Had cross posted with my bit emphasizing suspect but do not know. The general principle is the ultraprocessed bit: the concept that the broad category of ultraprocessed foods have a host of negative associations. And of course it will depend on the individual product. My belief is that any general pattern of “real foods mostly plants not too much” is going to be good and going with not real food even if mostly plants not as much so.
Yes, ultra-processed food is horrible for one’s health. What I was asking for is some evidence that vegetarian food, even that food that is manipulated in order to resemble meat or chicken products, falls into the category of ultra- or even very processed.
Someone in another thread mentioned Impossible Burgers as an example. This does not appear to be particularly processed. Here are the ingredients for their “Steak Bites”:
Ingredients: Water, Soy Protein Isolate, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% Or Less Of: Tapioca Starch, Yeast Extract, Sodium Alginate, Calcium Carbonate, Dextrose, Cultured Dextrose, Spices, Vegetable Juice Color, Glucono Delta Lactone, Garlic Powder, Cooked Apple Juice Powder, Onion Powder, Vitamin E (Tocopherols), L-Tryptophan, Salt
Where are the scary ingredients that people shouldn’t eat? How is this, to quote you, “even less healthy than the animal based food it is trying to pretend to be”? How is it even “less healthy than unashamed vegetarian food”?
To put it mildly, I think your concern is over-stated. To put it less mildly, I think you want other people to not eat food that you disapprove of.
FWIW there’s this which claims that plant based meats (PBM) are superior for health to their meat replacements in general.
Unlike other ultra-processed foods, PBM rated as healthier than the foods they are intended to substitute and similarly countervail other negative criteria typical of ultra-processed products. Compared with PBM, conventional meat has the inferior nutrient profile, higher calorie density, and more missing phytonutrients, and results in less satiety and more weight gain, gut dysbiosis, and oxidative stress. With PBM, insulin resistance and inflammation outcomes are similar or superior to meat, depending on the PBM tested, and heat-induced toxins and harmful additives depend on the chemicals in question. Other advantages of PBM include lower potential cancer risk and enhanced food safety. The lowering of LDL cholesterol from the partial replacement of meat with PBM could alone potentially save thousands of lives a year in the United States and billions of healthcare dollars. Whole plant foods fare even better, but PBM appear to be the rare ultra-processed exception in that they are preferable to the foods they were designed to replace.
So maybe not as bad healthwise.
Dude, it has isolated protein, seaweed derived fiber, extracts from yeast, fermented dextrose, something called Glucono Delta Lactone, processed apple juice, and an ingredient that starts with “L-”.
That sh*t’s processed. Very processed.
I’m still buying a couple pounds of it for a pot luck, but it’s processed.
Yeah the cite above notwithstanding Impossible Burgers are definitely a very highly processed food. Here’s one comparison that touts them to some degree but notes the downside of that: “The bad news: Meatless burgers are heavily processed and high in saturated fat”
High sodium. High saturated fat. And
Even though legumes are sourced for protein in the branded meatless options, their health benefits are somewhat blunted by the high degree of processing involved. For instance, moderate amounts of whole soy foods, like edamame (soybeans), have been linked to reduced rates of cancer. This protection is often attributed to isoflavones, a subgroup of plant compounds called flavonoids thought to provide health benefits. Unfortunately, in the case of the Impossible Burger, one serving contains less than 8% of the isoflavones found in one serving of whole soy foods (one serving is roughly a quarter of a block of tofu or 1 cup of soymilk).
All of those ingredients don’t sound highly processed to you?
The other side than the cite I already gave -
According to the researchers, their findings – published in the journal Lancet Regional Health – indicate that while plant-based UPFs may be marketed as healthy alternatives, they may be linked to worse health outcomes. They add that dietary guidelines should be updated to encourage people to reduce their consumption of UPFs as well as to promote plant-based diets.
The actual study below. No question a diet high in unashamed plant based foods is healthier.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00115-7/fulltext
replacing intake of plant-sourced UPF with plant-sourced non-UPF was associated with a 7% and 15% lower risk of CVD incidence and CVD-cause mortality, respectively. Finally, our study reveals that the influence of the dietary contribution of non-red meat on CVD risk also depends on food processing. These findings advance current knowledge by highlighting that a higher intake of plant-sourced foods may only bring about better cardiovascular health outcomes when largely based on minimally processed foods while a higher intake of plant-sourced UPF may have detrimental effects on health
Yes I meant to clarify specifically in my previous post, that I enjoyed the breaded (blue bag) for months until one day it seemingly changed for the worst.
I tend to use gardein for the naked chick’n, but another good one IMO is Abbot’s chopped chick’n. I think its the best for a classic stirfry.
Another cite for you @Roderick_Femm This for all cause mortality.
https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(22)00284-2/fulltext
Seventh Day Adventists are generally considered to represent a healthy lifestyle, included in the Blue Zone list for longevity. Among them more ultra processed food (but not more non-red meat) was associated with higher mortality,
primarily with mortality from neurologic causes (particularly Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease) and respiratory causes (particularly chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, even when restricted to never smokers). The association of ultra-processed food with mortality appeared stronger among those with chronic diseases at baseline, suggesting the potential for greater impact among those with higher mortality risk.
Hey, over here 
The environment is most of the reason we do it; animal welfare being the remainder.
Health… well, it’s theoretically possible to eat a healthy vegan diet, but quite time-consuming and expensive. It’s also possible to eat a healthy omnivorous diet, and much cheaper & simpler. Health alone isn’t a great reason to go vegan.
Yeah, but it’s one thing to eat that once a week or whatever. Another thing if you have to subside on the same 5-10 meals for decades on end, made with the same basic ingredients and dressed up with different sauces. It gets boring real quick. After a while, you’ve tried all the Indian, Thai, Greek, etc. plant-based foods and maybe you’ve expanded your repertoire by a little bit, but it’s still mostly the same basic legumes and grains mixed with various spices and sauces.
The fake meats offer textures and flavors not found in nature — arguably both a good and bad thing. They offer novelty at the expense of health and sustainability.
Was it similar to Eleven Madison Park (video), a three-Michelin star vegan restaurant?
I think it’s possible to creatively come up with unique vegan options, but they’re usually 1) more expensive 2) incredibly time-consuming 3) require global sourcing from hyper-industrialized farms and 4) frequently less nutritious than a simple meat dish.
“What a chef can make for a fancy vegan meal” is usually quite different from “what can a normal vegan household grocery shop for this week”. If you ate “fancy vegan” every day, you’d be both bankrupt and probably quite nutrient-deficient. Mushrooms, for example, aren’t a complete protein, and much of the fancier ingredients they use in luxury restaurants are basically devoid of macronutrients, offering only texture and taste without actually being “food” per se. You’ll be hungry again shortly thereafter. And if you eat too many raw leaves in salads, the silica will do a number on your teeth.
On the other hand, the vegan dishes at your neighborhood ethnic diner are almost always just adapted from their traditional omnivorous origins, but with tofu or fake meat added. Some Asian temples will have their own vegan faux-meat factories, for example, for their adherents to eat from, but those are still moderately to highly processed. Even tofu is itself a processed food.
Most plants and legumes are not naturally tasteful in the way that meat is, which is why there are so many curries, spicy ethnic foods, salad dressings, etc.
It’s one thing to experience some creative meal that took 5 hours and $50 in ingredients. It’s very different to go from that to eating vegan at home year after year. It gets really boring, really quickly… sure, there’s a few different Mexican rice and beans, a few Indian rice and beans, a few Chinese rice and beans, but after a while it’s all still just rice and beans…
Meanwhile, add meat/fish/butter/milk to anything, and it’ll just magically taste better. We’re adapted to enjoy them as high-nutrition food sources, vs the leaves that we can barely even digest.
I think you’ll almost never find such a food packaged for sale in grocery stores. Maybe in a restaurant where humans hand-make patties (and charge accordingly for them). Otherwise, stuff like soy protein isolate is made in giant vats via chemical processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85zQTJo1j4Q, adding various chemicals and acids to dissolve various bits and pieces, leaving behind proteins, then using additional solvents and mechanical filters to wash away the previous chemicals. You really don’t want to see how the plant sausage is made…
Personally, I’m not convinced that ultra-processed foods are inherently bad for you, but if you DO believe that, then you should know that almost all vegan product-ized foods are ultra-processed. The ingredients list shows you the what but not the how, and the “how” alone can turn an ingredient (like a soybean) into an ultra-processed ingredient (like soy protein isolate).
This is a mainly US thing, where most of our vegan foods are hyper-corporate and made for a profit. They therefore seek to maximize addictiveness and profit, not your health. It is different elsewhere, where vegan foods can be (and are) made with less hyper-industrialized ingredients. In general our food system is pretty sick, no matter what you eat… the obesity epidemic is not a coincidence, but the direct result of our corporate food system that sells hyper-processed ingredients and then markets them as health foods. Veganism is just the latest trend to be co-opted by these same giant conglomerates.
I’ll have to dig up some cites after work, but if I remember correctly, the fake meats should still win out by quite a large margin. The industrial processing and transportation doesn’t really add that much — it’s minor overhead compared to the trophic inefficiency of animal metabolism. Most of what a cow eats gets turned into heat and farts; very little of it becomes edible muscle for human consumption. That effect is much stronger than the minor inefficiencies of industrial processing (which is mostly just grinding/mixing and chemical baths). A cow (cattum? don’t know what you call a single gender-neutral unit of cattle) is still just a legume-and-grain processing machine, but an incredibly inefficient one.
Also, keep in mind that this isn’t a mutually exclusive situation… most of the world’s processed soybeans, for example, goes towards animal feed. If you take a soybean and process it for cattle, then the resulting burger has something like 10% of the caloric value that the soybean originally had. Better to just feed the soy to humans directly (environmentally speaking).
But it’s not quite that simple; there are also some land and water use concerns, for example large areas of rangeland that herbivores can graze on but that are ill-suited for farming human foods. Edible grasses can grow there, but corn/soy/rice etc. might not do well in those terrains. Cattle can turn wild grass into hamburger in a way that even the best machines and GMO soy currently can’t…
I’ll try to dig up better cites later…
Edit: And in this case, not necessarily, because the market pricing doesn’t accurately reflect the inputs in this case (due to various farm subsidies, price controls, dumping, etc.) and also due to the need to pay back large food conglomerate investments in hyperprocessed vegan foods.
If you look at the labor-unit costs of growing basic grains vs raising animals, then yes, it’s more representative. But by the time something becomes a marketed and advertised food product for US consumers, it’s so detached from its global supply chain — much less the original plant — the final price isn’t really representative anymore of its ingredient cost. Most of that is due to R&D and expensive machinery, which isn’t necessarily a good proxy for the environmental or climatic cost in this particular case.
Been there, too. I was invited to a wedding celebration at a very fancy restaurant in NYC. And my meal was terrific. But the vegetarian sitting next to me was served my meal without the meat. It looked inadequate both in protein and in total calories for a nice dinner. I was pretty shocked.
I saw an interesting finding that i wish i could find now that dug into that “ultra processed food” claim, and found that essentially all of the negative impact could be attributed to two categories:
Sweet drinks
Cured meat (think sausage and bacon)
The whole “ultra processed” thing may be a red herring.
A steer. We mostly eat steers, not cows. (Head of cattle, beef, bovine also work.)
Chickens and pigs are both a lot more efficient than cattle. And cattle grazed on range that’s too dry for agriculture are an effective way to turn land into human calories, although perhaps not very energy efficient.
But remember that an impossible burger is not soybean porridge, which would be much more efficient. (And also much cheaper.) I’d believe a credible source with numbers saying it’s environmentally better. But I’m not assuming that’s true until i see that source.
I hang out with a lot of vegetarians, mostly of the religious variety (Hindus and Buddhists) some of whom are vegan.
We had a gathering at a restaurant in Flushing, NY which was strictly vegan but the dishes were mostly faux meat ones. Imitation chicken, pork, fish and shrimp. Some people were offended by the “carnivore cosplay”, most people were not. One person said it’s like watching violent CGI porn. It’s cultivating a mindset that leads to evil.
My wife is vegetarian and we do use Quorn, Morningstar Farms and some other brands of “meat substitutes”. My wife does not like Impossible Beef and Beyond Burger products because they are too close in APPEARANCE to the real thing. Same thing for sausages. She hasn’t eaten meat for so many years, I doubt she remembers what it tastes like.
I was a vegetarian for the first 13 years of our marriage. My wife is aggrieved that I eat meat. It’s possible that I may become vegetarian again, now that our daughter has gone away to college. Or maybe just not cook and eat meat at home.
I’m another omnivore who mostly prefers foods that don’t pretend to be what they aren’t. This also extends to, for instance, using mashed cauliflower as a substitute for potatoes: I like cauliflower, but if you’re going to serve me cauliflower, serve it as cauliflower. Pretending it’s potato isn’t doing either vegetable any favors.
The one exception I’ll make is that, in things like spaghetti sauces where the meat isn’t the main ingredient, TVP works just fine as a replacement for ground beef. I’ve never seen an entire TVP burger patty, and there’s probably a good reason for that, but it works as a minor add-in. But then again, you can also just leave out the protein entirely and still have a perfectly good spaghetti sauce.
And I really don’t understand the folks who say that meat (or pseudo-meat) adds variety that isn’t found in undisguised vegetables. There’s more variation between lentils, Lima beans, and pinto beans than there is between any meats. Adding meat (or pseudo-meat) is basically one more ingredient, out of hundreds you already have available. I guess that technically, 101 options is more variety than 100, but it hardly seems significant.
That’s a really interesting perspective. Thank you for sharing.
It’s not just the raw ingredient, but the (totally artificial, yet delicious) processing they do to it. No way you can recombine various fats and proteins into texture resembling marbled meat at home… takes a lot of corporate food science and big fancy machines to do that to the exacting standards of US junk food consumers!
My household is interesting in that I’m an omnivore, pushing towards carnivore by preference, and my wife is vegetarian (not vegan) for a variety of reasons.
For myself, I find I can live with the ethical issues - note, I’m not saying they aren’t there, and that I shouldn’t reduce my usage, but I very much enjoy the flavor of meats. Though, due to cost of beef (one of my favorites) I haven’t bought more than a couple of pounds in the last couple of years. Mostly pork and chicken.
I buy quite a bit of seafood and fish, both for health reasons and cost, and personally have fewer qualms about the ethics of eating those creatures, but again, my choices are not, and should not bind others.
My wife though… She has ethical concerns, environmental concerns, but the main reason she went vegetarian is that she doesn’t LIKE the taste or texture of meat. In America’s meat-centric meal planning, she didn’t consider it much until around 10 years ago - she just got her meat well done, covered in sauce, or breaded and fried. And became much happier when she stopped forcing herself to eat it because it was expected!
She avoids most meat derived products as well, with the exception of cheese, yogurt and butter, because, well, flavor is important as well. And she absolutely HATES vegetarian products that try to mimic meat - because that’s what she is trying to avoid. Trader Joe’s Cowboy Quinoa or Black Bean Burgers? Likes or even loves them from time to time, but as stated upthread, they’re “burgers” in shape only, they don’t try to mimic the tastes.
One thing she does miss though, is how some meats smell when cooking. She doesn’t want to eat my bacon, but smelling cooking bacon is heavenly for her.
I have eaten some of the products from the OP, trying to find more things that we can cook and eat together (which we plan on at least once a week or more), but the more I like it, the less she does, and the higher salt and fat of a lot of those products make the net result (nutritionally) worse than buying lean pork or chicken, as well as being more expensive.
So even if we eliminate or greatly reduce a lot of the ethical, environmental, and cost issues of meat (some bio-printed meat became cost-effective), there’s always going to be the issue of personal tastes and preferences.
Now excuse me, I’m making breaded, air fried mushrooms in just a bit for one of our shared meatless nights: cleaned button mushrooms, dipped in a thinned, seasoned yogurt sauce, dredged in breadcrumbs, and air fried with a little misted olive oil to bring out the crunch and browning.
More yogurt sauce and malt vinegar on the side for perfection.
That sounds yummy
This may be the study but definitely less than essentially all, but biggest drivers yes -
https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj-2023-078476
Table 3 breaks it down by subgroup.
I’m an omnivore who enjoys good vegan food every bit as much as good food that contains animal bits. I’m not going to be dismissive-across-the-board of fake meat, fake eggs, or even fake cheese (although I’m closest to dismissive of the latter, very unimpressed so far with what I’ve tried). But all in all, I prefer to make vegan dishes that stand on their own as tasty food and not as wannabe carnivore or dairy. Tempeh-based dishes, tofu-based dishes, rice-and-beans with various spices and flavorings, root vegetables, baked or stir-fried or slow cooked in the crock pot.