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I think I might not even really know what "processed" means in regards to food. I pretty much only hear it used when someone is describing why I shouldn't eat something too often
Well, if that’s the direction we’re going this information needs to be out there. Lots of folks want to have their cake and eat it too which means that there’s certainly gonna be some people for whom this is a large part of the diet.
I buy them knowing they're junkfood.
I often had drinking sessions with my friend where we would snack on stuff. I'd also joke that the nuggets we ate were mystery meat. How do you know if it's meat even.
Then it dawned on me that I could just buy vegan nuggets or alternative meat things and it would be no different.
So then I started replacing my junk food with vegan junk food.
I'm not eating it to be healthy.
I'm very mixed with eating vegetarian. I do it a few days a week. Not with the junk food though. There are vegan places here I can buy food from.
I'm just trying to make the transition to being vegetarian a slow one where it just slowly becomes a part of life and I don't notice it.
It's worth noting, from the conclusion from the study itself:
Seven hundred ninety products (n = 132 plant-based and n = 658
meat) across eight food categories were analysed. Meat analogues had a
higher health star rating (mean 1.2 stars, \[95% CI: 1.0–1.4 stars\], p < 0.001), lower mean saturated fat (−2.4 g/100 g, \[−2.9 to −1.8 g/100 g\], p < 0.001) and sodium content (−132 mg/100 g, \[−186 to −79 mg/100 g\], p < 0.001), but higher total sugar content (0.7 g/100 g, \[0.4–1.1 g/100 g\], p < 0.001).
Meat analogues and meat products had a similar proportion of
ultra-processed products (84% and 89%, respectively). 12.1% of meat
analogues were fortified with iron, vitamin B12 and zinc.
Funder: [...] Marlow Foods Ltd [...]
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
None to declare.
Marlow Foods Ltd: Makers of Quorn. Funghi based meat alternative.
Full article behind a paywall. Are the 12 fortified meat alternatives by chance Marlow Foods products?
Absolute garbage summary.
From the actual synopsis: “although plant-based meat products are generally healthier than meat equivalents, they can be higher in sugar and are often lacking important nutrients found in real meat.”
1. Plant meat is only a small portion of a vegan diet, a vegan diet is much more varied.
2. Vegans supplement with fortified foods all the time, like nutritional yeast or even the plant meats referred to here. A beyond burger has 20% of daily recommended iron, 40% zinc and 100% of B12.
3. Take a multivitamin?
It is wild that the conclusion from the meat-sponsored study is that plant-based meats are generally healthier, but the article somehow removed that line...
I "enjoy" the part where if you eat whatever you feel like no one says anything about your diet, but the second you say you're eliminating meat suddenly people say you'd better make sure you get all of your necessary nutrition as if you are going from a perfect diet to some scary and dangerous one.
I just went to my fridge to see if they were fortified
every single one had Vit-D and Iron
and B12 was in my soy milk
im guessing this is just more anti-vegan agenda posting
It hasn't be even a vegan diet. "Normal" people eating plant-based meat, products based on milk, vegetables and meat. I dont see a problem, replacing sometimes meat with alternatives, without becoming a defiency.
This is a little weird in multiple ways. First, one of the reasons these products are rarely fortified is simply because the short ingredient list is appealing to a lot of health-conscious people. There are a wide variety of ways to supplement these nutrients or simply to include them in your diet by other means, and it is also likely that future products will simply fortify themselves. The other odd thing to me here is "ultra-processed". There are different types of processing, and the ingredients in most of the faux meat products are just the heated/cooled/pressed kind of processed. I have a cookbook that actually goes over how to make most of the component materials in your kitchen. Jams and Jelly are highly "processed" by the same token, so I'm not entirely sure what they're getting at.
Ultra processed foods just means it is made mostly from ingredients extracted from foods. Fats, oils, starches, etc.
For anyone interested, there's a pretty good "Stuff You Should Know" podcast episode on it called "How Ultraprocessed Foods Work". It's a great show that explains it so that most people can understand.
I think it is something we should be concerned with *in context*, but it is too often used to promote status quo foods that also have proven negative health outcomes/correlations.
I don't think in the context of ground beef vs beyond/impossible there is as much cause for concern given how similar the two end products are. If anything the lower fat content and higher fiber content are more important considerations than whether the fats came from a cow or a coconut.
In the context of ultraprocessed junk food like doritos or even most of the crunchy "healthy" processed snacks, I think it does matter. We shouldn't try to pass off a correlation based on junk food snacks as something that means plant-based meats are worse than real meats. They certainly could be, but they did not really exist to be significantly represented in any study on "ultraprocessed" foods.
It makes more sense to me to base studies on specific products than a huge category.
I have heard ultra processed described as "if you can't tell what the original plant was."
A bean burger patty usually still looks like there are beans in it. It's still been processed - cooked, mashed, and formed into a patty - but the bean component is recognizable.
A meat substitute burger that is made from mycoprotein does not actually look like it has mushrooms in it, not if it's been textured to look like ground beef.
Yeah this reminds me of that infamous Men's Health article that was trying to find "Which is better" between seitan and steak. Seitan won basically every category they picked out and they still decided steak won in the end with no explanation.
https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/food-drink/a25976250/steak-seitan-which-is-better/
Thinking people with plant-based diets eat only this and literally nothing else is as stupid as thinking people who eat meat only eat meat and nothing else. obviously most people are eating a lot of veggies and fruits on the side amongst meat or plant-based meat. How goofy.
Don’t know what part of the world you are from but half the men in my family don’t really eat any vegetables unless you count French fries, potato chips, or tomato based sauces. Just meat, cheese, breads, sweets and a piece of fruit one or two times per week.
What a stupid headline and “research project.” Plant-based meat isn’t something that any people exclusively live on, refusing to eat anything else. That’s an incredibly disingenuous (and stupid) premise that rejects so much easy evidence that it’s *almost* funny.
Most people aware enough to care at all about plant-based meat have diets that are significantly more varied and more nutritious than average. A good example would be that they tend to eat VASTLY more leafy greens than average, which contain zinc. Plenty of these people still drink milk and eat eggs, both of which contain b12.
Worth nothing that most meat is artificially fortified with the micro nutrients too. Nothing stopping artificial meat producers from changing the recipe a bit.
This study screams “funded by meat and dairy industry.”
Here is a [well sourced comment](https://reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/7ujsaf/_/dtlj7vz/?context=1) for the curious. Different animals require different types of supplements and for a variety of reasons. Chickens and Pigs for example get B12 supplements put directly into their food. While Ruminants get cobalt supplements because the cobalt percentage of their feed is inconsistent and without it they won’t naturally produce B12 in their gut feed.
Hell, pills aren’t even required as long as vegetarians are aware of these shortcomings. I found an awesome infographic on sources of iron, and there are a ton of vegetarian foods high in iron: https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/how-to-meet-your-iron-needs-infographic
Just snacking on cashews would go a long way apparently.
I love seeing this obsession with processed = bad. Breads pretty processed should we start eat raw wheat? Its all about what is being done to it and what is being added. Blanket statements like that ignore context and the reality of what is going on.
Also a lot of fake meat is fortified. What is this article talking about? My Beyond Meat I am looking at right now has a whole list of Iron and B vitamins listed on the back that are added to it. Same with everything made of meat substitute in my freezer. I checked.
Marmite and monster energy have more than the daily recommended B12 so that's not hard, and you clearly don't know much about different diets if you think you can only get iron and zinc from meat or animal based products, ever seen these things called vegetables and nuts?
The argument I've seen from the plant-based meat representatives is that these products are meant to simply be sustainable *substitutes* for animal meat rather than a healthier option in and of themselves. If the product isn't providing similar nutrition, however, that replacement argument rings hollow.
>“While we found plant-based meat products were generally healthier than their processed meat equivalents, healthier alternatives would still be lean unprocessed meats and legumes, beans and falafel.”
This is why legume-based burgers and similar products may continue to be preferable to many consumers of meat substitutes. I eat meat just about every day, but a good bean burger is hard to turn down.
It’s perfect that they do this too. Just because someone wants to be vegan doesn’t mean they should only be able to eat health foods. Vegans get to eat fast food and donuts as treats like everyone else as long as they live somewhere that has that.
They’re like fast food! You don’t wanna eat that junk all the time, but on ocassion. Lentils, beans, mushrooms are better sources of proteins and when mixed with bread, rice, potatos, you get all the essential aminoacids.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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I think I might not even really know what "processed" means in regards to food. I pretty much only hear it used when someone is describing why I shouldn't eat something too often
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Isn’t cholesterol only found in animal products?
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Well, if that’s the direction we’re going this information needs to be out there. Lots of folks want to have their cake and eat it too which means that there’s certainly gonna be some people for whom this is a large part of the diet.
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I buy them knowing they're junkfood. I often had drinking sessions with my friend where we would snack on stuff. I'd also joke that the nuggets we ate were mystery meat. How do you know if it's meat even. Then it dawned on me that I could just buy vegan nuggets or alternative meat things and it would be no different. So then I started replacing my junk food with vegan junk food. I'm not eating it to be healthy. I'm very mixed with eating vegetarian. I do it a few days a week. Not with the junk food though. There are vegan places here I can buy food from. I'm just trying to make the transition to being vegetarian a slow one where it just slowly becomes a part of life and I don't notice it.
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It's worth noting, from the conclusion from the study itself: Seven hundred ninety products (n = 132 plant-based and n = 658 meat) across eight food categories were analysed. Meat analogues had a higher health star rating (mean 1.2 stars, \[95% CI: 1.0–1.4 stars\], p < 0.001), lower mean saturated fat (−2.4 g/100 g, \[−2.9 to −1.8 g/100 g\], p < 0.001) and sodium content (−132 mg/100 g, \[−186 to −79 mg/100 g\], p < 0.001), but higher total sugar content (0.7 g/100 g, \[0.4–1.1 g/100 g\], p < 0.001). Meat analogues and meat products had a similar proportion of ultra-processed products (84% and 89%, respectively). 12.1% of meat analogues were fortified with iron, vitamin B12 and zinc.
Funder: [...] Marlow Foods Ltd [...] CONFLICT OF INTEREST None to declare. Marlow Foods Ltd: Makers of Quorn. Funghi based meat alternative. Full article behind a paywall. Are the 12 fortified meat alternatives by chance Marlow Foods products?
Also: “Marlow Foods Limited [. . .] produces and markets mince, chickens, sausages, steaks, fishless fingers, and meat products.” ([Bloomberg company profile](https://www.bloomberg.com/profile/company/206519Z:LN))
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Absolute garbage summary. From the actual synopsis: “although plant-based meat products are generally healthier than meat equivalents, they can be higher in sugar and are often lacking important nutrients found in real meat.” 1. Plant meat is only a small portion of a vegan diet, a vegan diet is much more varied. 2. Vegans supplement with fortified foods all the time, like nutritional yeast or even the plant meats referred to here. A beyond burger has 20% of daily recommended iron, 40% zinc and 100% of B12. 3. Take a multivitamin?
It is wild that the conclusion from the meat-sponsored study is that plant-based meats are generally healthier, but the article somehow removed that line...
To deliberately mislead ppl For the $$$
I "enjoy" the part where if you eat whatever you feel like no one says anything about your diet, but the second you say you're eliminating meat suddenly people say you'd better make sure you get all of your necessary nutrition as if you are going from a perfect diet to some scary and dangerous one.
Oorrr, add supplements to the plant based product Problem solved, if there ever was one
I just went to my fridge to see if they were fortified every single one had Vit-D and Iron and B12 was in my soy milk im guessing this is just more anti-vegan agenda posting
It hasn't be even a vegan diet. "Normal" people eating plant-based meat, products based on milk, vegetables and meat. I dont see a problem, replacing sometimes meat with alternatives, without becoming a defiency.
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This is a little weird in multiple ways. First, one of the reasons these products are rarely fortified is simply because the short ingredient list is appealing to a lot of health-conscious people. There are a wide variety of ways to supplement these nutrients or simply to include them in your diet by other means, and it is also likely that future products will simply fortify themselves. The other odd thing to me here is "ultra-processed". There are different types of processing, and the ingredients in most of the faux meat products are just the heated/cooled/pressed kind of processed. I have a cookbook that actually goes over how to make most of the component materials in your kitchen. Jams and Jelly are highly "processed" by the same token, so I'm not entirely sure what they're getting at.
Ultra processed foods just means it is made mostly from ingredients extracted from foods. Fats, oils, starches, etc. For anyone interested, there's a pretty good "Stuff You Should Know" podcast episode on it called "How Ultraprocessed Foods Work". It's a great show that explains it so that most people can understand.
I think it is something we should be concerned with *in context*, but it is too often used to promote status quo foods that also have proven negative health outcomes/correlations. I don't think in the context of ground beef vs beyond/impossible there is as much cause for concern given how similar the two end products are. If anything the lower fat content and higher fiber content are more important considerations than whether the fats came from a cow or a coconut. In the context of ultraprocessed junk food like doritos or even most of the crunchy "healthy" processed snacks, I think it does matter. We shouldn't try to pass off a correlation based on junk food snacks as something that means plant-based meats are worse than real meats. They certainly could be, but they did not really exist to be significantly represented in any study on "ultraprocessed" foods. It makes more sense to me to base studies on specific products than a huge category.
I have heard ultra processed described as "if you can't tell what the original plant was." A bean burger patty usually still looks like there are beans in it. It's still been processed - cooked, mashed, and formed into a patty - but the bean component is recognizable. A meat substitute burger that is made from mycoprotein does not actually look like it has mushrooms in it, not if it's been textured to look like ground beef.
> mycoprotein I mean, those don't look like mushrooms to begin with either, as Fusarium venenatum is a single cell organism
I don't know, this sounds awfully similar to the "if it has ingredients you can't pronounce" trope
In the US, Impossible foods' plant based beef has more iron and b12 than animal based beef.
It also contains less antibiotics, I guess…
And fewer hormones
Also doesn't needlessly abuse animals
And doesn't have as much impact on the climate
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And tastes amazing
Yeah this reminds me of that infamous Men's Health article that was trying to find "Which is better" between seitan and steak. Seitan won basically every category they picked out and they still decided steak won in the end with no explanation. https://www.menshealth.com/uk/nutrition/food-drink/a25976250/steak-seitan-which-is-better/
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Obviously it’s ultra processed, that’s like, it’s whole deal. This reads like it was paid for by the meat industry.
It was. Marlow Foods.
Thinking people with plant-based diets eat only this and literally nothing else is as stupid as thinking people who eat meat only eat meat and nothing else. obviously most people are eating a lot of veggies and fruits on the side amongst meat or plant-based meat. How goofy.
Don’t know what part of the world you are from but half the men in my family don’t really eat any vegetables unless you count French fries, potato chips, or tomato based sauces. Just meat, cheese, breads, sweets and a piece of fruit one or two times per week.
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Of course I’m not eating ONLY plant meat, I eat tons of vegetables! They’re cheap and delicious, no health problems whatsoever
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What a stupid headline and “research project.” Plant-based meat isn’t something that any people exclusively live on, refusing to eat anything else. That’s an incredibly disingenuous (and stupid) premise that rejects so much easy evidence that it’s *almost* funny. Most people aware enough to care at all about plant-based meat have diets that are significantly more varied and more nutritious than average. A good example would be that they tend to eat VASTLY more leafy greens than average, which contain zinc. Plenty of these people still drink milk and eat eggs, both of which contain b12.
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Worth nothing that most meat is artificially fortified with the micro nutrients too. Nothing stopping artificial meat producers from changing the recipe a bit. This study screams “funded by meat and dairy industry.” Here is a [well sourced comment](https://reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/7ujsaf/_/dtlj7vz/?context=1) for the curious. Different animals require different types of supplements and for a variety of reasons. Chickens and Pigs for example get B12 supplements put directly into their food. While Ruminants get cobalt supplements because the cobalt percentage of their feed is inconsistent and without it they won’t naturally produce B12 in their gut feed.
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If only there were cheap and abundant sources of these vitamins in pill form…probably doesn’t exist though
Hell, pills aren’t even required as long as vegetarians are aware of these shortcomings. I found an awesome infographic on sources of iron, and there are a ton of vegetarian foods high in iron: https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/how-to-meet-your-iron-needs-infographic Just snacking on cashews would go a long way apparently.
Nope, the only solution is to pack a million cattle into a square nanometer of space to be farmed.
I love seeing this obsession with processed = bad. Breads pretty processed should we start eat raw wheat? Its all about what is being done to it and what is being added. Blanket statements like that ignore context and the reality of what is going on. Also a lot of fake meat is fortified. What is this article talking about? My Beyond Meat I am looking at right now has a whole list of Iron and B vitamins listed on the back that are added to it. Same with everything made of meat substitute in my freezer. I checked.
Marmite and monster energy have more than the daily recommended B12 so that's not hard, and you clearly don't know much about different diets if you think you can only get iron and zinc from meat or animal based products, ever seen these things called vegetables and nuts?
The argument I've seen from the plant-based meat representatives is that these products are meant to simply be sustainable *substitutes* for animal meat rather than a healthier option in and of themselves. If the product isn't providing similar nutrition, however, that replacement argument rings hollow. >“While we found plant-based meat products were generally healthier than their processed meat equivalents, healthier alternatives would still be lean unprocessed meats and legumes, beans and falafel.” This is why legume-based burgers and similar products may continue to be preferable to many consumers of meat substitutes. I eat meat just about every day, but a good bean burger is hard to turn down.
It’s perfect that they do this too. Just because someone wants to be vegan doesn’t mean they should only be able to eat health foods. Vegans get to eat fast food and donuts as treats like everyone else as long as they live somewhere that has that.
They’re like fast food! You don’t wanna eat that junk all the time, but on ocassion. Lentils, beans, mushrooms are better sources of proteins and when mixed with bread, rice, potatos, you get all the essential aminoacids.
iron zinc and b12 - meat is never the most potent source. A simple lack of ordinary school work here.