Why go with an exotic, new protein source like brown rice when there're others available in huge quantities and very good quality like whey protein isolate ?
Whey protein may not be 100% for vegans, I guess. But then, it's something so remote from milk, just as rice isolate is remote from rice.
I think you probably know this, but whey is suitable for vegetarians (being a byproduct of curdling milk) - and whey-based protein supplements are often vegetarian. Vegan protein supplements are generally extracted from things like peas, beans or hemp.
It's sort of interesting but I don't really understand the issue they seem to have with using protein isolate rather than the dregs of boiled peas. Maybe it's because isolate rings like a chemical name? It's especially funny when considering that folks appear to be fussy about finding a natural-enough vegan protein source to make meringues, the other half of which is white sugar anyway, aka refined sucrose if you wanted to give it a chemical name, and IMO a quite "unnatural" product to begin with
> Also I have trouble getting enough protein with a plant-only diet.
Pea protein has 78/100g protein which sounds like a reasonable replacement for whey protein isolate (89/100g) or other animal sources. Not saying you should eat pea morning 'till evening but supplementing just protein powder is an option, too.
What vegans may have trouble obtaining from non-animal sources are vitamin D3 and Omega3 fatty acids.
Whey Protein, Casein Protein or Whey Protein Isolate is a more like-for-like replacement for milk than a plant based alternative.
There’s also nothing inherently wrong with consuming fat, it’s more than twice the energy per gram compared to carbs and protein. If you are bulking or need to consume more calories, there’s no issue with drinking milk or using it in smoothies.
Whey protein is not of questionable utility, it's used heavily by athletes worldwide, to great effect. Other proteins can be used, but it's the most common by far.
The comparison might still not be perfect, but OPs point about needing a well-balanced diet is still relevant and important to this discussion. We don't get all our nutrients from a single source, especially not meat. So not getting all our nutrients from lab-grown meat isn't a problem. We'll get them from somewhere else. Unless you know there is a specific nutrient in meat, which we don't get from any other source, which lab grown meat won't replicate. However, that's unlikely or vegans would all be dead.
Most of the protein shake stuff would not solve the issue for a vegan diet. Most of the protein shake stuff is made from Whey or Casein or egg whites which IIRC are not vegan. There is pea protein or hemp protein but my quick googling tells me is high carb and low protein and can easily throw you off your calorie limits.
I find vegan protein powders to taste better than whey which is kind of gross to me. (I’m not a vegan). They usually have a blend of 5 or so protein sources to balance out the amino acids.
If you need more calories then fat is by far the easiest.
This study seems awfully limited (16 people!), so may not mean much.
However, it's pretty well known that animal protein is higher quality than vegatable protein (by the amino acid profile.) You can't just compare grams of protein on the back of the container.
So it wouldn't be all that surprising either. For me personally, I've tried whey protein powder and the vegan stuff (the good, expensive stuff.) I get better results on the whey. I also tried beef protein powder. It's disgusting, I don't know if the gains were any different from whey, but it's not worth it!
Is there any concern over the use of rice protein vs whey or another complete protein?
My understanding is that rice protein comes up short with the amount of Lysine present. Not sure if Lysine shows up in other ingredients at high enough levels to compensate.
No, brown rice isn't a complete protein, you need to add beans or tofu and maybe some micronutrients from greens that grow pretty easily. Consider reading a book on nutrition for vegetarians--malnutrition can creep up on you and cause some bad long term health problems.
They dance around this in the article, but there is a current obsession with taking in massive amounts of protein for “health reasons”, and there’s just little reason to do so. Even a vegan diet - even a particularly poorly designed one, will get you pretty far without any needed supplementation. The idea of combining foods, like beans and rice, turned out to be a myth.
I find this plausible, but I think it's about powdered proteins generally, or at least many of them.
I tolerate dairy well, although I only drink small amounts of sweet milk and cream, eating mostly yogurt and cheese. I like to make strained yogurt / labneh, and I'll drink the whey by itself (I like pickle and sauerkraut juice as well).
But when I add whey powder to a shake for the gainz, my stomach really doesn't like that as much. It doesn't cause problems or I wouldn't eat it, but it's just a bit gassy and sometimes irritating.
I've noticed much the same thing with the pea-protein based vegan meats. I believe it's difficult to extract proteins without denaturing them somewhat, collagen is an exception but not a vegan one.
I like eating peas just fine, peas don't give me gas and lentils rarely do (that's it for me and pulses these days), but the extracted protein, not so much, doesn't sit right.
Vegan proteins are not absorbed as good as egg / whey but it's possible to structure a vegan diet to gain strength (eg. vegan protein shakes). Personally, I tried briefly and gave up.
There are impressive vegan athletes even if it's hard to say whether they built more or their muscle on a vegan diet or not.
That said, I agree with your message, getting stronger is not always easy.
Vegan for 20+ years (now 40). I've never had any protein deficiency or any other nutrition related health problems. I weight lift so I take a scoop or 2 of brown rice/pea/soy protein which gets me to what any muscle gain diet guidelines recommend.
Vegan protein powder tastes pretty great. I use a Costco brand. You can add it to almost any meal. If you are lifting weights, its almost impossible to get enough vegan sources of protein to meet the 1g / 1 lb of body weight that is usually recommended.
Actually, if anyone knows how to put together 150g+ protein /day on a vegan diet in under 2100 calories I would be interested. I would switch over at least a few of my days to vegan.
You could revise your claim that vegetable proteins are just as good as animal sourced proteins, to the far more specific claim that soy proteins being as good as animal proteins if you like. Because soy is the only plant source that is comparable in quality to animal sourced proteins (which is why the majority of vegan protein supplements are soy-based).
Even then, if you were to get all or a majority of your protein requirements from soy, then that's a lot of soy. You'd have to eat 1-2 pounds or more of boiled soy beans per day. Which aside from being a very atypical diet, would also be above the level of isoflavone consumption that has been studied to be safe (incidentally, consuming large quantities of whey protein also has some unpleasant side-effects in most people, like extreme flatulence, constipation and the associated discomfort).
Implementing a highly restrictive diet, that eliminates entire food groups that you've evolved to rely on, is unsurprisingly complicated. It also unsurprisingly puts you at risk of deficiencies in the nutrients that your new diet is deficient in. Which is why vegans are unsurprisingly at an increased risk of negative health outcomes associated with those deficiencies.
Your claim that vegetable protein is just as good as animal protein is honestly just misinformation, as well as being dangerous health advice. You can eat a healthy vegan diet if you put the effort into planning it properly, which anybody following your erroneous advice would not be doing.
Whey protein may not be 100% for vegans, I guess. But then, it's something so remote from milk, just as rice isolate is remote from rice.
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