed on the health aspect if you want. That isn't why Impossible and Beyond were invented.
Sounds to me like someone shorted Beyond and is trying to get the market to fix his mistake for him.
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How much water and other stuff does it take to raise a pound of beef?
How much to raise a person? I'm not saying we should/n't eat people (especially now the Soylent [soylent.com] isn't people, unlike in the 1970's [wikipedia.org] ), but maybe raising fewer people would help the planet more...
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How much to raise a person? I'm not saying we should/n't eat people (especially now the Soylent isn't people, unlike in the 1970's ), but maybe raising fewer people would help the planet more...
I am saying we shouldn't eat people.
What people seem to forget about the Soylent Green story was that the producers of Soylent offered this product in various types, identified by color. The different colors were of different quality and the newest product, Soylent Green, was supposed to be the best they offered but was available in limited quantities.
We are now seeing people advocate for the eating of meat from dead people, and I find this not just revolting on many levels but also a sign of just how insa
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There is nothing immoral, revolting or insane about eating *dead* people any more than pumping all that ready energy full of poisons and putting them in a cask that will never degrade. You spend enormous amounts of energy (forming the molecular bonds) to build and maintain that human body, it contains an enormous amount of energy locked (again in the molecular bonds), preventing that energy from returning back to the biosphere should be a crime. The rest of the planet does not embalm people and buries in bi
Cost (Score:2)
Sugar is the problem, not fat (Score:5, Informative)
I first stumbled on this video 8 years ago, "The Bitter Truth About Sugar" by Dr. Robert Lustig. He's an endocrinologist specializing in childhood obesity. It's a long video and he goes through the history of fructose consumption in the U.S. and gives statistics demonstrating the correlation between fructose and weight, but correlation does not imply causation. In the last 19 minutes he goes through the explicit metabolic responses by the human body to ingesting fructose. That convinced me to listen.
So I tried the experiment: severely restrict the amount of sugar (fructose to be precise, not glucose) in my diet: no soda, no candy, no ice cream, no fruit juices that weren't freshly squeezed by myself. The result: I went from 268 lbs. down to 205 lbs in approximately 4 months. He convinced me. The experiment was a success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Excellent video, and transripts and legal torrents are easy to find.
One example: https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/31243591/Transcript_-_Sugar_The_Bitter_Truth.html
I'm not so sure (Score:2)
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I've noticed that most diets which make you think hard about what you're eating have weight-loss effects, whether it's keto diets or gluten-free diets or vegan diets or HFCS-free diets. I'm starting to wonder whether they're successful for a common reason: Maybe making you put a lot of extra mental effort into eating ("Are there any animal products on this inscrutable ingredient list?") leads to less eating, which leads to weight loss.
I could well be wrong.
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That's a component, but sugar and starches have and additional mode of operation that is independent of that. Sugars more-so than starches, but starches too.
Please note I'm not using the overgeneral "carbs" because fiber is quite important to a healthy diet.
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I first stumbled on this video 8 years ago, "The Bitter Truth About Sugar" by Dr. Robert Lustig.
I just posted about this too, and have several times over the past few years. Very informative lecture.
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You do realise why it is called fructose, right?
Tell that to the Japanese (Score:2)
Yes, cutting down on sugar helps. That's because you restrict your diet. What matters is getting a balanced diet rich in nutrients and low in calories. You dropped 60+ lbs because you stopped eating junk food. I did the same thing myself. We humans are really, really good at storing calories. One soda a day is 200 extra calories. That'll eventually get you to 260lbs, where most people top out (the amount of calories needed to maintain your weight
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Fruit has vitamins and fibre, which offsets some of the disadvantages of fructose. Fibre helps with rate of absorption, which matters more than total quantity.
Salt, Fat and Carbs make it tasty (Score:2)
Evolution has programmed humans to like fat and carbs - until there's a healthy alternative to them that people respond to, then you turn off people.
If it's better for the environment and provide a healthier option for people with heart disease and diabetes, then it sounds like it's a (small) step in the right direction.
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Except that they load it with so much salt that nobody with heart disease can eat it without ignoring doctor's advice.
Re:Salt, Fat and Carbs make it tasty (Score:5, Insightful)
Japanese diet is very high in salt, but life expectancy is at the top of the list. Just looking at salt is too simplistic.
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The Japanese also tend to be rather thin. You need to factor this into your calculations. (Sumo wrestlers don't eat a nearly normal Japanese diet.)
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Except that they load it with so much salt that nobody with heart disease can eat it without ignoring doctor's advice.
Apparently, the jury's still out on this... From Is Salt Actually Bad for You? [healthline.com]:
There is some evidence showing that high salt intake may be associated with an increased risk of certain conditions like stomach cancer or high blood pressure.
Despite this, there are several studies showing that a reduced-salt diet may not actually decrease the risk of heart disease or death.
A large 2011 review made up of seven studies found that salt reduction had no effect on the risk of heart disease or death (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21731062).
Another review with over 7,000 participants showed that reduced salt intake did not affect the risk of death and had only a weak association with the risk of heart disease (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25519688).
However, the effect of salt on the risk of heart disease and death may vary for certain groups.
For example, one large study showed that a low-salt diet was associated with a reduced risk of death but only in overweight individuals (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2071962/).
Meanwhile, another study actually found that a low-salt diet increased the risk of death by 159% in those with heart failure (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21731062).
My doctor once told me that too much salt is a problem for people who are sensitive to it, but seems to have less/minimal impact for those who aren't. [ So, I guess, take all this with a grain of salt, unless it's a problem for you. :-) ]
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Nevertheless, if you are diagnosed with high blood pressure, you will be told to restrict your sodium intake. If your medication for any heart condition includes a diuretic, you will be sodium restricted (not much controversy there, salt is basically an anti-diuretic).
The only real question is how harmful or not it is to the population that does not currently need treatment.
Killing animals (Score:3, Insightful)
The obvious goal here is to wipe out all the herds of animals we raise and care for. There is a reason some animals were so willing to be domesticated, and that reason is that it favored the survival of their species versus remaining feral.
only time will tell (Score:5, Insightful)
only time will tell if fake meat is healthier than real meat. Fake sugar was launched with great fanfare stating how good and healthy it was for you. Decades later, they are just finding out there can be an increased risk of diabetes and other health problems. The same goes with the fake meat - who knows what health problems will appear years later
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they are just finding out there can be an increased risk of diabetes and other health problems.
I'm willing to bet they did not find an actual causal link, just associations.
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There is no evidence that artificial sweeteners cause health problems. Only a bunch of BS studies that study correlations. Nobody established a specific link that makes them "bad".
Not all rosy ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The plant based burger patties have palm oil, which has a significant social and environmental impact [wikipedia.org].
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All our food has social and environmental impact.
My country is densely populated and wiped out the vast majority of old growth forest a long long time ago. I'm not willing to contribute to paying the third world trillions a year to conserve their forests, so in return I don't expect them to treat their forests any better than my forefathers did.
If we get more calories from Malaysia and Indonesia we can get less calories elsewhere, they can plant trees there.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Thanks.
I stand corrected. Perhaps I misread or mistook coconut oil as palm oil.
Canola is more sustainable, since it is grown in prairie land, not by felling trees. ...
Coconut oil, I don't know, but it is a natural tree, and I assume in its native range, so less harmful than palm oil
Much better that way ...
As healthy as we want them to be (Score:2)
When you make something like that, you make it as healthy as you want it to be. Keeping in mind artificial meat is mostly designed to be tasty and meatlike rather than healthy, people want and choose tasty. Real meat is just as healthy as meat and can't change much about it beyond relatively minor effects from the animal's diet.
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When you make something like that, you make it as healthy as you want it to be.
The goal of these products is to make as much money as possible. The solution is cheap filler ingredients, combined with high-tech texture agents and flavoring.
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I can tell you've never eaten a steak from an old goat or a ram.
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Who would do such a stupid thing? You stew it in a nice curry.
No, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are Plant-Based Meat Alternatives Really Healthier Than Meat? Of course not, because they were not developed to be a healthy alternative. Rather, they were developed to cash-in on the movement that want's people to stop eating meat.
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Healthier by not containing nasty stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
By eating plant-based meat alternatives you would get:
* No sodium nitrite (E250 in Europe),
* No hydrocyclic amines (HCA), and
* No polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)
All three are well-known to increase the risk of getting intestinal cancer.
Sodium nitrite is an additive in a whole lot of meat products, which is there because of historical reasons: it makes meat red and producers are afraid that consumers would not buy meat that does not look like what they are used to. More than half a century ago, it us
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Sodium nitrite has been historically used to preserve meats (sausages, hams, etc). The meat color is only a nice by-product of this process. It's not a historical mistake. It doesn't go into steaks or hamburgers. Moreover, its danger is wildly exaggerated. It's been now shown that nitrites happen naturally in plants and most of human intake of those comes from plants. (Ever wonder how they make "uncured bacon"? They use celery extract which does the same as curing meat with nitrates).
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To all your points should be added: "In the USA.".
The US meat industry is, viewed from a trading bloc with sane food standards, a complete mess.
But then you put mayo and salt on your burger . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Real meat is usually not eaten unseasoned.
A vegan diet certainly can be high in salt, fat, or sugar; but in the final analysis, I think most vegan diets are healthier than most omnivorous diets. Vegans tend to have lower cholesterol, better BMI, lower blood pressure, and so on.
Usually, vegans eat processed food in moderation. Although it's changing, Americans especially are known to eat meat three times a day, and often in huge portions.
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Salting meat does not mean that it has to be unhealthy. A healthy daily intake of sodium is 2000-2500 milligrams a day. Now, cooking salt is 40 percent or so sodium by weight. That means, 4000-5000 milligrams of salt can be consumed daily by an adult healthy individual.
Now, salt is critical to revealing the taste of meats, but it takes only about half a teaspoon of _coarse_ salt (it weights less than table salt) to season a 1 pound steak. A serving size of a steak should be about half a pound per adult, wh
Cholestroal Damage Likely Not Reversable (Score:2)
Junk food (Score:5, Insightful)
The headline should read, "Junk Food Is Bad for You Even When It's Vegetarian or Vegan."
I guess some people need reminding that it's called junk food for a reason. If you want to eat healthily, try foods that have some decent nutritional content.
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Hello? Hamburger is not junk food. There is nothing wrong with cooking seasoned ground meat (which is what a hamburger is)
But maybe sodas and french fries are junk (shockingly your order of french fries can often contain more calories, salt, and bad fats than the hamburger sandwich itself).
It's never the reverse. (Score:2)
Let me know when there is broccoli flavored meat.
That's not going to happen. Ever.
Does it matter? (Score:2)
I have the feeling that whether they're healthier doesn't matter at all. Those that eat meat will eat meat or I-can't-believe-it's-not-meat based on which one is cheaper and/or tastier. Those that don't eat meat will eat them because they don't want to eat meat because they don't want to eat meat.
Which one is healthier doesn't even enter the equation.
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I agree. The two factors which make people reduce meat intake are
- because they see it as against animal cruelty
- because they see it as against climate change or sometimes ecological footprint.
Then there are those who do it on principle. They tend to be more absolutist.
And those who just reduce the amount of meat they eat. At home we've reduced the amount of meat. It's annoying how guilt seeps into everything.
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- because they see it as against climate change or sometimes ecological footprint.
Next time you run into such people, please remind them that they can move to the state of Washington, kill themselves, and have their body converted into compost. This will reduce their carbon footprint to zero, and their inflamed brain will never has to spend X-hours a day calculating the carbon footprint of each decision taken in their life.
I thought they would have fixed that (Score:2)
I tried a veggie burger something like 20 years ago, and my immediate impression was "this is salty as hell". They've come so far and I've heard rave reviews. Maybe they just masked the salty taste, if that's even possible. Oh well. I wasn't that interested anyway. I tend to be conservative about stuff like this. There are plenty of other willing guinea pigs who want to try these highly processed nouveau foods. 20 years from now, we might find out that they're as healthy as hydrogenated oil.
The point of it .. (Score:3)
But "If eating more realistic fake meat was about health, the offerings would be far lower in salt content, contain fewer calories and have a bit less dietary fat. None of them do..."
But that's just the thing. Eating fake meat currently has nothing to do with it being healthier than real meat. It's about reducing the amount of livestock we're raising and slaughtering for food. It's also about it being tasting as good as the real thing, to the point of it being impossible to tell the difference between real and fake. At least that was my take-away from this new fad.
As far as I know, I've not seen anything suggesting these new phony-meats being healthier than their real counterparts. It's all about reducing cow farts.
White Castle, KFC, Del Taco, Cheesecake Factory (Score:2)
"major fast-food chains White Castle, KFC, Del Taco, Cheesecake Factory, Subway."
One of these is not like the other. Cheesecake factory is about as far as you can get from fast food.
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I'm not going to eat my burger without a bun either way, the impact on carbs isn't really relevant.
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It's a pipedream for the moment, our (bio-)engineering is nowhere near up to the task.
Trying to efficiently replace the animal organs to create and keep clean the growth medium for muscle cells with machines is not going to work with our current technology, look how inferior, huge and expensive dialysis is ... we can do it, but not at a reasonable cost. Nor can we engineer cows/pigs/chickens without a central nervous system instead.
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Finally a bunch of Hindus will find out what a Big Mac tastes like.