Eat with your head: Why eat animals if we can survive on plant food?

Eat with your head: Why eat animals if we can survive on plant food?

Many of you are here because you drink bone broth and therefore, I am probably (but hopefully not) preaching to the choir. That being said, this article unpacks a small amount of the misconseptions faced when eating a plant based diet in the hope that you can leave slightly more educated when you speak up in the world, and start eating with your head.

So, why eat animals if we can survive on plant food?

You might be able to survive on plant food alone, but are you thriving? Here are two main points to consider.

1. The defence mechanism

All living things have a defence mechanism. Animals have an acute stress response triggered by the sympathetic nervous system to either fight danger or run away from it. In the wild, that is how they would escape a hunter. Plants on the other hand need a different way to protect themselves. Most plants are completely poisonous to humans and animals. For the few we have gentically modified to be able to eat, the antinutrients found in the plant protect it by sending out chemical compounds whilst passing throught the intestines (you’d never have been able to eat most wild fruits before we started tinkering with them and). Think back to when you last ate corn on the cob and how much of that came out whole?! Antinutrients are pretty much what they say on the tin. They work against nutrients by binding to vitamins and minerals blocking absorption and causing nutritent deficiencies with the highest amounts of antinutrients found in grains, cereals and legumes.

Womens Health wrote an article stating that in 2023-24, there were 191,927 admissions for conditions caused by iron deficiency, an 11% rise from 173,227 the previous year and nearly 10 times the 20,396 recorded in 1998-99. This timeline fits in with the rapid rise and push for plant based foods putting an enormous financial strain on the NHS and decreasing quality of life.

2. Not all protein is equal

This is an important one to get your head around. When I was vegan I thought I was getting all of my protein from eating copious amounts of lentils and adding vegan protein powders to my smoothie.

So lets use protein as an example. The buzz word of the century. Everyone is trying to up their protein and the simple phrase “just eat more protein” requires some nuance. When you look at the nutirional profile on the back of packaging it is not as simple as protein is protein is protein.

Complete protein is made up of twenty amino acids (AAs) all of which are found in meat making it a complete protein. Plants lack one or more making them an in-complete protien. There are nine essential AAs which must be obtained from food and eleven ‘non-essential’ which doesn’t mean we don’t need them but that our bodies can convert them by using other nutrients as building blocks. If nutrients aren’t coming from meat they are coming from plants, and we’ve already gone over antinutrients above, which makes this conversion process highly inefficient leading to deficiencies.

At the moment, I’m aiming for 1.8kg of protein per gram of body weight. That looks like approximately 131 grams of protein per day. This is way above the national reccommended guidelines for women, and so it should be. As someone who eats a species specific diet, pratically all of this will be coming from meat - completely bioavilable and nutrient dense.

Lets compare.

When I eat 131 grams of protein, lets say from steak, I’d be eating 790 calories. If I were plant based and getting my protein from kidney beans for example, to get 131 grams of protein I’d have to eat 2,096 calories made up of an incomplete protein and additional carbs. Although simplified, this illustrates that if you are trying to reduce overall calories and limit carbs, plant-based options are not the solution.

Meat is good for you

There are many avenues that you could take when dissecting this topic. Hopefully you can see that it can be a huge challenge to get protein and other nutrients needed to thrive from plants and that animal products play a critical role in human health.

Until next time x

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