A vegan diet is really not as hard as people make out to get protein from for the average person.
I have heard this sentence for years, but nobody has been able to provide an example whose price was not outrageous. I suppose that this sentence is written by people who do not care whether they pay $5 or $50 for their daily food. Such people are not average people.
While it is possible to compose a vegan diet with enough proteins at a reasonable cost, and I do this every day, it is really hard to avoid gaining weight, much, much harder than with a non-vegan diet, where you have access to cheap pure proteins, like chicken breast or turkey breast.
Ever since I have switched to a vegan diet, a couple of years ago, I have to monitor my weight permanently and I have to take corrective actions frequently, despite the fact that I eat much less than most people are used to.
They are necessary for a vegan diet, but they are not sufficient. They must be combined with some other source of proteins, which must contain much methionine and which must have a better ratio between protein content and calories.
The commercial protein extracts from them are much more expensive than meat, so they are a non-solution.
Using so much energy requires many hours of intense physical activity. When your job requires spending 8 hours or more per day sitting in front of a computer, then it is absolutely impossible to also do enough physical work to consume over 3000 kcal.
Therefore your suggestion is also a non-solution for many people.
It is true however that for most of our ancestors the problem of gaining weight when eating a strictly vegan diet would not have existed. This is indeed just a modern problem, of the sedentary people.
For instance, bread is normally considered to be an incomplete source of proteins, but that is just because one cannot eat enough. Eating bread made from 1 kilogram of flour per day provides enough of all essential amino-acids. It also provides about 3500 kcal/day. Someone doing hard physical work, like it was much more common in the past, could eat only bread without needing any other source of proteins.
Lentils have 26g of protein and 353 calories per 100g, and eggs have 13g of protein and 143 calories per 100g, so the ratio is 13.5 for lentils and 11 for eggs.
Doesn't seem all that different.
On the other hand, lean meat is almost pure protein, so its ratio of protein vs. energy is 3 to 4 times better than for vegetable sources.
Even with whole eggs, you can get much less calories than with lentils, if they are used to supplement cereal proteins, because they have a significantly better lysine to calories ratio, so when the amount of required lysine is specified you can eat less of them than in the case when their amount would be computed to provide a specified amount of protein.
I suppose that in countries where soy is an important crop, tofu may have a competitive price, but not here.
For a sedentary life style it is impossible to compose a vegan diet that has enough proteins without containing too much energy.
It is necessary to use at least one protein source where a special method has been used to separate the proteins from the rest of the vegetable.
There are plenty of such products on the market, like tofu and various protein extracts, but all of them are much more expensive than chicken meat. At the tofu price mentioned by another poster it is 2.5 times more expensive than chicken breast, while other kinds of protein extracts that I have seen around are 5 times more expensive than chicken breast.
The discussion was strictly about how to get vegan proteins cheaper than meat. When you are willing to pay many times more than for meat, then of course it is trivial to eat a vegan diet.
Because all commercial products are more expensive than meat, the only other way is to extract vegetable protein at home. I am aware of only a single source of vegetable proteins where the proteins can be separated without any special equipment or chemicals (excluding soy, which is expensive in Europe), and that is wheat flour, from which the gluten can be separated from starch by simple washing.
But in any case, even paying double meat price for tofu protein, $.05/g of protein, is still "too cheap to meter" in the context of an industrialized lifestyle.
Nevertheless, this is still very expensive in comparison with the food I normally eat. At the prices typical in the European Union, I can eat a very complete, tasty and healthy food for about $5 per day (as a male of average size). This is true only because I cook myself and I buy only raw ingredients. Processed food would be much more expensive.
Chicken breast without bones and skin would cost here between $6 and $7 per kilogram. Even at the maximum $7/kg, that corresponds to about $0.78 per 28 g of protein, i.e. 2.5 times cheaper than tofu at your price. Therefore tofu is much too expensive to compete with meat.
To be able to eat a vegan diet, I remove most starch from wheat flour, making a bread enriched in protein. This is more than 10 times cheaper than tofu at your price, so tofu is something that I would never consider. I spend the money not wasted for something like tofu for vegetables or fruits that are rich in vitamins, which are usually much more expensive than the staple food that can ensure the required daily intake of protein and fat.
I think that's similar to "seitan" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan , which is also pretty cheap in Europe (~13€/kg on amazon.it: https://www.amazon.it/Bongiovanni-Farine-bont%C3%A0-naturali... )
Nevertheless you can still find meat that is cheaper than this, per its protein content, e.g. chicken gizzards, so it does not demonstrate the expected efficiency of eating directly vegetable proteins without passing them through animals.
It is likely that something like seitan should be cheaper to produce than this, since I can do it at home for many times less money than that, but most commercial products for vegans are overpriced.
Reaching the Protein RDA is very easy for me. The RDA for me is 48g per day, but I usually eat >60g. Am I correct in assuming that you have a way higher protein target than that? That is, at least, what your comments seem to imply.
I get about 30g from my breakfast and dinner, where I usually eat cereal/oatmeal with some soy/oatmilk. That stuff is dirt cheap.
Getting 20g and more for lunch is super easy. Here are some examples I recorded in the past:
30g: Ragou (carrots, kidney beans, tomatoes,...) with noodles
35g: crumbled tofu and lentils (as vegan "minced meat"), in wrap with salad
43g: pasta with tomato sauce and a store-bought vegan schnitzel (I don't usually buy those meat substitutes, but I got that one as a gift)
25g: smoked tofu, rice, canned peas with carrots
20g: from a chickpea/potato soup
Edit: BTW, I also tracked the essential amino acids, and I get easily 150 to 300% of the RDA. I get all of them to >80% of RDA from breakfast and dinner alone, the average is 130% of the RDA per essential amino acids.
Oh, and if you are wondering I had an average of 2100 kcal per day.
It's theoretically possible using raw foods only, but very very few things have the necessary protein to calorie ratio. There's lentils, soybeans, peas, and not much else. You can also get processed food (fake meat), if you're willing to eat that and can find it cheap near you.
A single portion of protein powder each day is cheap and it gives you the freedom to eat anything else you want for the rest of the day.
I switched to vegan after 20 years of being a healthy vegetarian. I stuck at it 18 months, but reverted because I wasn't healthy. Colds, coughs were frequent and lasted weeks, often turning into infections. The worst was an on/off respiratory infections that went on for 3 months. Doctors were useless, I was handed antibiotics and inhalers (although the inhalers did help the symptoms) but a week after it had gotten 90% better, I'd wake up with night sweats and a fever and the whole cycle would start up again. I was on a by-the-book vegan diet, watching my vitamins etc. No idea what I was missing, my bloods looked fine, and I was still able to do 10km runs when I wasn't sick. I went back to vegetarianism have been fine ever since (5 years ago), aside from occasional minor colds and COVID. Never again.
Where I live, in Europe, tofu and protein extracts are many times more expensive than meat, e.g. 5 times more expensive than chicken breast per their protein content (chicken breast is only twice more expensive than lentils, both having the same protein content).
Therefore neither tofu nor protein extracts are a rational choice for a vegan diet.
I have made countless experiments in the attempt of composing a vegan diet that would not make me gain weight very rapidly and which would also be no more expensive than a meat-based diet.
At the prices from here, I have found only a single solution. I make at home a special kind of bread that is highly enriched in protein, with up to 50% protein. This is made by washing away most of the starch from the dough, enriching the dough in gluten. While it is possible to extract almost pure gluten from wheat flour, the so-called "seitan", this requires more time and more water than I am willing to spend every day. For the protein-enriched bread that I make, about 5 minutes of dough washing are enough.
Fungal ovalbumin would be a good alternative for this process, but I doubt that we would see it at a decent price any time soon.
If you're a professional athlete trying to be vegan, then sure, you'll end up with a weird diet to meet those absurd protein needs, but omnivorous professional athletes tend to have weird diets too for the same reason.
Professional athletes that are actually vegan are 4 sigma outliers. For most normal humans it's not possible to even be a more-that-casual athlete in any competitive sport eating plants. Animal meats contain more than just protein including things like iodine, creatine, vitamin D, etc. A quick google brings up numerous studies on the nutritional deficiencies of the typical vegan diet you would need to rely on external supplementation for. Keto diets and other fad diets are also not great for the competitive athlete.
If you're vegan because you don't want to eat animals there's nothing wrong with it. When the vegans start pointing to the outliers as evidence "it can be done" it's just a deep cope to make everyone as miserable as them.
People approach veganism as "take out the meat", which leads to nutritional deficiencies. You can't do that, you basically have to reboot the way you eat. I tracked all my food for months when switching to learn what mix of foods gave me the nutrition I needed. Now it is habit and pretty easy. The only new thing I supplement with is vitamin B12 and a protein shake after workouts. (I did the protein shake before being vegan so no change there)
It isn't miserable at all, we love how we eat.
Also, look into how much protein is actually recommended per day to be realistic about how much carbs and fat on top is fine to eat. It's not like people eat meat/dairy without a serving of fat and carbs next to it, so it should be fine to get some extra fat and carbs from protein sources then rebalance elsewhere on the plate.
My understanding is if you eat enough calories with an okay diet without thinking about protein, you'll hit the recommended (non-athlete) amounts without trouble and will easily exceed them if you throw in a couple of high protein sources.
> You'd pretty much have to eat some kind of fermented soy product every day to get enough protein through semi-normal meals, which is workable I guess though very boring.
Althetes eat pretty weird and repetitively anyway, lots of chicken and protein shakes. TVP, seitan, tofu and tempeh are versatile, and there's plant based protein shakes too.
For the average person that doesn't lift somewhat regularly, I think this means you're disagreeing with the health professionals from Canada, UK, US and more here.
What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?
The horror
> What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?
60g (12% of a 2000 cal diet) is the low end of the recommended 10 to 35% protein intake by these organizations anyway. Low end is getting to barely preventing muscle wastage territory. Plenty of upsides and no downsides to taking more protein while plenty of downsides to not taking enough protein. Do your own googling I guess, not particularly interested in convincing you.