Plant vs Animal Protein: Head to Head

Some people will obviously have strong ideological opinions here—for vegetarians and vegans, it’s no question, and for meat-eaters, it’s easy to be reactive to that and double-down on the bacon. But, we’re a health science newsletter, so we’ll be sticking to the science.

Which is better, healthwise?

First, it depends on how you go about it. Consider these options:

• A piece of salmon
• A steak
• A hot dog
• A hot dog, but plant-based
• Textured soy protein (no additives)
• Edamame (young soy) beans

Three animal-based protein sources, three plant-based. We could render the competition simple (but very unfair) by pitting the hotdog against the edamame beans, or the plant-based hot dog against the piece of salmon. So let’s kick this off by saying:

• There are good and bad animal-based protein sources
• There are good and bad plant-based protein sources

Whatever you choose, keep that in mind while you do. Less processed is better in either case. And if you do go for red meat, less is better, period.

Picking the healthiest from each, how do the nutritional profiles look?

They look good in both cases! One factor of importance is that in either case, our bodies will reduce the proteins we consume to their constituent amino acids, and then rebuild them into the specific proteins we actually need. Our bodies will do that regardless of the source, because we are neither a salmon nor a soybean, for example.

We need 20 specific amino acids, for our bodies to make the proteins we will use in our bodies. Of these, 9 are considered “essential”, meaning we cannot synthesize them and must get them from our diet,

Animal protein sources contain all 9 of those (just like we do). Plant based sources often don’t, individually, but by eating soy for example (which does contain them all) and/or getting multiple sources of protein from different plants, the 9 can be covered quite easily with little thought, just by having a varied diet.

Meats are #1!

• They’re number 1 for nutritional density
• They’re number 1 for health risks, too

So while plant-based diet adherents may need to consume more varied things to get all the nutrients necessary, meat-eaters won’t have that problem.

Meat-eaters will instead have a different problem, of more diet-related health risks, e.g.

• Cardiovascular disease
• Metabolic disorders
• Cancers

So again, if eating (especially processed and/or red) meat, moderation is good. The Mediterranean Diet that we so often recommend, by default contains small amounts of lean animal protein.

Which is better for building muscle?

Assuming a broadly healthy balanced diet, and getting sufficient protein from your chosen source, they’re pretty equal:

• Vegan and Omnivorous High Protein Diets Support Comparable Daily Myofibrillar Protein Synthesis Rates and Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy in Young Adults
• A mycoprotein-based high-protein vegan diet supports equivalent daily myofibrillar protein synthesis rates compared with an isonitrogenous omnivorous diet in older adults: a randomised controlled trial

(both studies showed that both dietary approaches yielded results that showed no difference in muscle synthesis between the two)

The bottom line is…

Healthwise, what’s more important than whether you get your protein from animals or plants is that you eat foods that aren’t processed, and are varied.

And if you want to do a suped-up Mediterranean Diet with less red meat, you might want to try:

A Pesco-Mediterranean Diet With Intermittent Fasting: JACC Review Topic of the Week

^This is from a review in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and in few words, they recommend it very highly

Controlling What We Can, To Avoid Cancer

Every time a cell in our body is replaced, there’s a chance it will be cancerous. Exactly what that chance is depends on very many factors. Some of them we can’t control; others, we can.

Diet is a critical, modifiable factor

We can’t choose, for example, our genes. We can, for the most part, choose our diet. Why “for the most part”?

• Some people live in a food desert (the Arctic Circle is a good example where food choices are limited by supply)
• Some people have dietary restrictions (whether by health condition e.g. allergy, intolerance, etc or by personal-but-unwavering choice, e.g. vegetarian, vegan, kosher, halal, etc)

But for most of us, most of the time, we have a good control over our diet, and so that’s an area we can and should focus on.

Choose your animal protein wisely

If you are vegan, you can skip this section. If you are not, then the short version is:

• Fish: almost certainly fine
• Poultry: the jury is out; data is leaning towards fine, though
• Red meat: significantly increased cancer risk
• Processed meat: significantly increased cancer risk

For more details (and a run-down on the science behind the above super-summarized version):

• Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy? ← A mythbuster article that outlines many health properties (good and bad) of animal products
• The Whys and Hows of Cutting Meats Out Of Your Diet ← A life-hack article about acting on that information

Skip The Ultra-Processed Foods

Ok, so this one’s probably not a shocker in its simplest form:

❝Studies are showing us is that not only do the ultraprocessed foods increase the risk of cancer, but that after a cancer diagnosis such foods increase the risk of dying❞

Source: Is there a connection between ultraprocessed food and cancer?

There’s an unfortunate implication here! If you took the previous advice to heart and cut out [at least some] meat, and/but then replaced that with ultra-processed synthetic meat, then this was not a great improvement in cancer risk terms.

Ultra-processed meat is worse than unprocessed, regardless of whether it was from an animal or was synthetic.

In other words: if you buy textured soy pieces (a common synthetic meat), it pays to look at the ingredients, because there’s a difference between:

• INGREDIENTS: SOY
• INGREDIENTS: Rehydrated Textured SOY Protein (52%), Water, Rapeseed Oil, SOY Protein Concentrate, Seasoning (SULPHITES) (Dextrose, Flavourings, Salt, Onion Powder, Food Starch Modified, Yeast Extract, Colour: Red Iron Oxide), SOY Leghemoglobin, Fortified WHEAT Flour (WHEAT Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Bamboo Fibre, Methylcellulose, Tomato Purée, Salt, Raising Agent: Ammonium Carbonates

Now, most of those original base ingredients are/were harmless per se (as are/were the grapes in wine—before processing into alcohol), but it has clearly been processed to Hell and back to do all that.

Choose the one that just says “soy”. Or eat soybeans. Or other beans. Or lentils. Really there are a lot of options.

About soy, by the way…

There is (mostly in the US, mostly funded by the animal agriculture industry) a lot of fearmongering about soy. Which is ironic, given the amount of soy that is fed to livestock to be fed to humans, but it does bear addressing:

❝Soy foods are safe for all cancer patients and are an excellent source of plant protein. Studies show soy may improve survival after breast cancer❞

Source: Food risks and cancer: What to avoid

(obviously, if you have a soy allergy then you should not consume soy—for most people, the above advice stands, though)

Advanced Glycation End-Products

These (which are Very Bad™ for very many things, including cancer) occur specifically as a result of processing animal proteins and fats.

Note: not even necessarily ultra-processing, just processing can do it. But ultra-processing is worse. What’s the difference, you wonder?

The difference between “ultra-processed” and just “processed”:

• Your average hotdog has been ultra-processed. It’s not only usually been changed with many artificial additives, it’s also been through a series of processes (physical and chemical) and ends up bearing little relation to the creature it came from.
• Your bacon (that you bought fresh from your local butcher, not a supermarket brand of unknown provenance, and definitely not the kind that might come on the top of frozen supermarket pizza) has been processed. It’s undergone a couple of simple processes on its journey “from farm to table”. Remember also that when you cook it, that too is one more process (and one that results in a lot of AGEs).

Read more: What’s so bad about AGEs?

Note if you really don’t want to cut out certain foods, changing the way you cook them (i.e., the last process your food undergoes before you eat it) can also reduce AGES:

Advanced Glycation End Products in Foods and a Practical Guide to Their Reduction in the Diet

Get More Fiber

❝The American Institute for Cancer Research shows that for every 10-gram increase in fiber in the diet, you improve survival after cancer diagnosis by 13%❞

Source: Plant-based diet is encouraged for patients with cancer

Yes, that’s post-diagnosis, but as a general rule of thumb, what is good/bad for cancer when you have it is good/bad for cancer beforehand, too.

If you’re thinking that increasing your fiber intake means having to add bran to everything, happily there are better ways:

Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)

Enjoy!