Hello there, I'm Monica Rinegal, and you are listening to the Nutrition Diva podcast

Welcome.

You may have heard about a pair of lawsuits that were recently filed against Beyond Meat,

a popular brand of plant-based meat alternatives.

These suits claim that the company has misrepresented the amount of protein provided by their

products.

But if you've had a little trouble making sense of the news coverage, you're not alone,

and I am here to explain. Beyond Meat, as you may know, produces a variety of plant-based

products, including burgers, sausages, and ground meat-like products. And I reviewed both the Beyond

Burger and the Impossible Burger on the podcast when they came out a few years ago. Both of these

products have enjoyed widespread popularity, but now Beyond Meat has been named as a defendant

in two lawsuits. According to the Nutrition Facts labels, the Beyond Burger provides 20 grams

of protein per serving. The lawsuits claim that the actual amount is 19 grams. Now, clearly,

that's not a big enough difference to justify a class action lawsuit. But there is a little more

to this story. And to tell you the rest of it, I'm going to have to get a little nutrition nerdy.

Fortunately, I know you're good for it. Okay, the amount of protein in a food is determined by

the amount of nitrogen it contains. Nitrogen is only found in protein molecules. It doesn't appear

in carbohydrate or fat molecules. So you can use the nitrogen content to calculate the protein

content of a food. And based on this, the Beyond Burger contains 20 or maybe 19 grams of protein

per serving. But in addition to indicating the amount of protein, the Nutrition Facts label

may also show what percentage of the daily value for protein that number represents.

Now, the daily value for protein is 50 grams. That means that adults should try to consume at least

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