There are some people who simply don’t function as well when they don’t eat meat. “But I’m vegan and I do just fine, in fact it I feel better then when I was eating meat”. I don’t doubt you, but I also don’t doubt the ex-vegans who tried and tried, but just felt awful and tired until they reintroduced meat. Different people have different metabolisms, and some people just can’t properly digest certain foods for some reason.
Meat has a much higher concentration of protein and iron than vegan food. Even foods like tofu and seitan (sold refrigerated at grocery stores) are only 50% protein while chicken breast is around 90% and lean fish is almost 100%. The only vegan alternatives which do have a comparable ratio (protein powder, TVP) are basically pure protein extracted from vegetables, the quality and bioavailability doesn’t compare (apparently the human body is bad at absorbing pure nutrients vs. “natural” food that contains them). Many ex-vegans have been consistently anemic, even while taking iron supplements, until they re-introduced meat.
This review debunks the "bioavailability" and "quality" claims quite easily.
"bioavailability" (pdcaas diaas) is a contrived measure of protein source completeness made up to characterize protein issues of starving humans. It was also calibrated on rats and pigs, not humans. The "complete protein" misinformation is everywhere. Even on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein (edit: now I see that someone recently changed the statement to "adequate proportion" while previously it was just referencing that it contains all 9 essential amino acids).
All plants contain all essential amino acids, including green grass. Completeness in case of no starvation does not mean a thing. If you are eating 3000kcal of wheat every day, protein is no longer a worry, despite wheat having a 25% made-up bioavailability measure that was deduced by checking what happens to nitrogen in a live pig.
The protein "concentration" is just not true. Chicken breast does not have 90g of protein in 100g of chicken breast. 35g of protein in 100g of raw soybean. You will have to find a really rare steak of 100g to top that.
> Many ex-vegans have been consistently anemic, even while taking iron supplements, until they re-introduced meat.
This is not at all the conclusion of peer reviewed articles. Increased occurrence of nutrient deficiencies in vegan populations does not exist. Some people get deficiencies on any diet, and this is also the case for diets that have low-calorie high-volume foods like plants. Nothing special about that. People need to eat more volume but rarely do so. Similarly, they need to eat more calories. Talking about micronutrients in a world with no starvation is unnecessary. If you're eating a variety of plants, enough calories, it is certain you are consuming all of the necessary nutrients and protein. If you want to do powerlifting, marathon running, you will need to adjust your diet, whatever diet it is.
In contrast, chicken breast is nearly entirely calories from protein and very low fiber. Replacing some chicken breast with soy makes sense, but your fiber budget would cap out quickly and that would leave no room for other fiber rich foods like fruits and leafy green vegetables.
There is small amount of fiber in tofu, seitan, tempeh or other soy derivatives.
The "protein concentration" was mentioned together with iron, as if it is a problem of deficiency, not in the context of obsessive compulsive dieting by tweaking your macros to achieve the best results.
I am not sure the fiber budget you mention is a reality. There is no threshold where your body will stop behaving if you consume too much fiber.
The rest of us have lower GI problems of some sort if we go too much over the daily recommended amount. That can cause significant practical and social problems. But you are correct that we probably won't die. It could be painful in some cases, though, and that would be enough.
The irony being that I absolutely love veggies of all kinds, and would have no trouble eating vegetarian, if it weren't for the side effects on my health. I'd be thrilled to try lab meat!
100g of raw beans, or 100g of raw lentils, has more grams of protein than a chicken breast. 100g of raw soybeans has more grams of protein than same amount of beef.
Of course, "raw" is the catch word, because when cooked, beans/lentils fill with water and then you might claim that concentration has been lowered but the amount of protein stays the same (nothing is lost by cooking).
I'd say that latter case especially counts as a need.
Exactly this. The whole point is the Protein:Fat+Carb ratio and vegan options just don't come close. My diet has me eating ~150 grams of protein a day. If I were vegan, I'd be consuming an insane amount of carbs and/or fat along with that protein. My high protein diet combined with weight lifting is the only thing that keeps the dad bod at bay.
I’ve been planning meals using linear programming with the Simplex algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm) to calculate the optimal ingredients/quantities to hit my macro goals while minimising total calories.
From playing about it’s impossible for me to hit my macro goals using a pure vegan/vegetarian whole food diet. To hit my protein goals my carb ratio would need to go way up and I’d then need to lower the fat percentage and even then I’d likely be in a caloric surplus. I could lower the protein proportion to try and hit the total calorie goal but then I’d likely be in a catabolic state and loose muscle mass.
I really wanted to eat less meat just for the fact meat costs more and as a plus eating less lowers my environmental impact. When plugging in the numbers with simplex it becomes very apparent it’s extremely hard to get the nutritional bang for your buck you get from meat. For the average person not interested in strength training or body fat percentage it’s probably not as big a deal but the fact remains it’s extremely hard to get specific macro targets without meat.
I fear that often the vegan community insists that these lifestyle changes are universally easy. It probably doesn't help that many of the vegan activists make a part of their living by being vegan activists, which gives them flexibility to micromanage their diet. But for the gentleman at the lumber yard, it isn't so easy.
I'm excited to see cultured meat make some headway and hope the ventures in this space are successful. I've been watching for some time.
I am pretty sure that gentlemen at the lumber yard do not have 300kg deadlift events and are not competing.
It is well known that diet has very little to do with progress for an amateur athlete. Consistency is the biggest factor in long term success. If you want to eek out the most out of your body, then you might want to optimize, but then you're already deviating to obsessive behavior.
Yeah, if you want to increase your squat by 20% short-term, you're going to have to eat more food and be obsessive about it, but if you're fine with consistent training over a span of 10-20 years, there's no reason to stress too much about diet.
When I hear people talking about diet and "optimal performance", I always wonder what the hell are they doing that they need to optimally perform. Like, what exactly is optimal performance of a sedentary programmer that maintains elasticsearch clusters? What, he feels tired sooner if he's on a vegan diet instead of something else?
People are driven by incentives. People like meat, so instead of asking them to stop eating meat, which most won't do, make it a better option that fits with whatever the asker's goals are. In this case, you'd want people to care about animals or decrease environmental effects, so the way to do that while also considering people's incentives of loving meat is to have lab grown meat, or something close enough like plant-based meat substitutes that taste like meat.
You will never get anything done by appealing to individuals to change their habits wholesale, that's just not going to happen, people are too entrenched in their defaults. You have to appeal to people's wants and desires and bend them towards your own goals. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat (and now Micro Meat, etc) have got it spot on: economically target the incentives of wanting to eat meat but make them out of non-sentient substances like plants or bacteria growing muscle cells.
That people still consider that everyone will go vegan or stop eating meat altogether is a fantastical view of the world, it has no basis in true reality. There will be more people contributing towards the lessening of the suffering of animals in the next few years via eating these non-sentient substitutes than has ever been achieved in the last century of the modern vegan movement, simply because it seems now finally that larger human incentives are being targeted directly, which is much likelier to effect change than individualistic pandering.