You can make an awesome burger pattie with beef, onion, garlic, a touch of finely chopped jalapeno and some herbs and spices etc. You don't need to add salt.

I have made burgers hundreds if not thousands of times and I have never done more than roll ground beef into a ball ans squish it flat. Salt and spices are completely unnecessarily, who am I, Gordon Ramsey? Sliced onion on top of the patty does plenty of work.

You don't need salt and spices to make a burger, it can be 100% beef with no additives. A pinch of salt can be like 0.3g/burger and you're fine as well.

I don't eat that these days, my burgers are actually 25% beef and 75% lentil/seasoning. Still under 0.5g/100g

A burger can be made from that solitary ingredient though.

If they're selling in a supermarket, it's more than fair to compare them to those offerings.

Who's buying Burger King more than grocery shopping?

I'm probably similar to you re: diet, but...

If I eat perfectly clean for 90% of my diet and then I consume poison for the remaining 10%, that's still doing some damage.

You can, however, be happy with the fact that 10% is better than 50%.

Health conscious vege here, I'd never touch these things with a 10 ft pole when I can make a bean patty burger or halloumi burger for 50% of the price and 300% of the flavor

> I get micronutrients from other sources

Looks like agree that it's not great but you compensate elsewhere. If you chose the "hard way" of limiting your menu to vegan why not pick the options with less compromises? Even paper can be food as long as you compensate elsewhere.

> Something is only unhealthy or healthy in light of everything else you eat. It's reductive to say otherwise.

Are you maybe conflating "unhealthy" with "not explicitly healthy"? Plenty of foods are unequivocally unhealthy, anything else you eat will not compensate. You don't "compensate" for eating a lot of ultraprocessed food because some of the contents of that food should not be in your body at all. You can't always "subtract" by eating other food. Not saying this is the case for you and these burgers.

> people who are not panicly afraid of "ultra processed" food and generally don't consider food processing to be a sin

If you're not you should, colon cancer is becoming a leading cause of death in people under 40...

https://www.cancerresearch.org/blog/colorectal-cancer-awaren...

https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/0...

There are different classes of food processing, with very different properties.

The kinds of food processing methods that remove from raw food the parts that are unhealthy or undesirable cannot have in principle any kind of harmful effect, when the processed food is used correctly. They may have only an indirect harmful effect because the availability of pure food ingredients may enable some people to use such processed food in an incorrect way, by making food that has an unbalanced composition, for instance food that has too much sugar.

On the other hand, the food processing methods that cause irreversible transformations of food, i.e. mixing various ingredients and/or using certain food treatments, e.g. heating, are quite likely to have harmful effects on food quality, when they are done in an industrial setting, instead of being done at home. The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost. So any useless or even harmful ingredients will be used if those reduce the production cost, as long as the food still looks appetizing and it has a good taste provided e.g. by excessive sugar, salt and bad quality fat.

So the problem is less that food processing methods are bad per se. The problem is that most producers of processed food cannot be trusted to use processing methods that are good for the customer, instead of being good only for the producer. Now there are a lot of regulations that prevent some of the most harmful methods of food adulteration that were used in the past, but they are still not severe enough to ensure that every producer makes healthy food.

They must be panicly afraid of salt and saturated fat instead then, since that was OP's argument for "health conscious". Yet still insist on a simulacrum of a burger, instead of having a chicken breast.

This product will only succeed if its reasonably cheaper than the cheapest meat (not just beef). It is and forever will be inferior to meat as a food product for the vast majority of consumers. Perhaps in some vision of the future the dominant consumer is Hindu and they may find the product acceptable, but they'll still be price conscious.

Ultra processed foods are tied with a myriad of health conditions.

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...

Please tell the British Heart Foundation that they're "the crazy kind of health conscious" :-)

[dead]

The dose makes the poison.

People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.

Dog meat is pretty good.

(It also amuses me when vegans retreat to xenophobia as their Motte.)

> Have you tried dog meat?

I'd like to try one day. But I don't think I'd easily find a butcher selling it here in Western Europe

Every single study I've seen so far on this topic conflates "red meat" and "processed meat".

I would argue that modern processed meat may well be really bad for us.

I imagine that burned/charred meat is carcinogenic too, same as burnt/charred anything is.

If there's a well constructed study that actually suggests that natural red meat is bad or causes cancer, please give a link and I'll look, I genuinely want to know.

I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that modern factory farmed red meat has stuff in it that's toxic, where say wild venison might not.

I won't disagree on harm to animal, I'm not a fan of industrial animal ag, etc.

> That there is sufficient evidence that red meat causes cancer in humans

By a barely measurable amount. No-one is ever going to die of cancer caused by eating red meat. You are far more likely to die of heart disease than any sort of cancer, and after that you are far more likely to die in a car accident because you were distracted by your phone (doesn't matter if you were driving the car, or walked out in front of a car because you were too busy scrolling on your phone, in this case). Cancer is waaaay down the list.

> You also have to consider that you eating meat does quite a lot of harm to the animal

Yeah, bit of a shame that. You have to give them the best life you possibly can. But, without livestock farming there is no arable farming, so what are you going to do?

> Have you tried dog meat?

No, because dogs are carnivores and carnivores tend to taste bad.

No reason? How about financial incentives?

I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.

But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:

1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.

2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.

3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.

4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.

5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.

6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.

Potato != extracted potato starch

Peas != extracted pea protein

They're not the same thing.

I do agree that wild meat is probably a lot healthier than modern industrially farmed meat. Just as wild plants are probably often a lot healthier than modern monocropped plants grown with synthetic fertilizers rather than healthy soil.

About as funny as complaining "oil" is used to refer to petroleum-based lubricants, avocado oil, etc. since the etymology of "oil" is strictly a reference to olive oil only.

I can't stand this type of thing, just like people who get upset at terms like "oat milk" or "soy milk."

Not really a dig at you, sorry.

As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.

I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.

My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o

EDIT: grammatical cleanup

I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore

Please don't post snark like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.

Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.

There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5

I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients