Low nutritional quality in vegetarian meat substitutes
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
While important to keep in mind it doesn't seems like a big indictment of meat substitutes. Take a supplement and move on with your life! Vegans (less so vegetarians) need to supplement anyway, things like creatine or B12 have few natural plant sources.
My personal beef with meat substitutes is that they aren't particularly good substitutes so I'd rather eat the real thing. But if you're eating a burger you're not really thinking about your health anyway.
The people running hog confinement operations, cattle feedlots or chicken warehouses give the animals B-vitamin fortified food to make up for the deficiency.
So vegans should take a B vitamin directly, but it's the same B vitamin being given to the animals for it to end up in meat.
"Oh, I eat only pasture-raised beef" is all well and good, and I can commend doing so if one is going to eat meat anyway. But AFAICT, it unfortunately doesn't scale well enough to supply a burger-hungry world, and certainly is not an affordable option for all.
Do you actually believe that or is it limited to burgers?
If culturally, there was more emphasis on using other parts of animals in our (presumably American diet) we'd definitely get more mileage out of every raised cow, chicken, and pig.
...but this actually brings it into a more 'chicken or egg' (pun intended) contradiction. Because farm raised animals typically don't make the base for good stock since they don't consume good food. They don't consume good food because they're mass produced on a budget. They're mass produced on a budget because consumers typically pick only a few cuts of an animal and discard the rest.
The U.S. needs to stop trying to feed the world, especially with extremely cheap (and low quality) corn and soy that are exported primarily for use as feedstock or for biofuels.
We have created enormous imbalances in global food supply by driving out of business local producers, making many countries dependent on a small number of producers for global staple crops, which is a dangerous proposition that puts the world at risk of famine should trade be disrupted.
We pay the price for lack of nutritious food in higher health care costs and lower quality of life in our later years.
Supplements may not necessarily be vegan either. If a supplement you’re taking is a byproduct of meat production, what is even the point?
I don’t know where people buy theirs but i spend more in Spotify than in supps.
You're better off getting micronutrients from food sure but there are other options if for some reason you can't or won't.
> If a supplement you’re taking is a byproduct of meat production, what is even the point
Most vegans I know are vegan for ethical reasons which is consistent with minimizing the "animal footprint" even if you can't 100% remove it.
People end up conflating advice from fitness culture with general health, which while overlapping isn’t the same. If you want to be super jacked then sure, eat a lot of protein, but if you just want to enjoy your life without major health issues there are bigger fish to fry so to speak.
You can build plenty of muscle if you eat significantly below the recommended 1g/lb that fitness influencers talk about, it just won’t be as much as you could have otherwise.
That’s a fine trade for me, I’m not planning to compete in any bodybuilding shows and I have other things I’d rather focus on in life.
Will eating more protein help you build more muscle? The answer to that for the average person is almost certainly yes. Do you need to eat the “optimal” amount to build muscle? Certainly not.
Like everything else, protein consumption has to be weighed against the trade offs.
Peter Attia disagrees:
"The more I research this topic, the more I find that the RDA (recommended daily allowance) of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight is simply not sufficient"
https://peterattiamd.com/category/nutritional-biochemistry/p...
While it is an official statistic, it isn’t representative of the average person’s idea of protein needs.
Which seems to be mostly true from my research.
for example, I'm 93kg, which sets my dietary protein to 150g or thereabouts I need 2700 calories a day for maintenance
that means even if I do nothing but drink full fat milk, I will have gained only 135g of protein from my calories, which isn't enough to optimize for muscle recovery after training
this is why I slip a few grams of protein powder into my morning coffee, avoid eating foods high in carbs and fats, just to approach that number (I may not hit it exactly every day)
Absolute minimum requirement for a sedentary person: .8 g/kg of body weight (not recommended).
Optimum for muscle building: 2.2 g/kg
What I’m talking about: 1.1g/kg and up is probably fine.
What about this do you take issue with? “High” and “low” are extremely vague.
Edit: erroneously wrote .36 g/kg, when it should have been .8. .36 is g/lb
90%+ of people ought to be building lean muscle even if they don't care about sports or aesthetics. This is essential for having a healthy endocrine system and stabilizing joints in order to prevent injuries.
https://www.gabriellereece.com/muscle-as-the-cornerstone-of-...
It'd have probably been easier to manage when we didn't have to put hours of intense exercise in bursts to compensate for working in offices and stores, and instead did physical labor.
Eating lots of legumes and groats to fulfill protein needs is more viable if the calories are needed for your daily labor, then the starches are an upside.
Tofu fortunately makes things easier, but it's not always readily available in many places where its consumption wasn't a cultural practice already.
Still, you've got to pay attention to eating some protein in every meal, and if you're in the West and similar (Latin America will have many of the same patterns, but I'll always find it weird it's not considered "Western" culturally despite being an offshoot of Spain), you may have to deviate plenty from the diet of your culture.
I’ve found a liter of chocolate milk after training to be the best low-cost solution to topping off protein. My gym-bro understanding of metabolism justifies this as a way to replenish glycogen post-workout.
“High-quality” is an extremely vague notion, and there is a huge gap between the average persons habits and the health/fitness world’s “ideal”.
People will point to an extremely low average and then use that as evidence of an extremely narrow ideal, when there is a fairly large amount of range in between that may or may not be just fine.
Resistance training is good. Eating below the minimum standard of protein is good. Does the average person need to be eating 1g/lb of body weight? No.
- dense protein vs calories
- adequate quantities of all consituient amino acids
- easily digestable
So e.g. beef is a higher quality protein than beans, by that metric.
It's hard to know the ideal amount of protein for sure w/o e.g. life-long RCTs (and even then, that answer will only be for whatever context those studies are done in), and to be sure there are people to advocate for low-protein diets as well as for high-protein.
Personally, I'm placing my bets on high-protein.
I've tried everything from vegan to vegetarian to (now) meat-based diets, and I feel by far the healthiest and strongest on a meat based diet. (And it's my most recent diet, so I have the disadvantage of aging going along w/ it.)
Given the lack of consensus around dietary topics, I'd advise all people to keep an open mind and do some indivdual experimentation.
(I take it as an axiom that feeling good, strong, healthy in the moment is a good predictor of health over the long term, thus making personal experimentation a valid approach. Of course that could in theory be not true, but it seems very unlikely to me.)
There are many example of things that make you feel good in the short term, but not in the long term. It's not a wild "theory", it's a pattern we see all over the place. I'm not sure why that would seem unlikely to you.
I feel better in the moment while eating a dozen cookies. I feel worse later.
I feel better for a few hours when I take an opioid or other drugs, but long term it's not going to be for the better.
I'll feel better for a few days if I skip my workout today, I wont feel sore and beat up. After a week or two, old aches and pains will return, and over the long run not exercising will cause me more and more problems.
Billions of people overeat and have an unhealthy body weight which causes them problems. They do it because overeating feels good in the moment.
Is it really that unthinkable that eating a lot of red meat can make a person feel good but increase their risk of cardiovascular disease long term? We may not agree whether or not this is true, but can we at least agree that if it is true, it follows the exact same pattern as many other things in life?
I mean, sure, it's possible that eating food which makes you feel good (over weeks and months, not just for 1 hour and then w/ a hangover) is actually unhealthy, but it seems unlikely, especially if you're eating traditional foods which your body should have incorporated knowledge of through evolution.
I'm glad you said that. This notion of "high quality" just refers to the essential amino acids it contains. There is no intrinsic quality to a particular protein source, they are broken down into single amino acids or very small (tripeptide or less) in digestion, anyway. Anyone can get all essential amino acids necessary for their body's protein synthesis from a mix of plant sources, too, it just requires a little planning.
Most people should look more at metabolic disorders as a factor in middle age or later sedentary lifestyles, and maybe even secondary vascular disorders' role in health and muscle density in later life. Being active when you are young is great, but their are many other factors in later life health. There is good evidence that veganism is associated with improved average longevity (among other good outcomes). I don't care who eats meat - I do - but it's better to do it with eyes open, and not for faulty reasons.
Bringing it back to the article though, some of the plant based products being brought to market give me pause because of how processed they are. The salt, sugar, and fat levels are getting high and you lose the benefits of less processed vegetables.
that's not the topic of the article you're commenting on
The act of processing or modifying our food is not in and of itself unhealthy. Nuance is important and you are correct that there are tradeoffs here. The most unhealthy vegetable calories are almost certainly better than a soda.
Eating as much refined flour, sugars and novel vegetable oils turned out to have some pretty negative outcomes, and we wouldn't have made those choices without economic incentives to do so; we developed the technology to make them cheaper, at a scale, and durable to be stored for long periods of time and remain saleable, and much of it is stuff that you wouldn't have eaten as much if not.
It was an uncontrolled experiment.
Now, picking apart peas and rice, isolating their proteins, putting them together with refined coconut oil in a cellulose matrix, none of these things you would even be able to cook yourself, you can't make any assumptions that they'd have an effect in you similar to eating peas, rice or sauteeing something in coconut oil, it's not a valid inference.
Well we're dealing with two separate audiences now, aren't we? The people who care about their health and have moral quandries about eating meat are likely a separate group from those who engage in the typical "American diet". Based off how the article is written, it seems that the intended audience is more of the former than the latter.
We can well argue from uncertainty about how suitable for human health these products made from various isolates put together are, but not from that particularly certainty about the harmfulness of certain ingredients.
No one else in my family ate it, so I gave up after two batches. I want to restart using banana leaves as a wrapper, the way they make it in Java. I've also wanted to try out natto, another way of fermenting beans.
I recently started an oatmeal "starter" similar to a wheat sourdough starter. I began with a 1:1:1 ratio of rolled oats, water, and active yogurt. I let it sit for 36 hours. Then in the morning I take out half, and replace it with a 1:1 ratio of water and oats. It smells yeasty and tastes as if it's been cooked. I have no source on this but I'm hoping that the process nets me more nutrition than cooking. I also don't have to heat or refrigerate it. Everything operates at room temperature. If I ever go out of town I can put it in the fridge.
I do something similar with my beans, use some sourdough starter, or slop from the previous soaking of beans. I let them soak, ferment (they bubble) for a few days, rinse and cook as normal. It improves the flavor and I don't get as much gas. It also gets rid of so called "phytotoxins" which bind to minerals, etc.
You can also use koji to break down grains and legumes prior to cooking. It's quite amazing how sweet rolled oats will become when you let them sit with some koji rice. Koji is full of amylase and protease (enzymes that break down starch and proteins respectively).
Do you cook the raw beans before mixing with the starter? Or cook afterward? Is the bean starter raw or cooked?
There are similar methodologies where you ferment cooked legumes, like making natto, miso or tempe. These do similar things but have entirely different flavors.
However, when there are no conditions to do this, it is enough to use instead of fermentation just soaking in acidulated water (with lemon juice or vinegar) for a day or a half of day, and then wash the legumes/grains/seeds/nuts, which would still remove most of the phytic acid, which causes the problems described in the article, with the intestinal absorption of the minerals.
The argument for fermenting foods is that you introduce beneficial bacterial flora to help the gut microbiome. Additionally, the "pre-digestion" mechanism that you're talking about tends to make the nutrients from the food more bioavailable.
Occasionally can be consumed with enough barbecue sauce that I don’t prefer going hungry, but only rarely.
I wonder if it’s a genetic/tastebud thing like goat’s milk; my daughter and I are happy to eat pretty much any cow cheese, but if goat cheese is involved at almost any concentration in a dish, it’s spit-it-out-and-find-something-else time.
Tempeh isn’t quite that bad.
If I didn't acquire the taste in that time, I'm confident I never will ;)
You could also try a BBQ dry rub.
In either case a little msg makes it really pop.
I don't think any fake meat is really satisfying enough for most people to eat it the way some omnivores sometimes eat animal proteins (as the main food for most meals). But I suppose it takes all kinds.
Remote work has made it easier than ever for many people to cook at home. Before the pandemic, meal prepping was a pretty convenient way to do it. A couple of hours a week can get you very far.
Barbazoo seems to me to be talking about the opposite of the tech scene, the 90% of people who don't have (or want to waste) an hour after work to cook dinner. Or even worse, take a half an hour away from sleeping every day to have time to cook breakfast, all for dubious benefit.
Will processed, quick foods hurt you more than sleeping an hour and a half less a day?
Some small subset might have to make hard choices about sleep versus cooking. Not 90%. Most are choosing something else over cooking.
It won't make it faster (wall time), but it reduces your effort to virtually zero. Dump the steel cut oats/milk/water in, push the magic button, and come back in 25 minutes. I've been eating this daily for breakfast for a couple years and it's great.
No continuous stirring to prevent scalding the milk, no slightly burned milk welded to the bottom of your pot, etc.
The recipe I like, fwiw: 2 parts (I use 1/2 cup) Bob's Red Mill steel cut oats; 3 parts whole milk; 2 parts water. 10 minutes on high pressure.
I don't get why vegan and vegetarian food are highlighted here. People eat plenty of packaged or highly-processed meats, too. If anything, most raw items that don't require cooking are probably vegan, and there is no shortage of low-prep ones.
There’s an old South Park episode about cartman Being outraged at the vegetarian school meals until he realizes they are highly processed goo and then he’s okay with it.
I actually like beyond meat and find impossible meat good in pasta with red sauce. Yeah they’re vegetarian and tick two out of the three main reasons people go vegetarian but I doubt it’s any healthier, the third reason.
Are most meat substitutes maximally healthy? Probably not. Are they likely healthier than the red meat they're replacing? Yes.
Is it a perfect win? No. Is it likely healthier per our best guesses at nutrition science per the articles I've read? Yes. Again, it's not perfect.
https://chanapdavis.medium.com/the-skinny-and-fat-on-wall-st...
https://www.nutritionix.com/i/usda/beef-ground-80-lean-meat-...
https://www.nutritionix.com/i/beyond-meat/beyond-beef-plant-...
> higher fat
untrue
> higher sodium
true
> lower iron and calcium
untrue
Beyond has less calories, and less calories from fat. it also has less cholesterol and more protein. at least, according to this source. I suppose your final statement still stands, though. But to me the Beyond looks healthier, especially if you compensate for that increase in sodium elsewhere in your cooking.
I think the thing the vast majority of comments on hn regarding fake meats miss is the 3 factors in going vegetarian (1. environment, 2. animal welfare, 3. health) are completely independent.
Like I care a lot about 2, some about 1 (in that it's not my motivating factor just a nice side benefit) and not at all about 3.
I'd be eating like crap if I ate meat too, sausages, KFC, McDonald's. The cool thing about meat substitutes is you no longer need to be an incredibly intense lentil-weaving, yoghurt-knitting hippie to go vegetarian, you can do it if any one of the 2 non-health factors is motivating enough.
Is it gonna replace steak? No and I don't think it should. It can totally replace ground beef at Taco Bell though.
If I buy a meat substitute now it's to avoid the more dubious meats like "breakfast sausage."
I laughed because the only substitute I actually prefer over the meat equivalent is Beyond's breakfast sausage links.
We are advised to avoid "processed food" and prefer real food, commonly defined for convenience as containing no more than five ingredients. So meat substitutes are right out, at least as a habit.
A disastrously large fraction of descendants of subjects of England (incl. US, Canada, Australia, India, Pakistan) suffer from "processed food disease", also "metabolic disorder" or "fatty liver disease". Many are not obese. They can be cured with remarkable ease by dietary means, but generally are not.
https://www.webmd.com/diet/foods-high-in-oxalates
I've been a gym rat for 20+ years and tried to build my physique from primarily vegetarian sources. My favorite staple was bean burritos. But my joints were always achy (I couldn't survive without 1500/1200 glucosamine/chondroitin), my skin was broken out, I was bloated, I had chronically low energy, and I suffered from depression and anxiety for so long that I didn't know that I was (because they were my baseline for 2 decades).
When I hit 40, suddenly I couldn't digest anything I had been eating. I believe the main culprits were:
* Dehydration (exacerbated by creatine and not using a shaker for protein)
* Almond butter (tree nuts are inflammatory and shells eat holes in intestinal lining)
* Casein (slowest digesting protein, sits in intestines, promotes bad bacteria, many people are sensitive like with lactose)
* Beans (oxalates, phytic acid)
* Wheat (gluten irritates small intestine once immune system is sensitized, glyphosate disrupts intestinal flora and may be even higher in non-organic oatmeal)
I experimented with autoimmune protocol (AIP) diets but never found a "cure". I made a full recovery, but it took 2-3 years of trying everything I could think of. The best things are:
* Pumpkin seeds (like in Nature's path granola available in bulk at CostCo)
* Spinach and broccoli
* Rice
* Kefir
* Daily "stress" B complex with ~100% of each vitamin (the body can't store it, so a weekly 8000% B complex leaves 6 days of deficiency)
* Psyllium husk capsules with meals (1 is usually enough)
I've found that the body doesn't really care where protein comes from. So any whey protein is just as effective as meat, especially when taken with meals. But rare beef has (hormones?) and micronutrients which can't be mimicked by other foods, so is critical for healing micro tears. I'm looking forward to incubated meat because weightlifting progress is greatly enhanced by eating 1-2 pounds of meat per day, but I can't justify that ethically.
The one meat substitute I can tolerate right now is Impossible breakfast sausages with 3 eggs and granola in the morning, and the bonus is that it's indistinguishable from meat. Some of the other ones trigger the shocked/hungover feeling I get the next day if I eat too many legumes or nightshades.
So I endorse meat substitutes as long as they've had the anti-nutrients removed. But like milk substitutes, they may not have the healing qualities of the real thing.
It's almost always best to get health advice from older people. Young lifters especially often make recommendations which aren't sustainable. And IMHO the backlash against meat substitutes comes from people procrastinating on their healing journey, who don't want to face the cognitive dissonance of how their personal choices affect others and the planet. And yes, I agree that humans evolved as scavengers and are meant to eat meat, I just think that tech has reached a point where we can do better.
Definitely yes on butter. In fact, just throw away most pre-2000 health advice (lite, low-fat, etc). Those recommendations were tainted by Big Ag to get us to forego healthy foods for higher-profit ones. Margarine is cheaper than butter, sugar is cheaper than ripe veggies in stuff like spaghetti sauce, and so on.
You group them oppositely. Are you sure that was the issue?
Sometimes these things are hard to solve. I think that's why they call it IBS or "leaky gut" and not a specific condition. Where maybe one food disrupts gut bacteria while another feeds it.
I just did a quick search and kale seems to have about 30 times less oxalates than spinach, so I may switch to that. My experience with kale was making smoothies with it, but they didn't make me feel good, and I found out later that high concentrations interfere with the thyroid and maybe other things. I'll probably try it cooked instead, or stick to broccoli.
It sure feels like every argument with a vegan ends with "you don't need protein" or "<insert processed vegan thing> is actually good for you" or "1 kilo of kale has just as much calcium as a glass of milk!"
plenty of protein in all of those things. I've been vegetarian my whole life and vegan for the past 19years. I've never once had to think about getting enough protein. Having never eaten real meat and I don't much care about the fake processed stuff. I mean I'll eat it, but I don't buy it much. lentils and rice is a lot cheaper and tastes better imho.
I guess if it matters, I would say I'm a fairly active person. I bike for transportation when ever possible, I backpack and hike a lot, and typically work jobs in the trades or farming. So not a pro athlete but just keep active and moving.
Not really?
Olive oil cannot withstand higher temperatures, it smokes at 350F, compared to 500F+ for canola oil.
Peanut oil imparts a strong peanut flavor, compared to the neutral flavor of canola oil.
Also lol, processed sugars aren’t vegan because the whitening stage uses bone meal.
This is a good rule of thumb for North America, but not true all the time.
In the USA, organic sugar cannot be processed with bone char. Also, beet sugar is never processed with bone char, only cane sugar.
Also, not all non-organic cane sugar is processed with bone char. For example, in Canada, neither of the two main sugar companies (Rogers/Lantic and RedPath) use bone char for processing their sugar anymore (RedPath never did, and Rogers/Lantic stopped within the last few years).
Finally, all sugar in Australia and the EU (and probably other places) is processed without bone char.
I don’t think “pressing the curds for a while”, which is about all there is to making tofu after curdling hot soy milk, really qualifies as processed.
Vegan food is not just salads and Impossible burgers. Get to an Indian restaurant and pick from any of a half-dozen to a dozen options that are entirely plant-based, and then tell me that there's no vegan food that tastes good and is satiating.