I certainly understand why people like meat substitutes.
These products are created to simulate meat or dairy, and in order to do so they undergo a lot of changes and additions. I have never been a fan of most store-bought vegan burgers, cheeses, buttery spreads and other substitutes for animal products as they are mainly processed foods containing ingredients that aren’t health-supportive. Soy was basically the plasticine of the vegan food industry, shaped into tofu burgers, tofu dogs, soy margarine and ‘chickn’ nuggets. At the time, there were a bunch of dairy-free and vegan products and most meat substitutes were made from soy and vital wheat gluten (aka seitan). You can read about everything I did here or listen to this episode of the Today Is The Day Podcast. When I began my health journey to address my diagnosis of Crohn’s disease naturally, I turned to a whole foods diet. Yes, its active component is originally derived from willow bark, but would you call Aspirin a natural remedy? Where a food originates from, and what it actually is when you’re about to bite into it are not the same thing. It’s about the same as calling Aspirin a natural remedy. It is a mash of processed plant-derived ingredients. That being said, Beyond Meat is very far removed from anything even remotely related to a living plant or whole food. I wholeheartedly believe we all need to eat more plants. The curriculum of my school, the Academy of Culinary Nutrition, is primarily focused on plant-rich eating and is inclusive of all whole-food based dietary philosophies. I aim to eat locally and consume foods with minimal packaging involved. And in the last few years, I’ve transitioned to more of a plant-rich, paleo approach while keeping sustainability at the forefront of my decisions. At times it may have fallen under the label of plant-based whole foods, vegetarian, and vegan. I have eaten all manners of ways along my health journey. They’ve got fancy packaging, extremely fancy and sophisticated marketing and are throwing around their claims of the health benefits of going vegan, and the apparent low environmental footprint of their vegan ‘meat’ products. They’ve pulled the vegan burger out from under the crunchy/hippie stereotype that has followed most vegan food around for the last thirty years. I thought it time to share my final word on Beyond Meat and answer the question: Is the Beyond Meat vegan burger healthy?īeyond Meat is positioned as the vegan burger that will save us all.
But I get a lot of questions from people asking for my thoughts on Beyond Meat (or other meat substitutes) and whether it’s actually as healthy and good for the planet as the marketing and media make it out to be. I didn’t want to deal with the haters that I got when I shared facts about Arbonne, Soylent, and Nutella. I tried to avoid writing about the Beyond Meat burgers.
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