How to get enough protein without meat
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Most people's health issue is too many calories.
In grams of protein per calorie, many plants score high. You just have to eat more, which, if you make delicious food, is a benefit.
A good rule of thumb for finding high protein foods is to look for foods that have calories/10 grams of protein (or more). This equates to 40% of calories from protein.
I don't remember what they are in english but my favorite beer compliment is tremoços (a legume), and they are something like 40% protein by calories.
It's like saying the issue of a murdered man is too much metal inside the body. Technically correct but misleading.
If you replace the carbs by exactly the same amount in fats, most people will lose weight. Many of them would be unable to eat so much because they would feel stuffed and stop feeling hungry all the time. And for those that eat the same amount of calories, they would not be in fat storage mode so excess is secreted.
Calories are meant to be and are calculated as the lingua franca of macronutrients. 5 calories of one really will have the same effect on your waistline as 5 of another, holding all else equal.
Regardless, the grandfather is discussing macronutrient distribution and you seem to be in favor of optimizing it as well, so I don't think there's disagreement here.
That’s the theory, at least.
That's one factor of why eating fat instead of carbs defeat the calories-in-calories-out idea. But it's not the only one. Both the lack of release of insulin and ketosis helps the body work much better.
> 5 calories of one really will have the same effect on your waistline as 5 of another, holding all else equal.
That's the problem, nothing else is equal when you have a vastly different proportion of macronutrients.
On the face of it this makes no sense because fat is such a good energy source that it's what our bodies use to store energy, so why would our bodies have problems extracting energy from dietary fat?
> If you replace the carbs by exactly the same amount in fats, most people will lose weight.
The body barely converts carbs into body fat, thus the fat you eat is pretty much the fat you wear. You can eat mostly fat and still have a calorie deficiency, sure. And you can go for a keto diet (but please not too long and with a doctor/nutritionist supervising you).
Without any portion restrictions, calorie counting or exercise, the best diet for loosing weight is... a whole plant food diet.
http://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/2015/07/30/to-shed-pounds-g...
> The body barely converts carbs into body fat
Here a quote to back it up (from McDougall, halfway in the article):
https://fanaticcook.com/2014/03/24/excess-carbohydrate-does-...
Take a look at these videos (or any other of that channel, I'm not affiliated but happens to explain a lot of things I've learned myself), or read the sources in the description.
The other one is grams protein per kilo of bodyweight. This depends on if you are working out or not. Common recommendations for those working out are really high (like 2g/kg). And taking too much protein is not very healthy.
Now a lot of nutritionists are lowering their recommendation to, like, 1g/kg or even less. And many seem to be putting on muscle just fine with those amounts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_Digestibility_Correc...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestible_Indispensable_Ami...
https://dabamirror.sci-hub.cc/bbb1a373d204d4fe2c1f9a8a38356d...
http://dacemirror.sci-hub.cc/journal-article/a73bbb377b5c4cd...
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-protein-combining-myth/
B12 is the only real deficiency vegans experience and it's easily solved by taking a supplement. B12 isn't some miracle vitamin, exclusive to animal products either. It's produced by bacteria in the soil and since we're usually sterilizing our food, it's not usually found on our produce anymore. That's why livestock are getting it supplemented, just the way vegans are supplementing it. It's not even like eating meat and animal products saves you from B12 deficiency as a big chunk of the population is actually deficient.
While true that plant proteins are not “incomplete”, it is also true that some aren’t absorbed as well [1] and are lower in certain essential amino acids than others. The article/video that you linked suggests that the essential amino acid profiles don't matter, even from plant proteins, because you get more than you need anyway but that's not true for everybody.
Importantly, if you're someone who is physically active or looking to gain muscle mass! When you're physically active, your body _does_ use almost all of the protein that you give it (at least, all of the protein it's able to absorb through digestion). And if you give it a deficiency in certain essential aa's that it can't create for itself, you can see less muscle growth. In that case, it is important to either stick to some of the more complete veggie proteins or to consume a combination of proteins that satisfy a complete amino acid profile.
I'd be happy to see research to the contrary.
I'd also encourage anyone reading to consider a vegetarian or vegan diet. Cutting out meat is pretty easy, even if you have to complement proteins for bodybuilding, and it's one of the best individual contributions you can make to inhibiting climate change.
The sulfur-containing amino acids, methionine and homocysteine, can be converted into each other, cysteine can be made from homocysteine, and phenylalanine with tyrosine. Likewise arginine, ornithine, and citrulline, are interconvertible.
But for example if you only eat rice, you think you get 2.56g per 100g, but just 3.8% of lysine and 8.2% of leucine in its proteins, when you need 23% of leucine and 18% of lysine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid#Recommend...
Also nutritionfacts.org is junk science vegan propaganda like Cowspiracy and What the Health.
https://www.thatnerdysciencegirl.com/2015/11/13/the-case-aga...
What if we didn't sterilize? Would the bacteria then produce it in our stomach? Once I "get " those bacteria in, do I have to replenish?
What about the bacteria though? Not a good idea?
http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank
So there's a good deal more at stake here than just optimal protein digestibility uptake rates.
Anecdotal, but I recently placed first in my age group and 5th overall in a trail marathon on a nearly vegan diet. Two other the other four in front of me were vegans. In another recent half marathon with over 1,000 runners, a near-vegan diet helped secure 4th out of 90 in my age group, close to the top 10% overall. I wasn't counting calories and certainly not protein. I did lose to close to 30 lbs while also getting faster. I used to have an "afternoon slump" at work, but that's rare now, even when running 7 miles before work.
For more interviews with scientists, the Cowspiracy movie (bad name) helps explain why animal agriculture has ended up as a top cause of climate change, and the newer movie "What the Health" interviews a number of doctors and scientists about the relationship between plant-based foods and health.
They were suggesting that if you get your protein from plant sources, you should make sure to hit a complete amino acid profile and you should understand that digestibility is also lower for plant-based proteins.
This seems to be a point of confusion for a lot of people: the thing you want to pay attention to is not plant vs. animal, but the amount of inputs that went into providing a calorie. If you use calories per dollar as your metric, and I think this is an imperfect but quick and dirty metric, you’ll see that chicken, for instance, is an order of magnitude cheaper per calorie than most leafy green vegetables. I wrote about this in detail here: http://www.thinkfundamental.org/why-kale-is-actually-terribl....
So what you really want to eat, if your goal is reducing your environmental impact, are grains, legumes, and plant oils. But eating a lot of kale, broccoli, and spinach would negate any gains from avoiding animal sources.
https://www.quora.com/How-accurate-is-the-movie-Cowspiracy
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/7/25/16018658/wh...
Even vegans agree : https://www.vegan.com/posts/vegan-dietitian-review-what-the-...
>As a vegan health professional, I am sometimes mortified to be associated with the junk science that permeates our community. And as an animal rights activist, I’m disheartened by advocacy efforts that can make us look scientifically illiterate, dishonest, and occasionally like a cult of conspiracy theorists.
On the topic of muscles and protein:
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/plant-based-bodybuilding
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/protein-intake-and-igf-1-pr...
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/anabolic-steroids-in-meat
On the topic of B12. Many omnis are also B12 deficient, 1 in 5 iirc. In vegans all are eventually B12 deficient under the modern hygiene practices and without supplementation. All B12 originates from microbes that live abundantly in the soil. We are very clean with our food and water, so our plant foods and water are mostly devoid of B12. Pasture fed animals get it "naturally", their factory farmed relatives usually get a B12 supplement. I recommend everyone to get tested for B12 (and D) deficiency as it is very common, and supplement accordingly. Vegans with modern hygiene standards for sure need to supplement (or eat B12-fortified foods).
> B12 as deficiencies in it is a silent killer
Yes. So get your blood tested, and supplement accordingly. This is not something unique to vegans (though a lot more common). For good supplements consult: https://www.toxinless.com
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1187088/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes... https://www.thatnerdysciencegirl.com/2015/11/13/the-case-aga...
Or you mean I have to eat those microbes as they themselves contain b12? In which case dead or alive, what does it matter?
Cups are not weird, just just a pain in the arse because US cups are 240ml and metric cups are 250ml. If you're following a recipe that needs exact measurements it often trips you up.
Yes they are. For example, the article talks about "dark leafy greens (about 5 grams per cup)". Is that cups of dark leafy greens before chopping them up or after? If you specified the amout per weight, it would not make a difference. If you specify them by volume, it does.
More generally, and anecdotally, I had a health scare that resulted in going through a fairly standardized regimen including exercise and dietary advice. I received many pamphlets and handouts! There seems to be a substantial effort to convey health advice in a way that downplays or minimizes any kind of math. People just freeze up when they see math.
This could give rise to an effort, from a public health perspective, to come up with units of measure that people can use without being put off by math.
For the non-US-non-cooks: 1 cup = 240 ml ≈ 1/2 US pint
Using volume for those, the amount you’re actually using can vary by a factor of 10 depending on how granular it is, how finely chopped or shredded it is, or how it fell that day.
I do everything in grams, but with some recipes and labels it’s just not possible to know how much of something it’s talking about. Which is unfortunate because that’s the entire purpose of a recipe or a label.
Why can’t we stop this?
Well, the recipe should give you an indication of granularity, although you won't get an ASTM number. That said, for cooking you're supposed to eyeball it a bit and judge through experience. Rarely does a little too much broccoli kill.
It sucks when it's a new dish or you are inexperienced -- but if you can't afford practise runs where the result is allowed to be sub-par, then it's probably a good idea to switch to a different source of recipes.
Broccoli is really an edge case. The traditional measuring cup for the kitchen (looks like this: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Messbecher.jpg) has more typical ingredients: semolina, raisins, flour, pearl barley, pulses & so on.
Grams of protein per ounce of food seems like a good example of this.
My initial intention was to be somewhat "flex" and have meat and seafood once in a while, like once a month, but I've eaten meat only once in 4 months and it was not specially satisfying: it tasted overwhelmingly salty and I wasn't able to enjoy the flavor. I guess I lost interest. Biting into a dead animal now feels wrong, it feels like eating food from a garbage can. Even eggs, milk and sometimes cheese seem like a stretch for me now. I did not anticipate that. In fact, I thought I was going to really enjoy my "meat day" but now I dread it.
Friends ask why I did it. I don't have one particular reason. Just did it. I'm not sure if the planet's better because of me not eating meat. I don't want to sound moral, but it does feel civilized, in an almost naive way, not to crave other animals. But I know I'm vegetarian because my body, and not my conscience, asked for it.
I've always been a proud meat eater. I laughed at my sister when she turned vegan. But I now feel relieved like a criminal that confessed his crime after 40 years in hiding. Trust me, eating meat is not important when you eat from a wide range of sources. Eating meat, poultry, seafood should be a special, almost mystical thing (in some religions it is), reserved for special occasions. It should be local, not global. The massive processing of animals is not only cruel and insanely wasteful, but is quite unhealthy from the epidemiological and physiological perspective.
Others of us are well adapted to dairy and, for us, dairy is a miraculous food category. It is a great source of protein and fat. It adds a wonderful dimension to so many recipes. And, aside from meat, milk is one of the few single foods that you can largely sustain yourself on (I think of it as mother nature’s Soylent).
No one is properly adapted, that why milk consumption is associated with shorter lifespan and some diseases.
> And, aside from meat, milk is one of the few single foods that you can largely sustain yourself on (I think of it as mother nature’s Soylent).
What? Do yo mean to only drink milk (or eat meat)? In that case you lack fiber, big time. I've mentioned, and provided you with a video revealing how damaging milk is to the human body.
It will sustain your medical bill, until you die. :)
> It adds a wonderful dimension to so many recipes.
That's an opinion, and I must say I also really like the taste of some milk products.
Adaptation to a lifestyle dependent on milk and it's derivatives was a huge inflection point in the evolution of Europeans. It gave the bearers of this adaptation a tremendous advantage over people who lacked it and consequently spread rapidly.
If I were you, I would be very suspicious about diet advice derived from epidemiological studies, since those studies can only ever infer correlation, not causation, and are likely mostly useless as a result of this shortcoming. This article by Gary Taubes goes into great detail about why (and, seriously, this is one of the most important things I've ever read):
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t....
> Do yo mean to only drink milk (or eat meat)?
Yes. See the Maasai (huge milk consumption) and Inuit (who historically ate a diet consisting entirely of meat from sea mammals).
If you're interested about diet and how it relates to health, Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes is an amazing book, which is, on the surface, about how dietary fat and carbohydrates affect health, but is really a deep dive into how we ascertain knowledge and how the political process of scientific recommendations gets corrupted by human shortcomings.
Aren't low testosteron levels a bigger issue?
Nope. Vegans have higher T levels. Also higher than vegetarians. Here an article with plenty links to studies:
https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/02/12/less-cancer-in-vegan-m...
Does nutritionfacts.org pay for studies? Nope. (Exxon does)
Sorry, bad comparison. But I understand what you mean: Greger eats a plant based diet himself so he must be biased and the probably goes about cherry picking studies to match his beliefs. After a lot of research I've come to the conclusion he's honest and works in the interest of people's health.
A religion.
Turning to the article's sources, you find [1] source for the testosterone claim. And the summary at the beginning of that study states the following:
"Vegans had higher testosterone levels than vegetarians and meat-eaters, but this was offset by higher sex hormone binding globulin, and there were no differences between diet groups in free testosterone, androstanediol glucuronide or luteinizing hormone."
So higher overall testosterone, the same amount of free testosterone. I think this is a perfect example of selectively reporting on scientific studies. The author of that article may not technically be wrong, but it encourages spreading bad advice when you repeat that claim over and over again without the caveats mentioned in the actual studies.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374537/pdf/83-...
It's worth noting that it's even in the title of the study: "Hormones and diet: low insulin-like growth factor-I but normal bioavailable androgens in vegan men". There's no excuse for misrepresenting that.
Where are you basing the assumption that low testosterone happens from a vegan diet?
Edit: here's an article from a bodybuilding website that tries to summarize the conclusions of various journal articles on the topic:
Edit: Here's a link to an article discussing how much soy is too much: https://nutritionfacts.org/2013/02/19/how-much-soy-is-too-mu...
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/who-shouldnt-eat-soy/
See my other comment on T-level being higher in vegans (Even higher then in vegetarians). There's a huge vegan-fitness movement going on, and it rapidly moving into professional sport in general. They simply self-report to perform better, thus stick to the diet.
1) Milk based products that are high on protein (either whey, or casein). Most shakes are usually whey. Otherwise yogurt is a great source (Icelandic skyr is mostly protein). Some cheeses have more protein than fat, etc...
2) Egg protein. Either full eggs, or just whites, or powder egg protein.
3) Peas, Beans, Peanut Butter are good protein sources as well... but you can really eat so much in a day
4) Avoid soy, (for many reasons, but mainly because it is thought to be andrenogenic).
If you can't eat either milk or egg based products and I think you are a bit out of luck. Yes, there are people that manage fine with (there even vegan bodybuilders), but it really becomes tough diet wise as it is very restrictive....
https://www.sbnation.com/2017/10/25/16505120/nba-vegan-veget...
In every sport I've ever participated in, the diet dilemma of the top tier athletes is how to keep the weight on...not how to lose it. I don't even know what to say, just that it seems so weird.
https://www.theringer.com/nba/2017/11/4/16593220/nba-weight-...
You are responding about "energy use", this environmental impact.
Two separate reasons to go vegan. (besides the issues of pollution, scarcity and health-impact)
Bottom line is vegan, period. And even that line is blurry if you zoom in enough :)
One can opt out of meat and meat products for reasons of health (which are complicated and debatable, but a personal choice), reducing environmental impact, and not taking part in the way we currently handle animals for food.
The latter one is complicated, as it is technically possible to opt out of supporting the chicken/cow "matrix" if you really truly only ever eat meat/eggs/dairy from animals that are raised, used, and finally killed on (likely) local farms that generally treat their animals with "dignity" for whatever that's worth until they kill them. I personally don't think that real free range cattle and chickens that are eventually slaughtered have bad lives for what they are - but being able to only eat such animals is definitely a choice only available to the upper-middle class and up, given the current system.
But if you're a vegetarian and you routinely buy 48 egg cartons for $6 at your local safeway and eat tons of cheese? You just have a restrictive weird diet.
Cows...not so much, but by that logic, where are we drawing the line?
I keep hearing that soy proteins promote estrogen production but I've never found an actual study with significative results proving this. Any sources?
There aren't any.
Here a good overview of what we do know:
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/who-shouldnt-eat-soy/
The "bad soy" story originates largely from Kaayla Daniel and has been thoroughly debunked.
There needs to be a service that brings together several major newspapers or streaming services so you can pay one subscription for all of them.