It seems like the article is mostly talking about micronutrients like iron and zinc absorption rather than the protein.
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.
Fun fact, animals don't produce B12. Historically meat contained B12 because animals got it from drinking water and eating food that had the microorganisms which do produce it, but in contemporary industrial scale agriculture, where animals are drinking chlorinated water piped into their pen, eating grains from a trough and being given antibiotics, they no longer get it from microorganisms which would have been in their natural environment.
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.
What do you think a cow eats? Grass. No, it eats micro organisms grown on the grass/food. Its a walking bioreactor. And a B12 source, due to the micro organism s it carries.
It's depressing to read that animals are treated somewhere like that. Meanwhile I can see funny looking highland cattle grazing in the pasture from my window. It's so delicious and comes with zero ethical issues (for me, I'm a proud carnivore but I despise mistreating animals) when contrasted with the horror stories of cattle spending all their lives indoors and such. Heck, I am grateful that the locally produced quality meat is basically prized the same here as the stuff you know nothing of when bought directly from the farmer.
Meanwhile I can see funny looking highland cattle grazing in the pasture from my window.
"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.
A lot of it, imo, is cultural more than mass production. Chickens are kind of a prime example of that. Factory raise them for the breasts and maybe thighs and essentially discard the rest from a consumer standpoint. I'd wager the ratio of chicken raised primarily for chicken breasts far outweigh the added consumption of thighs and wings. Wings in particular are so funny to me... most places sell "boneless wings" alongside actual wings that are just cubed chicken breasts.
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.
You don't need to worry about it scaling to supply a burger hungry world. The market for burgers will clear, no central planner needed. Maybe they wont be available for $6 they will cost $12. Then again, not everyone needs to get the bulk of their calories from burgers.
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.
Those are the harder ones to hit than protein anyway, makes sense it's looking at those. In a way it would make a lot of sense for these kinds of products to intentionally add them - just like your 'take a supplement', why not have it added to the food? Can't really do that with raw vegetables, but processed vegetarian (especially 'meat substitute') stuff...
According to the article the problem is anti-nutrients. I’m not sure how powerful the effect is, but it could mean phytates in beans disable added supplements. Maybe the advice is don’t take supplements when eating high phytate foods.
For the average person living in a high income country, protein needs are easily met to begin with.
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.
How long do you want to live and how robust do you want to be as you age? Something like 50% of people have sarcopenia by the time they're 80. Seems likely eating more high-quality protein and doing resistence training could be a good way to increase life-and-health-span, avoiding that fate.
How many of those people are just plain sedantary?
“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.
- 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.)
> 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?
Those are all short-term phenomenons, though, providing rapid feedback in both feeling worse and having worse performance.
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.
Protein (specially the aminoacid methionine) is actually known to shorten lifespan in mammals. It does this by decreasing the level of FGF-21 in the body. Advices to maximize lifespan should mention restricting dietary protein.
You know all those studies on caloric restriction that show life extension benefits? Looks like their benefits are mediated by FGF21 increase resulted by protein reduction [1].
You should be exercising, which raises your protein requirements. Sure, for sedentary people the requirements are low. But being sedentary is not ideal for health
I do exercise, and that doesn’t raise your protein requirements as much as one would think. It’s only relevant if you’re looking to be a competitive athlete, which I am not.
Those are two wildly different things to compare. Among all degrees of doing something usefully physical, exercising at all would be at the bottom of the ladder, and competitive athlete would be at the top. But you don't need to want to compete to want to get stronger, improve your form, improve your mobility, looks, lose weight etc.. and a greater protein intake would likely be helpful with all of it. It's still good to exercise anyway, obviously, but diet is considered a massive component in getting results of any kind for a reason.
My point consistently been that protein needs are overestimated, not that there isn’t any benefit to greater protein consumption.
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.
It really feels like you’re talking past GP. GP does not appear to be saying that most people need to eat enormous amounts of protein in the pursuit of peak physique and performance. Simply that, for most people who aren’t already focused on high protein intake, increasing the share of protein relative to other macronutrients will likely correlate strongly with increased strength, athleticism, longevity, and looks. There’s no call to take this to extremes that I’ve seen.
I find that with relatively low protein intake, simply because the tradeoff for me is money and desire, I'm definitely able to build muscle, but I also feel like it just goes away in other areas, and likely would be easier to work on multiple major muscle groups with a greater intake.
My point consistently been that protein needs are overestimated
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"
That's not true, since you want muscle mass even for health reasons. The requirement for increasing muscle mass when doing weight training is at least 1.6 g/kg of bodyweight or thereabouts, which is a huge amount of protein
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)
I do actively build muscle, the thing is that you don’t have to be “optimal” to do so.
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.
While I am certain that influencers are saying 1g/lb, I just want to clarify that it is around 1.4-1.6g/kg. It takes significantly less protein to build muscle and have an atheltic physique than some are trying to prescribe, which is a shame because it is overconsumption like anything else we do and as a vegetarian I previously struggled with the idea knowing full well I couldn't hit 190 g of protein unless I was chugging shakes all day
That is really terrible, ignorant advice. There are significant health benefits from maintaining a fairly high protein intake, even for regular people that aren't elite athletes. That especially applies to older people because protein digestion becomes less effective with age and they are at high risk of sarcopenia.
I aim for 1.5g/kg and don’t eat meat most days. I need to actively plan to meet that protein intake. I don’t use meat substitutes if I can help it, but they do make it significantly easier to get protein.
Getting enough protein to meet the needs to sustain exercise is pretty awkward without substitutes in our sedentary lives.
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 eat 3,000-4,000 calories/day (I’m reasonably lean at 105kg body weight). Eating that many legumes just leads to bloating in my experience, which makes getting enough protein entirely from that source tricky. I’ve done it, but I found it impacted sleep quality.
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.
Listen to the interview that I linked above. It's long but seriously worth the time. I can't boil down Don Layman's research to a short comment without losing essential information.
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.
The concern over the "highly processed" nature of plant-based meat-alternatives seems really disproportionate to all the other problems common in American diets: high sugar, low fiber, etc.
Stick with the healthy stuff like unprocessed arsenic and hemlock teas . . ..
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.
The issue is that we began utilizing a lot of ingredients that just weren't available, or edible at all, until the advent of modern industrial processes.
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.
> The concern over the "highly processed" nature of plant-based meat-alternatives seems really disproportionate
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.
Not really. People who are health-minded choose these products with the intention of being healthier, while that choice is diametrically opposite of anything concerning health. They're full of linoleic acid which will fuck your metabolism and gut health beyond repair for years, provide little nutritional value and are even more expensive than meat at times.
New ones at least often use refined coconut oil, which is known to have little linoleic acid.
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.
Tempeh is noted in the study as a good exception; the fermentation process breaks down phylates which normally inhibit iron uptake. So, eat more tempeh!
Fermented foods need to be the next diet fad. The fermentation process acts as a pre-digestion mechanism, breaking down complex structures to be more easily digestible.
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.
Any reason why you don't cook your oatmeal after fermenting it overnight? An overabundance of yeast isn't entirely desirable in your digestive system. Also, it tends to improve the flavor and do more digestion.
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).
When someone can afford to let beans or other legumes or grains or seeds or nuts to ferment for some days, this provides optimal nutritional results.
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.
I'll try cooking them some time. They only sit for 24 hours and the fermented taste is not overpowering (I've let some sourdough starter sit too long on the countertop and know what that smells like). The oats are completely soft though, as if just boiled. I tried adding steel cut oats, but they're too thick to soften overnight. For flavor I add a pinch of salt, nuts, and raisins.
Do you cook the raw beans before mixing with the starter? Or cook afterward? Is the bean starter raw or cooked?
I cook afterwards. The bean starter raw, it contains live bacteria and yeast that help to break down non digestible starches, etc.
There are similar methodologies where you ferment cooked legumes, like making natto, miso or tempe. These do similar things but have entirely different flavors.
> Fermented foods need to be the next diet fad. The fermentation process acts as a pre-digestion mechanism, breaking down complex structures to be more easily digestible
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.
This is great advice except for the part where I, and approximately 50% of my vegetarian and vegan friends, find the flavor of tempeh disgusting.
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.
It's an acquired taste... similar to how cheese is an acquired taste that East-Asians used to be repulsed by. For low-effort, I love eating it in broth where it adds complex nutty smells. It's typically marinated and then baked or battered and fried.
Probably is an acquired taste. I love tempeh but the flavor can overpower other seasonings making all your the meals made with it taste the same. Good choices are teriyaki or curry.
I've made black bean tempeh a few times. I bought a starter pack online. I cooked the beans in an instant pot and waited for them to cool to room temperature. I mixed in the powder (fungal spores, essentially) and let it warm in the instant pot for 24-48 hours. There will be a white mold in and around the bean mixture. The mold should be enough to bind the beans into a loaf.
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.
Instant pot sounds like a good idea! My housemate built a custom incubator in a styrofoam cooler. We made some good tempeh. We had one batch of good natto, then it went south. When natto goes wrong, it goes REALLY wrong. It's already pretty borderline :P
I'm a vegan who loves fake meats. I know they're not ideal. But I still end up eating way more vegetables, beans, etc as a vegan than I do otherwise.
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.
The problem I think is we don't know how how to cook a meal from scratch anymore which makes any vegetarian or vegan diet suboptimal because of all the processed and overly packaged foods. Our lives don't allow anymore to wait 30 minutes for a porridge, 2 hours for a soup even if it's an async process. That's a prerequisite however for a healthy diet a lot of the times.
> which makes any vegetarian or vegan diet suboptimal because of all the processed and overly packaged foods
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.
He's probably talking about themself and a few close individuals, likely also from the tech scene.
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.
Tech people are the people who are are working from home, and are most able to cook.
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?
If 90% of people are not cooking, it is by choice, not because they would have to steal time from sleeping. Modern marketing is very good at convincing people to do other things with their time than what is good for them.
Some small subset might have to make hard choices about sleep versus cooking. Not 90%. Most are choosing something else over cooking.
Right, if the average American spends more than a few hrs/day watching the tube, as commonly reported, they could easily spare 30 minutes/day to cook if they wanted.
It takes a couple of minutes to make porridge. Pour boiling water over a bowl of rolled oats, let it sit for a couple of minutes, ding in the microwave for 30 seconds.
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.
yeah i see Germans use Porridge but i can't tell if they're just using an English word from their language's recent cousin (i.e., English) or not...and i'm 1/4 German but not hip on lingo.
It’s not exactly a secret, but ensuring people are aware is good.
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.
Just hopping on your comment to make a tangentially related point.
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.
I've tried a few different ones. Some sort of plant based sausage (don't know what brand they use) was fine with onions on a pizza. Those chicken nuggets aren't quite the same consistency but I don't mine them, they taste mostly the same.
Is it gonna replace steak? No and I don't think it should. It can totally replace ground beef at Taco Bell though.
I can't wait for a future were we could (hopefully) artificially grow meat in a lab so the meat available that didn't come from a dead animal is closer to the real thing. In an affordable and sustainable fashion at least. Maybe I'm being too optimistic and hopeful on this one.
The Buddhist-cuisine mock meats that I get in my Asian supermarket are essentially gluten in marinade. I don't see how these are anywhere healthier than the meats they replace.
Ounce for ounce, beyond meat burger has higher fat, higher sodium, lower iron and calcium than just regular ground 80/20 beef. Healthier is at best debatable.
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.
Are you comparing premade beyond meat patties to raw ground beef? Beyond meat burgers are preseasoned which is why the sodium is higher. You could eat unseasoned ground beef, but it wouldnt be very good.
In my case, meat substitutes were an off ramp from eating a lot of meat. They are more satisfying than a lentil burger or mushroom burger. Lost a significant amount of weight and meat substitutes helped. But now I'll splurge on high quality meats like bison or lamb when I do eat meat, which is much less often.
If I buy a meat substitute now it's to avoid the more dubious meats like "breakfast sausage."
Does the study mention sprouted tofu or sprouted beans/grains? Sprouted grains and beans can reduce phytic acid. Here's a study, though honestly doesn't look like much, but maybe it is from a non layperson POV: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4252429/
Why does the title use "Low nutritional quality..." instead of "Nutritional quality in vegetarian meat substitutes". The latter makes a judgment of something that is subjective and relative ("Low nutritional quality compared to..."). I mean, it's supposed to be a research paper...
When I was vegan years and years ago, I discovered that getting enough cholesterol can be a challenge. I ate a ton of avocados to try to tackle it. Now the challenge years later is, "how do I reduce my cholesterol intake?"
I'm not an expert but I understood that the value of heme iron is disputed by some. It has the advantage that iron will always be available and you won't need to eat more every day. The problem with it is that some conditions can be caused by excess of Iron and that's more common in the west.
Meat substitutes are, first and foremost, "processed food". They resemble meat secondarily.
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.
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.
How are you handling linoleic acid? I found switching to lard and butter to be a better health alternative for my gut flora after I experienced a period of strange digestive imbalances
I'm not very familiar with it, but Stan Efferding (The Rhino) recommends conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) as part of his Vertical Diet. I've found that beef and rice is pretty much the ideal bodybuilding food, so he's evidently onto something.
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.
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.
My guess is that it is primarily a cost issue. Beyond meat is 2-3x more expensive than real meat in most grocery stores I have seen. I know we subsidize the meat industry in the US, but it’s not clear to me if this is because of that subsidy or their business model just isn’t competitive yet.
going vegan would be a much more appealing proposition if it wasn't for the fact that the only vegan food that both tastes good and is satiating is processed.
I'm not vegan or vegetarian. It sounds like you simply haven't cooked vegan meals before. Vegan isn't raw carrots and boiled vegetables. Vegan curries, sauces, soups are all delicious and aren't processed. The satiating aspects of non-vegan food are mostly the same ones as in vegan foods. It's mainly the staple carbs that fill us up and they're all practically vegan - potatoes, yams, corn, rice, wheat. As for "tastes good", well it's subjective but fat carries flavour and coats your mouth and lingers. Meat comes with fat already so it's easy to make it tasty enough. Apply the same process to vegan food and make some roast potatoes in oil. Taa daa tasty and filling. Probably about as unhealthy as fried meat. Your comment just seems like you need to actually try cooking some vegan food. It's easy af to make any food delicious by covering it in salt, oil, spices.
"vegan food"?! There are boat loads full of vegan cooking books teaching how to make delicious food. I wouldn't equate "fake meat" with vegetarianism or veganism. This is more of a problem of reliance on processed foods in general which is bad, vegetarian, vegan or not.
Added sugars are definitely processed and definitely unhealthy, but completely optional for many good vegan recipes. Canola oil is processed, but also easily swapped for olive or peanut oil. And sure, I guess tofu is processed… but it’s also a 2000 year-old dish that has been consumed as part of a healthful diet in multiple Asian cultures for centuries. The common denominator among all the things you mention here is that they’re also optional in a healthy vegan diet.
Fair points! I guess my cooking rarely requires a smoke point above 350. Looking at the internet, it seems like avocado oil and light olive oil (as opposed to EVOO) have high enough smoke points to use for frying. But I suppose vegetable and canola oil are ideal for frying and switching to other sources requires some tradeoffs
if I was cool with getting my protein from processed food I'd be better off with a protein shake. If you believe processed food is optional in a vegan diet, feel free to enumerate any whole-food sources of protein in a vegan diet.
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!"
legumes, grains, potatoes, seeds, nuts (if you can afford them).
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.
You don't need as much protein as most people get on omnivore diets, and you can easily still get more than enough protein on a vegan diet anyway, and plenty of processed foods are fine even if you don't stick to whole foods. Multiple things can be true. There are very few things that are remotely difficult to get from a vegan diet, and a B-Complex vitamin covers most of them.
Tofu is not actually very processed. It's an ancient dish, on the order of 2000 years old, that is essentially just cheese making but with soy beans instead of milk.
> 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.
What a sad state of existence if you think this is true. There are so many incredibly tasty and satiating foods made entirely out of vegetables. Many cultures have a wide range of tasty plant-based foods -- India, Thailand, Japan, Mexico (just to name a few)...have you never had chana masala? Bean tacos? Any of a dozen types of curries? Veggie sushi? Vegetables add so much texture and flavour to dishes (even dishes with meat...).
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.
All the things you've listed can be tasty, but none of them are satiating. Even after eating enough of that stuff for 2 or more people, I end up needing a serving of meat to actually feel satisfied.
Not a vegan but I disagree with this as someone who has lived with one and dated two. Rice, beans, lentils, Indian recipes, mac and “cheese” made with nutritional yeast, pasta with tomato sauce: all filling, all delicious when seasoned correctly, all (relatively) unprocessed.
This is an education problem and the solution is learning how to cook. I’ll admit that pure vegan is a higher and harder bar, but this is the same way people talk about not having meat every meal. It’s the way I used to talk. It’s just confident ignorance.
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.