Whole-Food, Plant-based Diet is ERE

[Slevin]

@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.

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).

[guitarplayer]

In the context of meat and diary versus plant based, it is worth pointing to the fact that the title of the thread is whole-food as well. I think I read up above @AxelHeyst rightly pointing to or hinting at including some meat to the diet. It requires just only a small stretch of imagination to see how an egg is plant based, too.

The whole-food, as in, unprocessed, or minimally processed food would be the ratchet to make the whole-food plant based diet ERE in the sociocentric sense.

On the level of an individual, I would still argue that it is the optimal choice statistically but this is much more down to individual and there is basically lots of room for individual preferences and variation of individual body.

So I would argue that it is better I eat wheat berries (ideally with husks, though these were sadly withdrawn from circulation by my local oriental shop a while back) rather than process them in my home to bake bread (which I had done plenty times and yes fresh home baked sourdough bread with fresh coffee is a blast like few others), but I would not argue it is better you do it.

ETA: OK I'd not milled wheat for my bread, I bought flour.

[IlliniDave]

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.

Any of these sound familiar from commercials people actually see?

https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/t ... #gsc.tab=0

ETA:

Couple podcasts of related interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-qq2Tzl5nM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOgH9LDwBzY

[jacob]

Any of these sound familiar from commercials people actually see?

They wouldn't be. They're conglomerates that only investors would know. Consumers would be well familiar with the brands they own though.

[jacob]

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.

There's an old post: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/food ... costs.html

[7Wannabe5]

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.

[IlliniDave]

They wouldn't be. They're conglomerates that only investors would know. Consumers would be well familiar with the brands they own though.

The top 3 are Nestle, Pepsi, and Coke!

[Slevin]

They wouldn't be. They're conglomerates that only investors would know. Consumers would be well familiar with the brands they own though.

For example, The Outback Steakhouse (who pretty much everyone in the US recognizes as a big nationwide food chain) gets their steaks from The Bruss Company, which is a subsidiary of Tyson. So if you’ve ever eaten a steak at an Outback Steakhouse, which does a *lot* of advertising, the backend is Tyson. You can do this for basically any chain restaurants in the US.

McDonald’s get much of their beef and chicken nuggets from Keystone Meats

Today, Keystone's US operations are proud to produce and deliver the highest quality beef, chicken and fish products to McDonald’s, including more than 150 million pounds of beef, 300 million pounds of chicken and 15 million pounds of fish each year.

who when you go and look it up, is also owned by Tyson on the back end. So McDonalds’ advertising is essentially advertising to people to go buy Tyson meat products. This isn’t meant to be sinister or conspiratorial or anything, it’s just how large supply chains with specialized parts work.

[IlliniDave]

...
McDonald’s get much of their beef and chicken nuggets from Keystone Meats
who when you go and look it up, is also owned by Tyson on the back end. So McDonalds’ advertising is essentially advertising to people to go buy Tyson meat products. This isn’t meant to be sinister or conspiratorial or anything, it’s just how large supply chains with specialized parts work.

Yep (and don't forget eggs on the animal protein front), but also whoever they get their buns, biscuits, pancakes, english muffins, potatoes, condiments, ice cream, apple pies, coffee, juice, salad stuff, and sodas from. I don't know if it's still true, but at one time it was beverage and side item sales that drove the profits of fast food chains, maybe most restaurants, with profit margins of like 75%-90% on those in the fast food space. The Big Mac or Egg McMuffin is just to get you in the door/drive thru to give them a shot at selling you the higher margin extras.

Interesting the McDs sells twice as much chicken as beef. I'm old enough I remember when hamburgers and fish were the only choices.

[IlliniDave]

@theanimal agreed. But the corn and soy industry are generally selling most of the products to exactly the meat industry. ...

I think biofuels has passed animal feed for both corn and soybean consumption in recent years. Corn is 40% ethanol and 35% feed (varies a little year-to-year with demand), leaving about 25% for human consumption and other uses. Soybeans are at least 50% biodiesel I believe [edit:, that belief was incorrect, more than half of biodesiel is made from soybeans, but it's a small fraction of soybean production, the majority of which still goes to livestock feed, a misread on my part].

The sad thing is monocrop agriculture is horribly destructive (as is the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides) and none of the animals fed corn or soy byproducts or things like oats really have any business eating them, and the result is poor quality meat as far as food goes. It's unfortunate people like beef, for example, with high quantities of intramuscular fat, which, the same as for humans, is a sign that the animal is metabolically unhealthy.

Edit to add: there's some overlap in the ethanol/livestock feed numbers for corn since some of the leftovers from distillation are converted to animal feed, so the human consumption/other uses is probably somewhat more than 25%.

[Dave]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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 .

[Slevin]

I mostly agree with everything you've said here @Dave, except that I'm not trying to necessarily arguing the points you think I am (and I guess that's on me if it came off that way). I agree that there are a lot of big companies that can outspend more of the big meat companies. I just don't have any evidence that plant based food industry (me reading that as alt-meat + alt cheese + alt milk) is demonizing them with any large scale amount of resources. Definitely could be a misread of @IlliniDave's point as well, if he's just saying there's a lot more Coke + cookie advertising. Definitely agree with that.

I did literally write (and the suppliers of the buns and the suppliers of the veggies / cheese or something like that) when writing up the restaurant post, but deleted that bit before posting because it seemed like an unimportant tangent from the point of the post. Should have left it, I suppose.

As to the protein point, heavily agree. You have to eat more. That isn't a "problem" necessarily, but yes requires much more thought and effort than "put large hunk of meat into mouth" due to the protein / calorie density you mention. Literally had a long conversation about that earlier this week on it being annoying and having to dedicate much more calories to "protein". Some tasty low processed protein powder + pea milk is an acceptable "patch" for me. And making pea milk is pretty easy.

Unfortunately for me starting eating vegan though, I didn't care about the health reasons being hard, because playing life on default mode is boring and simple anyways (also I love the taste of meat, its delicious), but did it after watching a bunch of animals get slaughtered, and I just couldn't handle it. So I just have to figure out the stupid rules anyways, or find a way to get past the literal gag reflex that happens when I even think about eating meat / fish. Which is sad, because I do now literally live right next to an insane amount of amazing seafood.

[Dave]

Haha, well to the extent I was speaking to something you weren’t talking about, that’s my bad! I very well might have imposed some thoughts onto your comments that you didn’t intend, so at the very least partially on me. I also just find the broader topic super fascinating after many years of reading and experimentation, and to round out the discussion (IMO this forum skews plant-based), I thought it worth fleshing a few thoughts out.

Yeah, it depends how one frames meat vs. other. The historical context of how saturated fat came to be demonized from the health context is largely from sugar/grain producers/processors, not the meat alternates of the world today. One thing a lot of people don’t think about is that if you think broadly and literally, plant-based means literally anything not meat, eggs & dairy. So absolutely everything else, including most highly processed junk food but along the whole spectrum to oils, refined grains, and so on. By calories, only 30% of American food is animal products, which is pretty high compared to much of the world. My point being with all this that most food produced and consumed is plant food, and in a competitive world with everyone fighting to win stomach-share, animal products are in the minority and also are generally low-margin, commodity goods that have a fraction of the ability to advertise and lobby compared to plant foods at large and particularly the high-margin processed branded stuff.

Interesting to hear your thoughts on protein. I wrestled with this a lot…to hit 0.67g/lb of body weight that I was striving for, I had a hell of time doing WFPB given the protein/calorie ratio of plant foods, even those that are generally considered good sources like beans. The carbs just pump up the calories so high as to make it difficult to hit the absolute protein number without exceeding caloric maintenance, especially when you’re also trying to fit in a variety of other caloric food sources like nuts and seeds for fats, or fruits for carbs! This was one area that I sometimes wished I didn’t care about when I was plant based as is the case for many plant-based eaters, but as someone who was trying to build muscle I felt it important for both strength and muscle gains, and also that I just felt more satisfied and energetic with more protein. I liked the idea of just eating a broad range of plant based foods and it being enough, but it didn’t just “happen” for my goals like many lead on – like you said, it’s annoying dedicating so much of your calories to it, and without supplementing a powder, it requires a substantial legume intake which was rough on the GI system. Sounds like you found a nice solution with the powder & pea milk, nice! I did end up eventually supplementing with a protein powder and it helped a lot, but your approach sounds superior to how I navigated the situation.

Yeah, I hear you there. I respect ethical vegans a lot and am still friends with many. I used to share a lot of the beliefs, and while I have changed my mind on several of the topics, I respect people who stand for something and sacrifice for it. And it’s definitely health and fitness on hard mode, IMO. I did enjoy the game of it to some degree for a while – it’s fun to learn about nutrition and try to piece it all together and to reproduce tasty food food with plant-based alternatives. At the end of the day, we all strike out on our own path of balancing our beliefs, skills, exposure, values, and health situations, and often end up in very different places.

Dang haha that’s hard with the seafood. I know a number of pescatarians who get around the ethical side of seafood given dramatically lower sentience, but I try to stay away from suggesting such things unless someone actively wants to discuss.

Apologies again to the extent I mischaracterized you, was not my intention for sure and I agree with much of what you said too.

[IlliniDave]

Although I wound up being somewhat of a devil's advocate in the discussion, it wasn't really my intent. I'm 100% in favor of WF-dominated nutrition, and whether or not someone chooses to make animal protein and fat a part of that is an individual choice I respect either way. I'm far from carnivore in my regimen, and spend nearly all of my animal food dollars on regeneratively-raised, pastured/naturally fed sources (tbh, more for selfish reasons of health than because of ethics). I eat a large volume and variety of plant foods on a daily basis, I just severely curb grains and most starches, limit fruits, and avoid a subset of plant foods that are known to cause serious gut issues over time for at least some fraction of the population. Inherent to the WF part of it is a near complete ban on highly processed carbohydrates and/or added sugar/fructose. Anecdotally I went from decidedly metabolically unhealthy to metabolically healthy (especially for my age) in about a year as a what I call a "thoughtful omnivore".

[Smashter]

Unfortunately for me starting eating vegan though, I didn't care about the health reasons being hard, because playing life on default mode is boring and simple anyways (also I love the taste of meat, its delicious), but did it after watching a bunch of animals get slaughtered, and I just couldn't handle it.

Ditto!

Perhaps too personal a question, but did you watch those slaughters in person? That would be intense. Like so many people in todays day and age, I was radicalized by youtube videos

Factory farming footage is worse than any horror movie. The documentary "Dominion" is free on YouTube on the off chance anyone wants to see why many states with booming animal agriculture industries have passed laws making it illegal to film inside animal farms.

Do you have a go to pea milk recipe? I should try that, I spend way too much on plant milks. I also want to try that PB2 powder, sounds great.

[eating vegan] is definitely health and fitness on hard mode, IMO.

This is where I feel lucky, especially from a fitness perspective. I’ve gained muscle mass and strength while improving my overall fitness on every metric since going vegan 4 years ago, without paying a ton of attention to protein intake. My blood work and energy levels are good as well. Definitely makes things easier. Still, I can't say for sure that I'm healthier than I would be if I was an omnivore, especially if I focused on eating organ meats.

I'm far from carnivore in my regimen, and spend nearly all of my animal food dollars on regeneratively-raised, pastured/naturally fed sources

That's awesome, and how I would want to be if I ate meat. If only more people actually did this or obtained a significant amount of their meat from personal hunting and fishing trips. The sad reality is that 99% of meat in the US comes from factory farms.

As for the idea of plant based being easier on the wallet, you only have to look at my latest grocery spending numbers in my journal to know that that’s not always the case

[thai_tong]

The past 2 years I've eaten meat once a week and reduced ultra processed food a lot. Even when running 6-8 hours a week I never had a problem with too little protein.

I love cooking and putting some restrictions on what ingredients I can use makes it enjoyable and more creative.

I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything because I love the feeling that I'm eating healthily.
There's lots of new research about how harmful ultra processed foods are and it's good to know I'm protected from that.

When it comes to cost, I never worry about the cost of health. I won't buy gimmick and convenience stuff, but eating a whole food diet isn't worth restricting with costs.

[Slevin]

Interesting to hear your thoughts on protein. I wrestled with this a lot…to hit 0.67g/lb of body weight that I was striving for, I had a hell of time doing WFPB given the protein/calorie ratio of plant foods, even those that are generally considered good sources like beans. The carbs just pump up the calories so high as to make it difficult to hit the absolute protein number without exceeding caloric maintenance, especially when you’re also trying to fit in a variety of other caloric food sources like nuts and seeds for fats, or fruits for carbs!

I’m roughly 170-180lbs lean body mass, so need about 120-130 grams of protein for 0.7. I basically just eat 1 block of Trader Joe’s extra firm tofu (70g protein / 750 cals) and then 1 cup pea protein with pb2 (260 cals, 28g protein for both). Some days I do tempeh instead, and I also sometimes eat lentils instead of protein shakes. Then I let the rest come in random residuals from whatever else I’m eating that day, usually either pumpkin seeds (pepitas), bread / pasta (yeah wheat has a weirdly lot of protein), roasted nuts, sunflower seeds / cashews used to make creamy sauces. Beans, lentils, whatever. I’ve calculated it out a bit to spot check and it always works out. So yeah, burning a little less than 1k cals per day on just protein focused foods, but my maintenance is also around 2700 - 3k cals per day, so it’s not like it’s super oppressive from that perspective.

Now, the highest protein density foods there are technically slightly processed… but so is any meat, so I’m not too worried about it.

[Slevin]

Ditto!

Perhaps too personal a question, but did you watch those slaughters in person? That would be intense. Like so many people in todays day and age, I was radicalized by youtube videos

Factory farming footage is worse than any horror movie. The documentary "Dominion" is free on YouTube on the off chance anyone wants to see why many states with booming animal agriculture industries have passed laws making it illegal to film inside animal farms.

Do you have a go to pea milk recipe? I should try that, I spend way too much on plant milks. I also want to try that PB2 powder, sounds great.

Dominion is the literal worst. But I also think if you eat meat every day, you need to watch it, so that you can understand what you are doing and the harm you are inflicting by buying the cheap cuts of meat at the supermarket. It’s only fair.

Yeah dominion was the final straw for me, after also having felt really bad about killing fish while fishing, and killing some other animals in the past (dying wildlife and such where it wasn’t going to survive), and going to college in a place where every once in a while you could smell them boiling beef fat into tallow in the slaughterhouse the town over. I’m a proponent of not doing things without understanding what I’m doing (thanks physics), so I thought it would be a good idea to understand what the meat processing world was like……… aaand now I’m here. With 50% of our household labor currently going towards helping run a farmed animal sanctuary.

[Dave]

This is where I feel lucky, especially from a fitness perspective. I’ve gained muscle mass and strength while improving my overall fitness on every metric since going vegan 4 years ago, without paying a ton of attention to protein intake. My blood work and energy levels are good as well. Definitely makes things easier. Still, I can't say for sure that I'm healthier than I would be if I was an omnivore, especially if I focused on eating organ meats.

I wanted this to be true for me for numerous reasons...ethics, environment, & $, namely. But I tried a lot of things and never could get it to work. I suspect it has to do with one's efficiency in converting certain plant-based nutrients into more useable formats, such as ALA->DHA, and perhaps variance in protein/fat needs. Some people definitely swing it well, but I also know a lot who haven't, too.

It'd be cool to talk about your thoughts on this during the walk in a few weeks!

I’m roughly 170-180lbs lean body mass, so need about 120-130 grams of protein for 0.7. I basically just eat 1 block of Trader Joe’s extra firm tofu (70g protein / 750 cals) and then 1 cup pea protein with pb2 (260 cals, 28g protein for both). Some days I do tempeh instead, and I also sometimes eat lentils instead of protein shakes. Then I let the rest come in random residuals from whatever else I’m eating that day, usually either pumpkin seeds (pepitas), bread / pasta (yeah wheat has a weirdly lot of protein), roasted nuts, sunflower seeds / cashews used to make creamy sauces. Beans, lentils, whatever. I’ve calculated it out a bit to spot check and it always works out. So yeah, burning a little less than 1k cals per day on just protein focused foods, but my maintenance is also around 2700 - 3k cals per day, so it’s not like it’s super oppressive from that perspective.

Now, the highest protein density foods there are technically slightly processed… but so is any meat, so I’m not too worried about it.

Right on, so we were/are going for similar protein #s and at similar calorie levels. Cool to see how you hit it. I did 2.5-3.5 scoops of 25g plant-based protein powder, but also a bit more beans & lentils than you. I was a little reluctant to have that much tofu in my diet, although I really like tofu. Yeah, I mean I'd argue that (at least most, including the one I bought) all protein powders are highly processed foods, stripped of most of the whole food component and often with other additives. They're fairly decent processed foods, but a far cry from say beans. Tofu is also fairly processed.

Why do you say meat is processed? Maybe I'm missing something, but I think of something like muscle, connective, or organ tissue as a whole food. Sure it's butchered out, but people aren't eating the entirety of the corn, soybean, banana, almond, or kale plant either. And if it's the cooking part, you don't really have to cook any meat (the risk of things like salmonella comes from the industrial production/distribution process, not relevant for say hunters or small scale clean farms with rock solid distribution), whereas you absolutely have to cook, otherwise process, or limit many plant foods (e.g. many legumes) to minimize the impact of plant defense chemicals.

[Slevin]

Yeah, I mean I'd argue that (at least most, including the one I bought) all protein powders are highly processed foods, stripped of most of the whole food component and often with other additives. They're fairly decent processed foods, but a far cry from say beans. Tofu is also fairly processed.

Why do you say meat is processed? Maybe I'm missing something, but I think of something like muscle, connective, or organ tissue as a whole food. Sure it's butchered out, but people aren't eating the entirety of the corn, soybean, banana, almond, or kale plant either. And if it's the cooking part, you don't really have to cook any meat (the risk of things like salmonella comes from the industrial production/distribution process, not relevant for say hunters or small scale clean farms with rock solid distribution), whereas you absolutely have to cook, otherwise process, or limit many plant foods (e.g. many legumes) to minimize the impact of plant defense chemicals.

Ehh, pb2 is just peanuts that got squished enough to remove all the oils, then they ground the rest up into a powder, and that's what you're being sold. Oil-less peanut butter (I assume they're also selling the oil on the other end for double the profits ).

I made Tofu before plenty of times though. Its not a complicated process, its pretty much exactly the same process as making curds with milk and then pressing it at the end. But I don't hear people running around yelling about how processed cheese is (IDK maybe they do that, people are crazy). I can get why you might not want to eat soy tofu every day, but you could also mix tofu types. Since nothing is especially special about making tofu from soy, you can actually use pretty much any legume.

Also I meannnn, I guess you don't *have to* cook meat, but I don't think I've met almost anyone in the modern world who didn't without the influence of random diet people on the internet. But yeah I meant most people cook and flavor their meats, and cure them etc. Which I put in the same level of processing as the above (yeah you're doing something, but not adding weird ingredients / etc). Then obvs there are actually processed meats (bacon, sausages, etc), but anybody can avoid those.