Isn't the piece kind of silly? It implies that protein intake must be animal-based (that's even in the title) where all it shows is (the well known fact) people eating primarily plant-based diets need to supplement their nutrition with stuff like B12 pills.
Edit: Reading the full paper itself, it seems to be the case. They explicitly add "excluding the use of nutritional supplements or fortified foods." - very silly and misleading.
Doubly so given their actual conclusion (not listed in the abstract): "...would necessarily require food fortification and/or nutrient supplementation to cover adult nutritional requirement". So they acknowledge their title is basically a lie.
(As a side note their math/calculations also look very "I made this up and this has numbers" vs. a serious statistical analysis but that's really not the main point here)
> Edit: Reading the full paper itself, it seems to be the case. They explicitly add "excluding the use of nutritional supplements or fortified foods." - very silly and misleading.
It is neither: they were trying to control variables. The question is: if someone wanted to reduce/eliminate animal-based protein sources, how far could one go?
Most people 'just want to eat' and not worry all the chemicals in food and their levels. If moving away from animal protein is going to be recommended to people (for health, ethical, environmental, etc, reasons), how far is it possible to go before having to tell people to take supplements. From the study:
> Our results therefore imply that moving towards diets with lower animal protein contributions or to a fully vegan diet as the ones included within the range of diets recommended by the Eat Lancet commission (21) would necessarily require food fortification and/or nutrient supplementation to cover adult nutritional requirements. The minimum percentages of animal proteins found in the present study to being compatible with nutrient adequacy in the different subpopulations considered can be compared to those obtained in two recent studies focused on designing sustainable diets for French adults from the Nutrinet-Santé cohort (24) and for older Dutch adults from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam cohort (25), respectively.
Per the study, currently about (on average) 70% of protein is animal-based; depending on the demographic, that can be reduced to 45-60%.
You are quoting the discussion part I was quoting - which is the point I was trying to make. Their conclusion there is on-par with existing scientific consensus and nothing new.
The silly part was the misleading title/abstract - the reason I was pointing to the (obvious and well established) conclusion of "people who don't eat meat need to supplement their diet with fortified foods or pills" is the claim "Approximately Half of Total Protein Intake by Adults Must Be Animal-Based".
Not that fortification is costly or even all that environmentally taxing, but they omitted some major vegan nutrient sources. Yeast, algae, and sunlight treated mushrooms cover most of your bases for missing micronutrients and in quantities higher than meat for some nutrients.
I don't know about the article.. but generally speaking
You can't "count" protein in the same way that you can count carbohydrates or sugar or calories. This is because protein is much more complex and different types of protein vary in type of amino acids and your ability to digest it.
Thus quality of the protein varies significantly by it's source.
So 50 grams of protein from a hamburger is not equivalent to 50 grams of protein from a bean-based burger. Depending on the exact mixture of components and how it's prepared you might need to eat 250 grams of "fake meat" to match the 50 grams of beef protein.
Even in the USA most people don't meet minimum intake requirements for proteins. And it's very difficult for vegans to meet the minimal requirements.
It is possible, but it requires a mixture of different types of plant proteins to supplement each other and improve digestibility. But it's not a simple thing you can do by accident and very few people are aware of the disparities. You can even make things worse by mixing things badly.
I don't know all the details as I've only become recently aware of this stuff...
For gauging the quality of protein they have developed the DIAAS method to indicate protein quality. The old scale was PDCAAS, which some older dietary guidelines are based off of. However PDCAAS didn't take into account the digestibility of the protein, which lead to misleading suggestions.
> Even in the USA most people don't meet minimum intake requirements for proteins. And it's very difficult for vegans to meet the minimal requirements.
This is not true, almost the whole population in the US reaches the minimum intake requirements. If you are making claims like this, you should source them with some sources
> There is a widespread myth that we have to be careful about what we eat so that we do not cause protein deficiency. We know today that it is virtually impossible to design a calorie-sufficient diet, whether it is based on meat, fish, eggs, various vegetarian diets or even unprocessed whole natural plant foods, which is lacking in protein and any of the amino acids.
> Most American adults eat about 100 grams of protein per day, or roughly twice the recommended amount. Even on a vegan diet people can easily get 60 to 80 grams of protein throughout the day from foods like beans, legumes, nuts, broccoli and whole grains.
As soon as you’re using protein for energy the exact ratio of amino acids stops being nearly as important. The body preferentially burns the amino acids it has in abundance. Which is why so few people run into this issue.
A sub 50 gram fortified plant based burger could be in theory be more ideal than a 50 gram hamburger. However in practice hitting the perfect mix of amino acids at every meal or even on average isn’t needed, you can eat beans for lunch and rice for dinner and reach a complete surplus over the day.
Of course nutrition goes beyond protein, if you only eat hamburgers protein is fine but you run into other issues. A varied diet it critical, but it really doesn’t need to include meat.
Isn't the piece kind of silly? It implies that calorie intake must be food-based (that's even in the title) where all it shows is (the well known fact) people eating primarily food-based diets need to supplement their nutrition with stuff like soylent green./s
Let's not start replacing normal nutrition by pills if we can.
I'm not sure how you got "replacing normal nutrition with pills" with "this article isn't news and its point is misleading" but ok..
My critique was about how they claim one thing (You need 50% of your protein to come from meat) but don't show it and instead show that if you don't take supplements you need to do that which is a _completely different claim_. The silly bit isn't that supplements are needed for a balanced plant-based diet it's that this piece is silly and the point it _actually_ makes isn't news.
People supplement their diets all the time - babies get Vitamin D3 drops and iron drops. Mothers take folic acid during pregnancy. Would they die otherwise? Usually not, but supplementing your diet according to medical advice to avoid things like neurological defects is generally a good idea.
Another example is magnesium. This isn't in "normal nutrition" anymore (it's no longer in soils of "normal" (industrial) agriculture, and thus I supplement it (happens to be delivered in the shape of a pill).
My sleep mechanisms are night and day (no pun intended) because of this single supplement.
“Sources of Support: MS-Nutrition and MoISA received financial support from the French National Interprofessional Association of Livestock and Meat (Interbev). Interbev had no role in the design, implementation, analysis and interpretation of the data.”
My first thought when reading the title: "I wonder what livestock group subsidized this."
A reasonable wondering, it seems.
That doesn't invalidate the data, but it does raise questions about how the researchers might frame the experiment or interpret or present the results (such as a click bait title). Then, of course, there's always the possibility of a modicum of cultural bias...
What a bizarre article. Basically shows that if you don't take any animal protein, then you probably need vitamin supplements to go with your vegan diet in order to achieve optimal nutrition. That's hardly news. But it also shows, without trumpeting it so loudly (maybe because of their meat industry sponsors), that the average French diet could well do with a lot less meat (in as much as most of the target populations studied already get MORE than 100% of their protein requirements from animal sources).
Personally, I'm going to stick with my almost vegetarian diet (I probably average 2 servings of meat a month, at most, but get most of my protein requirements from eggs and cheese, while the bulk of calories come from grain, vegetables, fruits and nuts). To me the reason to cut back on animal products isn't nutrition, or health (moderate animal product consumption is clearly not a big health negative), but environmental and ethical: the way most meat, especially, but also dairy and eggs, is produced is environmentally unsustainable, and ethically abhorrent.
Sources of Support: MS-Nutrition and MoISA received financial support from the French National Interprofessional Association of Livestock and Meat (Interbev)
Hm, misleadingt title and abstract. Basically animal food source is more dense in protein, so cheaper. If you constrain the price of the meals, optimal solution will of course favour animal source.
In the intro they even say for western country it food source would not matter because we're above minimum protein intake.
Very misleading, not sure how this title passed the bulshit test.
I don't think a hypothetical $52/year increased food cost requires a half a million dollar salary. I don't make great money right now in my non-tech job, but beans and tofu are still on the menu.
I am down with your "must". Its may be technically valid within the constraints of the paper - no supplementation, no higher cost etc, but it as a word has little place in the title of an academic publication.
My contempt is for the "people should just spend more money" crowd.
Aren't there whole populations where people live without meat for cultural reasons? Like many regions in Asia, especially India? How do those survive till today?
> This study provides factual information about the animal protein contribution to total proteins compatible with meeting all nutrient-based recommendations at no additional cost and shows that it varies between 45% and 60% depending on the group of adults considered.
TL;DR, if you replace animal protein with non-animal protein, you're probably losing out on other nutrients. Also:
> In Model Set#2, for women and men over 65 years (C and E), decreasing animal protein contribution to total proteins below 55% and 60% respectively led to protein levels below recommend levels.
This suggests that non-animal proteins are not used by the body as efficiently as animal proteins.
I don't think this means your protein must by animal-based, but if you're substituting vegan options, you probably need more protein than you think, and also need additional vitamin supplements, as well.
Seems like the cultured meat options are likely to win over plant based made with basic processing. Cultured meat in theory can have almost any amino acid profile targeted which means it could potentially be made with plenty of arginine and lysine which is a limiting factor with meat from creatures.
Edit: Reading the full paper itself, it seems to be the case. They explicitly add "excluding the use of nutritional supplements or fortified foods." - very silly and misleading.
Doubly so given their actual conclusion (not listed in the abstract): "...would necessarily require food fortification and/or nutrient supplementation to cover adult nutritional requirement". So they acknowledge their title is basically a lie.
(As a side note their math/calculations also look very "I made this up and this has numbers" vs. a serious statistical analysis but that's really not the main point here)