Are burgers made from plants better for you than beef burgers? Scientists have found that in most cases, plant-based meat substitutes - or “alt-meat” - can improve some measures of your metabolic health, most notably LDL cholesterol, the kind that’s associated with heart disease. Companies like California’s Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods often tout the health benefits of their foods. But whether you see any health improvements will depend on the brand of alt-meat you choose and what exactly it’s replacing in your diet.
The best plant proteins are whole foods such as beans, lentils, chickpeas, peanuts, almonds, walnuts and seeds, but plant meats can be a good choice for people who want to cut back on the amount of beef and pork in their diets for health or environmental reasons, said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“Ideally, we’d like to see people switching to whole-food plant sources of protein,” he said. “But there’s a reality factor that a lot of people can’t make that leap all at once, and so having these alternatives is a good thing. They can be quite a bit better than the real thing.
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