It’s not exactly the best moment to pitch ultraprocessed foods as healthy and delicious, but that’s exactly what two major producers of plant-based meat are trying to do.

Beyond Meat wants to convince people that its vegan versions of meat products are good for you. So does its competitor, Impossible Foods, which recently changed its packaging colors from green to blood red, all the better to woo carnivores.

In the last year, Beyond Meat has reformulated some products to cut saturated fat and sodium and simplify its ingredient list. Impossible Foods launched a “health hub” and rebranded to emphasize tasty meatiness. Products from both companies have been deemed healthy by the American Diabetes Association and American Heart Association.

It’s all part of an effort to reverse sagging sales of plant-based meat at a time when foods made through industrial processes, with lengthy ingredient lists, have come under increasing scrutiny. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, ordered a crackdown on ultraprocessed foods, new research has shown a link between ultraprocessed foods and adverse health effects and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for health secretary, has criticized processed foods.

Plant based meat is ultraprocessed, but not necessarily unhealthy, according to several experts. The products generally have less saturated fat, no cholesterol and more fiber than animal meat, and zero hormones or antibiotics.

An analysis of dozens of studies that was published last year in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology found that compared with meat, plant-based alternatives “generally lie on the range from roughly neutral to beneficial,” said Matthew Nagra, a naturopathic doctor in British Columbia who led the review.

The studies found no evidence that some of “the concerning aspects” of plant based meat, such as food processing and higher sodium, outweighed the potential cardiovascular benefits of eating it instead of animal meat, he said.

Health and nutrition concerns are among the top reasons people seek out plant-based meat, and Beyond Meats and Impossible Foods want to distance themselves from the ultraprocessed label, or at the very least add nuance. Ethan Brown, the founder and chief executive of Beyond Meat, said the company’s method of extracting proteins from legumes and converting them to meat-like products simply skipped using animals as the intermediary.

“It’s a beautiful process that is direct from the soil and from the farm in a way that a CAFO or factory farmed animal is not,” he said, using the acronym for concentrated animal feeding operations.

If plant based meat must be categorized as processed food, the argument is that they are more like canned beans than Twinkies, and a long way from processed meats, the category that includes hot dogs, bacon and deli meat, which the World Health Organization has classified as carcinogenic to humans.

“Processed, if you really want to look at it from a food perspective, means highly artificial and very little nutritional value,” said Peter McGuinness, chief executive of Impossible Foods.

“We are a nutrient dense product,” he continued. “That’s not the traditional definition of processed.”

It remains to be seen whether more consumers can be swayed. In recent years, the plant based food sector has taken a drubbing.

Five years ago, protein alternatives appeared poised to take on the primacy of red meat by offering an option that was healthier, more ethical and better for the climate. The market has since contracted and a shadow hangs over the sector, due in no small part to the saga of Beyond Meat. Since the company went public in a blaze of glory in 2019, its stock price has tumbled from $234 to less than $4 a share, and the company is more than a billion dollars in debt.

Mr. Brown blamed attacks from the meat and livestock antibiotics industries and criticisms from whole foods purists. Plant based meats were also increasingly seen as “woke,” while a series of blistering ads linked with the former tobacco lobbyist and public relations strategist, Richard Berman, characterized the products as chemically laden. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of plant based meat consumers who believed the products to be healthy fell from 50 percent to 38 percent, according to FMI, the Food Industry Association, a trade group.

Mr. McGuinness said the sector had also likely been too hot and overhyped, causing other companies to rush in with inferior products that failed, spurring critics to say plant based meat was a fad.

Impossible Foods, which is privately held, is on surer footing than Beyond Meat. Mr. McGuinness said it was “on a path to profitability,” with a strong balance sheet and no debt. Still, it faces similar challenges as Beyond Meat in trying to win over meat eaters, the vast majority of whom have never tried plant based products.

“I think this is one of the greatest communication challenges in the history of business,” Mr. McGuinness said.

Compared with meat, the market for plant-based alternatives is relatively tiny. Plant-based meat and seafood accounted for $1.2 billion in retail sales in the United States in 2023, compared with $100 billion for conventional meat and seafood, according to the Good Food Institute, a research organization. And global meat consumption is growing.

Emma Ignaszewski, a senior associate director with the Good Food Institute, said expansion of the plant based sector depended on consumer priorities and how quickly companies could innovate, improve taste and bring down price — plant-based meats can cost at least twice as much as their animal counterparts.

“Growth is not inevitable,” Ms. Ignaszewski said. Still, she said research showed the majority of young consumers in 10 countries planned to spend more in the future on plant based products out of concerns for health, sustainability, animal welfare and climate change. Plant based alternatives have on average 11 percent the environmental impact of meat, according to the Good Food Institute.

Beyond Meat is hoping its reformulated burgers and beef, which include more legumes and avocado oil, will help silence critics and win over consumers. The company consulted with Joy Bauer, a registered dietitian and nutritionist, and Dr. Matthew Lederman, co-author of the “Forks Over Knives Plan” and “The Whole Food Diet” books. Both said the point of plant based meat was to provide healthier options when people craved burgers.

“For most people, myself included, putting beans and lentils on a hamburger bun simply won’t satisfy that need,” said Dr. Lederman. When his patients swapped plant based meat for red meat, they often made other lifestyle changes such as getting more exercise and eating more vegetables, he said. “It catalyzes a healthier living transformation,” he said.

Dr. Lederman also challenged perceptions that conventional meat is natural; an estimated 99 percent of farmed animals in the U.S. live in factory farms.

“They feed them abnormal diets,” he said, referring to livestock raised on factory farms. “They put them in abnormal conditions. They pump them up with hormones and antibiotics. They’re in these small, confined areas. Their bodies are flooded with stress hormones.”

Not everyone will be won over. Michael Pollan, the influential writer who once urged people to not eat any food their great-grandmothers would not recognize, has been critical of plant based meat. Mr. Pollan declined to comment for this article.

Marion Nestle, emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said that plant-based products were still ultraprocessed, and that long term studies on their impacts were needed. Still, she allowed there were likely relative benefits. “I’m sure it’s environmentally better than beef, everything is,” she said. “My prediction would be if you’re not eating beef and you’re eating this instead, you’re going to do better than people who are eating beef.”

Even if more consumers are swayed by its products, Beyond Meat’s challenges remain immense. The company reported revenue growth in the third financial quarter of 2024. But John Baumgartner, a consumer food analyst at Mizuho Americas, a financial services group, said the growth was driven by increased prices and that it was unlikely that Beyond Meat’s stock could rebound. He also said that while Beyond Meat had been working to improve its burger, Impossible Foods likely benefited from launching a wider array of products, including faux chicken options.

Notably, with their latest messaging, both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have downplayed the climate benefits of their products compared with meat, which is a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and water pollution. Under Mr. McGuinness’s leadership, Impossible Foods has been plugging a “delicious and nutritious” message. “Once you cover that, then you can talk about climate, but people are also pretty selfish,” he said.

There is arguably no statesman who cuts such a striking political resemblance to Donald J. Trump than Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.

The two men built their brash political brands on insulting rivals, attacking the press, doubting science and vowing to unroot political elites. When they were each running for re-election, they both warned that only fraud could cause them to lose. And when each lost, they both questioned the results and helped spark attempted insurrections in their respective capitols.

Since then, however, their political paths have dramatically diverged.

On Monday, Mr. Trump is set to return to the White House. Mr. Bolsonaro has been invited to attend the inauguration — but he will have to watch from home. That is because Brazil’s Supreme Court confiscated his passport as part of sprawling investigations into what it says were his efforts to subvert democracy — probes that could land him in prison this year.

So why have the two political matches faced such different fates for similar acts?

A key reason: Brazilian institutions have responded to Mr. Bolsonaro far differently than their U.S. counterparts responded to Mr. Trump.

Here are three differences that have made an impact.

1. Bolsonaro was ruled ineligible

Perhaps the clearest contrast: Mr. Trump was able to run for president while prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him, while Mr. Bolsonaro has been ruled ineligible for the next election.

Six months after Mr. Bolsonaro left office in 2023, Brazil’s electoral court ruled that he could not run for elected office until 2030. The seven-judge panel — made up of Supreme Court justices, federal judges and lawyers — made the ruling based on Mr. Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s voting system during the presidential campaign.

In the United States, no such federal electoral court exists. Voting is run by the states, and candidates can appear on a ballot just by passing a few basic thresholds, including collecting a set number of signatures and having been born in the United States. When Colorado’s top court blocked Mr. Trump from that state’s ballot because of his efforts to hold on to power, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ruling.

In other words, the Brazilian system empowers a federal court to determine who is fit for office, while the U.S. system largely leaves that decision up to voters.

2. Brazilian courts acted quickly and aggressively

The court ruling that deemed Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible is an illustration of another divergence in the approaches: The Brazilian judiciary has been faster and far more aggressive in its pursuit of Mr. Bolsonaro.

Just one year after Mr. Bolsonaro left office, Brazil’s federal police filed formal accusations in three separate criminal cases against the former president. The police accused him of overseeing plots to sell jewelry he received as state gifts, falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination records and trying to reverse the results of the election he had lost. Mr. Bolsonaro denies that he committed any crime and says he is being politically persecuted.

It took two years after Mr. Trump’s election loss for the U.S. Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to lead criminal investigations into the former president. That appointment came days after Mr. Trump announced he was running again in 2024.

There are wide expectations that Mr. Bolsonaro will be criminally charged and face trial this year. As for the four indictments against Mr. Trump, he was convicted in one case but the sentencing came after his election and he was given no punishment. It appears his other three cases may never go to trial.

The two nations’ Supreme Courts have played very different roles in the processes.

In the United States, appeals to the top court helped to delay the cases against Mr. Trump. The Supreme Court then threw some of the cases into jeopardy when it ruled that presidents were immune from prosecution for their actions carried out as president.

In Brazil, the Supreme Court — and, in fact, a single justice named Alexandre de Moraes — has been leading the investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro.

Justice Moraes’s position alone atop the investigations — in a role that is in some ways akin to both judge and prosecutor — has enabled the inquiries to move much faster as he ordered searches of Mr. Bolsonaro’s home and jailed some of the former president’s allies. But it has also raised grave concerns that, in his pursuit of protecting democracy, Justice Moraes may be doing more harm than good to Brazil’s institutions.

“From a U.S. sensibility, Brazil’s looks like a hyper-activist judiciary that’s willing to do things that most Americans would find very problematic and many Brazilians find very problematic,” said Scott Mainwaring, a Notre Dame political science professor who has studied how each country responded to its former leaders. “But the upside is that it has protected democracy.”

“On the other hand,” he added, “the U.S. judiciary was extremely slow in bringing these four Trump cases to trial.”

3. The Brazilian right offered tepid support

Immediately after the Jan. 6 riot on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, Republicans broadly denounced the violence and Mr. Trump for helping to spark it.

But three weeks later, the Republican congressional leader, Kevin McCarthy, flew to Mar-a-Lago and took photos with Mr. Trump. The Republican Party almost universally followed suit, shifting its own politics further to the right to align with Mr. Trump’s.

The Jan. 8, 2023, riot on the Brazilian Capitol has been met with a much clearer rebuke from the Brazilian right. Though some of Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies have criticized the multiyear prison sentences for many of the people who invaded Brazil’s halls of power, many conservative leaders have remained critical of the Bolsonaro movement’s response to losing the election.

That willingness to push back is partly because Brazil has a far more fragmented political landscape: Twenty-five political parties hold seats in Congress.

While the Brazilian right has not abandoned Mr. Bolsonaro, it also appears ready to move on, promoting several conservative governors as a potential candidate to challenge leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva should he run for re-election next year.

The differing responses from the U.S. and Brazilian right-wing movements is also a consequence of the nations’ divergent judicial approaches, said Malu Gaspar, a political columnist for one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, O Globo. “Trump was eligible,” she said. “Bolsonaro is already ineligible, so you talk to bankers and politicians and they say, ‘Why rehabilitate Bolsonaro?’”

And yet: Bolsonaro finds hope

Mr. Bolsonaro’s view of the situation is different: Don’t count me out yet.

In an interview on Tuesday, the former president said he hoped that his ineligibility ruling could be overturned, enabling him to stage a political comeback like Mr. Trump. “I am certain that if I’m eligible, I’ll be re-elected president,” he said.

His hopes are not that far-fetched. Brazil’s current president, Mr. Lula, was in prison just three years before he was elected in 2022; he became eligible to run for president again because a Supreme Court justice tossed out several criminal cases against him.

And two years after Mr. Trump left office — when he had his own series of encircling criminal investigations — expectations in the United States were low that he would rise again politically.

Now, on Monday, Mr. Trump will become the first felon to become U.S. president.

The star Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan was stabbed multiple times in his house in an affluent neighborhood in Mumbai on Thursday, Indian police officials said.

Mr. Khan, a prolific actor from a family of prominent celebrities, was injured in the pre-dawn hours in the neighborhood of Bandra by an intruder who managed to flee, according to the police. He was taken to a hospital, where doctors reported that he was recovering and in stable condition.

The police were investigating the attack, and believe the stabbing was part of a burglary attempt, said Dixit Gedam, a deputy commissioner with the Mumbai police. The police were looking for one suspect who had been identified, he said. “We know that the intruder used the fire escape to enter the house,” Mr. Gedam said.

Mr. Khan sustained a major injury to his spinal cord, as well as deep wounds on his arm and neck, according to Dr. Nitin Dange of Lilavati Hospital, where he was being treated. He had undergone an operation to remove a knife and repair leaking spinal fluid.

Mr. Khan, 54, has acted in more than 70 films in a career spanning three decades, with roles ranging from fun, romantic heroes to dark, gritty villains. His mother, Sharmila Tagore, was a celebrated actress, and his father, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, who had royal lineage, was the captain of India’s cricket team. Mr. Khan is also married to another prominent actor, Kareena Kapoor Khan, and his daughter, Sara Ali Khan, is also an actress.

The actor’s representatives released a statement requesting fans and the news media to remain patient while the police investigate.

As news of the stabbing spread, opposition politicians in Maharashtra, the state in which Mumbai is the capital, were quick to criticize the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party over what they said was a deteriorating law enforcement situation.

“If celebrities are not safe then who in Mumbai is?” Priyanka Chaturvedi, a member of Parliament from Maharashta, wrote on social media.

The actor and filmmaker Pooja Bhat called for a greater police presence in the neighborhood, writing on social media, “The city & especially the queen of the suburbs, have never felt so unsafe before.”

Last July, two gunmen opened fire outside the star actor Salman Khan’s house, also in Bandra. The police arrested two men in that shooting, and said the suspects were connected to the imprisoned gang leader Lawrence Bishnoi.

In October, a former Maharashtra state minister, Baba Siddique, was fatally shot by three gunmen near the office of his son, also a politician, in Bandra. Mr. Siddique had close ties to Bollywood stars.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Kyiv on Thursday, a show of solidarity four days before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump.

The trip to Ukraine, Mr. Starmer’s first since he became prime minister over the summer, comes amid a flurry of diplomacy between Kyiv and its European allies, who are watching to see whether Mr. Trump maintains American support for Ukraine in the war against Russia.

Britain is the third-largest provider of military aid to Ukraine, after the United States and Germany, and on Thursday Mr. Starmer and Mr. Zelensky signed a “100-year partnership” between their two countries.

“We have reached a new level — this is more than a strategic relationship,” Mr. Zelensky told a news conference that the two leaders held. Mr. Starmer said that Britain would provide more military aid to Ukraine this year “than ever before.”

The partnership agreement will include a particular focus on maritime security and promises to strengthen collaboration on technology, health care and education. It follows a narrower security agreement signed a year ago in response to the invasion that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered in 2022.

“Putin’s ambition to wrench Ukraine away from its closest partners has been a monumental strategic failure,” Mr. Starmer said in a statement. “Instead, we are closer than ever.”

Mr. Trump has said that he plans to quickly bring an end to the war, but he has not said how he will do so. Marco Rubio, his pick for secretary of state, said this week that both Russia and Ukraine would have to make concessions in any negotiations.

Kyiv’s official position is that it will not negotiate directly with Mr. Putin, a stance that Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Sybiha, confirmed on Wednesday. But Mr. Zelensky has said that he hopes to meet with Mr. Trump at the earliest opportunity.

On Thursday, Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain and former commander in chief, accompanied Mr. Starmer during the visit. He said the partnership would deepen security ties and bolster collaboration between the two countries.

Mr. Zelensky said at an allies meeting in Germany this month that he planned to discuss with Mr. Starmer “in the coming weeks” the possibility of Britain’s sending peacekeeping forces to Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader has also presented the idea to other European leaders, but they have met it with skepticism.

Ukraine has been receiving support in other ways from other European allies.

Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, said on a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday that he was optimistic that Berlin would find a way to send an additional 3 billion euros (about $3.1 billion) in military aid. But Germany is facing its own political upheaval after the government collapsed a month ago.

Mr. Zelensky discussed continued French military support for Ukraine with President Emmanuel Macron in a phone call this week, according to Mr. Zelensky’s office, and a Latvian delegation visited Ukraine on Tuesday to discuss military and humanitarian support.

And on Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky was in Warsaw, where he met with Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, and its president, Andrzej Duda. Both expressed support for Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, a prospect that the military alliance has been reluctant to fully endorse, despite offering significant support to Kyiv.

Ukraine has increased its efforts on the diplomatic front as Russia’s offensive continues in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

The last of the modest gains Ukraine made during its summer 2023 counteroffensive have been wiped out, according to an assessment on Wednesday from DeepState, an analytical group with ties to the Ukrainian military, after Russian forces captured the village of Neskuchne.

Moscow’s forces are also making progress in their attempts to surround the key city of Pokrovsk, also in eastern Ukraine, from the south.

As Mr. Starmer was visiting Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital was placed under air-raid alert. Shortly afterward, a loud boom was heard in the skies above the city. Vitali Klitschko, the mayor, said that air defenses were operating and warned residents to stay in shelters.

The British leader and Mr. Zelensky visited a burns unit in a hospital where wounded soldiers and civilians are undergoing treatment. After Mr. Starmer introduced himself, Petro, a civilian with burns across both hands and arms, asked: “Prime minister of Britain, right?” and then added, “If Ukraine falls, so does Europe.”

Mr. Starmer said the injuries he saw at the hospital were “a grim reminder of the heavy price that Ukraine is paying.”

Naralia Novosolova and Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.