If you have a specific disease its one thing but please do not advocate and claim what is healthy or not for most people based on that. Many vegi burgers that people would eat as replacements are far more unhealthy.
No one is forced to eat an unhealthy burger. Advertise the unhealthy burgers as unhealthy, increase demand for healthy burger (or healthier, since there might not really be a healthy burger).
Advertise the sugar and sodium and carb and sat content prominently.
They are healthier than burgers (barely), but that's a really low bar. They are not health foods, and nobody is eating them because they think that they are.
I just think the tone of your overall argument is too alarmist. I eat processed foods from time to time - cookies, potato chips, hot dogs, ice cream, McDonald's etc. They aren't in my regular diet but if the situation is right I'll eat it, I don't think they are unhealthy because my body can probably cope with whatever is unhealthy in them, just like I drink alcohol from time to time but I don't do it on a daily basis.
I don't think anyone is advertising cookies, potato chips or ice cream as healthy diet choices. McDonald's has some actually balanced things on their menus (from macro nutrient perspective) like their breakfast egg burger was ~25g of protein/carb/fat - but if you order 3 + 1/2 liter of cola and fries along with that then yeah it's not going to be good for you.
The custom of serving them with french fried potatoes and a milkshake or cola gives them a bit of guilt by association, but meat, some cheese, some vegetables, and a serving of bread? Don't see an issue at all.
In the end though, it's just food. I could launch a kickstarter campaign that sold veggie shakes and claim it makes people feel healthier when they drink them and it would be no more harmful than this campaign.
You seem to possess a dogmatised notion of "healthy food." Burgers, even the over-processed fast-food kind, stack up pretty well as these things go. It's the fries and Coke that'll destroy you. And if a salad gets you down, it may benefit with more oil or cheese. Understanding the relationships between carbs, fats, salt, and spices is most of what you need to make something taste good.
"Healthy" just means that the food is beneficial and doesn't harm you. To know with some real certainty that something is or isn't harmful you have to run your own tests: The effects of sesame oil vs. olive oil, more butter vs. more sugar, etc. Given the speed at which dietary guidelines change, the facts and hard rules should be given less weight than your own feelings and behavior post-consumption.
Just about any food is potentially unhealthy if not consumed in moderation. A bag of potato chips and a Coke now and then isn't going to kill anyone. But a couple bags and half a dozen cans a day sure isn't good for you. And a porterhouse steak every day probably isn't that great for you either.
Put another way, health is very multi-dimensional. I'm quite confident that an Impossible Burger is healthier along some dimensions, and a beef burger healthier along others.
Food marketers are experts at exploiting this: if a food is unhealthier in 397 different ways but healthier in 1, then guess what gets highlighted on the packaging....
The way I’ve always said it is that individual foods are neither healthy nor unhealthy in and of themselves and our insistence on treating them as though they are is what leads to the ridiculous heralding of new “superfoods” du jour like spirulina, kale, wheatgrass, açaí, chia seeds, ad nauseum.
It’s diets which are healthy or unhealthy, not individual foods. Swapping in kale for iceberg lettuce or açaí instead of blueberries is not going to statistically improve anyone’s health or wellbeing.
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