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Comment by vortegne | Hacker News Reader

> Meat provides far more nutritional value than any plant

Completely wrong

Probably exaggerated and imponderable, as it really depends on how you would rank such a thing. But it is really nutritious in that it packs a great density of protein and micronutrients.

Lentils, tofu, peanuts, and seitan are 25%, 20%, 28%, and 80% protein by weight. Meat is about 26%, according to WolframAlpha. Not that you actually need very many grams of protein each day to be healthy.

I find seitan and tofu completely unpalatable, and I can’t rely on eating hundreds of grams of peanuts to fill my protein needs. Lentils are fine...

I lift heavy, which I believe is integral to my good health (the evidence on the health benefits of strength training is overwhelming). You do need significant amounts of protein if you lift - this is backed by both research and empirical evidence. Designing 3000-4000kcal diets high in protein without meat is entirely possible, but highly impractical.

Most serious weightlifters in my experience supplement their diet with protein shakes or similar, many vegan formulations exist. It's not super tasty, but I wouldn't call it "highly impractical".

Beyond that in my experience "lifter diet" is not exactly gourmet stuff, unless you really, really like chicken breasts.

I drink about 2-3 day. It leaves anywhere between 2-3.5k calories of real food to fill. It is highly impractical compared to brown rice, chicken and veggies, which is one of the reasons why they will be about the last population segment to ever adopt a diet without meat.

> You do need significant amounts of protein if you lift - this is backed by both research and empirical evidence.

Specialized athletic hobbies like powerlifting are sort of irrelevant to discussions involving reducing GHG emissions by scaling up plant based meat substitutes. Niches like that aren't the target market.

I am for plant-based substitutes anyway. It’s a natural vegetarian diet that I would struggle with.

I have no doubt that many would struggle with it for many valid reasons.

For a whole lot of people (even people who eat meat), plant based vegetarian food still forms the foundation of their diet, and it's been that way since the dawn of agriculture.

For example, a dish made of legumes, grains, and vegetables flavored with a little bit of meat, while not vegetarian, is still fundamentally plant based. That describes a whole lot of traditional foods the planet over.

The diet you’re describing also has a significantly higher calorie intake than most people’s exercise level can balance. If I ate that much, I would be fat not fit.

(Also: I just picked four ingredients I just happen to have; there are others).

It actually matters which proteins are in there. Plants in general, and seitan in particular, are pretty bad in that regard and so much (to most, for seitan) of that protein can’t actually be used by your body unless you find ways to supplement the missing essential amino acids.

It’s very easy to get protein diversity in a vegetarian or a vegan diet, though I grant it isn’t automatic like it would be in a meat diet.

About 10% of calorie intake is the protein sweet spot. Incidentally about the average you would get from a divers whole foods plant based diet. Meat diets will struggle to get that low. In fact, the Norwegian government has stated that it would in fact recommend 10% because it would be the best nutritional advise, were it not for the fact that it would be hard to fit into the common meat based diets of Norwegians. I wish I could provide a source but have since been unable to locate the official document Were it was discussed.

"Far more" value than "any" plant. I fail to see how this meat-fetishist point of view is anything but completely wrong. Yes it's hard to tank such things, absolutely.

But to be 100% sure that this one food is beating every single other food is just stupid.

What is one plant that contains menaquinone or eicosapentaenoate?

Sauerkraut, buckwheat, fermented soy

Are you eating a lot of liver? Because if not, you're not getting that much of menaquinone anyway. And there's plenty of it in plant-based foods, as pointed out by the other commenter.

As for omega-3, I believe it's been a few decades since we found it in a ton of different seeds, nuts and oils.

Do you have something more substantial to add? I do imagine that to match meat on a value per gram measurement, you'd have to have either spend way more or be lucky with where you live, but something to check would be great.

Meat already is one of the most overpriced foods out there if we're talking about nutritional value. If you're not buying complete trash meat that is of course.

Take for example potatoes. Dense in calories, has almost all of the nutrient groups you need and is dirt-cheap. Nutrition is a very unclear science for now, but the fact that meat has this godlike status of an apex food is definitely a product of lobbying and marketing, not facts.

It costs me about $3-7 for a single cheaper cut of steak at my local store, which according to a cursory search, probably yields 30-70g of protein. 1 potato, while very cheap, is only going to contain 2g of protein, and at most I could probably eat 3 in one go. Certainly, I'd get other vitamins and minerals from both, which is why I'd have both in the same meal. How much are you spending on meat? An occasional indulgence in that area for me would maybe be a $20 steak, or a big burger.

Sure, if you're chasing protein then potatoes aren't the best choice. Tofu is close in protein content to meat though (about 17%) and is also cheaper, if you don't go for the overpriced hippy tofu.

I don't spend anything on meat, stopped eating it a while ago. But when I did, it still wasn't breaking the bank of course, not like I was spending hundreds of dollars monthly on meat.

While meat is definitely one of the most delicious foods out there, I don't really miss it that much. The cognitive dissonance wasn't worth it.

I don't feel like you need to be chasing protein to occasionally include a cheap steak in your meal, I just picked one of the most obvious attributes of food that you need. Seems pretty reasonable if the argument was about density of value. You'd also want to get fats and proteins from nuts and so on, but preferably from things you enjoy eating and can afford so it's personally sustainable, so tofu might be off the table.

Pound for pound, it cannot be denied meat provides more nutrition than the same amount of plants.

Are we also considering the pounds of plants that the animal had to eat to grow to such a size? I should imagine it takes quite a lot of food to raise a one ton cow for slaughter. At least one ton of plant material as food, right? To produce how many pounds of meat? 750lbs seems reasonable.

So if you had 2750lbs of plant food for yourself, vs just the 750 lbs of meat -- which has more nutrients?

(I do not know the answer myself, but I can see where it could be argued that meat is not more nutritious, pound for pound)