Apart from ethical or environmental concerns, one of the best decisions you can make nutrition wise is to vary your intake a lot and one of the worst is to try and subsist on a limited range of foodstuffs.
The paradox is that by restricting my diet, with an ethically, morally, environmentally and health conscious move to ~veganism, it expanded the variety of food I eat.
When you are unable to rely on old faithfuls, especially meat and dairy, you have to explore other possibilities and really dip into the weird.
I have zero intention to comment on vegetarianism or veganism with this observation, I am solely talking about seeking variation in whatever dietary spectrum you may choose to follow...
That is good advice, but I'd like to clarify that I meant variation over diversity. Eating the same 15 things every week is better than eating the same 5 things, no doubt. But changing it up over the week, month, is even better because is diminishes the chances you're getting too much of something that might be bad in great quantities and works with the adaptability of the body.
Fasting seems to be good for you, for example, because it stimulates the body to consume malformed proteins. Changing intake up from one day to the next also should help the diversity of the gut biome and the activation of several metabolic pathways without 'overheating' any of them.
> A 2021 French study found that ultra-processed ... accounted for 37% and 39.5% of energy intake for vegetarians and vegans ... 33% figure for meat eaters [1].
The data suggests that in whatever population the study sampled from all types of food eaters are eating roughly the same amount of ultra-processed food.
That said, I agree with you that the numbers are too high. I eat meat, cook my own food, and I am pretty sure my percentage is less than 10%.
More seriously, if they follow a nearly vegan diet for ethical reasons, except they don't give a shit about bees, it makes sense to describe their choice as approximately vegan, rather than plant based, because it is approximately vegan.
I can't speak for them, but adding a scoop or two of pea or brown rice protein makes it very easy to achieve any target amount of daily protein while getting a good amino ratio.
Also, per serving: lentils (?g), peas (5g), peanut butter (8g), flax meal (3g), hemp hearts (10g); and more I’m sure I’m missing.
That said, I could easily eat 3 cups of beans per day.
As to “complete proteins” mixing quinoa and oats, which each have some of the necessary amino acids, makes their combination a source for complete proteins.
> All the things in your diet are listed as "examples of not complete proteins" on that page. not quite sure what that means.
Complete proteins contain all nine essential amino acids in consistent amounts. Most of those are stuff like fish, poultry and dairy, whereas grains or vegetables usually don't contain all the needed amino acids.
So if you're on a veg diet, mixing and matching those protein sources is recommended to get you all the amino acids your body needs.
Things like high oxalate content that, without hydration, can put you at risk of kidney stones.
As a ~vegan I once contracted gout!
What that taught me (via internet knowledge shares, the doctors were completely stumped) was an excess of nutritional yeast.
The daily recommended amount was 3-4 tablespoons per day. I was easily eating 15.
Apparently nutritional yeast has a thing called purines, also found in red meat, and is a cause for gout.
Cut it down to normal consumption levels, and the problem went away.
https://multimedia.efsa.europa.eu/drvs/index.htm
Some of the entries in this public nutrition database have daily maximum values.
That information needs to be more readily available.
reply