From vegoutmag.com
By Maya Flores
They look wholesome, they sound virtuous—but under the label, they’re just junk food in a plant-based disguise
When I first went vegan, I bought vegan chicken nuggets every week for three months before I read the back of the box. The sodium content was higher than the regular chicken I'd stopped eating.
That's when I started checking labels on everything. Turns out, a lot of vegan products I'd been treating as health foods were just processed foods wearing a plant-based badge. Higher sugar than expected. More salt than made sense. Ingredient lists that looked like chemistry homework.
The plant-based label had given me permission to stop asking questions. I wasn't alone in this—nutritionists have been pointing it out for years, but the message gets buried under marketing about saving the planet and eating clean.
1. Plant-based burgers with more sodium than potato chips
Nearly 400mg of sodium per patty. That's what I found when I finally checked the label on a popular plant-based burger—about as much as a serving of chips.
Many plant-based meat alternatives contain significantly more sodium than ground beef. Some pack 370mg per 4-ounce serving, compared to 75mg in lean beef. The salt creates that savoury, meat-like flavour, but if you're eating these a few times a week, you're getting close to half your daily sodium limit from what you thought was the healthy option.
2. Vegan cheese that's mostly oil and starch
The ingredient list on most vegan cheese reads like a chemistry experiment. Refined coconut oil, tapioca starch, modified food starch, natural flavours, lactic acid, xanthan gum, guar gum.
Where's the nutrition? Many vegan cheeses match or exceed dairy cheese in saturated fat while offering almost none of the protein or calcium. The coconut and palm oils used for texture contain the same saturated fats cardiologists tell you to limit. You're essentially eating flavoured oil that melts.
3. Meat alternatives engineered in labs, not kitchens
A friend who's a nutritionist once told me to count the ingredients. If it's more than five or six, it's probably not food your great-grandmother would recognize.
I counted twenty-three ingredients on a package of plant-based chicken strips. Soy protein isolate, methylcellulose, cultured dextrose, modified food starch, yeast extract, maltodextrin, sunflower lecithin, calcium alginate. These products require industrial processing to mimic the texture, appearance, and taste of meat. While the additives are considered safe, you're eating something created in a lab, not grown in a field. The protein might be plant-based, but the product is about as far from a bowl of beans as you can get.
4. Sweetened plant milks with more sugar than soda
Sixteen grams of added sugar per cup. That's what I found in my vanilla almond milk—nearly as much as a Coke. I'd been pouring it over my morning granola for months, thinking I was making the healthier choice.
The unsweetened versions exist, tucked away on the bottom shelf. But the sweetened varieties dominate because they taste more like what people expect when transitioning from dairy. Nutritionists lump these in with other sugar-sweetened beverages, regardless of the plant-based label. Your pancreas doesn't care whether the sugar came from cane or beets or agave—it all triggers the same insulin response.
5. Vegan desserts that replace one problem with another
I ran a comparison once. A vegan chocolate chip cookie versus the regular version from the same bakery. The vegan cookie had 4 more grams of sugar, 30 more calories, and 3 grams of saturated fat from coconut oil. The regular cookie had 2.5 grams from butter.
Manufacturers removing eggs and butter need to compensate somehow. Extra sugar provides sweetness and moisture. Coconut oil mimics the mouthfeel of butter. Starches and gums hold everything together. You end up with something that's technically vegan but nutritionally equivalent—or worse. The ingredients changed. The impact on your body didn't.
6. Vegan protein bars that cost $3 for what's essentially candy
I used to justify the price by telling myself they were nutritious. Then I started doing the math on what I was actually getting.
Most vegan protein bars contain 15-20 grams of sugar—as much as a Snickers bar. The protein comes from isolated powders (soy or pea), stripped of the fibre and nutrients found in whole beans. The vitamins listed on the label are synthetic additions. Nutritionists point out you'd get more nutrition from a handful of almonds and an apple, and you'd save about $2.50 per snack. But almonds don't come in packaging that promises 20 grams of plant-based protein.
7. Frozen vegan meals designed for convenience, not health
Two weeks of eating frozen vegan lunches taught me something about sodium I wish I'd learned sooner. My rings stopped fitting. My face looked puffy in photos.
The meals averaged 700-800mg of sodium per serving—some hit 900mg. That's more than a third of the recommended daily limit in a single meal. Salt acts as a preservative and flavour enhancer, which is why frozen food relies on it so heavily. But sodium contributes to water retention, elevated blood pressure, and over time, increased cardiovascular risk. The vegan label doesn't override basic physiology.
8. Veggie chips that trick you with pictures of vegetables
The bag shows kale. Beets. Sweet potato. It's easy to believe you're eating something virtuous.
Then you look at what's actually inside: dehydrated vegetables fried in oil and coated with salt. Some brands contain 140 calories and 250mg of sodium per serving—nearly identical to regular potato chips. The vegetable content is often minimal, processed to the point where most nutrients are gone. You're better off roasting actual vegetables or, honestly, just eating regular chips without pretending they're health food. At least then you're not paying extra for the illusion.
Final thoughts
The pattern I noticed after tracking all this: the products marketed most aggressively as healthy tended to be the most processed. Bright packaging. Claims about protein and plants. Language designed to make you feel good about your choices.
Whole foods don't need marketing because their value is obvious. A bag of lentils doesn't promise to change your life. It just sits there being cheap, nutritious, and versatile. Same with vegetables, beans, rice, nuts. The less packaging something has, the less you need to worry about what's actually inside.
I still buy processed vegan products sometimes—I'm not making everything from scratch. But I'm honest now about what they are. They're convenience foods that happen to be plant-based. The health benefits of eating more plants come from actual plants, not from companies figuring out how to make isolated soy protein taste like chicken.
Most of your diet should be whole foods. When it is, the occasional vegan burger or pint of coconut ice cream isn't going to hurt anything. But building a diet around processed plant-based products and calling it healthy? That's just swapping one type of processed food for another while paying more for the privilege.
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