VIDEO: Rethinking Plant Based Diets
TRANSCRIPT
Hi everybody! I am here today to talk about probably one of the hottest topics in nutrition right now: plant-based diets. I want to start with the nomenclature. This term: “plant-based diet.” What was once not that long ago referred to commonly as veganism and generally kind of a fringe diet / political type of movement has suddenly co-opted the phrase “plant-based.” I take issue with this, to be honest, I take kind of a lot of issues with this. First and foremost, this is kind of petty, but as a dietitian that has always promoted real, unprocessed, anthropologically proven, logical diets, I feel like the word “plant” has kind of been stolen from me. I remember a talk that I wrote almost 10 years ago that had a slide that said “eat more plants.” And then I went on to explain what that meant and what not. But was that a talk about going vegetarian or vegan? No, absolutely not! It was a talk about having a balanced diet that includes all of the foods that human need to thrive and to get all the vitamins and minerals that we need, animal foods being some of them and plants being a big part of them. Any dietitian worth their salt has been promoting the right plants prepared the right way forever, so the idea that plant-based suddenly means veganism and avoiding all animal products is just… They should be calling it the anti-animal diet, not the plant-based diet! But virtually everything I've clicked on or read in the last year that is labeled plant-based is just a thinly veiled name meaning vegan.
My second big issue is that I feel like the term “plant-based” has this new, sexy, health halo connotation and it's really hoodwinked a lot of people into a diet that is absolutely unproven, illogical and straight-up nutrient deficient. Animal foods have always and always will be an integral part of the human diet. Just a short list of things that you really can't get from plants alone: b-12, creatine, carnosine, the heme form of iron, taurine. There are a myriad of nutrients that are either completely unavailable in plants or not really available in the amounts that you would truly need. If you look at vegan literature they'll usually right off the bat say you'll probably need b-12 supplements, you might need to find ways to get protein powders, and they're kind of admitting that it's not actually a feasible long-term diet. And when you talk to people who used to be vegan a lot of times what they'll tell you is that the reason they stopped is they just were craving meat. It was like their body was telling them I need more, this isn't cutting it. It's often fine for a little while because many of these nutrients can be stored. So someone can avoid animal products for a couple months, maybe even a couple years, maybe, without feeling too many of the ill aside effects. But they’ll likely hit a wall where their body is begging them to get these nutrients that they're now deficient in, that they've given up the only sources of them which is animal food. And this is great news for the fake meat industry and all these Beyond Beef and wacky fake meats! Because these people are craving meat, they go for these fake plant-based “meats” that don't actually satisfy what their bodies crave. So they keep craving it and then they keep buying these fake meats. It's a brilliant business model on the part of the companies making these fake meats, but is it healthy? Is it improving the people's nutrient density? No! It's a sales thing really. And truly very few people last super long on a vegan diet partly because just like any really extreme diet it's just not sustainable, but partly because their bodies start to need and demand more nutrients.
This is an interesting point and one that I think is really relevant especially to a lot of my audience: there is no history of a society that has been vegan. Not really a ton of even vegetarian, but there's some vegetarian where they're having dairy and eggs, and certainly maybe some societies that have done fish. But vegan, with no animal products, there is no historical example of a society that has lived this way. And to my knowledge there is no historical example of a woman who was born, fed a vegan diet for her whole life, got pregnant naturally, gave birth to a baby then raised that baby vegan, and then that baby was fertile. The reason I bring up that chain of events specifically with fertility is I strongly doubt that's even possible. Animal products play a major, major role in the growth and development of babies in utero and in their childhood. And they really have a big hormone role. No study has been done, but I'm not aware of even an anecdotal example of a three generation vegan situation, not to mention a study that's been done. I think that there's maybe some misconception that there's been a lot of research on the health of vegan diets, and there most certainly has not. There's people doing it, but that's not a research study. There's not a clinical trial, especially not a long-term clinical trial, where a child is raised vegan, grows into a vegan adult, and tries to become pregnant. There's just no research on this. So yeah, that's my second reason, just general health.
My third issue with the term “plant-based” is that I take issue with the broad use of the word “plants.” It's wrong to say that all plants are healthy and that all plants belong inside of our bodies – that’s just not true. Frankly I would argue that three plants in particular are actually at the root of our modern health crisis. Those three plants are wheat, soy and corn. Wheat makes all of the refined bread we have, all of the super hyper-palatable crackers and pizza crusts and buns and breads. That's all wheat and we've been eating this refined non-whole-grain wheat to excess for a while now in our society. Corn is at the root of sugar! When we had to get sugar from sugarcane it was expensive and people couldn't have that much of it, they couldn't afford that much of it. But once we figured out how to make sugar out of corn… I'm not even really arguing that corn sugar is less healthy than cane sugar, I'm just arguing that it's cheap and because it's so cheap companies put it in so many more things. So probably if I had to pick one, at the root, the biggest issue with our health, it would be corn. And then soy is really just at the root of so much processed food. It's made it so that we can derive all these substances that just are not really intended for the human diet. And it's at the root of soybean oil and margarine and all of these hydrogenated and high omega-6 fatty acids that are inflammatory. Inflammation is at the root of so many diseases today. So yeah, corn, soy and wheat: three plant-based foods I would argue are the biggest problems out there.
So what's the verdict? Obviously if you've been following my accounts for a while you know that I've never really been promoting vegan diets. And sexy name or not, I do not recommend plant-based diets. But I hope that you realize that doesn't mean I don't recommend vegetables and in the right circumstances fruits and nuts and seeds and whole grains. I'm not saying that these foods are not appropriate. I just don't believe, based on science, that they can be nourishing enough to sustain human life in the long term. It's all about the balanced diet. Yeah, make half your plate vegetables, make three-quarters of your plate vegetables, but we've got to have a little bit of animal food in there to keep you going in the long term.