Comment on "Protein is not protein. Here's why"

Hey everyone,

Thought I'd share some thoughts on my new Protein is not protein video.

Unsurprisingly there’s a couple comments asking me things like "are you getting paid by the meat industry for this video?" (Answer is no), and I'm not surprised that some people will look at this as an "anti-vegan" piece. That's not really the intention, which is why I acknowledged more than once that you can technically hit your protein requirements without animal foods. (I even went back and re-edited the animation at 1:08 to add an example of a "good" quality whole plant food - chickpeas) 

However, here’s the thing with plant-based diets and protein: I suspect most people get a decent amount of protein on accident. This is good considering most aren't aware that the old recommendation for protein intake was too low.
People just eat what they like and end up getting a decent amount of protein. Even bits of dairy helps out  with protein needs. Milk with cereal, cheesy potatoes, cheese in their salad, milk and cookies or glass of milk with a PBJ. An ounce of cheese or a cup of milk gets you 8 grams of high quality protein. However, I was looking at some vegan cheeses in the international store the other day and these "cheeses" provide zero protein.

As mentioned, the protein quality of cereal by itself is very poor to where you can only use 1〜19% of its protein because it is very lacking in lysine. However, adding milk to the cereal will drastically increase the protein quality of that meal because milk has tons of lysine. Similarly, you can only utilize at most 43% of the protein in a peanut butter sandwich because it's lacking in lysine. Ironically, the best thing you can drink with a peanut butter sandwich (the food mentioned in the Game Changers) is a glass of cow milk.

But nowadays it seems like tons of people want to drink plant milks. Soy milk has 8 grams of protein per cup, similar to Cow's milk, but the lysine content(s) is only 2/3rd’s the lysine of cow’s milk.(S) A cup of Oatly Oat Milk has only 3 grams of protein… and only 11% the lysine of cow’s milk. A cup of almond milk has a gram of protein and 3.6% the lysine of cow’s milk.* So protein quality of soy milk and cereal won't be so great, but almond or oat milk and cereal will have terrible protein quality. Same goes for plant milks and a peanut butter sandwich.

*Could not find data for oat milk or almond milk’s lysine content, however per gram of protein, almonds have less than half (44%)the lysine of soy, and oats have 68% the lysine of soy, so being generous and assuming no lysine is lost when processing oats or almonds into "milk," we get the above numbers.

Keep in mind that as Peter Ballerstedt points out in his presentation ‘When is protein not protein?,’ lysine deficient pigs end up fatter and with less muscle mass.

I talked about stunting in the video, and a lack of essential amino acids is associated with stunting. Lysine is commonly lacking in many parts of the world thanks to cereal based diets. Stunting doesn’t affect just height, but cognitive development as well. And, stunting is permanent. Unsurprisingly, it seems the less animal sourced foods people get, the more stunting we see.(S)

I plan to release this interview I did with Peter Ballerstedt soon, and in it he said something like "What do these plant-based dieters have against children in Africa?"

Proponents of plant-based eating can't argue that plant-based protein is better, so they've always argued that we need not worry because you can get "enough" protein. But imagine if a pediatrician told a mother that if the child gets X amount of protein he'll grow tall "enough."

"What do you mean?"
"He'll be 5'9". That's enough."
"But I would want him to grow as tall as possible, why don't I give him more protein?"
"It's not necessary, 5'9" is tall enough."

By the way, the protein quality score for the Impossible Burger (soy protein) is 91% and the Beyond Burger (pea protein) is only 71%(S) Again, putting vegan cheese on that and making it a cheeseburger gives you no extra protein.

So I get why some people advocating for a plant-based diet would be upset with this video. They may say that “a well balanced” vegan diet will meet all your protein needs, so why do you need to paint plant-foods in a bad light? And indeed that may be true if someone is very diligent, but if people don’t understand protein quality, then they can’t “balance” their vegan diet. So it concerns me that there is this huge push towards plant-based dieting without an equal amount of cautionary messages.

People want to make eating plant-based seem super easy because surely there’s plenty of people who want to be vegan, but don’t get around to it because it looks like a pain. But now there’s all these convenient, tasty vegan foods making it easier than ever for people to go totally plant-based. However, vegan cheese doesn’t come with a warning label saying “Did you know you were getting 8g of protein per ounce of cow’s milk cheese? Well, this cheese has 0 grams.”

In fact, a typical omnivore who eats plenty of protein most likely doesn’t have to go back and say “Can I count the protein in my peanuts towards my grams of protein today?” because whatever animal protein they ate would have raised the protein quality of those peanuts. But when you go plant based you really need to start worrying about protein quality.