I agree with many points in this essay but was surprised by this claim. The claim is definitely not true if by “nutrient density” you mean “nutrients per calorie”, which is how that expression is generally understood in the scientific literature. I think this is also the most relevant metric when comparing how much “bang for your buck” you get from eating different types of food: if you approach this as a problem of constrained optimization, where you are optimizing for health and nutrient content is regarded as the measure of healthfulness, energy (as measured in calories) rather than, say, volume or weight is ultimately the constraint you are dealing with.
Perhaps you meant something vaguer by “nutrient density”, like “the degree to which a person’s diet would move closer to meeting their nutritional needs if a portion of this particular food were added to it”. Depending on how this idea is made more precise, the claim that “animal products are incredibly nutrient dense” might become more defensible. But this would need more elaboration and supporting evidence.
I indeed didn’t quite mean “nutrients per calorie”.
The following is a chart I made for some common animal vs. plant protein sources. All the values come from the cronometer database. To get everything in the same units I converted everything to % daily need.
To create this chart I copied over the calories, protein, and micronutrients for several common sources of protein from animals and plants. The animal sources were off the top of my head, the plants were primarily from the first list I found on google, + Impossible Burgers. To get everything in the same units, I used % daily value.[1]. This was all done using the cronometer food database
First I assumed 100g of each food product, and summed the % target values together for a nutritional score. But it doesn’t make sense to credit them for vitamins no one needed, so I capped the values at 100% of target value (excluding protein, for now). I also 0ed out biotin, because only a few foods have filled out that value and I didn’t want to unfairly penalize ones that didn’t. From there I calculated [nutrient score/calorie], both with and without protein.
For total score (not normed/calorie, excluding protein), excluding Impossible Burger which I want to talk about separately, the least nutritious animal product (eggs) is still more nutritious than the most nutritious plant product (edamame), although not by much. If you norm per calorie, edamame eeks ahead of eggs, who are now tied with lentils. Norming per calorie kills cashews.
Including protein (as % of DRI) doesn’t change much, so I’m going to ignore it.
But this kind of assumes the daily targets (which are based on DRIbut somewhat personalized to me) are right, and that you’re not eating anything else. In practice (and excluding Impossible Burger), the nutrients that beans/edamame/non-nut sources are rich in are things anyone with a halfway decent plant diet should already be doing well in. This is much less true of nuts, but nuts have far too many calories for most people to use as a major source of anything.
Which is why I think the median meat eater would benefit nutritionally from swapping in one of those plant protein sources, and the average vegan would benefit from swapping in an animal product. Similar to what you described, it’s about the density of what a particular person needs.
I said I wanted to handle Impossible Burger separately. It scores pretty well; above eggs but below steak, salmon, and liver (same ranking whether you include protein or not). For who people who like and can absorb nutrients from Impossible Burger and other fortified products, they seem pretty good, although not quite as dense. And for people who can digest IBs more easily than meat, seems great. I’m still pretty worried about unknown unknowns, and the health nuts have concerns, but I think both of those are beyond the scope of this post, which is about satisficing not optimization.
You might ask “why focus on high protein foods?” Because protein is the hardest and most valuable macronutrient for most diets, and because it’s correlated with the subset of vitamins that’s richer in meat sources. There are plant sources that are rich in other vitamins (kale is looking at these nutrient/calorie scores and laughing), but except maybe for nuts nothing unfortified is rich in this set. It’s mostly fixable, by you have to tetris together the missing nutrients from multiple sources.
In the reverse situation I would 100% describe kale as nutrient dense to someone eating the Stanard Shit American Diet. I expect it to be less helpful to them than an egg is to a vegan, but for reasons that reflect well on plant-based diets: most of the problems from meat-based diets aren’t nutritional deficiencies that can be fixed by eating more things. Many SSAD problems (cholesterol, calorie excess) are an accumulation of problems from what you do eat, and can’t be fixed by throwing in more vegetables.[2]
This is tricky on a few levels. First, the RDA is too high for most people. Second, I didn’t use RDA, I used my personal targets, which I’ve modified for some nutrients (roughly: (vitamin A (x1.5), riboflavin (x2), niacin (x0.3), folate (x0.5)). I eyeballed it and didn’t feel like the shift was giving animal products an unfair advantage, and it would have been a huge pain to correct, so I didn’t fix this.
My personal opinion is that people would eat less shit if they were getting enough vitamins, and so forcefeeding them kale would eventually lead to less bad stuff, but it’s a more complicated process.
Thanks for the extended reply. I understand your position much better now.
On a meta note about communication, I think “Substituting non-animal protein with animal protein likely gets you closer to meeting all the Dietary Reference Intakes for vitamins” is more informative, less likely to be misinterpreted, and probably more persuasive than “Animal products are incredibly nutrient dense”. (I offer this as a constructive criticism focused on one relatively minor point of how your post is written rather than as an objection to its substance.)
I think emphasising protein is totally the wrong track, since it’s just not that important (and also if you’re getting enough calories near impossible to have a deficiency in)
See especially 38:41 where he talks about a review with meat industry funding
“In general, these data confirm a modest satiety effect with protein-rich meals but do not support an effect on energy intake at the next eating occasion.”
Lastly your omission of leafy greens is suspicious—from memory spinach has about 40% of its calories from protein, and (dry) soya chunks/mince around 66%, far exceeding most animal products (due to fat), and legumes.
Before I reply, I’d like to acknowledge that my original comment from 3 months ago, much before our recent, cordial and respectful exchange elsewhere on this post, was probably a 6-6.5/10 in terms of tone and clarity, and could have been made more conducive to discussion: sorry.
I’d also like to say upfront that I am very reluctantly spending 150+ minutes getting nerdsniped into writing this comment during a week when I’m aiming to address a sleep deficit, and as I said in my other comment, “For the sake of my time, this should hopefully be my last comment on this post.”, but this time for real.
I realise making a point and walking away can come off frustrating/rude, but that’s not my intention here, it’s just self-preservation. If that’s objectionable, you may ignore the rest of this comment.
But to your basic point—my point is not that “people are wrong about their feelings of hunger” (which off the top of my head, and my experience, I think they can be—for example mistaking stress/discomfort/boredom for hunger—but this is besides the point).
My point is about the primaryattribution of the cause of the subjective feeling of hunger to a not easily perceptible thing such as protein. My intuition comes from subjective wellbeing (e.g. Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert) and also perception/embodied cognition research (e.g. rubber hand illusion). The attribution is an empirical claim, and that’s what I was (very poorly) getting at.
As part of this empirical attribution, there’s two different concepts at play here: satiation and satiety (yes, silly naming). Satiation is how much of food can be consumed in one sitting. Satiety is how much a given food will delay or decrease calorie intake in the next meal.
From the post:
But there isn’t a satisfying plant product that is as rich in as many things as meat, dairy, and especially eggs.
But there isn’t a satisfying plant product that is as rich in as many things as meat, dairy, and especially eggs. Every “what about X?” has an answer, but if you add up all the foods you would need to meet every need, for people who aren’t gifted at digestion, it’s far too many calories and still fairly restrictive.
From the comment:
Because protein is the hardest and most valuable macronutrient for most diets, and because it’s correlated with the subset of vitamins that’s richer in meat sources.
It looks like there’s two aspects to this: (a) judging plants using meat as the standard (b) an implicit assumption that protein is (b) important, (c) especially “satisfying”-ness, i.e. satiation and satiety.
[Tangent: I think others have pointed out that (a) is a little unfair—meat doesn’t have many health promoting things like Vit C, fibre, antioxidants, easier to regulate absorption of nutrients, lack of cholesterol, less saturated fat etc.]
In response to (b) the first video about the very low protein requirement for humans I think covers the major aspects (babies need the most protein and human breast milk is 1% protein by weight, 5-7% by calories, adults need around 0.8g/kg of body-weight, maximum up to 1.5-1.8g/kg for strength training etc).
In response to (c), a whole host of other factors influence satiation and satiety (as mentioned in video 2 and elsewhere[1]).
Calorie density, influenced mostly by lack of fats and increased water. Quoting Dr. Greger, “When dozens of common foods, pitted head-to-head for for their ability to satiate appetites for hours, the characteristic most predictive was not how little fat or how much protein it had, but how much water it had.” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/). Whole fresh fruit & veg generally fall in at < 100 calories per cup, whereas meats are 300-600 calories per cup.
Fibre. Fibre limits the absorption of calories, meaning that you can eat more but still absorb the same amount of calories.
Absorbability. Conversely, processing (e.g. turning peanuts into peanut butter) separates the peanut’s calories from the fibrous cell walls and thus making it more vastly more absorbable. Animal product do not have a fibrous cell walls, meaning they are absorbable off the bat. This means lower satiation per calorie—you eat more calories in a stomach full.
Thylakoids. The thing that makes leaves green slows down fat absorption in the gut. Slowing down fat absorption means that un-absorbed calories can reach the end of the intestine (ileum). When this is detected, appetite is decreased dramatically.
Hardness of food. Same food, presented hard or soft (e.g. carrots) leads to fewer calories being consumed but no extra calories as compensation in the next meal.
To be clear, I am willing to grant the premise that “protein > carb > fat” in terms of satiation. But this would not be the end of the matter, because cardinality matters too. I don’t want to spend an hour digging for numbers at this stage, but I can illustrate what I mean with an example:
Chicken/beef roughly 45% calories from protein (rest from fat).
Chickpeas roughly 22% calories from protein (rest from carbs incl. fibre).
Dry soya chunks rougly 57% calories from protein (rest from carbs incl. fibre).
Based only on macros (let’s say you blitzed the chickpeas into ultra fine hummus and equalised the water content), which of these is going to be more satisfying is going to depend on the ratio of how much less satisfying carbs and fat are (per calorie) compared to protein. And it’s not clear to me based solely on protein being most important that meat has a slam dunk advantage here.
Anyways, as I said in the other comment, I’m going to signpost Chris MacAskill as a source of information and potential collaborator. Toodles!
Chris MacAskill’s https://youtu.be/zOAapJo9cE0?feature=shared high-protein, animal keto vs low-fat, plant-based diet especially the section on satiety vs satiation, which is the source of my information in this comment.
First, I want to apologize. I didn’t realize you were the same commenter I’d been talking to and had asked to bow out. I’m not sure what the right way to handle this was, but I should have at least acknowledged it.
I have some disagreements with some of your claims here, but mostly they feel irrelevant to my claims. This feels like an argument against a heavily meat-based diet, not against small amounts of meat in an otherwise plant-based one.
I agree with many points in this essay but was surprised by this claim. The claim is definitely not true if by “nutrient density” you mean “nutrients per calorie”, which is how that expression is generally understood in the scientific literature. I think this is also the most relevant metric when comparing how much “bang for your buck” you get from eating different types of food: if you approach this as a problem of constrained optimization, where you are optimizing for health and nutrient content is regarded as the measure of healthfulness, energy (as measured in calories) rather than, say, volume or weight is ultimately the constraint you are dealing with.
Perhaps you meant something vaguer by “nutrient density”, like “the degree to which a person’s diet would move closer to meeting their nutritional needs if a portion of this particular food were added to it”. Depending on how this idea is made more precise, the claim that “animal products are incredibly nutrient dense” might become more defensible. But this would need more elaboration and supporting evidence.
This is a really good question. It’s taking a fair amount of time to formalize my answer but I wanted to let you know I was working on it.
I indeed didn’t quite mean “nutrients per calorie”.
The following is a chart I made for some common animal vs. plant protein sources. All the values come from the cronometer database. To get everything in the same units I converted everything to % daily need.
To create this chart I copied over the calories, protein, and micronutrients for several common sources of protein from animals and plants. The animal sources were off the top of my head, the plants were primarily from the first list I found on google, + Impossible Burgers. To get everything in the same units, I used % daily value.[1]. This was all done using the cronometer food database
First I assumed 100g of each food product, and summed the % target values together for a nutritional score. But it doesn’t make sense to credit them for vitamins no one needed, so I capped the values at 100% of target value (excluding protein, for now). I also 0ed out biotin, because only a few foods have filled out that value and I didn’t want to unfairly penalize ones that didn’t. From there I calculated [nutrient score/calorie], both with and without protein.
Spreedshet available here.
For total score (not normed/calorie, excluding protein), excluding Impossible Burger which I want to talk about separately, the least nutritious animal product (eggs) is still more nutritious than the most nutritious plant product (edamame), although not by much. If you norm per calorie, edamame eeks ahead of eggs, who are now tied with lentils. Norming per calorie kills cashews.
Including protein (as % of DRI) doesn’t change much, so I’m going to ignore it.
But this kind of assumes the daily targets (which are based on DRI but somewhat personalized to me) are right, and that you’re not eating anything else. In practice (and excluding Impossible Burger), the nutrients that beans/edamame/non-nut sources are rich in are things anyone with a halfway decent plant diet should already be doing well in. This is much less true of nuts, but nuts have far too many calories for most people to use as a major source of anything.
Which is why I think the median meat eater would benefit nutritionally from swapping in one of those plant protein sources, and the average vegan would benefit from swapping in an animal product. Similar to what you described, it’s about the density of what a particular person needs.
I said I wanted to handle Impossible Burger separately. It scores pretty well; above eggs but below steak, salmon, and liver (same ranking whether you include protein or not). For who people who like and can absorb nutrients from Impossible Burger and other fortified products, they seem pretty good, although not quite as dense. And for people who can digest IBs more easily than meat, seems great. I’m still pretty worried about unknown unknowns, and the health nuts have concerns, but I think both of those are beyond the scope of this post, which is about satisficing not optimization.
You might ask “why focus on high protein foods?” Because protein is the hardest and most valuable macronutrient for most diets, and because it’s correlated with the subset of vitamins that’s richer in meat sources. There are plant sources that are rich in other vitamins (kale is looking at these nutrient/calorie scores and laughing), but except maybe for nuts nothing unfortified is rich in this set. It’s mostly fixable, by you have to tetris together the missing nutrients from multiple sources.
In the reverse situation I would 100% describe kale as nutrient dense to someone eating the Stanard Shit American Diet. I expect it to be less helpful to them than an egg is to a vegan, but for reasons that reflect well on plant-based diets: most of the problems from meat-based diets aren’t nutritional deficiencies that can be fixed by eating more things. Many SSAD problems (cholesterol, calorie excess) are an accumulation of problems from what you do eat, and can’t be fixed by throwing in more vegetables.[2]
This is tricky on a few levels. First, the RDA is too high for most people. Second, I didn’t use RDA, I used my personal targets, which I’ve modified for some nutrients (roughly: (vitamin A (x1.5), riboflavin (x2), niacin (x0.3), folate (x0.5)). I eyeballed it and didn’t feel like the shift was giving animal products an unfair advantage, and it would have been a huge pain to correct, so I didn’t fix this.
My personal opinion is that people would eat less shit if they were getting enough vitamins, and so forcefeeding them kale would eventually lead to less bad stuff, but it’s a more complicated process.
Thanks for the extended reply. I understand your position much better now.
On a meta note about communication, I think “Substituting non-animal protein with animal protein likely gets you closer to meeting all the Dietary Reference Intakes for vitamins” is more informative, less likely to be misinterpreted, and probably more persuasive than “Animal products are incredibly nutrient dense”. (I offer this as a constructive criticism focused on one relatively minor point of how your post is written rather than as an objection to its substance.)
I think emphasising protein is totally the wrong track, since it’s just not that important (and also if you’re getting enough calories near impossible to have a deficiency in)
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-great-protein-fiasco/
I also think your general model of “satisfying” is built off of myths which just are not supported by the evidence
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/evidence-based-weight-loss-live-presentation/
See especially 38:41 where he talks about a review with meat industry funding
“In general, these data confirm a modest satiety effect with protein-rich meals but do not support an effect on energy intake at the next eating occasion.”
Lastly your omission of leafy greens is suspicious—from memory spinach has about 40% of its calories from protein, and (dry) soya chunks/mince around 66%, far exceeding most animal products (due to fat), and legumes.
I’m really confused that you’d invoke a paper to tell people their experience of their own hunger is wrong.
Before I reply, I’d like to acknowledge that my original comment from 3 months ago, much before our recent, cordial and respectful exchange elsewhere on this post, was probably a 6-6.5/10 in terms of tone and clarity, and could have been made more conducive to discussion: sorry.
I’d also like to say upfront that I am very reluctantly spending 150+ minutes getting nerdsniped into writing this comment during a week when I’m aiming to address a sleep deficit, and as I said in my other comment, “For the sake of my time, this should hopefully be my last comment on this post.”, but this time for real.
I realise making a point and walking away can come off frustrating/rude, but that’s not my intention here, it’s just self-preservation. If that’s objectionable, you may ignore the rest of this comment.
But to your basic point—my point is not that “people are wrong about their feelings of hunger” (which off the top of my head, and my experience, I think they can be—for example mistaking stress/discomfort/boredom for hunger—but this is besides the point).
My point is about the primary attribution of the cause of the subjective feeling of hunger to a not easily perceptible thing such as protein. My intuition comes from subjective wellbeing (e.g. Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert) and also perception/embodied cognition research (e.g. rubber hand illusion). The attribution is an empirical claim, and that’s what I was (very poorly) getting at.
As part of this empirical attribution, there’s two different concepts at play here: satiation and satiety (yes, silly naming). Satiation is how much of food can be consumed in one sitting. Satiety is how much a given food will delay or decrease calorie intake in the next meal.
From the post:
From the comment:
It looks like there’s two aspects to this: (a) judging plants using meat as the standard (b) an implicit assumption that protein is (b) important, (c) especially “satisfying”-ness, i.e. satiation and satiety.
[Tangent: I think others have pointed out that (a) is a little unfair—meat doesn’t have many health promoting things like Vit C, fibre, antioxidants, easier to regulate absorption of nutrients, lack of cholesterol, less saturated fat etc.]
In response to (b) the first video about the very low protein requirement for humans I think covers the major aspects (babies need the most protein and human breast milk is 1% protein by weight, 5-7% by calories, adults need around 0.8g/kg of body-weight, maximum up to 1.5-1.8g/kg for strength training etc).
In response to (c), a whole host of other factors influence satiation and satiety (as mentioned in video 2 and elsewhere[1]).
Calorie density, influenced mostly by lack of fats and increased water. Quoting Dr. Greger, “When dozens of common foods, pitted head-to-head for for their ability to satiate appetites for hours, the characteristic most predictive was not how little fat or how much protein it had, but how much water it had.” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7498104/). Whole fresh fruit & veg generally fall in at < 100 calories per cup, whereas meats are 300-600 calories per cup.
Absorbability. Conversely, processing (e.g. turning peanuts into peanut butter) separates the peanut’s calories from the fibrous cell walls and thus making it more vastly more absorbable. Animal product do not have a fibrous cell walls, meaning they are absorbable off the bat. This means lower satiation per calorie—you eat more calories in a stomach full.
Thylakoids. The thing that makes leaves green slows down fat absorption in the gut. Slowing down fat absorption means that un-absorbed calories can reach the end of the intestine (ileum). When this is detected, appetite is decreased dramatically.
Hardness of food. Same food, presented hard or soft (e.g. carrots) leads to fewer calories being consumed but no extra calories as compensation in the next meal.
To be clear, I am willing to grant the premise that “protein > carb > fat” in terms of satiation. But this would not be the end of the matter, because cardinality matters too. I don’t want to spend an hour digging for numbers at this stage, but I can illustrate what I mean with an example:
Chicken/beef roughly 45% calories from protein (rest from fat).
Chickpeas roughly 22% calories from protein (rest from carbs incl. fibre).
Dry soya chunks rougly 57% calories from protein (rest from carbs incl. fibre).
Based only on macros (let’s say you blitzed the chickpeas into ultra fine hummus and equalised the water content), which of these is going to be more satisfying is going to depend on the ratio of how much less satisfying carbs and fat are (per calorie) compared to protein. And it’s not clear to me based solely on protein being most important that meat has a slam dunk advantage here.
Anyways, as I said in the other comment, I’m going to signpost Chris MacAskill as a source of information and potential collaborator. Toodles!
Chris MacAskill’s https://youtu.be/zOAapJo9cE0?feature=shared high-protein, animal keto vs low-fat, plant-based diet especially the section on satiety vs satiation, which is the source of my information in this comment.
First, I want to apologize. I didn’t realize you were the same commenter I’d been talking to and had asked to bow out. I’m not sure what the right way to handle this was, but I should have at least acknowledged it.
I have some disagreements with some of your claims here, but mostly they feel irrelevant to my claims. This feels like an argument against a heavily meat-based diet, not against small amounts of meat in an otherwise plant-based one.