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What makes them bad for your health? I wouldn't eat them except as a one off experiment, since I'm an unapologetic meat eater, but I haven't heard that claim before.
Eyeballing the ingredients, it looks like the beyond burger is about 15-20% seed oils. That completely rules it out in my book.
What's your beef (rimshot) with seed oils?
I think they're the cause of the obesity epidemic and the main cause of chronic disease.
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Seed oils are a meme, the evidence against them is limited. Some of the most ‘ultra processed’ foods are vegan foods, but they’re also stuff like salami made using the traditional method, packed full of sodium nitrate. We don’t know, it’s like microplastics, there’s a lot of supposition bur the assumption is they’re probably deleterious in some way.
Ah, so more naturalist fallacies at work.
I do like the joke about Oreos being completely vegan and therefore a health food. Always gets a chuckle out of me.
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Beyond burgers are an ultra-high processed food
The first three ingredients are pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, and refined coconut oil. The rest is the usual assortment of flavors and additives.
In my opinion, the taste is mostly okay especially if paired with a good bun and tomato. But the terrible health profile make them a no-go for me.
I have always found the "ultra-processed" definition lacking. I don't doubt the conclusions generally, but "processed" is a very broad definition, and I think deserves a closer set of guidelines: hydrogenated oils, breaded-and-fried foods, and such are far worse than, say, hummus, which is "processed" by pureeing a few fairly-healthy ingredients. I think it'd be a lot clearer to grade processes rather than count them.
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Coconuts are obviously seeds, but are peas? What about other legumes?
Asking because of the “seed oil” comment above. The real percentage could be much higher if we count peas.
Seed oil in practice seems to just refer to polyunsaturated fats, which is probably listed on the nutrition label.
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I haven't looked into this deeply, but I recall when Impossible and Beyond were first coming out, all promotional material conspicuously ignored commenting on how healthy the food was, which is highly unusual for a plant-based meat-imitation product, and all independent analysis tended to point out that they were, pound-for-pound, less healthy than actual meat. This led me to conclude that they were almost definitely at most as healthy as regular meat and likely less healthy, even if I don't recall what the exact reason was; I think higher saturated fat than regular meat?
That would be highly unusual because saturated fat mostly comes from animal products. It’s probably high levels of polyunsaturated fat, which vegan food in general uses immense amounts of.
Coconut oil in particular is mostly saturated fat
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It also depends on what you mean by “healthy”. Plants simply don’t contain all of the necessary nutrients humans need.
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