If you know me, you know I love my veggies and am more than happy to eat a delicious plant-based meal, but I also love my meat. I’ve always been a big advocate of the nutritional, health, physique, appetite controlling and metabolic benefits of getting lots of protein from eating good quality, lean cuts of meat and fish. (As much as possible I stick to organic, grass fed meats and wild fish.)
However, lately I’ve been doing some reading and some research which has led me to spin all of my previous learnings and beliefs regarding meat versus plant protein on their head and I feel a change coming…
I realise I’m a bit late to this party and that many people made this discovery some time ago, but it turns out that you absolutely CAN get good quality and complete proteins – and in fact an almost* complete nutritional profile from a plant based diet. Not only that, but rather than assisting things like blood sugar and insulin control, cardiovascular health, even physical fitness, power, strength and metabolism, which I’d always believed to be true, research now shows that meat (even those good quality options) can have huge detrimental effects on all of these areas and more.
*Vitamin B12 is the only nutrient that cannot be obtained on a vegan diet, so is best taken in capsule form. Having said that, it’s not necessarily a given that you’re absorbing it from a carnivorous diet and is actually a supplement I include anyway.
One of the other big reasons that has swayed me is meat and dairy’s influence on bodily inflammation. Many of you who know my history will be aware that over the years I have had to eliminate many foods from my diet – gluten, cow’s milk, high FODMAP foods, oats, buckwheat – due to digestive sensitivities and issues. So you might think that a diet filled with lots of potentially high FODMAP and fibrous vegetables and legumes would be a disaster. However, research has shown that poorly functioning guts like mine, can often be due to an imbalance of gut bacteria, caused in part by poor quality diets, but also an over-consumption of inflammatory meat and dairy (especially if the meat has been given anti-biotics and hormones in it’s life) and that removing these things from the diet can quickly restore gut bacteria and eliminate symptoms. I’ve been to many extremes and spent a lot of money to try to resolve my gut issues, including a month long course of low dose anti-biotics, without much resolution, so I certainly have no problem giving this much more natural option a whirl!
I’ve always said the driver for me to do what I do, to eat a healthy diet and keep fit – aside from maintaining a healthy weight – is to increase my chances of a long and HEALTHY life. So if I find out that what I’ve been doing could hinder this I need to change, right?
Now I have a family to feed, who aren’t quite ready to go cold turkey on the meat front (and I’m probably not either if I’m honest) and I absolutely refuse to get into the habit of cooking more than one meal. So instead I plan to make a gradual adjustment, slowly reducing how often we have meat and fish, but also how much we eat at each serving. Simply doing this over the last 5 days has already seen me lose over 5lbs (NB it’s normal for me to lose about 2-3lbs Monday to Friday after the indulgences of the weekend, but 5lbs ordinarily would take a lot of hard work, will power and frankly hunger!!). There’s no secret, or magic to this by the way – it’s simply that fruit and vegetables contain fewer calories for the same volume of food, so you can eat more food but take in fewer calories (something I’ve talked about for a long time anyway, but just tipped the balance a bit more).
So, if like me you’re into creating the best health you possibly can, achieving easy, natural weight control AND eating delicious food, then watch this space for lots of new plant based recipes!!!!! 🥗
If you’d like to read more on the subject I can highly recommend reading Dr Micheal Gregor MD’s ‘How Not to Die’ and ‘How Not to Diet’.
