The Processing Question: What Vegan, Vegetarian, and Meat-Eating Diets All Get Wrong About "Processed"

A Ranch Table Club editorial

Somebody eats a Beyond Burger and calls it health food. Somebody else eats a ribeye and gets told they're killing themselves. Both of them are working off half the picture.

We wanted to know what actually happens inside the bodies and the shopping carts of people eating vegetarian, vegan, and omnivorous diets, once you strip away the marketing on both sides. So, we went and read the studies. Not press releases about the studies. The studies.

Here's what we found, and here's where it leads.

Going plant-based doesn't mean going less processed

Most people assume cutting out meat automatically means eating cleaner. The numbers don't back that up, and they haven't for a while.

In 2021, researchers working from France's NutriNet-Santé database — one of the largest diet-tracking cohorts in Europe — split over 21,000 adults into meat-eaters, pesco-vegetarians, vegetarians, and vegans, then measured what share of their daily calories came from ultra-processed foods. Meat-eaters sat at 33%. Pesco-vegetarians came in a touch lower, at 32.5%. Vegetarians jumped to 37%. Vegans topped the list at 39.5%. The jump was driven almost entirely by plant-based meat and dairy substitutes (Gehring et al., Journal of Nutrition, 2021).

A newer study out of Kiel University in Germany, published in Scientific Reports in early 2025, followed 142 first-year college students and found something a little different: ultra-processed foods made up roughly 49% of daily calories across the board, with no meaningful difference between vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores. The Kiel researchers noted this actually contradicted the French findings — in their sample, cutting animal products out didn't push processed-food intake up or down (Fedde et al., Scientific Reports, 2025).

We're not going to pretend these two studies agree, because they don't. What they do agree on is the baseline: ultra-processed food is eating up close to half of daily calories no matter which diet camp you're in. The UK Biobank, tracking nearly 200,000 adults, found ultra-processed foods made up more than 46% of daily energy intake across every dietary pattern studied, vegan included, though in that dataset vegetarians ran about 1.3 percentage points higher than regular red-meat eaters, and vegans came out statistically even with them (UK Biobank analysis, eClinicalMedicine, 2024).

Put plainly: nobody's diet gets a free pass on processing just by picking a label.

Why the substitute aisle does this

It isn't a mystery. A burger built to replace a burger, a cheese built to replace cheese, a milk built to replace milk — none of that starts as a whole food. It starts as isolated protein, engineered fat, texturizers, and flavor chemistry built to fool your mouth. Researchers in Norway sat down with vegetarians and vegans and asked them directly what they thought counted as ultra-processed in their own diet. Almost everyone pointed straight at the substitute products — the fake meats, the fake cheeses — even while admitting those products made plant-based living a lot more convenient (Haneberg et al., BMC Nutrition, 2024).

A can of black beans is vegan. So is a Beyond Burger. One is a whole food. The other is a lab-engineered stand-in wearing the same dietary label. That distinction gets lost constantly on both sides of this argument.

What's actually sitting in the top-selling products

U.S. retail sales of plant-based foods hit $7.9 billion in 2025, with plant-based milk and plant-based meat the two biggest categories (Good Food Institute, 2026 market data). Here's what's typically inside the best-sellers:

Plant burgers and ground substitutes from brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods usually carry more sodium than a plain beef patty and comparable or higher saturated fat, mostly from coconut oil. Protein numbers often look fine on the label, but the iron and zinc in these products come from plant sources, which the body absorbs less efficiently than the iron and zinc in meat.

Flavored plant milks lean on gums and stabilizers to hold their texture together. Soy milk gets closest to matching dairy's protein content. Almond and oat milk fall well short of it, which matters if someone's swapping milk 1-for-1 without adjusting protein somewhere else in the day.

Plant-based cheese is frequently built from modified starch and coconut oil instead of fermented milk protein. It contributes almost no protein and carries real sodium and saturated fat.

Breaded, fried substitutes — nuggets and tenders — follow the same script as any breaded, fried food, plant-based or not: solid protein, high sodium, refined starch.

None of that makes these products dangerous. It just means "plant-based" and "healthy" aren't the same word, no matter how the packaging reads.

What deserves credit on the plant-based side

Tofu is coagulated soy milk. Tempeh is fermented whole soybeans, and it's currently the fastest-growing meat-substitute category on the market. Seitan is cooked wheat gluten. Lentils and other legumes are just lentils and other legumes. None of these are ultra-processed. All of them carry real protein, real fiber, and none of the sodium load that comes with the engineered substitutes.

A vegetarian or vegan diet built around tofu, tempeh, seitan, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and produce sidesteps almost everything we just described. The health case for plant-forward eating is real. It just lives in the produce aisle and the bulk bin, not the freezer case.

Does the processing level actually matter for your body

This is where it stops being an argument about labels and starts being an argument about biology.

Florida Atlantic University researchers pulled data on 9,254 U.S. adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and looked at high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, a well-established marker of chronic, low-grade inflammation and a strong predictor of heart disease. People in the group eating 60 to 79% of their daily calories from ultra-processed food had an 11% higher likelihood of elevated inflammation markers than the group eating the least, even after adjusting for age, smoking, and activity level. People in the moderate-intake group, 40 to 59%, actually showed a 14% higher likelihood. The senior author on that study went as far as comparing the ultra-processed food industry to the tobacco industry of decades past, in terms of scale and influence (Ferris et al., American Journal of Medicine, 2025; FAU News, 2025).

A study of adolescents in São Luís, Brazil found the same kind of association between ultra-processed food intake and inflammatory markers and proposed a mechanism: these foods tend to run high in sugar and saturated fat while running low in fiber, protein, and micronutrients, a combination that can switch on inflammatory pathways in the body.

Neither of those studies sorted people by whether their ultra-processed food was plant-based or animal-based. The inflammation signal tracks with how processed the food is. It does not care what the label on the box says. A processed veggie patty and a hot dog are cousins in this literature, not opposites.

Where the science stops being settled

It would be just as dishonest to swing this the other way and claim the inflammation research settles the meat-versus-plant debate. It doesn't. That's a separate question, resting on separate evidence — cardiovascular risk data, colorectal cancer associations tied specifically to processed red meat, nutrient bioavailability research — and serious people land in different places on it.

There's also money on both sides of this fight, and it's worth naming plainly. A February 2025 paper in the Journal of Food Science argued that the Nova classification system unfairly lumps soy milk and plant-based meat substitutes into the same bucket as soda, simply because they're made from concentrated plant protein. That's a real methodological point. It also came from Mark Messina, Director of Nutrition Science and Research for the Soy Nutrition Institute Global, which is funded by the United Soybean Board — disclosed right in the paper itself. Meat-industry-funded research carries its own version of the same problem. Read nutrition claims from either direction with that in mind.

Where this actually lands

If you've gone vegetarian or vegan, good for you. That's your call to make, and there's a real, legitimate health case behind whole-food plant eating when it's built on beans, lentils, tofu, tempeh, whole grains, nuts, and produce.

If you eat animal protein — beef, chicken, lamb, goat, fish, wild game — also good. You don't owe anyone an apology for that either.

What you don't have to do is trade one for the other because a trend told you to. The research doesn't support "plant-based" as a health halo, and it doesn't support "animal protein is the enemy" as gospel truth. The line that actually matters runs between whole food and reconstructed food, not between vegan and omnivore. A grass-fed steak, a dozen eggs, a block of tofu, and a bag of lentils sit on the same side of that line. A Beyond Burger, a slice of plant cheese, a hot dog, and a bag of fried nuggets sit on the other side, whatever protein happens to be hiding inside them.

That's the ground Ranch Table Club stands on. Pasture-raised, minimally processed animal protein, not because plant-based eating is wrong, but because whole food is the right answer no matter which diet you've chosen, and the research backs that up either way.

Sources

Gehring, J., Touvier, M., Baudry, J., Julia, C., Buscail, C., et al. "Consumption of Ultra-Processed Foods by Pesco-Vegetarians, Vegetarians, and Vegans: Associations with Duration and Age at Diet Initiation." Journal of Nutrition, 151(1), 120-131, 2021. DOI: 10.1093/jn/nxaa196

Fedde, S., Wiessner, M., Haegele, F.A., Mueller, M.J., Bosy-Westphal, A. "Ultra-processed foods and plant-based alternatives impair nutritional quality of omnivorous and plant-forward dietary patterns in college students." Scientific Reports, 15, 4233, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-88578-0

"Plant-based dietary patterns and ultra-processed food consumption: a cross-sectional analysis of the UK Biobank." eClinicalMedicine, 2024.

Haneberg, J., Molin, M., Byfuglien, M.G., Garnweidner-Holme, L. "Vegetarians' and vegans' experiences with and attitudes towards ultra-processed foods (UPF): a qualitative study." BMC Nutrition, 10(1), 121, 2024. DOI: 10.1186/s40795-024-00925-y

Good Food Institute. "US retail market insights for the plant-based industry," 2026.

Ferris, A.H., Hennekens, C.H., et al. "Ultra-processed foods and increased high sensitivity C-reactive protein." American Journal of Medicine, 2025; Florida Atlantic University News, September 9, 2025.

"Intake of ultra-processed foods is associated with inflammatory markers in Brazilian adolescents." Sao Luis, Maranhao cohort.

Messina, M., Messina, V. "Nova fails to appreciate the value of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives in the diet." Journal of Food Science, 90, e70039, 2025.