Plant-based dudes had reason to rejoice when the Impossible Whopper debuted in 2019. The sandwich was a take on Burger King’s classic, but with the traditional beef patty replaced with one of the alternative patties made by Impossible Foods. Imitation meats, ones made from pea or soy protein instead of the flesh of slaughtered cows, proliferated in the years since. It’s not difficult to find alt-meats in the place of old-fashioned burgers, as well as of pork, sausage, meatballs, and chicken.
They’re pretty convincing when it comes to taste. (Even cattle rancher Glenn Beck couldn’t tell the difference.) So naturally one begins to wonder: Are fake meats better for you than the real deal? And are they really more nutritious because plants make up the foundation?
“People often think a plant-based diet is better for you, but it really depends on what plant-based foods you eat,” says David Julian McClements, a professor in the department of food science at the University of Massachusetts. “In general, it depends on how they're designed.”
Making ‘Meat’
Unlike other plant-based burgers, the ones made of mashed-up black beans, the patties created by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are going for the same taste and mouthfeel as an all-beef patty. They’ll use either soy or pea protein as the base, but then add in other ingredients: there’s usually some type of fat, like a coconut oil or palm oil, to help match the soft texture of meat; a thickener to bind it together so that the patty doesn’t fall apart when it’s squeezed; and oftentimes natural or artificial flavors to help give a meaty taste. Combine all of that, and, voila, there are your plant-based “meats.”
Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat add in vitamins and minerals that are typically found in 100-percent beef: niacin, zinc, vitamins A, D, and B12. Impossible Foods also includes heme, which is made by fermenting yeast, which adds iron to its products. Because they’re plant-based, there’s naturally more dietary fiber in these alt-meats as well.
Good For Us Doesn’t Mean Good For You
Whether plant-based meats are better for you in a nutritional sense is usually where things get blurry. Many people draw a line between how these alt-meats are produced and their relative healthfulness, says John Coupland, a food science professor at Penn State. So because these alt-meats don’t come from cows, consumers tend to view them as healthier.
The truth is a little more complicated. “What sort of nutrients are in each of these things? The fake meat may be marginally worse,” Coupland says. “The question then is if I choose to eat this, will it fit into a broadly sensible diet?”
It’s certainly true that alt-meats are more processed than a beef burger, as they have comparable levels of sodium and saturated fats—and for that reason, there are people who argue that the alt-meats are worse for you. “I’m not convinced that’s a particularly good argument in this case,” says Coupland.
A processed food we should avoid (or eat less of) is something like Cheez-Its. But applying that same criterion to two burgers, “there’s not an obvious difference between them,” Coupland adds.
It's easy to cherry-pick studies to support how you already feel about fake meat. Let’s say you’re someone who thinks plant-based meats are a poor alternative for real beef or chicken. You’d have a lot of help in the form of a study published this year in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The top line: Protein peptides from real chicken are more water-soluble in the human gut, which just means they have an easier time making their way into your cells to help your body do things like rebuild and maintain muscle.
Now let’s say you’re all in on that Impossible Whopper. A small study conducted at Stanford University in 2020 found that participants who ate plant-based Beyond Meat had lower levels of TMAO (trimethylamine N-oxide), a gut molecule associated with cardiovascular disease. The people who ate the plant-based meats also experienced a drop of 10 milligrams per deciliter in their LDL levels, the bad cholesterol, a decrease that the researchers called clinically significant.
A Burger’s A Burger
McClements says the extremes on both sides of that argument are far too broad to do anyone any good. There’s just not enough of a deciding factor in either direction to say, “Fake meat is better for you,” any more than there is enough to say, “Real meat is better for you.”
Where there is a meaningful potential difference in the two is in the composition of plant-based meats. You start from scratch and can make anything you want. “What I’m arguing,” McClements says, “is that if we’re going to make this transition to plant-based foods, that we do it in a way that’s going to have positive health benefits.”
Over time, it might be the case that an alt-meat is objectively healthier. But, for now, a burger is a burger. And we should all be eating more whole foods and fiber anyway.