Where do you get your protein?

The funniest question I receive regularly concerning nutrition is "where do you get your protein?" Every plant-eater will get this question more times than you'd imagine. Try it yourself -- just start telling people you're a vegan or vegetarian and watch how their questions come out in an eerily Pavlovian manner.

I find several levels of beauty in this question.  Modern Americans are so convinced that animal protein is one of the essential daily foods that, on TV shows like Top Chef or Hell's Kitchen, the words "protein" and "meat" are synonymous. ("What kind of a protein did you choose?" "Top sirloin, chef!") That's advertising and marketing if I've ever seen it! Hire that person. This is the same type of impressive sales force that somehow convinced Americans that drinking milk biologically optimized for infants of four-legged four-stomach bovine creatures was a good idea for adult bipedal homo sapeins. Not that I can blame your average American -- the FDA in fact has been promoting these foods for decades. We just didn't know any better.

Additionally, the question shows absolute ignorance from the person asking. They must literally think that animals somehow magically produce protein from whatever it is they eat, and that the only way we can get protein is from the animals. People are often shocked when I tell them in response to the question that "I get my protein from plants." As if the thought hadn't occured to them! 

If you're curious still where in plants the protein comes from, the answer is everywhere. Every plant has protein in it, some with much higher levels (e.g. spinach or hemp).  If you think "well those aren't complete proteins", the origin of that particular counter-argument was recanted by the original author of it decades ago but the marketing of that phrase was here to stay. In reality the human body will pool amino acids and construct the proteins as they go.  Or, you could just eat quinoa, which is a complete protein (and cooks in about 10 minutes -- definitely my favorite most recent discovery).

Ah.... it's a good time to be a plant-eater at my company. When I first started back in 2007 I was probably the only one there who was interested in nutrition from a perspective of optimal health, and now our forward teams at Rivendell are almost 50% vegan! The vegan group in the Shire met for a lunch the other day and we're all going to see Food, Inc. in a few weeks as well. Our lunches and dinners are always catered, and I've been regularly pressuring the ops folks to always have whole foods, plant-based options (e.g. why bring in two trays of white rice when we could have one tray of white rice and one tray of brown rice).  And thanks to my sister running Rivendell, I can proudly say that our forward teams are arguably healthier than the Shire-folk! (this turns out to be an important fact, as the forward teams are under significantly more stress than the folks in the Shire) We're even starting up group PT within the next few weeks.

I'm glad to be back on a mostly whole foods, plant-based diet. I've started to believe that pretty much any whole foods diet is good, although there is overwhelming evidence to show that a plant-based diet is optimal for long-term health. While I was on a mostly Paleolithic diet last summer, I felt great too -- but that diet is also whole foods. I even saw a picture of my father from 40 years ago or so and it looked like he had a six pack -- with moderate exercise and a standard Richmond diet of meats, mashed potatoes, and loads of fat. The difference is that the food was whole! There wasn't high fructose corn syrup everywhere and America wasn't yet addicted to caffeine and refined sugars. Let's also not forget that over 50% of all antibiotics in America now is used on animals to counter their horrendous living conditions, and humans are the direct consumers of those animals.

As a wonderful bedtime story, I was out to dinner with my father the other night and noticed as two of his friends independently saw him at the bar and commented how good he was looking and how much weight he lost (he's a pesco-vegan now after having read the China Study).  Furthermore, two of my siblings are now effectively pesco-vegans (they still sneak in some cheese every now and then, but I don't think any of us has had milk in years and would probably puke at the thought of drinking it).  I think the funniest part of becoming a plant-eater is how quickly the blood lust for land animal meat evaporates.  If you're interested in living longer, I encourage you to give it a shot -- I would be surprised if within two weeks you realize you don't miss animal meat at all. Nowadays, the thought of red meat is nauseating, and chicken seems to hold no flavor at all.  I'm starting to reduce my seafood intake as well, but I just love sushi so much that it's my vice and I'm sticking with it for now. Nobody's perfect. :)

Master Cleanse

Apologies for not posting in so long! Mea culpa, work has been ridiculously busy, but of course saving the world is worth the lion's share of my time.

In my neverending quest to explore my own frontiers of health and nutrition, I recently embarked upon a Master Cleanse. For those of you who are not familiar with this, it's a "detox" program that makes the news regularly when the latest celebrity tries it x days before her movie starts. (some refer to it as the Beyonce diet because she lost 10 lbs in 10 days on it) You basically drink a quart of warm water with 2 teaspoons of sea salt in the morning, an herbal laxative at night, and lots of "lemonade" that consists of 2 tablespoons fresh organic lemon juice, 2 tablespoons of grade B organic maple syrup, 1/10 teaspoon cayenne pepper, and 1 cup high quality water.

I was recently deployed in the Shire for a fortnight and decided to try it -- why not.  The BLUF is that I lost 12 lbs in 10 days and felt amazing. By day 8 I had more energy than I knew what to do with, and I was able to bang out three whole wide-grip pullups (I had never been able to do any as I figured my lats weren't strong enough)  

Going back to solid food was somewhat depressing. The first thing I ate was a delicious organic orange, but by the end of my day I was eating cooked soups. It was all plant-based, of course, but still sapped my energy levels and reduced my number of wide-grip pullups to 1.

Would I do something like this again? Perhaps, but not while I'm working where I am. Our lives are far too unpredictable to enjoy a nice scheduled and boring existence.  I'm glad I finished the program, much to the amusement of my coworkers, and now I can check it off my bucket list. It's arguable how much of a "detox" is really going on. The reality is that the human body is in fact always detoxifying, and we have plenty of organs that do just this, but the counterargument is that in modern culture, given the abundance of processed foods and polluted environments, that our bodies can't handle the load of toxins coming in.

If you have any questions about the master cleanse, feel free to ping me on the facebook or at mcs37 at cornell (edu)