Yellow Pea Protein, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).
Except for Vinegar, every one of these is an industrially processed/extracted/refined ingredient that humans never ate until within the last ~50 years.
We have no way to even know if many of these are safe let alone healthy.
I don't know of any evidence that these things are a decent substitute for meat and salt which humans have been eating for our entire history. And for those who actually believe animal fat and salt are unhealthy one could make burgers with lean meat and less or no salt.
Humans have been eating some of these for thousands of years. I know "extract" is a scary big scientific word, but most of the time it's just immersing the grain in hot water, strain it to remove the pulp, then boiling the liquid to concentrate it. You can separate the starch and protein from any bean or grain in your kitchen with some basic kitchen equipment and hot water.
Pea starch might be the most benign of all of these. I'm not making an argument that pea starch is bad either, just that it's not quite the same as peas, and isn't quite the same as home-made pea starch, and we don't really know if this is a problem.
For example, with pea starch, they use defoaming agents like siloxanes, as well as sulfur dioxide, sodium hydroxide, and others. And, because it's a concentrate of just part of the plant, you might get a heavier dose of pesticides or heavy metals depending on what part of the plant these bind with. (Sure, if you eat equal portions of each part of the plant, extracted, this factor would balance out.)
There's a spectrum of course with these things. Some things like refined oils might be far more harmful than the extracted starches based on the chemistry I've looked into. I'm not particularly afraid of pea starch but I just don't buy or eat processed food generally unless I'm in a pinch.
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.
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.
By this logic, you shouldn't eat modern meat, as its very different from the one our ancestors were eating. Modern meat is mostly fat
This is an argument that no white people should be eating pineapples, mangos, bananas, kiwifruit, etc. Hell, probably not even apples.
I‘m pretty sure humans eat potato, rice, peas etc. since a pretty long time.
I‘m also pretty sure that the meat our ancestors ate is a lit different from the meat we have now coming from animals optimized for meat production and fed with whatever produces the most meat and costs the least (mad cow disease anyone?).Not to mention the amount of meat we eat today compared to back then.
The problem with processed food isn’t that it is processed but that it makes it easy to consume too much
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.
Not to mention all cooking really is is a bunch of refinement, extraction, chemical reaction, and heating processes anyway. I refine & extract & process in my kitchen all the time, including separating protein in milk (cheeses) or wheat flour (chaap, seitan, or for the starch) for example.
what absurd scaremongering! Do you know how yellow pea protein, for example, is "refined"?
You take dried peas and grind them into powder. Pop in a centrifuge to separate protein from starch. Not exactly pumped full of "toxins"!
> Avocado Oil
You literally press avocado flesh. It's been done for centuries. It's not some crazy refinement process.
> brown rice protein
This is just ground up rice mixed with amylase or protease to isolate the proteins. There's nothing scary here. We've been eating it for millennia.
etc
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/study-finds-82-percent-avo...
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
If I see "avocado oil" as an ingredient, sure it could be simply pressed avocado flesh. But it could also be a rancid hexane-refined oil potentially cut with other stuff, and I'd bet that's more likely because it's probably a lot cheaper for the manufacturer.
I don't know as much about how the starches and proteins are extracted, I'd bet it's more benign, but there are added chemicals - even if they are considered safe, it's still not quite the same as eating actual peas and rice.
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.
TBH, I haven't heard the complaints about the use of "oil" in that context.
