Slevin wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2024 4:56 pm
Pure evangelization of a thing should always raise a red flag that you are reading propaganda, and I do find that too often in this space.
For disclosure, I grew up on SAD, spent 6-7 years eating predominately plant-based, including mostly WFPB in various forms (emphasizing various things like legumes, higher fats, soy, raw, etc.) I've tried the carnivore diet. And now I'm omnivorous, but whole-food. I agree with you that there is a tremendous amount of evangelizing and dogma in the plant-based space, which probably comes about because people are partially or wholly ethically driven, obscuring their ability to see clearly.
Oey wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 6:49 am
some people have "tried" a whole food plant diet, but have found reasons to return to old habits.
There are a lot of people, myself included, who tried it in all its variations, with all the supplements, with all the tetrus-playing of aligning this food with that nutrient and so on, and they just don't do well on it. They often get dismissed by ongoing plant-based dieters, despite repeated, long-term efforts to remedy the problem. It's kind of a cliché now, to the point where some people on the carnivore diet joke "the first step to an animal-based diet is a plant-based diet", as a huge number of carnivores are ex-WFPB practitioners who tried and tried and tried but couldn't make it work to solve their problems.
Slevin wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 11:08 am
And also agree on the bioavailability being lower. My understanding is that with protein mixing, it doesn’t really matter all that much (and I certainly have gained a lot of muscle on a vegan diet. I’m the first one to also say, “Yeah, performance slightly worse than eating meat” But I’m not an Olympian so who the heck cares if I’m only at 95% of the possible potential instead of 100%) and we usually do enough protein mixing in meals anyways (beans and rice, lentils and tofu, peanuts and peas, all that sort of nonsense).
There are actually two separate things at play. There is the bioavailability of the amino acids, which is meaningfully lower for most plant proteins than animal foods. And there is what you refer to here, which is that the amino acid profile is inferior in that they are not "complete proteins" comprised of all the essential amino acids. This second point is fairly easy to remedy. The first point less so, and it basically means that 1g of protein from quinoa is not equivalent to 1g of protein from beef. You can just eat more of the plant-based proteins to account for this, but it is an issue. This idea of worse bioavailability permeates tons of plant nutrients compared to animal food versions. And then the third factor that the protein/calorie ratio is generally inferior, which can make it hard to hit certain protein targets without either 1) eating tons of soy products 2) using protein shakes or 3) having to eat in a surplus.
None of this is to say you can't build muscle on a plant-based diet, you definitely can, but if not approached thoughtfully it can be challenging because of these considerations.
IlliniDave wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 8:01 am
I'd also point out that the BigAg corporate money that's inundated academia and the government in the interest of demonizing fat and animal protein dwarfs any advertising backing meat and dairy.
Yes, when I was plant-based I used to believe that Big Meat and Big Dairy were singular villains at play here, but as @theanimal said there is a lot of money sloshing around from all parties. Which shouldn't really be surprising, but when your team is spending money, they are The Good Guys telling The Truth, and vice versa. You can find highly-educated, thoughtful, active MDs advocating for all sorts of dietary practices. This is not unique to WFPB.
Slevin wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 10:24 am
Cargill annual rev: 177 billion
JBS annual rev: 71.1 billion
Tyson Annual rev: 53 billion
Perdue farms annual rev: 8 billion +
Please don’t post claims like this without some sort of backing source. Meat companies are an absolute behemoth in the US and abroad. Implying there’s “other advertising money” just coming in that can outspend them just to change public opinion would require an absolutely insane amount of discretionary spending power.
Some folks already responded to you here, but you're a little off base in claiming that meat companies are behemoths relative to their counterparts. If you read down thread and think through the situation, you will see that the marketing budgets of various consumer product food companies that promote plant foods (remember, sugar, flour, etc. are plant foods and were the original players in demonizing saturated fat)
vastly exceed that of the meat companies. Coca Cola alone spent $5B on advertising last year...Tyson spent $339M (data from most recent 10-K filings). Think about how many processed food companies there are spending compared to the meat companies, the revenues and margins involved (Tyson has a 10 year average operating profit margin of 7%, Coke 28%, and this isn't unusual for a commodity producer vs. a "value-added" branded product), etc. And sure, if you want to allocate part of restaurants marketing to meat, at least be fair and allocate it out equally to the plant foods as well.
The other problem with what you're saying is that if we look at actual data, red meat consumption per capital in the US has fallen hugely in the last 60+ years, so I'd say that this claim that Big Beef won the marketing campaign and outmuscled its competitors is demonstrably false. Poultry took in a lot of the substitution and gained ground, but the general idea is that the interests were predominantly against foods high in saturated fat, like beef.
Slevin wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 11:08 am
@theanimal agreed. But the corn and soy industry are generally selling most of the products to exactly the meat industry. Would be weird of them to try and remove their largest source of rev. Again, why I asked about a sourcing for a big claim.
We have to be clear that different interest are at play for different things. Sure, corn & soy industry sell a huge portion of their production to animal producers in the US so they have an interest in meat production continuing. However, globally, I think something like 65-75% of human calories consumed come from wheat, corn, rice, and sugar. Give or take a few %. So it's not the case everywhere. With all that said, I don't think @IlliniDave was referring to grain producers as much as sugar producers & processed food companies like Kraft, FritoLay, Mars, Kellog, etc. If I had more time I'd go through it all, but I would be astounded if the direct marketing spend of meat & dairy producers was even 25% of the budget of these packaged food companies, not to mention various associations of other plant foods (almonds, pistachios, oranges, synthetic meat, various vegan products, etc.) that promote themselves as a healthier alternative.
7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 3:34 pm
Another factor to keep in mind in terms of the systems ecology is that ruminant population pressure will tend towards rising if not impacted by farming, hunting, or urban spread. For example, due to hunting and farming, there were only about 50,000 deer left in Michigan circa 1900, but now the deer population is over 2 million. Michigan is the 6th largest dairy food producing state at around 12 billion lbs.(3.5 trillion kcals.)/ year, but only the 39th beef producing state, so total of all cows/calves is around 1.1 million. Michigan also produces over 100 million bushels of soybeans (4 trillion kcals)per year on around 2.2 million acres. There are also around 10 million humans in the state of Michigan who must consume around 7.5 trillion kcals/year total. Deer produce approximately 80% of the methane produced by cows per lb. body weight. A cow weighs about 4X the average deer. Ergo, in a state with natural conditions adequate for both dairy and soy production, which is net producing exporting kcals at many multiples those needed by human population (given many more agricultural products than just soybeans and dairy), the methane production by domesticated cows is only 2.5X more than that of the wild deer population. IOW, the natural or farming (many wild deer raid farm/garden crops) conditions that allow for a large population of wild ruminants absent wild predator population or hunting (large deer population currently in Michigan is directly correlated to aging of human deer hunter population) will also increase methane pressure on the atmosphere to some not insignificant degree. Although, I can't really imagine how the deer population could get much higher than current level given that I've seen deer wandering around an abandoned house near downtown Detroit. However, in one possible apocalyptic world of the future feral hogs could control the deer population in competition with humans and wolves.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. I read somewhere (cannot remember source/quality, but IIRC it was approximately accurate) that the bison herd in North America was roughly equal to what the current cattle herd is today, which was a bit surprising consideration all the pressure placed on beef production. I know there is a lot of nuance here so I'm not trying to make any broad implications, just find it curious to note that ruminant emissions in North America probably are not as much higher presently than in the past as some people think. Again, other considerations involved here, but that surprised me.
jacob wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2024 1:51 pm
In terms of "what is ERE", the only general recommendation is to cook from scratch/staples as much as possible. It is well-known that meat and dairy is expensive but so is organic out-of-season vegetables. The ERE way is fundamentally to learn how to cook a few select meals so well that it is preferred to eating out or making dinners by heating mixtures of cans and powders. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, you can cook whatever you want as long as you cook.
To bring it back to the OP, I don't see at all how eating some meat is outside of "ERE". Someone like @theanimal lives this to a greater degree than me, but I hunt for some of my own meat and do a large portion of the processing of it. It fits perfectly well into one's WoGs. As said above by @jacob, I think the point is, to the best of your ability, procure, process & prepare your own food from whole ingredient in a way that complements the rest of your life and goals, as opposed to simply buying prepackaged food solutions that come with downstream problems. I suppose if you think that eating some meat is 100% going to clog your arteries, that would not be homeotelic, but that's a whole other can of worms
.