Plant-based ultraprocessed foods linked to heart disease, early death, study says | CNN
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Eating plant-based ultraprocessed foods raise the risk of heart disease and early death, but there’s an easy fix, a new study found.

plant based alternatives are pretty good for reducing calories or inflammation in my experience.

Ultra processed foods are unsurprisingly (but disappointingly) still bad.

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    Completely agree. This needs to be better communicated. Vegan junk food is not meant to be healthy, it’s meant to be ethical.

    This whole subject is a misunderstanding.

    PS: I would go further and suggest that vegans stop insisting that a vegan diet is more healthy in itself. In the absolute, it clearly is not. Perhaps vegans are generally healthier eaters than non-vegans, but that’s because they pay more attention to food in general, not because they are vegan. In other words, the healthiness argument is a conflation of cause and correlation. I don’t think that this disingenuity helps anyone in the end.

    • rbnEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      A vegan diet is definetely not healthy by definition but for many specific products I would still argue that the vegan version is indeed healthier. And especially for junk food. If you take sausages for example, then both versions - let’s say pork and soy/wheat - contain plenty of fat and salt. But meat products have…

      1. Worse kinds of fat (meat contains mostly saturated fat while plants often have a better balance of saturated and unsaturated fats)
      2. The risk to contain nitrosamines which are definitely known to have a negative health impact.

      Animal based food on the other hand has better protein quality. E.g. eggs or meat contain a way better composition of amino acids than soy, wheat, peas etc. alone. This negative aspect of a vegan diet can be compensated by combining various different sources of protein (e.g. a mix potatoes, spinach, beans, peas and soy in one meal rather than just soy).

      This obviously can be done but it requires some knowledge, practice and more time if you want to prepare everything yourself. Using pre-processed food can make things way easier, more convenient and not necessarily unhealthy. If you can buy a healthy vegan something that tastes good, has similar nutrients like an egg and doesn’t take hours to prepare that’ll make the transition for people a lot easier. If you give them complex recipes and long tables instead of what should be combined with what, it will scare off many folks.

      Therefore, if we want more people to go vegan in a we shouldn’t object pre-processed food in general. We should rather praise manufacturers that manage to produce healthy substitutes. Without adding loads of sugar, cheap fats etc. There’s nothing wrong with large-scale food processing in general.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        Agreed on all that. Interesting points about sausages. My simplistic assumption has been that animal-based junk food is probably nutritionally superior to plant-based junk food not because of its protein but rather because of the sheer variety of molecules that animals contain by virtue of being higher up the trophic pyramid. I still think that’s generally true but thanks for pointing out those qualifiers.

        To be clear, ethically vegan food is superior across the board.