Question
Where do you get protein?
Alternatives
Where do you get iron? What about some obscure trace element (that they didn’t know about 2 months ago)?
Summary
When you mention you are vegan, many people suddenly become very interested in your nutritional requirements. Unfortunately, common knowledge hasn't caught up with the fact that most nutrients, including protein, originally come from plants. There are no essential nutrients that humans need that can only be derived from animal products, and the peak nutritional bodies affirm that a well-planned plant-based diet is healthy for all life stages. Healthy vegans don’t just remove things from their diet; they add other nutrient-rich foods in their place. By doing this, you can optimise your health while reducing your contribution to animal suffering and environmental destruction.
Discussion
At a party many years ago, a boy of roughly 10 brought around a plate of snacks. I declined the offerings but mentioned I’d be interested if there were any vegan ones. He then promptly asked me where I got my protein from. I'd heard this question many times before, but something about his young age and the speed with which he asked this question took me aback. When an exact repeated statement is so prevalent in culture that it is imprinted in the heads of children, we should wonder how it got there.
As a vegan, my doctor has never asked me about my protein intake, for good reason. Protein deficiency is extremely rare in wealthy countries. People with a diverse and adequate caloric diet, vegan or otherwise, easily obtain the recommended amounts of protein. Protein is in a lot of foods, so we get portions of it all the time. Even if someone ate nothing but potatoes, so long as they ate enough to maintain their overall weight, they would come very close to meeting their daily protein requirements. So why are non-vegans obsessed with protein above the myriad other things that people need to be healthy? B12, for instance, is harder to get on plant-based diets, so vegans need to know about supplementing their B12. Vegans are rarely asked about B12, however, or anything else similarly well-informed; instead, we get asked over and over again about protein.
Plant protein primer
Despite the concern around how much protein vegans are getting, the people who ask about protein rarely know how much we need or how much is actually in different plant foods. There’s no shame in not knowing everything about nutrition; we aren’t born knowing such things, but it would seem reasonable to investigate a little before you criticise a particular diet or dole out nutritional advice.
How much protein you need changes according to a number of factors, such as life stage and your fitness goals. Recommended daily intake ranges from 0.75 grams of protein per kilo of bodyweight to up to 2 grams for elite athletes. Most dietary bodies have public guidelines you can follow, and you should consult a qualified nutritionist. Once you have a daily target for your protein intake, it's worth checking your current diet to see how much you are already eating. A food diary kept over a couple of representative weeks that can be checked against a nutrition database will give you a world of information about your intake of protein and other nutrients. Everyone should probably do this every few years to improve their diet.
There is the concept of complete and incomplete proteins. The body produces most of the amino acids we need; however, there are a number we need to get from our diet. An ingredient is considered a complete or perfect protein if it contains all of the necessary amino acids in it. Complete proteins include animal products but also soy, quinoa, amaranth, hemp, chia, and buckwheat. Then there are incomplete proteins, foods which contain a subset of the necessary amino acids, and good sources of these include nuts, legumes and wholegrains. It was once thought that if you were eating incomplete proteins, it was necessary to combine the right ones so that your meal would form a complete protein. The classic examples would be beans and rice, or bread and hummus, which together form a complete protein. Current research says that the body is smart enough to do this on its own, and as long as you eat a variety of whole foods, you will be fine. Eating more quinoa won't hurt, though!
For those who need to increase the protein in their diet, there are also protein powders, of which a variety are plant-based. These are commonly available and similarly priced to other protein powders. Many are based on rice, soy, pea, or hemp protein, though the variety is quite wide. Some of them use blends for those wanting to get a specific protein profile. Again, though, your body is smart enough to combine things, so if you are eating plenty of rice, you will be better off eating a legume-based protein powder.
The proof of the ability to get protein on a vegan diet is in the fact that many high-profile athletes, including Olympians, weightlifters and bodybuilders, follow a vegan diet. Olympic gold medallist Carl Lewis changed to a vegan diet at 30, after which he achieved all of his personal bests, including setting the world record in the 100 metres of 9.86 seconds. Clearly, many elite athletes are getting what their bodies need for peak performance from a vegan diet. Nearly all of them also regularly consult nutritional professionals to make sure their diets meet their specific needs. We can all emulate these elite athletes and eat healthier diets that match our fitness goals while being kinder to animals and the planet.
Sexual politics
A hint as to where the protein question derives from is the gender of the people who usually ask about it. Many men obsess about their masculinity, which they relate to strength and muscle, and a single nutrient, protein. Protein, though, isn't the only thing required in the complex process of building muscle. We need enough calories to drive the growth process, fats to produce hormones, and carbohydrates to maintain energy levels. Still, few people ask vegans if we are getting the right mix of healthy fats; it is almost always about protein.
The masculine aspects of killing animals and eating meat have a long history in the human psyche. Most forager societies had gendered tendencies around the division of labour, with men taking on more hunting tasks, especially of larger animals. Men tend to be larger, stronger, and more expendable from an evolutionary perspective, so they were more suitable for dangerous tasks. Bringing in a large animal could give one status within the tribe, so while men focused more on this high-status task, it will come as little surprise that studies show that most diets in the Palaeolithic era were heavily plant-based.
The association between masculinity and violent killing, like many of our evolutionary tendencies, has been ripe for exploitation by the marketing industry. There has been a sustained and well-funded marketing effort to tighten the association between masculinity and meat-eating. Typical of this from my own childhood were the high-rotation meat industry advertisements on 1980s Australian television. The ad's focus was on a sports jersey-clad young boy. He runs into his family dining room, where his father reads a newspaper while sitting at the table with the boy's sister. The mother emerges from the kitchen with the burned, severed leg of an animal on a dish. There is no subtlety about the stereotypes or messaging here, or any thought to the diet of the women in the ad; the tagline is "Feed the man meat". These ads are reinforcing a widely held view in society. Studies have shown that even female vegetarians view men who abstain from meat as more feminine (though they omit to mention whether the women thought that was a good thing). There is inarguably a sexual politics to meat consumption. Masculinity is aligned with killing; the more toxic masculinity, the more it celebrates and reinforces this alignment. Women tend to eat less meat, the majority of vegans are women, and women generally hold more pro-social views. Instead of clinging to their masculine identity like a security blanket, if many men could free themselves of it, we would progress a little faster to a better world. It was those who tended to gather rather than hunt who had things right all along.
Corporate propaganda
Decent people don't want to participate in cruelty. To make them do so, the cruelty must be mostly hidden, or they must be convinced that it is necessary. Meat and dairy industry propaganda reaches far more people than unbiased nutritional advice. The industry has long used its financial and political sway to ensure a dominant voice on government nutritional panels and has been repeatedly successful in watering down attempts to make national eating guidelines healthier. They maintain this propaganda war because nutritional science often contradicts perceived national and regional financial self-interest. Not only do we not need to eat animals, but some of the most highly profitable forms of animal products that governments help promote are actively unhealthy. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organisation, has listed processed meats like bacon as a known cancer risk, and red meat generally as a probable cancer risk.
National eating guidelines have been very slow to recognise plant-based sources of protein, such as lentils, one of the first crops ever domesticated, or tofu, which has been part of the Asian diet for at least two thousand years. This long-overdue change in guidelines is starting to happen because authorities are increasingly being asked to respond to science and human health rather than to economic interests. That this change has correlated with fewer purely patriarchal governments and more women in positions of power generally is unlikely to be purely coincidental. We can not take this improvement for humans and animals for granted, however, as it is under constant assault from the entrenched interests of the animal product industry.
Science and plant-based diets
The modern scientific understanding of dietitians about plant-based diets has been slow to filter outwards, even in the wider medical community. I've had an elite cardiologist ask me where I get my protein from, and I know many people who have heard similarly poorly informed things from doctors and medical specialists. Unfortunately, most medical professionals only receive elementary nutritional training and are as susceptible to the unquestioned and outdated ideas cluttering up our culture as everyone else. One study found that doctors in the US and UK received about 11 hours of nutritional training during their five to eight year degrees. If we look at the opinions about plant-based diets from professionals who have completed an in-depth study of nutrition in their degrees, dietitians, we usually see a very different story. The public stances of peak nutritional bodies around the world generally state similar things to the following position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics:
"Appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."
For vegans, there is an important point here we shouldn't ignore. Vegans need to take note of the words “appropriately planned” in the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics quote above. The idea that vegan diets are innately healthy is almost as ill-informed as the idea that they are innately unhealthy. Vegan diets aren’t a magic bullet. Like all diets, they can be unhealthy if they contain too much sugar, oil, fat and fried food, and don't contain enough fruits, vegetables, pulses and whole grains. Perhaps the easiest test of the healthiness of a vegan diet is how regularly they include whole beans and lentils. A vegan diet is different to the diet most people in our modern world grew up with, so there might be some learning and adjustment needed. This is particularly true for people who grew up in a family that followed a meat-centric diet or one high in highly processed foods. They may need to learn how to cook in a healthier way, or perhaps even learn to cook period. A healthy vegan diet isn't one in which animal products are simply removed, but one in which they are replaced with plant-derived alternatives. There is a whole world of ingredients vegans and non-vegans should be more familiar with, particularly the incredible variety of beans and legumes that have been staples of human cultures for so long.
Vegans who eat a whole foods, plant-based diet don’t need to worry much about things people who eat too much meat and processed foods struggle with, such as fibre, antioxidants, healthy fats, vitamin C and the other goodies that fruits, vegetables and plant protein sources are loaded with. Instead, people on plant-based diets should keep an eye on having adequate sources of things like calcium, vitamin D, and omega-3s, and of course, B12, which they should supplement.
In the end, we should be getting our nutritional advice from qualified dietitians, not friends, family, random people, social media or even what you are reading now. A great investment in improving your health is booking a couple of sessions with a university-qualified nutritionist who understands plant-based diets. They will help you ensure your diet is working towards your long-term life goals. People can become overly obsessed with food, so it's not about purity, but getting the core of your diet right will serve you well for life.
Healthy food is a gift we can give ourselves and others that will help maintain physical and mental health. It will also reverberate positively out into the world. As a quote attributed to Hippocrates says, "Let thy food be thy medicine". Let us follow this advice while also ensuring our food is kinder to animals and the environment.