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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Please say how you can do that.

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.

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What about lentils, beans, wheat, soy etc? They're packed with protein and are cheaper than chicken where I live, especially if you get dried legumes. Are you saying that if you want a high protein diet low carb diet, then it's harder as a vegan? Probably. Just look at low fat cheese vs that vegan gunk.

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.

I'm vegan, and I sometimes record my food intake in a nutrition tracking app as a sanity check. With "sometimes" I mean very rarely, about two days this year, on a weekend when I feel like it.

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.

Just get protein powder.

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.

You can buy a block of tofu with 28 grams of protein for $2. What’s so hard about that?

I assume that this is a price in USA. Where I live, in Europe, it is somewhat more expensive, but indeed the difference is not great.

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.

> To be able to eat a vegan diet, I remove most starch from wheat flour, making a bread enriched in protein.

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... )

That is indeed a good price, because per its protein content it is cheaper than chicken breast.

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.

Tofu. Problem solved.

tempeh (also made of soy). rice and beans. chickpeas.

Lentils, chickpeas and beans are the best sources of proteins among non-processed vegetables, but they still contain too much starch and it is impossible to use them exclusively to provide enough proteins within a diet of not more than 2000 kcal/day, suitable for a sedentary life style.

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.

"suitable for a sedentary life style" change this.

An adequate daily protein intake from food cooked from vegetables that have not been processed using special methods for protein separation would provide over 3000 kcal/day.

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.

You can use a lot of words, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that you're too lazy to make your dietary principles really work. Burning 3000 calories a day while working in software is absolutely possible. I did it today.

> but they still contain too much starch and it is impossible to use them exclusively to provide enough proteins within a diet of not more than 2000 kcal/day, suitable for a sedentary life style.

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.

Whole eggs, like also most kinds of dairy, have similar amounts of fat and proteins, so indeed they are not much better as sources of proteins than nuts or seeds.

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.

Where I live, in Europe, tofu is much more expensive than chicken meat or eggs, so it is a non-solution.

I suppose that in countries where soy is an important crop, tofu may have a competitive price, but not here.

I'm not vegan, but in most places in Europe lentils are really cheap (2.50€/kg)

Lentils are a good source of proteins and are about twice cheaper than the cheapest meat, but like any non-processed vegetables they have a too high ratio between energy and protein content.

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.

Also consider that tofu is edible both raw and cooked, while meat must be cooked. So meat adds energy and labor costs of cooking.

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.

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