Thanks for your comment and clarifying, I appreciate the effort, I realise it is difficult to converse about these things whilst retaining respect and sanity.
This RCT came to mind not because it meets all your criteria, but because I thought it was relevant (especially non-monetary costs, i.e. quality of life) to the criteria you set out, modulo multiple months rather than years. It also I think alleviates some concerns about unfeasibility you think vegan diets.
“ideal study is a longitudinal RCT where diet is randomly assigned, cost (across all dimensions, not just money) is held constant, and participants are studied over multiple years to track cumulative effects.”
I didn’t mean to suggest this study implies that a WFPB diet is healthier than (for example) WFPB+(Fish 2/week). I don’t think that sort of question is resolvable on the current evidence either way.
I am sorry I was not clearer about what the video links were saying—I didn’t mean to imply about high meat vs vegan etc. I linked the first one to signpost a scientist who does tightly controlled experimentals setups (perhaps too tersely) but not specifically on WFPB vs WFPB+(Fish 2/week).
The next 3 were about epidemiological evidence that reducing meat consumption follows a strong dose response relationship. While we can’t rule out there could be an uptick in negative outcomes at eliminating, agnosticism seems like the right call.
I don’t take the war as reason to blanket trust nutrition research (or blanket doubt) either, but to be suspicious of conclusions that favour industry and look to a few well done studies and well-respected researchers that have stood the test of time.
Thank you for writing this and if it’s any help, your article is what prompted me to eventually find Plant Chompers and soften to your position to my current agnosticism about the optimality of WFPB vs WFPB+(Fish 2/week). While I do have concerns about some of your baselines assumptions (see initial comment), I think it’s admirable to spend hours on each paper. You might find it beneficial to reach out to Chris Macaskill and collaborate on this projects with him—I suspect he’s got much more time and knowledge than me!
For the sake of my time, this should hopefully be my last comment on this post. Apologies for misleading or inconveniencing you in any way.
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.