How healthy is plant-based meat? What the research shows | Prof. Christopher Gardner

these plant-based Meats will be a gateway drug to legumes beans and peas and legumes have the best protein in the Plant World people on a more plant-based diet live longer Freer of heart disease and other chronic diseases if you were able to make the shift towards those being a bigger part of your diet you're going to have a bigger impact on improving your health yes weight and blood pressure and cholesterol here's this plant version that's going to taste just the same and it looks the same but it's healthier for you yes Christopher Gardner is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford prevention Research Center he's a world leading expert on how the food that we eat impacts our health from a sort of nutritional standpoint how do these meat Alternatives stack up against your traditional meat saturated fat sodium and processing red meat has high saturated fat that raises LDL cholesterol that's one of the number one risk factors for heart disease which is one of the number one causes of death in the US what's your one key piece of advice that you'd want our listeners to walk away with from this episode 5% of people in the US are vegetarian so 95% are eating meat and they need to eat less welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your [Music] health Christopher thank you for joining me today it's a pleasure to be here fun topic well I know that we've basically got the world expert on actually running tests on meat Alternatives today so I am excited and to start with as always we have our quickfire round of questions you know the drill yes or no or if you have to a one- sentence answer go have you changed your mind about meat Alternatives no should most people be eating less meat to improve their health yes are most meat Alternatives ultr processed no is the quality of the protein in mil in meat Alternatives as good as the protein in meat yes okay and you you can have a whole sentence here what's the most surprising thing you've come across while studying the impact of meat alternatives on people's Health uh the amount of media hype misinformation disinformation polarized views one way or the other so everybody sort of disagrees on this do they yes and are we going to get to the answer today ah the answer is coming hi I have a quick favor to ask 63% of people who watch this podcast haven't hit the Subscribe button and 11% haven't yet hit the Bell to turn notifications on we want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions and we don't want anyone to miss out on hearing about Christopher's surprising research on meet Alternatives so if you've ever enjoyed this podcast please hit the Subscribe button doing us a small favor will really help thank you well look Christopher it's always a pleasure to have you back on the show with us I know that um our listeners always tell us how much they love uh like hearing you talk about something particularly when it's one of the things you've actually been doing your own randomized control trials on and I think today's episode promises to be another big hit because this is one of the topics that we have had one of the most questions from our listeners interesting um and I think that's because you if they're listening to these podcasts they're hearing a lot of people say you know what you should be eating less meat than you know the amounts that you were growing up with can we just start actually with what is a meat alternative yeah so you could say tofu and Tempe are meat Alternatives right and that's not what we're talking about today you could say our boka burger and Gardine burger like there are some old plantbased Burger substitutes that go back 30 40 years that aren't very controversial this didn't come up then why is it coming up now so and I those the things I would call is like a bean burger or something like like that is that what you're saying that we had in the past when you were but there was like textured vegetable protein which is extracted from soy so what we're really talk and I think this will help make the distinction I believe those older products were made for the market of vegetarians who were seeking something like a burger and didn't have an option for themselves and someone created one I think the meat Alternatives that we're talking about today are meant for meat eaters they were designed to be as close to meat as possible so that instead of being a source for vegetarians would be uh a hook to get someone to eat less meat and have a plant-based alternative so it's a sort of warm for one swap for what you were eating for something and with something that's going to hopefully taste I've actually seen these ads around you know you really like your pork sausages here's this plant version that's going to taste just the same and it looks the same but it's healthier for you yes and so there's clearly been a surge of interest in these me Alternatives and I understand that there's a lot more being sold as well what's driving this trend the reason is because we're not seeing as much of a drop in meat consumption as is needed so we need more Alternatives different alternatives to those than we already had I think I saw that in the US like the amount of beef that's been eaten is sort of at an all-time high so that has not seen a big decline from for example to be honest there is a there has been a decline in red meat over the last 30 or 40 years but if you look at any kind of uh FAO food and agricultural organization graphic of meat consumption across countries in the world us is number one highest consumer and I know that it's also very high in the UK and Canada and Australia um so it's a similar sort of situation but with I agree with this State's particularly um particularly high on this amazing how high it is yes well I remember like you know you know many years ago you know you're in you're in New York and I remember people telling to me you know like part of the American dream was that you know their parents or Grandparents were were really poor and they were coming from Italy or Ireland or wherever it was and you could hardly ever get meat because you couldn't afford it and part of this dream was you were going to be able to get you know red meat every day this was this amazing luxury um and it's great thing to um to be able to get by coming to America and I'd like to add that if China and India start eating as much red meat as we do in the US from a Global Perspective we are screwed environmentally right and so this aspiration of GDP going up what happens people eat more meat the US should cut back oh we're not the biggest uh you know total contributor to this there's these other countries well China and India are so big if they emulate this we are screwed so we need to eat less in the we don't have to give it all up can't be number one here so coming back to what you said about why the surgeon interest you're basically saying look people aren't giving up red meat so what about if you create something that tastes yes just like red meat but is healthier yeah only about 5% of people in the US are vegetarian so 95% are eating meat and they need to eat less and we're not moving the needle very much and for for for people who aren't really familiar with this why should people what's The View today in 2024 about why you should reduce red meat because I think this is still something that many people find controversial yeah so it's a good source of protein but we really do not have a protein deficiency issue even among vegetarians and vegans red meat has high saturated fat that raises Eld cholesterol that's one of the number one risk factors for heart disease which is one of the number one causes of death in the US red meat has no fiber uh we really are deficient in fiber in the diet we meet about half of the US dietary guidelines for that it's critical for a healthy microbiome and red meat doesn't contribute to that so less red meat replace it with more plants so help us to understand what what these new meat alternatives are like what's in them so the the two ones that I'm most familiar with are Beyond an impossible I know there's many others uh the idea is taking some kind of bean uh Beyond uses p and Mission uses uh impossible uses soy and instead of making a soy burger or a bean burger extracting the protein and and I don't know the the exact process I think sometimes it's called an extrusion they're taking the proteins and through heat and pressure they're unfolding and refolding them away in some ways like food Engineers are doing this so that when you bite into it it feels muscly and siney like Senus of muscles so it it replicates the feel of this so one is that mouth taste interestingly I was years ago present at one of the design kitchens for these and they saidou welcome to have a tasting here and they were all huddled around the grill and I said aren aren I'm just over here at the table waiting to taste it what are you guys all huddled around the grill for I said we're watching and we're smelling and we want to hear it when it hits the griddle and we want to see the color when it's flipped and we want to Fe we want to smell the aromatics coming off while it's cooking and they were were trying to replicate every aspect of the process I said aren't you just worried about the taste no no no our goal is actually to make the entire experience as close to a beef burger experience as we can that's really interesting I was stunned actually at taking all those different aspects into account so I'd love to to start to investigate then this question we started with really like are these any good for you um and so you know from a sort of nutritional standpoint how do these meat Alternatives stack up against your traditional meat well you'd have to do a trial but I'm going to back up and tell you why I did a trial so picture this I'm I'm at home and three different times I saw a full page ad in the New York Times full page uh with pictures of two products and a list of ingredients by the um the consumer Freedom Choice group something like that as like who paid for this advertisement which as I understand it I believe is uh funded by the Cattleman's Association or something like that but it's some more ambiguous benign name and basically the message in each one said this is like dog food why would you eat this it's like a full page ad to compare these new things to dog food really and and so they were saying they were looking at these um uh these alternative meats and saying like there's all this stuff this is basically dog food and it has coconut fat which is saturated so it will raise your LDL cholesterol it has high sodium so it will raise your blood pressure and it's Ultra processed so you will gain weight eating these and I'm sorry about a light bulb went off over my head and I said that is my superpower I I design randomized trials to answer question this is an answerable question like I can't always tell you who lives or dies that takes a long time to figure out but if you're going to make claims about blood chemistry and weight oh my God that's what I do for a living this would be such an easy trial to do and so we designed a trial so that we could compare or we could test the effect of this but the important thing is against what so we compared it against meat just before we go into the de because I absolutely want to go to that it's so cool that you've done this full study I just want to spend a minute on why anyone would think that these meat Alternatives wouldn't be much better because you might say I mean they're coming from plants and you know we know that there's all this evidence that you know plants are healthier than red meat um if they if you were saying like here's a bunch of beans you wouldn't have done a study would you cuz you'd be like well I don't need to do a study there been so many studies done I know that if you were to eat a plate full of like a variety of beans versus the red meat you're going to be healthier in few months won't taste like meat so those meat eaters might not want to make the change but you'd know it was healthier yeah so what is it that made you think hm it's not so obvious whether or not these meat alternatives are a great thing for you to switch to saturated fat sodium and processing those are the three factors and talk for a minute cuz we've talked a little bit about Ultra processed in um some of our other episodes and I think that some people listening like their ears will have perked up when you said like they take these peas and they extract the proteins and they reshape it like that sounds like this idea of ultra processed food and if Tim was here he'd be like you know I really don't like that I feel has all of these things why are people worrying what why does that sort of trigger for for for people some concern about that aspect of well and you have the recent book in the UK about ultr processed food so Kevin Hall a great scientist in the US did this wonderful study with about 20 people uh two weeks each uh for a four-week study where they did both uh an ultr processed arm and a minimally processed arm it's very clever it would take too much time to go into the details but they were comparing themselves to to themselves over this time and after eating two weeks of each they gained weight when they were eating the ultra processed foods and lost weight when they're eating the minimally processed foods and so that was the evidence for a weight issue that would come up and we already know about saturated fat and sodium so it was all plausible that these things could have been bad for you so you decided you know what we should do a proper study tell us about the study well cuz my question is always instead of what so actually I want to jump to the punchline at the end which is we did this study and we published the results and they said oh my God you have some positive results here do you mean you want people to eat these instead of lentils and beans I said that's not the question they got made to replace red meat so the question is are they better than red meat for these things so we designed a study that would compare the ultra the um plant-based Meats to these red meats and wrestled with a number of decisions so by the time we get to the end I want to make sure all the listeners agree or appreciate this is only one study it's only one type of people uh they're generally healthy people part of the struggle at first is you only get to pick one dose so Jonathan what dose would you pick if you were trying to compare this let's talk about duration and dose would this be one once a week that probably wouldn't be enough to move the needle once a day um would that be enough to move the needle how about all you get to eat is plant-based meat or red meat all day long every day that's too much where where in the middle would you pick do you have any idea I'm thinking twice a day yeah we did two servings a day ially made that up I was thinking about our interview with Walter Willow said he grew up up eating meat breakfast lunch and dinner so I thinking that's maybe a little less than that but you would like to have it quite often and so now sorry I'm going to put you on the spot again Guess What proportion of calories that might be if you had two servings of the meat not counting the Buns that went on the burgers or anything like that just the meat have any idea what proportion of calories that would be is that I actually have no idea 10 or four it's 25% of calories okay so quite a lot of your calories but not the majority yeah so 75% of what you're eating is what you normally eat so in my mind this is always it's funny I don't think people appreciate how much we struggle with that decision because once you make it you're stuck with it so if it was too low you you might not find anything because it wasn't enough to see a signal be generated and if it was too high people would say that's insane no one could ever eat that much what a stupid study so you you have to balance it that way and of course it would be really nice to know who lived or died so what would be the duration of this study let's see how long could I get people to eat this well our primary outcome in the study was listed on ct.gov that's clinical trials.gov when you when you have one of these studies you have to pre-register it to say what you're looking at we want to look at trimethylamine oxide which let's talk about that later but for now tmao that would be the primary outcome but also weight and blood pressure and cholesterol because that's what a lot of the claims in the newspaper ads were're highlighting as being problematic so we're collecting blood and O we even collected poop to be looking at that and so we decided ah well if we're looking at tmao and cholesterol and blood pressure it doesn't need to be that long let's make it eight weeks each let's make it a crossover study so everyone is their own control so we weren't really expecting these to lead to any weight change and just to explain that for everybody because I think may it means that everyone actually did both so you could see for each individual what happened when they're on the the normal meat and what happened to them on this like meat alternative so you really could compare for each of them the difference which is I think it's a sort of gold standard Now isn't it for for these sorts of things and then we describe what type of St we say it's a randomized control trial but if they're doing both why is it randomized they're randomized to order so some people do red meat first and some people do the beyond meat first but they all do both and so you get to see how that works four eight weeks that's that was plenty of time to figure out what this was and so that was we'll just stop there the design is crossover study in 40 people for eight weeks with two servings a day and I think one thing for for our listeners to understand which I think often surprises them is it's actually normal for these sorts of Interventional studies to have really small number of people because you get this ethical approval which says like this how many people do you need to have right in order to get results because it wouldn't be ethical to like get more people to do this than you need and actually when you do these sorts of designs which are very intensive you don't actually need that many people to measure this result because it's controlled over a short period of time especially if your own control so a big advantage of a crossover study is everybody is their own control so you are the same height as yourself and the same weight and age as yourself so that means even though it's a relatively small number of people because of this design which is very hard to manage not many people do these sorts of randomized control trials yeah it means that the results you know tell you something that is is really has some validity yeah which is a tease to so what did you find out uh no we have to talk more there's still a okay still another issue okay so what should I pick for red meat and I should clarify that for the um beyond meat products that we were using it's not just Burgers so they make a burger they make a ground beef substitute they make sausages and at the time they had a chicken option and so we didn't want people to get bored humans like variety so they got a mixer of those and we had to go get real meat so by the way we're buying these and then delivering the beyond meat products and then we have to go get our red meat from somewhere so do we go to you know the least expensive place we can find or no we go to a San Francisco delivery service that specializes in organic regenerative farming pasture raised like we really tried to get good quality I'm guess from the way you said that you went for this one not sort of the off the back of the truck uh red meat yeah so we didn't want to get criticized at the End by saying oh you compare it to lousy meat uh so it's not really valid no we compared it head-to-head with good quality meat I think you said that there was a funding disclosure that you wanted to to mention as we discuss this yeah this is funded by beyond meat so I am an industry shill I'm not sure the NIH would have funded this for me the National Institutes of Health in the US they tend to not be very good about funding nutrition studies um but I approached Ethan Brown from Beyond meet and I have to say I was totally impressed in the very beginning I said you do know that this might not work if you fund this it might show that it's worse or or at least that it doesn't work and he was pretty straightforward he said you know if this raises cholesterol or if this doesn't work then I want to reformulate I I'm ready for the answer whatever you got okay so we get ready and we do this and uh I think it was actually 38 people signed up for this study and 36 finished both arms so have fabulous retention uh they did eat more than two servings a day they ate on average two and a half servings a day equal like totally equal between the two groups so we have this internal validity uh of the tri that they did what we wanted them to do we have a whole table uh in the research paper of of what they were getting and and this is an important first step to look at so yes beyond meat uses coconut fat that has saturated fat in it the type that raises LDL cholesterol but less than the animal meat so yes it has saturated fat but it has less um they do have more sodium in their burgers and their ground beef but it turned out the people getting real meat salted their real meat beyond meat has some sausages that have a lot of sodium and the red meat sources had a lot of sodium in their sausages the sodium was virtually identical okay the beyond meat products had fiber and red meat has no fiber cuz it came from peas um the protein was virtually identical between the two one was all plant protein one was animal protein in the products which turned out to be half of their protein for the day so these two servings a day that we were providing that's 25% of their calories was half of the protein for the day for these so I'm trying to point out you know if I looked ahead of time at these I would have said well the Beyond has more Satur less saturated fat and more fiber that that should lower LDL cholesterol why are the newspapers saying this that's why I'm testing it and they have the same amount of sodium so it shouldn't do anything there and we're giving them the same number of calories their weight shouldn't change all right you're teasing me too much now what was it what what happened so the primary outcome this trimethylamine oxide thing that I should explain went down and this is this is not a tough lift so red meat has choline and carnitine in it two molecules that the microbiome converts to this thing called trimethylamine oxide which is considered to be a heart disease risk factor that has inflammatory immune problem functions to it and so the tmao was lower on the plant-based meat and that wasn't a huge surprise at all the LDL cholesterol dropped more than I thought it would have like 10 Mig per deciliter uh in the plant-based meat relative to the animal meat the blood pressure was not different between the two groups and the actually the most statistically significant finding was weight the weight dropped by about a kilo or two pounds in the plant-based eaters even though we didn't have a caloric difference from checking all their diets and what they were eating they they were roughly the same calorie levels when we provided them so I was not expecting the weight to change and I can't explain why it did but a funny thing is why it was statistically significant given that it was it's not really a clinically relevant amount it's just a couple pounds the reason it was statistically significant is almost every single person was one or two pounds lower on the plant-based meat for eight weeks than the other one so when you're trying to get statistical significance a big factor in here is how variable was the response so there was something positive that people were getting by switching out the red meat to this every single person was just a little bit lighter which was completely contrary to what was found in the Kevin Hall study the one that I mentioned earlier when the ultra process raised it but for that study that he did all the food was Ultra processed or all the food was minimally processed this is just the burger part this is just 25% of the calories and 75% are the things that they were normally eating let me clarify one point we did say say so we only provided the red meat or the beyond meat we didn't provide the buns for the burgers so as part if you had been a participant we would have said so do you like whole wheat buns or white buns we wanted to have the whole wheat but we realize you might like white buns better if you have white buns on one phase of this you have to have white Buns on the other we want you to have an heirloom tomato on your burger from the farmers market but if you have a store-bought crappy tomato on one Burger you have to have it on the other Burger so what we ask everybody is that you have other than these meat products you keep everything else the same within reason so everything else was the same and we drew up all this nutritional data and so it really shouldn't be a surprise TM was lower LDL cholesterol was lower weight was a surprise and not a surprise that blood pressure wasn't any different so three wins for plant-based over red meat if we're talking about health three things they were getting slammed for in the Press was it's going to raise your cholesterol raise your blood pressure and you're going to be heavier none of those were found so Christopher what's your verdict does that mean that it is it it is healthy to swap from red meat to of it is healthier like these are standard clinical measures that we have and it won and so that's that's my job is to do these tests so I think the follow on I I have many different follow-on questions I mean one is you tested one particular um brand of meat alternative in park because it sounds like they were willing to fund your your study yes um are would you expect them to be wildly different and also this was you know as always a few years ago now like would you expect them to be widely different or do you feel that the sets of Alternatives that are designed to sort of taste like meat actually are quite similar yeah I mean the the rationale for this is that beans and peas and legumes have the best protein in the plant world uh and so most of them making that kind of alternative are using some kind of beans so again impossible uses soy and Beyond uses pea they're they're more similar than different um I will say I did a garlic study at one point that didn't work and a farmer called me out I used real garlic and he said by the way I grow 99 varieties of garlic did you test them all I said no I did I tested one but I tested like the most popular one in the US said I don't believe your results because you didn't test all 99 there probably are dozens of plant-based Burgers if you really wanted to test them all it would become unwieldy you couldn't test them all um I always need grant money though so if anybody wants me to test them all I could keep going but fundamentally this seems like a good guide to thinking about the um the the meat Alternatives that you might find on your grocery store yeah and hope the listeners appreciate that when you do this you have to pick one dose one duration one type of person one set of outcomes and all you got to do is say ah but what about half as much well I I don't know that answer I'd have to run that study what about people who had high cholesterol to begin with yeah I didn't pick that either technically that could be another answer but I can only answer one sort of narrow question at a time so this isn't the end all Beall answer but there were no studies like this before we did it let me tell you a quick story so Wednesday last week I went for dinner with my wife Justine now this would have been a source of anxiety for me in the past and that's because some foods would leave me feeling really tired and sick for hours afterwards and as a result I actually followed quite a restrictive diet then I did Zoey and discovered that I'm prone to blood sugar spikes from my Zoe digital coach I learned that this doesn't mean I have to restrict what I eat I just have to be smarter about my food choices so back to last week at the restaurant we were eating Italian which before Zoe would never have happened but my Zoe coach helped me make choices that consider my blood sugar I started the meal with a delicious Italian salad and and then enjoyed some pasta afterwards drenched in olive oil of course and after dinner I felt great energized by my food and by the fact that now I don't have to limit the foods I eat and choose between a healthy and a happy life whether I'm eating out or cooking my Zoe digital coach helps me make smarter choices every day honestly it's transformed how I feel and according to the scientists who continue to develop the digital coach making these choices now could give me many more help the years why not join more than 100,000 other people giving Zoe membership a shot and tell me what you think to take the first step towards the possibility of more energy less hunger and more healthy years take our quiz to help identify changes to your food choices that you could make right now simply go to zoe.com podcast where as a podcast listener you can also get 10% off now I want to come back to the question that we asked at the beginning about the quality of the protein because this came up a lot one of the reasons I think that people um eat red meat is they feel like they're getting this quality protein and they're worried about that um and you're saying that the protein here is sort of EX extracted from particular um being is the quality of the protein in the meat alternative as as good as the protein that you're getting from from the real real meat yeah so I would like to rely on a very popular Zoey podcast where I did my protein rant to show that there is a whole podcast on that I agree if people want to get into it and but but for this particular topic because there we were talking about um like Whole Foods and here you're talking about this like ultr processed thing that some scientists created in a in a lab so I think it's a fair question like how does that compare with um the protein you would get from um yeah from a red meat so the protein in beans and plants is more abundant and closer to the amino acid profile so the amino acids are the building blocks of protein there's 20 of them we all need all 20 not just all 20 but we need them in specific proportions and sort of a myth that's out there in the protein world is that plants are missing some of those and they're not all plants have all 20 amino acids the the critique that is fair is that some of the amino acids are not in ideal proportions which means some of them would run out sooner than you need them to run out if you were only just barely meeting your daily requirement but the truth is most Americans get much more protein than they need for the day and so the exact distribution isn't quite as important so this was plenty of protein they were getting plenty of protein to build muscle to maintain muscle uh it was it was easily adequate what they were getting from these burgers and so which means they're getting you're saying it's not necessarily exactly the same profile of these sort of amino acids as in like a steak sa but it's it gives you everything that you need so you just really don't need to worry about it is that the red meat is better but only if you're at a low enough total protein that each proportion has to be perfect if you're getting a much higher total protein than you need the proportions don't have to be perfect and would there be anybody there for um who you might be worried about so I think I've heard on other podcasts that for example as you get more elderly your ability to absorb protein is worse or there will be people thinking about I don't know I'm um pregnant or I'm doing lots and lots of exercise um you know like I'm really a you know I'm doing sports at a very serious level where you would worry about the um the difference therefore between this red meat and these um meat Alternatives yeah plausible but for most most people they're getting more than enough even athletes even older people at some level that would kick in but probably not for these people in the study and probably not for most of your listeners okay so most people even if they are like older you don't think they should certainly you know worry about about that it's pretty good protein and it's a lot of protein in beans got it so then I think the other question I think that that um natur we want to come on to is you did this great study you were comparing like the difference between meat and meat Alternatives if I had a choice between my my meat alternative and moving to something else like how good is that switch to the the meat alternative yeah well I've been trying to get people to eat more beans and more plants for 30 years and don't really feel like May I've made much of a dent so for me I'm not ever looking for one answer in nutrition I'm looking for dozens cuz for different people there different priorities and motivations I'm kind of hoping these plant-based Meats will be a gateway drug to legumes like yes I made that switch and now I'm going to try lentils I would say and what is a legum yeah legumes is the overarching family name for beans peas lentils chickpeas pulses like that whole family and it sounds like you're saying those would be a lot healthier as a swap than these um meat alternative they would have more fiber they wouldn't be processed yes and just for a quick followup we've published another study since then uh instead of looking at cardiovascular risk factors we were looking at Young athletes who are tell us about that who are always super conscious about their protein they're like obsessed with protein so we got Runners and weightlifters 12 each and we had them do the same thing except we added a third arm and the third arm was going vegan okay so it was all beans and Grains and things like that that is a radical shift from eating red meat like twice a day and so we timed their runs and we checked their um we made a composite score we added together a bench press a lateral pull down where you pull down from above is doing great explanations visually by the way if you're uh only on audio no sorry I didn't mean to keep going and you can't see me under the table but now I'm doing my leg press so sort of three stand measures that people who do resistance training work out and we looked at a percent change in those and the resistance trainers lifted just as much weight and the runners ran just as fast but not faster on the plant-based Meats but I want to clarify who we picked for this it's kind of funny I for years I've wanted to work with Stanford athletes and the coaches will never let me touch their teams like stay away we compete don't mess with their diet okay and they all seemed to think their athletes need a ton of protein the population we picked for this was recreational athletes and to join you had to have been exercising regularly for two to five years and I think the average was 5 years like they had always run and they had always lifted weights just for their health like these are people who go to the gym or run three times a week which is more generalizable than Elite athletes so I I'm not after the elite athlete here I'm just after the folks who regularly work out and listen to the Bro Science on social media that says how much protein you need uh and actually we had some interesting preconceptions the resistance trainers thought they would lose muscle and lift less the runners actually thought they might do better because a plant-based diet has more carbs and I think they're more aware of their sort of uh energy storage for their runs anyway both of those outcomes for the 12 people it's not a huge trial but again across over everybody did all three so they're comparing their running time and their lifting capacity across the three arms they were only four weeks each that's another downside maybe something else would have happened if we had gone longer but no difference so we published the paper that Not only was the plant-based alternative meat equal but so was the vegan and so this is really your answer to this sort of protein question which is because you were expecting to affect potentially your your muscles and you're saying hey you know when you're bench pressing on beans amazingly uh instead of steak you're still able to bench press just as much at the end of the of the month um than with the with the steak am I understanding that right and in a table you could see that sort of plant-based alternative meat was in the middle for a lot of these things so there was a little less protein than the animal meat but more than the plant-based meat which had the least protein uh the the vegan arm had the most carbohydrate the animal meat had the least carbohydrate and the plant-based meat Alternatives was in the middle for all kinds of measures it was like a three it would go in the direction you expect for carbohydrate fiber saturated fat cholesterol and the protein was sort of the most fun the vegans got less protein they lifted just as much weight and they ran just as fast cuz they were getting more than enough protein which is back to something that you discussed with me on another podcast that we're basically being sold this idea that we're all sort of protein depleted and I feel like everything in the grocery store now says like high protein or extra protein and actually you know you're saying even for these people who are working out a lot compared to you know most of us in the states or the UK or or whever they were just just fine moving from the red meat to the beans now I guess what they didn't answer was whether or not the the beans were healthier cuz here you were looking more about those sort of exercise things you weren't looking back to sort of cardiovascular risk you know like heart disease or diabetes or or things like like that and it would have been harder to see in the second study because these are young fit athletes so they don't really have high cholesterol or high blood sugar or high other things they were fit young people now I've heard Tim talk about his excitement about more sort of mushroom based or fermented like almost bacterial style meat alternatives on the grounds that they're not Ultra processed they're like sort of like a whole food that's just put together probably tastes a little less perfectly like meat which I guess is what you were testing but um you know are you know don't have those con those concerns if someone was thinking here and saying um you know I I am really interested in improving my health which I think many of the listeners here that that's where they're trying to get to so they're open-minded potentially changing but they do want to still have that um that meat taste what would your expectations be there would that would you expect them to be a more healthy alternative to these sorts of meat Alternatives or not necessarily yeah I think there's yeah that sounds more Whole Food based if it's mushroom based it'll have a lot less protein I'm not sure they need the protein but for those who are obsessed with protein these plant-based alternative Meats do have a very similar amount of protein mushrooms not so much so I'd love to sort of switch in a way to like practical advice based on this you know I think it's brilliant to understand that this is real um and um and it looks like you know for people who are eating um sort of you know quite a lot of meat in that diet today which you know many of us are there is definitely a place for these um meat Alternatives um so if someone was thinking about switching from meat to meat Alternatives you know what should they look out for when you know they're buying these products and are there any sort of red flags that would help you to um think about it because I feel that there's more and more and more of these um Alternatives being um you know being advertised yeah and right now Max chair of the American Heart association's nutrition committee and we're working on a statement about ultr processed foods and as we go through this and try to explain it and take a position on it there's really two components to those foods and one is the physical processing so here's the bean I like soybean as an example soybean is the whole bean Tempe is pretty much the whole bean that's been fermented and stuck together milk soy milk is processed tofu comes from the soy milk so it's further processed and then you've got soy protein isolate that you add so you've taken the protein away from the whole bean you can't even recognize the bean anymore right and then you're sort of hitting the ultra pric so one is the physical processing but in the ultr processed world a big part of this is ingredients it is preservatives stabilizers colorant emulsifiers and so I think what the consumer can do is look at this list of ingredients so you'll find some of these plant-based Meats uh have one or two of those additives or preservatives in it but if they look it's it's mostly just plain Foods other than the pea protein or the soy protein that's extracted I'm sure in other ones there's a long list so we added red dye number three and we added this preservative and we added that emulsifier and we added this other thing and so that's their challenge so I would I would suggest they look to see the thing that has uh what Maran Nestle who's a very uh well-known nutrition scientist in the US she says uh avoiding Ultra processed foods mean you should try to pick things where you could find the ingredients in the store to make it at home and so it sounds like you're saying I just wanted to play that back like one part is the processing so the reality is that all of those things have like this isolated P protein like you can't find that in your kitchen that one part is like in all of these things that is this sort of ultra processing you can't get overwise and the second thing is all the things you're adding on top of thing other things that you've never heard of and these are like you know when you're talking about these additives and preservatives and emulsifiers that again you wouldn't find in your kitchen um and and I I think I've I've heard some of our guests talk about some of the concerns about how this might interact with our microbiome yeah yeah absolutely you know for the world of ultra processed food to be honest there's a huge overlap in salt added sugar and saturated fat like Many Of The Addictive Ultra processed foods have those and a lot of people are questioning do we really need this new categorization aren't these Foods just high in the nutrients that we've been telling people to avoid and the answer has been no part of it is the physical processing and part part is part of it is all the additives that go beyond salt sugar and saturated fat so just to make sure I've got that what you're saying because I think this is still a live debate amongst nutritional scientists is my impression yes and so it's really interesting you're leading this new um uh committee you know for remind me what you said the name was yeah it's the American Heart association's nutrition committee we write papers and make SC scientific advisories on so that sounds pretty official official and so it sounds like you are actively addressing this question about what is ultra process and you're saying it's not just I guess what I grew up with as a kid saying junk food is food that's got like lots of fat in it and salt and sugar it's this new realization that um it's got these other things in it you can't find in your kitchen I hear Tim talk about it it's like food like object or something I think he even calls it like stuff that's not really necessarily food as we understood and it sounds like you're saying you're of the viewer that there's something real about that there is huh but multiple domains and some I think what happens in the ultra processed word at this point using the Nova criteria as soon as it has one or two of these you fall into Ultra processed but picture one that has 20 of those and one that has two I'm pretty sure the one that has 20 I'd be more concerned about so coming back to my initial question and I probably got a bit over excited and pull us around you're saying like you're looking on the back of the pack and you'll see you might see one which basically just looks like things in your kid with maybe the addition of your pea protein that feels to you a lot better than one that has lots of different preservatives and emulsifiers and that's sort of what you should be looking out for uhuh and then you find one that has none and it's a lentil black bean burger and you bring it home and the meat eater in your family says I'm not eating that that doesn't look or taste like the burger that I wanted oh I'll have this other one that looks and tastes like it oh no way you fooled me it's not well I would love to talk bit about the the next stage you said I I love this idea that it might be the gateway drug to move you from eating meat let's say someone's listening and saying like I've had some of that and actually I'd like to go further on my transition away from meat but actually there's things about meat that I did really like you know the taste in my mouth what are the other you know let's say that someone is saying I am more um like open-minded to make um changes but I'm not quite ready to just have a salad for the rest of my life like what would you be advising and I seem to remember at one point you might have opened a restaurant instead of becoming a nutritional scientist so tell me what what are the other ways that you could maybe transition away from this this red me and maybe to somewhere even healthier yeah well it is true mushrooms in this particular case um depend like cooking up a a portabella mushroom uh can feel sort of meaty for that person you can Grill a portabella mushroom uh Tempe is great so I put Tempe in a lot of my dishes I think lots of people listening won't know what Tempe is could you explain yeah so it's a fermented soybean product it's interesting how they wrap it up it's wrapped very tightly in plastic and I can't find it in all the stores that I shop in but you when you open this up it tends to be about 6 to 8 in in length about a half an inch thick and about 4 in wide you can slice it like you would meat and it holds together in something that you put it in if you were to slice up tofu it's like that looks like a marshmallow why am I EA also what is tofu soy it's just soy before so Tempe is like this this this tofu sort of fermented yeah but the so the tofu doesn't look you can't see the bean so when you're cutting the Tempe you can see oh wow that's beans stuck together you can really see the whole bean whereas the tofu before it was tofu was milk so they had boiled and mashed the soybeans to make the milk and then they coagulated the milk and got the tofu so tofu or Tempe or mushrooms but really the whole bean family is probably the best place to go whether that's uh a soup or a hummus uh it it's filling it's got a lot of fiber it's got a lot of nutrients in it it's low and saturated fat and the fat that it does have is unsaturated the good stuff so lots of those I mean we also have plant-based milks we have plant-based cheeses I haven't tested those yet but there really are a lot of really exciting products out there where I would always want you to have the whole food um I'm not recommending that oh like I I'm never going to say these are healthy unless you ask me uh compared to what so just to make sure I've got that you you're sort of saying hey if you can go beyond the um um the meat alternative that's sort of wrapped up to look like the me there are a set of other things that you could introduce and interestingly you know it's interesting you jump to something that most people would have heard of right Tempe as an example um which is I guess the non-ultra processed food there for sort of you know it's a non-ultra proc processed food variety that you could have you also talked about mushrooms um and um and then sort of beans in general you're saying hey look if you if you able to make the shift towards those being a bigger part of your diet you're going to have a you're going to have a bigger impact on improving your health yes uhhuh I mean partly that's because we have data people have been eating beans and mushrooms for thousands of years they've only been eating these this new genre of plant-based Meats for years so we don't know who lives or dies here um so for now all we can look at is clinical measures that change quickly like blood values or those types of intermediate markers we have the data on the beans and the other things and what it does to clinical markers and that people on a more plant-based diet live longer Freer of heart disease and other chronic diseases yes and part of that presumably is you're getting much more fiber and all these other complex um chemicals in the plants that you were neither getting in the um the meat but also these me meat Alternatives because of the way their prices you know they're less um they're not having some of this complexity and this sort of food for your microbiome and things like this and just to add one other dimension because I I'm working on a book and I found this really fascinating publication of okay yes the red meat only has red meat that's the only ingredient but what went into making that red meat the antibiotics the corn and soy that they were growing for livestock feed all these other preservatives all these things that went into the food and the water that they were eating talk about that for a minute CU you said that you looked for like the best red meat in America and I think for listeners outside of the States you know there are definitely differences in countries to do with what um what the rules are about red meat and I think that um you know the rules in the states are less strict yes than in many other countries and so um you know what might have been in the red mid I guess is what I'm saying if you hadn't gone to your special supplier of grass fed meat like what else might have been in that um that red meat that that you might just generally been eating if you're you know ordering it from uh you know a restaurant somewhere wherever you live right I mean just to pick a really simple one so grass-fed beef has more omega-3 which is a Hot Topic in the world of nutrition this highly unsaturated fatty acid than uh the 99% of the meat that goes through a concentrated animal feeding operation so other nutrients other lack of some presence of others so that the standard US meat is not pasturised and organic and regeneratively grown that is a very very small percentage of the meat in the US maybe not in Korea where Kobe beef is like very carefully raised and it's traditional and they take immense pride in that uh I don't think we have immense pride in American meat and I think one of the things that um you know I've heard a number of people talk about is the antibiotics that are going into the meat in our diet like is still existing in the food that we eat and therefore um we're tending to eat a whole bunch of antibiotics which is obviously designed to kill bacteria and we have a lot of bacteria inside us um in a completely un intended way yeah and it's not so much I don't think that the antibiotics are still still present and we're eating it and absorbing it but in doing that to the animals and seeing run off from uh the water that they're using uh yeah the the connection is not necessarily as direct as you are eating antibiotics um but there is a connection there's not this is not my area of specialization but if you look at uh if you're trying to track antibiotic use 80% I think it might be down to 70% in the US goes to livestock and only 20 to 30% is what humans are eating and we're coming up with um these mrsas the the resistant bacteria we're running out of antibacterial Solutions in the US because most more and more people have become resistant to them doctors have been saying for years we need to stop that part giving it to the animals so Christopher just to wrap up what's your one key piece of advice that you'd want our listeners to walk away away with you know from this episode y uh eat Whole Foods first but along the way to that path consider instead of what so are these plant-based alternative Meats good or bad for you it needs to be in terms of instead of what and if you are a regular American eating a lot of the meat that's available available in the US and you wanted to focus on clinical measures those plant-based alternative Meats in our study which is the only one had better health outcomes amazing well I would like to try and do a a quick summary of of all of this um Christopher so I think we started by saying what are meat Alternatives and the key to understand is they're designed for someone who is a meat eater and wants to swap out to something that still tastes like the meat they're used to doing and looks and smells and it's super familiar and not very threatening and you ended up doing a study on one of these particular which was beyond um who um did help fund that and I think you described in in our our bit of beginning you know you have all of these protections to try not to be biased but of course you want to disclose it um because of that they use um uh beans in all of these in order because they're really high in protein they they are Ultra processed which means um that they have to extract these particular proteins and do sort of magical scientific e things to them in order to make them taste like meat and be as close as possible to meat and you did this you know very elegant study comparing the effects of people eating um you know like a high quality red meat and these meat Alternatives and it was pretty clear that actually the health benefits of these meat Alternatives were better and you talked about um uh tmao uh falling which apparently is a risk factor from Red me and I have no idea what that means but also LDL dropping which is something that you know comes up um often and indeed that there was a small amount of weight loss for these um people that anyone worrying about you know getting the wrong protein from these meat Alternatives really shouldn't worry in large part because basically almost no one should be worrying about whether they're getting enough protein if they are um like eating or like a regular diet in the states most people are getting too much and that you did this really elegant study in fact with uh athletes where you compared not only these meat alternities but actually also what happened if you went vegan and it turns out that these athletes were working out a lot were able to perform just as well even on a vegan diet which had significantly less protein than the meat it was the same with the meat alternative so in all these cases like worrying about the protein you know unless maybe maybe you're an Olympic Athlete or something just doesn't seem worth worrying about or unless you're in in a really extreme case where you're really not eating enough food and you're elderly and you know so sort of what you describe I think as very Niche um situations and then we talked a bit about does that mean that these meat alternatives are like really healthy and everyone listening to this should start eating them and I think um and Christopher's pulling a face here um as I said it because I think the answer is no you're saying like it's a great maybe gateway drug as you put it to transition from this like really meat Centric diet to something that's much healthier but actually if you can go towards eating much more um Whole Foods then actually you're going to get so much more because these foods are still Ultra processed you talked a little bit about this new um uh work you're doing really defining Ultra processed foods for the American Health Association because it's clear that this is something we really need to start um worrying about and I think you gave some examples there for like if you're willing to go further than mushrooms uh being a way to replace meat and still tasting quite meat like it's going to get you a lot further or Tempe which is uh fermented soybean which has definitely was new to me in the last sort of 18 months and I def I've had that experience it's definitely much more I would say chickeny or something like that I don't think it's going to get anyone who's really um out for that experience of a full steak um and that in general if you could move towards many more beans as one of those things that gives you all of this fiber and everything else you're going to really get to a much healthier place so it's it might be better but um just swapping from red meat to these meat Alternatives does not mean that suddenly you're going to you know live another decade of healthy years and we won't get into it because it's the wrapup but I'm into motivations for making dietary changes and keeping them and classes that I teach at Stanford for students they're very interested in environmental sustainability and animal rights and Welfare the plant-based alternative meets totally win for both of those so health is a very important component but there would be other reasons to do it as well Christopher thank you so much that was really clear and amazing to talk to someone who's actually done uh you know the studies themselves instead of quinting somebody else's thanks for being here always fun been a pleasure bye-bye bye-bye it's really been an eye opener to hear from Christopher whether we should eat or avoid meat Alternatives nutrition is a complicated topic so I hope his advice will really help you next time you're in the grocery store now if you want to go one step further you can get personalized advice and support to help you pick the best foods for you Zoe can help you feel better now and live healthier in the years to come back back by real clinical studies to learn more and get 10% off your membership simply go to zoe.com podcast as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by yellow huin Martin Richard Willen and Tilly fford the Zoe science and nutrition podcast is not medical advice it's for General informational purposes only see you next time [Music] a [Music]

Channel: ZOE

Views: 62,646

Keywords: christopher gardner, netflix you are what you eat, chris gardner, stanford, nutrition science, plant protein, meat alternative, plant burger, vegan food, veggie food, is meat alternative healthy, zoe science, zoe podcast, science interview, science podcast, health interview, health podcast, gut health, gut microbiome, ultra processed food, upfs, tim spector, sarah berry, beyond meat, dr christopher gardner, plant protein vs meat protein, is red meat healthy

Id: TVJKIgsY_g4

Length: 63min 39sec (3819 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024