Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:00

Welcome to the Deficient Vegans podcast, episode 48. I'm the muscle deficient vegan here with the protein deficient vegan. Do you want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:06

Hello!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:07

Hi, everybody. So this week, we're going to talk about the veganism is privilege argument. There are a lot of good points to cover here. We want to make sure that we do it justice because there are some valid concerns, so we'll go through it in detail and talk about it. The bottom line is the cheapest thousand calories that you can buy in almost every country on Earth are plant-based. So what's actually going on with this privilege argument? We'll also cover our myth of the week this week, which is that microwaves kill nutrients.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:30

I've been seeing this one a lot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:31

Yeah, we'll talk about it. But first up, new news.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:35

New news.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:37

So the first piece of news is Billie Eilish, who is a popular singer. I think it's probably an understatement.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:42

Yeah, very popular singer.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:45

But she did an interview with Elle. Oh, she's also a vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:48

By the way. And an animal activist.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:49

Yeah, she did an interview with Elle. And in that interview, they asked her for a hot take.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:54

And it was hot. People are pissed. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:58

So her hot take was eating meat is inherently wrong. And you can't say you love animals and also eat them. Like, you can't do both. Yeah. And that has been quite the controversy, apparently.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:07

It's taken over every social media app I have. Yeah. People are mad.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:13

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:13

They're really mad. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:15

Yeah. And I think that was kind of the inspiration for this episode, because a couple of the arguments that people were making against Billie Eilish are some of the things we're going to talk about.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:23

Yeah. Well, a lot of what I'm seeing is I can do both.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:26

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:27

And then, but like, I think one of the other reoccurring things that I'm seeing is like, Billie Eilish is a white, rich, privileged.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:36

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:37

American. So like.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:38

Which she is.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:39

She is. Doesn't mean she's wrong. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:42

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:43

So, I don't know. I thought it was really cool that she said that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:47

Yeah. Next piece of news, the Ridgeland Farms that we talked about an episode or two ago, they have a bunch of beagles they use for lab testing and a group of animal activists went out there and had a- A protest.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:00

Basically.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:01

A protest, basically. It got arrested. But this was either like the second or third time that Ridgeland Farms has had activists show up. So, I guess they're getting tired of that. And now they've come to some sort of agreement where they have agreed for an undisclosed amount of money to sell off 1,500 of the beagles. Yes. To, not just to like the labs and stuff, but they're going to basically release them and give them distributed to a bunch of rescues and stuff in the Wisconsin area.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:26

Yeah, so that people can adopt them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:28

Right. So, and we mentioned before that they were losing their breeding license. First of all, I don't know if it's called a breeding license, but they're losing whatever license they need to operate in their state, but they're apparently not losing their federal license. So I'm not sure if that just means they can move states and keep going. Yeah. Or really how this is going to impact their operations in general. Because even after these 1,500 get sold off, they've got about 500 beagles left.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:50

Yeah. So it's unclear what is happening with the other 500 beagles. I think that people are still calling to release them, obviously. But I think it's also unclear what happens to their business. Does it shut down? What is going on? I think it's a little unclear what's going on. Yeah. If you're interested in adopting one of the beagles, I think you'd probably just hit up some of the Wisconsin rescue shelters because.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:14

They're going to have a lot of beagles.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:15

They're getting flooded with beagles.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:16

All right. And then the last piece of news we have is that there is a new vegan cream cheese from Kite Hill that has twice the protein of a dairy-based cream cheese. This isn't exactly something where you're going to be eating a bunch of cream cheese to hit your protein goal. But I think it's interesting because a lot of the plant-based cheese substitutes don't really have protein. And you were getting a little bit of protein from the dairy cheeses.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:35

Yeah. I think this could be extra interesting if you're someone who bakes with cream cheese, because my normal go-tos are like Violife and then Philadelphia makes a pretty good vegan cream cheese. But both of those are coconut oil based. So if you get them hot, they will, in fact, melt. Yeah. So I would assume this one probably doesn't melt as much of it as protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:56

Yeah, that could be interesting. And I'll take any excuse to eat cream cheese. All right. So let's get into the main segment here talking about is veganism privileged? So there are five general arguments that coalesce around this topic.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:11

Yeah. That we've seen. We're on social media a lot. We're in Reddit a lot. Yeah. These are the things that we've seen. There are probably others too, but these seem to be the top hitters that I'm seeing a lot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:22

Yeah. And I've heard some of these in person too. Like nobody was really like, I am making this argument. But like the things they say all tend to fall into these categories.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:28

What comes up. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:29

So the five are cost. Just vegan food is more expensive is the argument. Access, where it's like fresh produce isn't available in food deserts, rural areas, or low-income neighborhoods. There's also time or labor. So cooking from scratch requires a kitchen, equipment, energy, and knowledge about making the food. And culture is another big one. The argument is that veganism is like a Western, white, colonial framework imposed on cultures that traditionally have animal-based food ways. And then the last one we're going to talk about is just the nutritional concerns. So people say, like, you have to know a lot about nutrition. You have to basically be a dietician to make it through a vegan diet healthily. So that's one of the arguments there. So, there are definitely some valid points in these arguments, but most of them shouldn't prevent you from trying to adopt a more vegan diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:14

Yeah. I mean, there are definitely some cases in which maybe your life would be at risk if you were trying to do a plant-based diet for various reasons. Yeah. But I think broadly, there are things everyone can do.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:27

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:28

To lean more towards plant-based.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:30

Yeah, for sure. So, let's kind of dive into each of these categories individually. So, the first one we're going to talk about is cost. So the cost of a vegan diet. So some of the good points that have been made are like Beyond Burgers, oat milk, vegan cheese, specialty protein powders, a lot of specialty vegan products. Those things can be pretty expensive.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:47

Yeah. I mean, especially if you're comparing like liquid just egg, if you directly compare that to like a dozen chicken eggs or if you compare like Beyond ground beef with regular ground beef, like those things are going to be more expensive. Usually because they're smaller companies. Yeah. But also because meat and dairy products get subsidies from the government that make the cost lower than they really should be.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:11

Yeah, definitely. So if your mental image of veganism is a cart full of Trader Joe's specialty products and small company products, then yeah, it probably does seem pretty expensive and that probably would be pretty expensive. Yes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:23

If you are buying like six vegan cheeses from Rebel Cheese every week, yeah, that's a hundred bucks. That's going to be pricey.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:31

Right. And then, you know, not just the cost of the food, but also kitchen equipment is pretty expensive and you might need a little more for a vegan diet. And then, you know, depending on your housing situation, you might not have a kitchen at all if you're like maybe a college student or some other housing situations. Or if you do have a kitchen, maybe it's like really small, not very well equipped, your stove sucks, something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:49

Right. And like, so if you were on an omnivore diet, maybe you'd be eating out a lot more like fast food restaurants where the price point is a Maybe a lot of those restaurants don't offer a plant-based option. Or maybe a lot of the vegan recipes will use like blenders that can be kind of expensive to get a good one.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:07

Yeah, blenders, especially if you're trying to blend things like the nuts and stuff. Yeah, like the cashews. Really the stronger blenders help and the stronger blenders are significantly more expensive. So you might not be able to make, you might have, you're trying to make queso with your cheaper blender and it's like, oh, this is kind of shitty.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 7:21

So I think if you were making alfredo sauce on an omnivore diet, like you don't need a blender. But like if you're trying to make a good alfredo sauce on a vegan diet, you might need a good blender. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:30

Yeah. Things like that do factor into the cost. So they're valid arguments. But let's talk about some of the data around the cost of a vegan type diet. So there was a 2025 narrative review that looked at 25 years of global cost data. So this is not U.S. specific or anything. You know, we do tend to talk mostly about U.S. things because that's where we are. But, you know, a lot of this conversation is also going to extend beyond that. So this was looking at global cost data, and it found that whole food plant-based diets, which is basically, you know, a vegan diet that is mostly whole food, right? So not like packaged processed products. A lot of times whole food plant-based is also no oil, no salt, anything like that. But it found that whole food plant-based diets are generally associated with spending less on food than omnivorous diets, which is a non-vegan diet, across a wide geographic range. So all across the globe, basically. The spending on legumes, grains, and produce, which are kind of the staples of a real whole food vegan diet, was more than offset by removing expensive animal products, mostly meat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:28

Yeah. I think this one is interesting because I think a lot of omnivores don't really understand what a vegan would eat. So I think they're always thinking like you're only eating fruits and vegetables. Right. Which when you look at the price tag of fruits and vegetables, like if I needed to eat 2000 calories of just fruits and vegetables, like that would be really expensive.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:48

Especially if you're trying to get fruits out of season or you don't like really have a fresh market really close to you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:53

But most of our calories aren't coming from fruits and vegetables. They're coming from like beans and tofu and like lentils and other stuff like that. So that's often overlooked by like omnivores hypothesizing on what a vegan diet might look like.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:08

Yeah, definitely. There was also another 2024 analysis that found that a low-fat vegan diet cut daily food costs by about 19% versus the standard American diet. And standard American diet is kind of the typical medical terminology for what most Americans eat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:22

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:23

That was mostly also driven by the savings on meat. Turns out meat's pretty expensive.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:28

Yeah, especially when you compare it to like beans and lentils. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:32

And then there was another trial in 2024 specifically for type 2 diabetics that found that a whole food plant-based diet ran about $9.78 a day compared to $15.72 a day for a comparable omnivorous diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:46

That's a pretty significant difference. Yeah. That's like almost 30% drop.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:50

And it's actually getting worse because inflation data is showing that meat, poultry, fish, and eggs are the food category that has the fastest growing inflation rate. It's up 36.4% since 2020. So every year, basically, a non-vegan diet gets more expensive compared to the whole foods vegan diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:08

That kind of makes sense with population growth, too. Like, there's only so much land we have to grow or to, like, raise meat for consumption because it takes a lot of crops. And a lot of land for just the animals. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 10:23

And we've seen a lot of this recently. There was an egg shortage that kind of caused a little bit of an artificial inflation earlier this year. Just egg kind of came in and they sold a lot of plant-based egg substitutes. Even with that, the price of eggs is still up over where it was a couple of years ago. So more people look towards those plant-based egg alternatives. With that said, once you start to factor in like a lot of processed vegan foods, the products from the small companies like we were talking about, some of those plant-based meat alternatives, that does make a vegan diet more expensive than an omnivorous diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:51

Yeah. I mean, if you are like, Truly following like a whole food plant-based diet where you're buying like grains and legumes, nuts, seeds, like fresh produce versus like pre-packaged stuff. Yeah. It's obviously going to be cheaper, but that's true with an omnivore diet too, right? Like less packaged foods, like less processed foods. If you're doing that on an omnivore diet, it's obviously going to be cheaper than buying a bunch of pre-packaged frozen foods in an omnivore section too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:20

Yeah, the frozen convenience foods for any type of diet really are the most expensive typically. All right. So now what are some ways you can manage the cost of going more towards a vegan diet? Frozen vegetables are a big one. They're nutritionally equivalent or sometimes even superior to fresh vegetables. And they're dramatically cheaper per serving. And then you can also look at canned vegetables. That could be an option as well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:42

Yeah, and I guess the good thing about that is with canned, you don't have to eat it right away either because it's shelf stable. Right. So, like, let's say you're in a cost situation where you're limited in fridge or maybe you don't even have a freezer, you know, like, maybe you're like in a small apartment and you have kind of one of those mini fridge situations without a freezer, you could go with canned.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:00

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, you know, if you do have a freezer, that can be a good option if you only go to the grocery store every once in a while, something like that. You know, a lot of the time, an issue people have with vegetables and produce is you buy it, you kind of don't use it for a few days, and then it's like, you know, rotten or molding or whatever.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:17

Right, and then you can't really justify the cost of buying fresh because you don't really know how long you're going to have with it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:23

Right, so frozen is a great option. Um, another one is kind of the bulk grain staples, like oats, brown rice, bulgur, barley, and whole wheat flour.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:31

Yeah. And if, so you can buy them obviously like packaged. Yeah. But a lot of stores will have, um, like the containers that you can weigh out your own. Yeah. And those will be cheaper because they don't have like brand names on them and stuff. You know, they're just like a bulk item.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:47

Yeah. And they're shelf stable. They last a long time. So you can stock up on it really.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:50

I think that also helps if you have like limited fridge, freezer space.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:55

Yeah, definitely. Also, I would definitely just like skip the alternative meat aisle if you're trying to constrain the budget for your vegan spending, because those are going to be very expensive.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:05

Definitely. And the other thing is, you know, a lot of those meats are based on like kind of a seitan structure. So you could make your own seitan. And that's really cheap.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 13:15

Get some vital wheat gluten, make your own. And then for protein, you know, we're talking about skipping the alternative meat aisle. So you might be like, okay, protein. So some of the cheapest protein staples globally are vegan sources, dried lentils, dried split peas, dried chickpeas, dried black beans, oats, peanut butter, tofu in the places where it's available, which is most places, but not all places. TVP and vital wheat gluten, like we just mentioned.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:37

Yeah. And then I think if one of your cost constraints is like having a functional kitchen and specific kitchen equipment, there are actually a lot of resources for like making, you know, cheap vegan meals without a lot of kitchen equipment. But you could rely on things like canned beans.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 13:53

You can also do some stuff like sandwiches or maybe even overnight oats because you can get like a mini fridge. You have some milk. You have some oats that are on the shelf. Basically, just put those in a jar overnight in the fridge. And even if you have the fridge, you can throw some berries and stuff in there. So that's a pretty good option.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:08

Yeah, one of my favorite meals we've been making a lot in the last couple months is like We call it a bean bowl, but it's literally just like black beans seasoned with taco seasoning and nutritional yeast. That's like very cheap. You know, you just stir it up and microwave it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:21

Also, if you get access to a kitchen like one day a week or something, you could go make a big pot of chili and that'll last you several days.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:27

Something like that. Maybe meal prep.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:28

Some options.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:29

You know, like if you're living in a college dorm or something.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:31

Also very cheap.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:32

Yeah. So, yeah, there's like lots of recipes that don't necessarily use like expensive kitchen equipment that you can find. And then I think for the piece about eating out, because eating out can be more expensive.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:42

Yeah, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:43

Just because a lot of restaurants don't really have plant-based options. But what I will say is Taco Bell kind of comes in clutch here. Yeah. Because like it's just as cheap as the omnivore version and you can almost like veganize most things on the menu without really a lot of additional cost.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:59

Yeah. And it's mostly, you know, if you get the like the Fresca style with beans, it's mostly whole food. I mean, the tortilla is obviously a little processed, but you could even just get like a bean bowl with a bunch of veggies on it, basically.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:11

Yeah. Like, they're really good about refried beans. They've got black beans, seasoned, like, potatoes. Yeah. Rice you can add on. So, like, a lot of higher calorie ingredients that'll keep you full, too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:25

All right. So, I think that pretty much covers kind of the cost category and hopefully showing some of the data there. This one in particular is kind of interesting because, like, the cost argument is mostly just really not true unless you're really focusing on specialty ingredients or alternative meats. I think it's good to see some data that, like, specifically has compared in these studies the vegan-type diet to an omnivorous diet. And it's, like, basically every time they look at it, a whole food plant-based diet is significantly cheaper than a non-vegan diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:51

Yeah, I think a lot of the confusion just comes from, like, the only products that an omnivore is seeing pushed are, like, your Beyond and your Impossible or, like, fake cheeses and stuff. And it's like, when they go to the grocery store, those are the only ingredients they're seeing, you know, because they don't know how to make... Like whole meals with TVP or vital wheat gluten, they don't really understand those as an omnivore. Most omnivores. I'm not saying all omnivores. Yeah. But like most omnivores, when you're going to the grocery store and you're like, what are vegans eating? You know, you're going to be in the dairy aisle and you're going to look at like the dairy shredded cheese and you're going to look at the vegan shredded cheese. And you're going to see that the vegan shredded cheese is maybe $2 more for the same amount. Yeah. And you're going to be like, wow, that's really expensive. Or you look at the vegan sour cream versus the omnivore sour cream. And it's going to be more because they're smaller companies. Right. Or like you're going to the frozen food section and you're looking at the vegan meats. And they're obviously going to be more expensive than real meat because it's a smaller company and the subsidies we talked about. But like I think what's usually being missed is like in the aisle with the gluten-free flour options is vital wheat gluten, which is super freaking cheap. And you can make your own seitan at home or TVP, which is pretty cheap, that you can use as a protein source as well. So I think those are the things that are being overlooked. And they're also not looking at like the beans and lentils. Those things are so cheap. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:15

Beans and lentils are huge. They're, I mean, some of the cheapest foods that exist, basically. And there's nothing really vegan specific about beans. I don't care if you're a vegan or not. You've eaten beans a lot in your life, I'm sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:25

And they're cheap. And I think the other piece is if you say like, well, don't buy the meat and dairy alternatives, I think they immediately go to, okay, so my entire diet is just fruits and vegetables. Holy crap. If I eat 2000 calories of fruits and vegetables every day, that's going to be expensive. Right. And yeah, that would be expensive, but that's not what most vegans are doing. Yep, exactly. So I think the cost argument comes down more to like... the vast majority of omnivores really not understanding what vegans eat yeah no

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:56

That's what it is like that and i didn't either like obviously before i was a vegan i had kind of these same ideas i was like i had to buy fresh fruit and vegetables all the time i had to do like the impossible was just starting to come out at some point but yeah i never really thought of a vegan diet until i started watching like forks over knives and stuff and saw like the whole food plant-based diet and then that was when it really clicked for me i was like oh wait this stuff is like dirt.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:16

Cheap oh yeah even as a vegetarian i wasn't really sure like what i would be eating as a vegan yeah i will say i think this is why social media is really helpful like i think social media is educating a lot of omnivores on what vegans eat because vegans are posting their food pictures like even if you have a smaller account and you think no one's seeing it like people are seeing it on their for you page and stuff yeah they're seeing what you're eating like that does help educate the public on what do vegans eat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:43

So let's move next into talking about the access argument. And this is mostly about like access to the optimal foods.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:49

Yeah. I actually think this, in my opinion, is one of the strongest arguments against.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:55

Right. So a lot of people live in what is kind of commonly referred to as a food desert. That terminology has technically been replaced, at least in America. Now they call it like low income and low access. Yeah. And this is, you know, a real situation, millions of Americans live in basically these food deserts. And that's defined by the USDA as an area where a significant number of people have limited access to a grocery store. And the limited access threshold is basically if you're in an urban area, it's more than sometimes half a mile away. And then they also track a mile away. And then for a rural area, like out in the country or whatever, they define it as a grocery store more than 10 miles away.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:34

And you might be thinking like, In an urban area, it could be a food desert, even if it's just a little over a half of a mile away for a grocery store. Yeah. But you have to be thinking, like, a lot of people that live in urban areas maybe don't have cars.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:47

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, they have to get on public transportation to go to the grocery store. You can't really carry a whole bunch of groceries back on the bus. So there's a lot of stuff like that that factors into what makes this low access. And they're all really valid.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:58

Yeah. And you might not really think about them if you have a car and you can just kind of drive to the grocery store and that's not a problem for you. But there are real concerns here. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:06

There are millions of people who basically have to rely on public transportation to get where they're going.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:12

Or walk even, you know? Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:15

Also, fresh produce in remote areas is like genuinely more expensive. You know, off-season produce, fresh produce in somewhere that's not near farms that grow it. That stuff just gets more expensive the farther away you get from the source. Yeah. In these food deserts where you do typically get a lot of your food are convenience store type options or like corner stores. And those stores mostly stock like cheap, calorie-dense, animal product-heavy options.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:38

Yeah. Think even just like the convenience store that's attached to a gas station. Right. Like the kinds of things you might see inside of a gas station store.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:47

Yeah, you're not going into the gas station and buying your bulk beans and grains.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:51

Right, yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:52

So, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:53

They might have like some of that stuff, but they don't usually have a very good variety. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:58

And, you know, for the people who live in these areas, a large portion of their food comes from places like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:03

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:03

Because maybe they only go to the grocery store like once every two weeks.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:06

Yeah, or maybe fast food restaurants. Yeah. They might have access to those and eating from those.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:11

They're putting those in locations specifically to cater to people that are in low access environments so they can basically sell them food. And then also people who are in a houseless situation, if they're getting food from like pantries, churches, things like that. I mean, a lot of the time you just you have to eat what's available to you to survive and you don't really get options. Oh, yeah. And, you know, there's a little bit of philosophy there, but you definitely can't eat strictly a vegan diet in a lot of those cases because a lot of your choices have been taken away.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:37

And you don't know when your next meal is coming or what it's going to be. Yeah. You're not really in a situation where you can choose. Yeah. And I think that holds true even if you're not houseless, but you're like very low income where maybe you're on government programs. Yeah. Or you are shopping at like a food pantry. Yeah, you just might not have a lot of choices there that you can make. Right. Or if you're in a situation like you're elderly and you're on something like Meals on Wheels where they're bringing meals to you. Yeah. A lot of those programs don't really offer like a vegan vegetarian option. You're kind of stuck with whatever you get.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:13

Yeah. There was an experiment basically that dropped a full service supermarket into an urban food desert. which has basically made it not a food desert anymore. This is not a vegan-specific experiment they ran. But just putting the supermarket into the food desert basically improved the food security and, more interestingly, added sugar intake dropped. So this shows that the constraint here is just strictly geographical and not about dietary philosophy or dietary preference. They didn't tell these people to eat healthier foods. It's just they had access to the supermarket and they started eating healthier options.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:47

They're going to make different choices if they have choices available.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:50

Right. So that shows that this is a real issue, but this is not an issue that is really specific to veganism at all. Like the access to healthy food. I mean, if we're talking about access to healthy omnivorous food or access to healthy vegan food, the problem is the same. It's just they don't have access to healthy options in general. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:07

But, I mean, aside from the healthy food, if the only place you can shop is a convenience store or a gas station store... you're kind of limited to whatever they offer. You know what I mean?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:19

Yeah, exactly. So some of the things that you can do if you're in this kind of environment and you want to kind of strive towards a more vegan diet, a more plant-based diet, are focus on some shelf-stable things when you are able to make it to the grocery store or even shelf-stable things that your convenience stores might have. These are things like canned beans, canned lentils, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, rice, oats, dry pasta, nutritional yeast. And they have those soy milk cartons that are actually self-stable. You don't even have to keep those in the refrigerator. So, you know, as you go, you can kind of stock up on a lot of these shelf-stable things. Also, again, like the frozen vegetables, frozen fruits, just, you know, this is from the standpoint of can't get to the grocery store very often. So you can buy more of the frozen stuff, bring it home and freeze it. Yep. You can also buy seeds. And in some cases, I mean, I know some people might not have like even a yard to grow things. Right. But you could buy seeds and maybe even grow some stuff inside. Even if that's just herbs and spices, because those can be kind of expensive. but they're actually a lot of those are pretty easy to grow so you could grow your own herbs and spices and stuff and then in the u.s if you're on our snap benefits or our ebt benefits which is basically a welfare system for food if you're on those they actually have specific allowances and provisions for seeds and food producing plants because the idea there is maybe you can use some of this extra allowance to help you grow your own food at home a little bit that's really cool i mean you're probably not gonna be able to self-sustain entirely off your home garden but it will definitely help supplement. Mm-hmm. Also related to SNAP, specifically in the U.S., there's something called Double Up Food Bucks that basically doubles your SNAP spend allowance on fresh fruits and produce in some markets. So if you kind of look around for where you live, Google Double Up Food Bucks, you can find some places that will allow you to basically spend double on those things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:06

That's neat because it kind of offsets the fact that like very processed foods are cheaper on like a calorie basis. Like you're getting more calories for less money. So, I think people tend to gravitate towards the highly processed foods because they need those calories. Yeah. But this kind of offsets that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:25

Yeah, definitely. Also, some places that are a food desert type situations, and this isn't really U.S. specific, but some places have community gardens. Yeah. So, you can kind of participate in a community garden if that's available.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:38

I know when I was living in Memphis, they had something like that. And I always thought that was really neat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:42

Yeah. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:44

You could start a community garden. There you go. If this is like something that's interesting to you and you want to give more options to people in situations where they don't have a lot of choices, instead of judging them for not having choices, we can make community gardens. Make it easier for them to get food and have choices.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:00

That can also help plant the seed, pun intended, about veganism, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:03

That's true, yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:04

So if you're starting this community garden and suddenly you're growing a bunch of food, people are probably going to eat the food there. Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:10

You can give them recipes to follow.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:12

There you go. You can also get shelf-stable grocery shipments from, like, the Amazon Fresh Market or whatever they call it now. And Walmart Plus delivery is pretty cheap. And you can get, you know, shelf-stable things from there. So you won't have to go to the grocery store. You just, you can have it delivered to you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:27

Right. I think these are things, if you're trying to do a more plant-based diet, it could be, like, TVP, vital wheat gluten, shelf-stable silken tofu, some protein sources. Yeah. That if you're in a food desert or like, especially in a rural community where they're not really catering to like the plant based people. Right. Because like, I mean, I think, you know, where my parents live, they definitely can't go to their neighborhood grocery store and get like silken Tofu. I don't think. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:57

Both of us grew up in like very rural. The sticks. So I'm definitely familiar with this. The grocery store is not very close.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:06

Oh, yeah. I mean, we had to drive like 30, 40 minutes to a grocery store when I was growing up. The one, there was one that was like 15 minutes away, but it just didn't have, it was really anything, you know?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:17

Yeah. They eventually built a Walmart in my town, like when I was going to graduate high school.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:24

So, yeah. I mean, if you're in like not an urban area where there aren't that many plant-based eaters, they're probably not stocking the shelves with plant-based protein sources. But the good thing is a lot of plant-based protein sources are shelf-stable. So like, yeah, like I mentioned, like vital wheat gluten, TVP, edamame puffs, shelf-stable silken tofu, lentils, beans, like a lot of really great protein sources that you could buy on Amazon and just get shipped to your house. And then that's something you don't have to worry about when you're grocery shopping. I will say there are a lot of dollar stores, like whether it's Family Dollar or the Dollar Tree. Yeah. And a lot of those actually have pretty reasonably priced items and they have a lot of canned foods and stuff. Yeah. So that's also an option. There's a lot of like canned vegetables. Yeah, for sure. And I wanted to wrap back around to the scenario around houselessness. This is a real option. And I don't think we should be shaming houseless people for the choices that they make because a lot of people don't have choices on what they can eat. And they might want to be vegan, you know, and they might actually care about animals. Or maybe they once were vegan and then their situation changed and now they don't have access to food and they can't really choose where their next meal is coming from. So... I think the best way that we can support them if we want to give choices to people, if this is something that you're passionate about, I would recommend you donate shelf stable items that are plant based to your local food pantries and stuff so that there are options for people to choose that aren't, you know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:59

I think you could definitely make an argument that somebody in that situation could still be vegan even if they end up having to eat animal products just because they're out of options because, you know, the definition of veganism, at least the modern definition, is basically like as far as is possible and practicable. So if you're like, if you consider yourself a vegan and you're doing everything in your power to conform to that, you know, vegan philosophy, I think you're still a vegan. It's just, you know, your current circumstances don't allow you to do everything you might do otherwise.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:30

You're doing everything you can. Yeah. But we can support people.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:34

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:35

By donating, like, you know, canned beans, canned lentils, vegan soups, vegan stews, vegan chilies, like canned products that are plant-based.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:46

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:47

Or you could volunteer with a group of your fellow vegans and run a food kitchen in which you do a plant-based meal option.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:55

Yeah. And, you know, we went back to basically the cheapest thousand calories is going to be vegan. So if you're trying to run a food kitchen, it's probably economically a good idea to make it entirely vegan. Although, you know, some people do have preferences.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:08

Yes. Everyone's going to have different preferences. There are some things, um, we used to do, we used to run one like a couple of times a year at one of my previous jobs. And we usually went with like spaghetti actually. And I think that you could make a vegan version of that pretty easy. Yeah. We did spaghetti, garlic bread, that kind of thing. Yeah. So yeah, substitute in some beyond or even like TVP crumbles. And most people probably aren't going to know, but do let them know that there might be a soy allergy,

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:36

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:38

But yeah, there's stuff that you can do to support people that are struggling with having choices.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:44

Yeah, definitely. All right. So next up is the time or labor type argument against veganism. Some of the arguments here are that you have to have free time to be able to cook and prepare vegan meals. And lack of free time is a big constraint for a lot of people. So I can see where they're coming from here. Cooking from scratch and this whole food diet we're talking about is cheap in terms of dollars, but it can be expensive in terms of, you know, the hours it takes to make the food. And I don't think, you know, I think you probably know how long it takes to make food.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:13

It can take a while.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:15

Yeah. So people, you know, in some circumstances, like single parents, shift workers, multi-job households, or even like there's only one vegan in the family. Yeah. And then somebody else says like some other dietary thing. Suddenly you're making like three different meals for dinner. A lot of those things people just don't have time for.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:33

Similarly, if you have a disability, you maybe aren't really mobile enough to like cook your own food.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:41

Or if you are, maybe because of your disability, it takes even more time than it would have.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:45

Yeah, exactly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:46

So, I mean, yeah, these are some valid constraints. So, let's talk about those in a little more detail. So, first of all, the time is real, right? So, when possible, if you're time constrained, default to some of those convenience options. It might be a little more expensive, but I wouldn't, you know, get overly hung up on if I can't cook from scratch, I can't be a vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:06

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, in a perfect world, I think we'd all like to, like, make our own bread from scratch every day and, like, make our own homemade meats and make our own homemade pasta sauces and whatnot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:18

Yeah, from the tomatoes we grew in the garden.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:20

Yeah, and I'd make our own homemade pasta and roll it out in a pasta maker. But, like, that shit takes time.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:26

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:27

A lot of time. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:28

And most people don't cook from scratch anyway. So using this as, like, the basis of comparison or the argument isn't really super fruitful. because you're saying, okay, if I switch to vegan and I start cooking on my meals from scratch, like that's going to take a lot of extra time. And it's like, okay, well, you weren't really doing that anyway. So why are we comparing it this way?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:47

I will say that I cooked as an, well, I never cooked as an omnivore because I went vegetarian at 12, but I did cook as a vegetarian and I have cooked as a vegan and I don't really think it takes any longer. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I think like the only part that's like maybe longer is like, oh, you got to pressure tofu. Okay. Buy the super firm tofu.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:07

Yeah. And that actually leads into the next thing I saw. There have been some studies that show that the actual time issue with switching to a vegan diet is mostly in, like, the perceived time it's going to take. But when they actually look at, you know, cooking and comparing, there's not actually a difference in actual time used.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:23

Oh, I believe that. Yeah. The only part I could see that would be added time is, like, if you weren't eating many vegetables when you were omnivore and now you're incorporating more vegetables, like, those can take time to clean. and then cut.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:36

But you're going to have the same problem if you just start eating healthier. Oh, yeah. And it has nothing to do with veganism. Even if you're not a vegan and you want to start eating healthier, that's probably going to include more prepping vegetables.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:44

Oh, yeah. I think, like, what I see a lot of people saying is, like, Okay, so if I'm a vegan and, like, for instance, like, I'm going to make a homemade pizza. Like, we're going to do pizza night Saturdays. If you were going to make a homemade pizza as an omnivore, you're still going to have to make the dough, just like I am as a vegan. Right. The only difference is I don't really like most cheeses for the pizza, so I'm going to make my own cheese. Yeah. But, like, the cheese we make takes literally five minutes. Yeah. And then it's done.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:13

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:14

You know, but, like, I think it's, like, the idea that, like, oh, well, vegans have to make their own, like... vegan meats like seitan or like vegans are going to make their own vegan cheese sauces like with cashews or tofu or like whatever and that's a larger time commitment but you don't necessarily have to do those things yeah And they also don't take as long as it's perceived that they take. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:38

And, you know, back in the 90s when somebody was trying to be a vegan, they basically did have to make everything from scratch. Oh, yeah. But, you know, now in modern times, there are a lot of convenience vegan options in the grocery store. Some of those are more processed. Some of those are more expensive. But there are also fairly minimally processed and comparatively priced convenience options basically in the store. You've got like your normal rice or your beans you might have to cook from scratch. But also right next to it is like some slightly prepared version of rice. Oh, yeah. Or the slightly prepared bean mix situation.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:07

Yeah, like minute rice now.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:08

Right, yeah. So there are convenience options that will help you save a lot of time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:11

I will say, I think where the time and labor argument really holds weight is when it's like time and labor and also a cost constraint. Yeah. Because now it's like, I don't have time and I also don't have the money to pay for convenience options. Yeah. But I think there's ways around that too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:28

And again, this would come into play in the same way. even if you're not a vegan, but you're trying to eat healthier. So this is not really something I see as a vegan-specific problem. I feel like if you had, like, a meal and then a vegan version of that meal and you were going to make them both in the kitchen from scratch, side by side, the time wouldn't really be different. It's like, what are the vegan ingredients that you can think of that are only used in vegan meals that take a lot of time?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:51

I can't really think of any.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:52

Right. So some of the things you can do to help save time if you're trying to eat more vegan-focused or even if you're just trying to eat healthier no matter what your dietary preference is. are 30-minute one-pot meals. So you can do like an instant pot or a crockpot-type meal, something like the chili we talked about earlier.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:10

Yeah, chili's a really good one, but the effort takes like 30 minutes, and then it just does its thing, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:17

Right. Or you could do, if you have an instant pot, you can do that faster. Or you can kind of just put a pot on the stove and just throw a bunch of stuff in there, like an old-fashioned stew, basically. There's a lot of ways to make that. And you can make a lot of food all at once.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:31

Curries.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:31

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:32

Curries. Yeah. Like one pan meals. Yeah. One thing that we like to do is basically just cut up some bell peppers and onions, toss them in some seasoning along with some sliced tofu, throw all of that on one sheet, throw it in the oven for 30 minutes, and then you have like easy fajitas. Yeah. And that's cheap too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:52

Yeah, yeah, for sure. You can also do like batch cooking in the slow cooker instant pot. Like you make something that will, you cook it once and it'll last like four to six days, kind of like a meal prep situation. Um, those are really good. Um, also we were talking about the prep time for vegetables. You can get frozen pre-cut vegetables. Um, and like we talked about earlier, just as good nutritional quality are usually a lot cheaper than fresh vegetables and they're already prepped. So. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:18

And a lot of them are like in steamable bags. You just chuck them in the microwave and you're done.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:22

Yeah. Um, so I would definitely lean heavily on those if you're time constrained.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:27

Same with like rice. They make rice in pouches that you can steam in the microwave. Yeah. There's a lot of like convenience options that if you maybe, maybe you're disabled or maybe you're very long time, like you can cut off a lot of time by using some of those options and just chucking them in the microwave.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:43

Yeah. Beans are another big one. Dry beans are incredibly cheap, but you do have to kind of go through the whole soaking, cooking process or whatever. So instead you can start with canned beans, which are a little more expensive, but still fairly cheap. Yeah. And they're already pre-cooked. So you basically open the can and you could eat them right out of the can cold if you want. But, you know, use them in your dish immediately. You don't have to do any prep work with them. And then smoothies are a really fast option as well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:06

Smoothies, I think, are a very underrated option. Like, if you're someone who just does not have the time or ability to cook, I think smoothies are a good way to get a lot of your vitamins and nutrients in in one go. And then I don't want to say eat whatever the hell else you want for the rest of the day, but I am going to say that. You know what I mean? Like throw in your spinach, throw in your frozen fruits, like maybe chuck in a block of silken tofu.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:35

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:36

You know, and you have like your protein, your fiber, a bunch of your vitamins.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:40

Yeah. And I think these are especially good for maybe you only have specific times of day that are time constrained. Like maybe you can spend two hours on dinner if you really wanted to. But for breakfast and lunch, you've got like 10 minutes. You could go to a smoothie for those and then make something more, you know, if you actually enjoy cooking, you make something more substantial for like dinner. Or whatever. So I think they're really good for like, oh, I need a lot of nutritious food and, you know, a pretty decent amount of calories pretty quickly here. I'd go for a smoothie.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:06

Yeah, I will say like when I've worked, turnarounds are usually the most time constraint I've ever been. And if you don't know what a turnaround is, it's basically like at a refinery and it's some like chemical plants. Basically, they'll take units or even the entire place down for like a month, maybe two months at a time. And basically anyone that works there is almost around the clock working. So you're working like 12 to 14 hours a day, every single day on site. And then like, maybe you get one day off every 14 days. Yeah. So you just don't have time to like cook. And I think this, this is the same if you're on like shift work and you're working like a 12 hour job, you know, 12 hour shifts or like you're switching between night and day. Like, yeah, obviously that can be really problematic if you're trying to make healthy meals. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:55

For sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:55

So I think one of the good strategies is like meal prep something easy on the weekend that's going to last you a long time. Or like if it's only a specific period of time where you're a time constraint, maybe you meal prep stuff and then freeze it. Yeah. So that you have meals for like that week or that month where you really don't have time.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:15

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:16

And then like another breakfast I really like. I know I talk about TVP muffins a lot. If you listen to our podcast, you've heard of TVP muffins. Yeah. But what I like about those is they literally take 15 minutes and then you can freeze them and then just like pull one or two out. And set it out to like defrost and you have like the perfect portable breakfast.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:36

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:36

And then I think the other piece would be if you're time constrained, but maybe you're not cost constrained, there are vegan options that you can get at various like restaurants. Yeah. Right. I would focus on like Taco Bell, like we were talking about. You get a lot of really good, healthy, whole food, plant-based options at Taco Bell, but also like a noodle bowl or a rice bowl or poke bowls.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:57

Asian places are great for this.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:58

Yeah, you can add a lot of tofu, so you're still getting your protein, like Thai. You can usually get like pad Thai with tofu and no egg. Smoothie places that pre-make you smoothies and smoothie bowls and any kind of, you know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:14

And a lot of those will usually have vegan protein powders. They turn into them, so, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:18

So, you know, there are good options if you're time constrained, but you have some money to spend there. And, you know, I think we covered some of the, like, maybe more cost-effective options if you're also time-constrained, being around, like, canned beans and, like...

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:31

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:33

Honestly, like, canned beans and tortillas are one of the cheapest things that you could eat. And you can eat that in, like, a variety of ways and, like, flavor them up in different ways and it doesn't take much time. So, yeah, there's definitely... ways you can eat even if you're time constrained and you're cost constrained yeah and um i haven't personally made any of her recipes but there's um an instagram person called uh cheap lazy vegan i think okay i haven't made any but she makes cheap and lazy vegan meals so you might check that out yeah um and then there's also uh going back to the cost one if you're on reddit at all there's actually a eat cheap and vegan subreddit and there's lots of ideas in that and a lot of those are like low effort as well right so go on reddit get ideas ask questions the the good thing about the vegan community and you know you've probably heard the vegan propaganda that vegans are horrible miserable evil people but but actually if you go on reddit and you ask a question like hey i'm trying to eat more plant-based foods like can you give me some ideas you are going to be flooded with helpful responses that are very like kind yeah because all we really want is for people to stop eating animals yeah you know and we're more than happy to help you do that at least that's been my personal like yeah for sure that's what i've personally seen especially

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:00

Yeah those communities on reddit that's basically what they're for is to help people like find the Recipes and find ways to eat plant-based. So very helpful.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:08

I mean, that's literally why we started our food blog.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:10

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:11

Was like, I kept hearing stuff about like, you can't get enough protein on a vegan diet.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:16

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:16

And then I had all these things that we were making at home and we were just kind of like, we should publish this so that people know you can do that. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:24

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:25

I just want people to stop eating animals. And I think most people do. So they will help you. You will get a support system is the main piece.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:34

All right. So let's move into the next kind of category of arguments here, which is basically around culture or family, maybe family traditions. So there's a lot of stuff in here. I'm going to do our best to unpack a lot of it and talk through some of it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:49

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:50

The general idea is that going vegan may cause some issues. Like it might mean cooking separately inside your family or it might cause some social friction. It might conflict with some like religious obligations around food or cultural kind of traditions, obligations, things like that. There's also the problem that a lot of vegan influencer content on social media leans very white and upper middle class. A lot of the loudest voices here are like affluent, white, tone deaf to material constraints, talking about like their expensive cashew cheeses and oat milk lattes every day and things like that. So that's definitely a very real thing that happens on the Internet. This is kind of going to be a little historical, I guess, about plant-based eating. So let's dive into that a little. So most of the traditional cuisines worldwide are actually plant-forward by default, which is like very heavily plant-based. Animal products historically were like a luxury that were just added on to the meal and not the staple of the meal. The current state of like animal products and diets in industrialized countries like America is kind of unusual historically. and it's really only made possible by like industrial animal agriculture and government subsidies.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:00

And capitalism.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:01

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:02

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:03

So traditional Indian, Ethiopian, Mexican, Thai, Mediterranean, Japanese, West Africa, much of it, and Latin American cuisines are predominantly plant-based with small amounts of animal protein like as extra flavoring.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:18

Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:18

So this is not like a Western invented style of eating.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:23

As someone who's on the internet a lot, this is definitely true. Like I can see how people think veganism is a white thing because a lot of the influencers are white. A lot of the food content creators are white. I am white. But there's also a lot of non-white content creators that are vegan and that are reinventing traditional dishes from their heritage and stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:46

Yeah, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:47

But I can see how this becomes a narrative. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:51

Yeah. Yeah, and I think one of the downsides of social media is that, like, extreme or luxurious things tend to look the best. so people like see expensive options or flashy options and that's what kind of gets promoted on social media so if you're just at home and you're like a normal person just making your beans and rice that doesn't really get surfaced but that's actually like the most common way for people to eat plant-based right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:17

I i feel like the ones that go viral or like somebody goes to like that what's that super expensive grocery store in la that people talk about

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 46:27

I have no idea anyways.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:28

Is there's a super expensive grocery store in LA where they charge you like$20 for oatmeal or something. I don't know, but like, you know, but like people, but like they have a lot of vegan stuff. So you'll see a lot of videos where people are like, I went and shopped at this place and like, look at my haul. And you're just like, holy shit, you just spent so much money. But like, I feel like because they're so ridiculous, they do better than like just normal people living normal lives. So that, that is the problem of social media, but I don't necessarily think it's a vegan thing because like if you look at like omnivore recipe creators or just like omnivore content creators that are just or influencers that are just living their lives like they're doing the same kind of thing you know yeah and

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 47:10

People tend to look to the lifestyle influencers or whatever as kind of an escapism so then their mind they're like oh what if i was in la eating at this super expensive store or whatever like even if you live there you wouldn't really want to do that but there's this thing in your mind that's like oh that that looks cool to me.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 47:26

Or whatever like i don't know anything about that like that could never be me let me go like see what people are doing right i think it's more like a curiosity thing like what are rich people doing yeah you know that's why like the kardashians is a popular show i personally never watched it but i know a lot of people that do yeah um but yeah but there are a lot of amazing content creators that aren't doing stuff like that that are like promoting like cheap meals or like here are ways to make like whole food plant-based recipes on a budget um or like traditional meals veganized right you know yeah so you can find those but i can i can see where this is coming from for sure yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:08

The moral of the story is social media kind of sucks and it doesn't really reflect how most people.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:12

Absolutely sucks so

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:15

Uh in india specifically vegetarianism goes back thousands of years and even today somewhere between 20 and 37 percent of people in india follow a vegetarian diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:25

I think that's so cool yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:27

And then in America, pre-Christopher Columbus, indigenous Americans' diets were heavily plant-based. Corn, beans, squash, potatoes, quinoa, chia, peanuts, tomatoes, and cocoa all originated from indigenous American agriculture.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:45

Damn you, Columbus, for ruining everything. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:50

Also, traditional African cuisines across the whole continent are predominantly plant-based. They're built on grains, legumes, and vegetables. Some of those common staples we talked about. And actually, you touched on this a little bit, but modern vegan African food movements are specifically framed around recovering those traditions rather than like importing a Western tradition. Because, again, like plant-based eating is not a Western created tradition.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 49:13

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think at least my understanding is like America, specifically the United States, kind of started with the whole factory farming and like finding ways to make animal products super, super, super cheap.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 49:26

Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And so it's actually kind of the reverse of the arguments I see a lot where people are saying like veganism is colonialism, I guess, is kind of the argument. But it's actually kind of backwards there because the plant-based food diversity has been eroded by colonialization and industrial agriculture not promoted by it. So, actually, the colonialization is introducing these industrial meat type things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 49:52

Factory farms.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 49:53

Right. And, you know, the European colonization into the U.S. mostly displaced, like, the indigenous Americans plant agriculture in favor of their animal product systems. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, this is just like, if there's a Western influence, it is adding more meat to everything.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:11

Yeah. Making everything more meat-centric. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:13

So, yeah, I think that portion of the argument really just has it backwards.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:17

It falls apart pretty fast when you poke at it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:20

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the actual... The actual like cultural lineage of plant-based eating is mainly like indigenous, ancient, goes back thousands of years, global, not really something that emerged from the Western world.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:35

I do see a lot of things though of like, there are traditional dishes that use meat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:40

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:41

And I think some of the arguments are coming from not necessarily like we want meat focus, but more like, it's unfair of you to expect me to like no longer eat my traditional dishes if you want me to go fully plant-based yeah do you know what i mean yeah and and another one that i see a lot is like um it's more around indigenous americans and it's talking about how they lived in harmony with nature and they did hunt but they respected the animal and they used every part of the animal that's something that i'm hearing a lot

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 51:17

Yeah yeah but that's not how most people in america are getting their meat anymore, right? Like most people, almost all people, I would imagine get it from grocery stores. Potentially you get it from a local farmer. There are still obviously hunters, but as far as like amount of meat consumed, the hunted meat in the wild is like an extremely low percentage.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 51:39

Yeah, and I do think there are probably indigenous American reservations where they are still like following cultural practices and eating that way. You know, I think veganism in general is we're trying to get away from eating all animals. But I think like, at least in my mind, the main thing we should be tackling at this point is factory farms.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 52:00

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like the industrialized process that's cramming a bunch of these animals into one spot and treating them horribly and then killing them for meat like a massive scale. Yeah. Is really the issue.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 52:13

So I guess the part I take issue with is like a lot of the comments I've seen because I I'm on threads a lot. But it's kind of like saying we can't stop eating animals because indigenous Americans have these traditions with animals and they kind of hide behind that like a like a group of people to uphold factory farms when like how we currently do animal agriculture is incongruent to like traditional farms. indigenous american cultures if that makes sense

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 52:45

Yeah definitely i think there's definitely a mismatch there yeah some of the things you can do if you're maybe in one of these countries or geographical locations where it's um maybe harder to get some of these plant-based options or maybe you've got some cultural restraints or something like that um one thing that comes up a lot is basically but in my country i can't find things like tofu oat milk or protein powder, Well, the good news is you don't need those things. You really just need like legumes, grains, and vegetables to build your diet around. And those are available in every country. So I would definitely focus more towards those whole food, simple, you know, plant foods rather than like these products.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 53:28

Yeah. And I think in terms of like traditional meals that have always had animal products, I think that I personally think there's something kind of cool about like trying to reinvent those with a plant-based twist. Yeah. I mean, like, I wouldn't say that I have deep cultural roots because my parents are just like Midwestern white people. Yeah. But like there are dishes that I grew up with that like my dad taught me that his dad taught him. I'm not saying they go far back enough to consider myself, like, cultured, having much of a culture. But some of the first things I cooked when I went vegan were those dishes of, like, how can I veganize, like, my dad's scallop potatoes because, like... I just remember that that was something that we always had like once a year. That was like a special dish that he made. Yeah. I know it's not like super special, but like that's something like my dad made. Or like sometimes he would make crepes on Sunday. Like how can I veganize that? You know what I mean? Yeah. So I think it's kind of cool to like try to veganize like traditional dishes. And there are a lot of like accounts and food blogs that are veganizing their traditional dishes that are part of their heritage. Yeah. You know, which I think is really neat. Because I don't really, I guess, have much of a heritage, you know? Yeah. I feel like when you're, like, just a Midwestern white person, you just kind of feel like a mutt. Like, I don't really have, like, I don't know. Like, I think my dad's got, like, some German-Polish and my mom's got, I don't know, some other shit. But what I can tell you is my dad makes some pretty good scallop potatoes. Yeah. So we veganize those. Yeah. But, like, people with actual heritages, they're veganizing traditional dishes and they're making really cool stuff. Yeah. So you can check those out. Yeah. Like if you're missing your favorite foods, if you're plant-based, I'm sure someone has veganized it and done a hell of a job.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 55:13

Yeah. So there are some places where it like really is pretty tricky. And a lot of those are like the very northern climates where they have short growing seasons, limited imports, things like that. Hard to get, you know, stuff moved around inside the area. So your biggest thing there, you're going to be leaning on like getting some of those dry staples shipped in in bulk whenever you can. but yeah I mean there's no there's no getting around like it's hard there you can't really grow stuff for the most part in your own yard very much you're not having a lot of options you might not even be able to get to the grocery store very easily just because of the weather so there's a lot of stuff like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 55:50

There are certain climates where essentially all you can grow is like grass that a cow can eat right but like humans can't eat grass so like they're relying a lot on animal products because they can't grow any crops that are things humans can eat right right and i feel like if you're in one of those places and you're like hands are tied and you also don't get imports from other countries like i don't think any vegan would be expecting you to starve yourself right i

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:16

Mean at a certain point you just have to play the cards you're dealt.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:18

So yeah do the best you can exactly which is i think the modern definition like you said earlier yeah like as much is practically reasonably possible.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:26

Yeah. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:28

And then I think another one that you touched on earlier was like family constraints. Like if maybe you're a kid in an omnivore family and they're really not going to let you go vegan.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:39

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:39

I mean- Sometimes you're going to have to wait till you're 18. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:44

Sometimes that's just the way it is.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:46

I mean, there are some, you know, I don't think anyone, any, no, no reasonable being isn't expecting you to like push that if it's like an unsafe condition, you know, condition like, you know, there are households where like that becomes like maybe like a concern of safety if you keep pushing something like that or like, you know, maybe a concern of an eating disorder comes up if you're like refusing to eat animal products and nobody will give you food that's plant-based. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 57:15

You know? Yeah. I mean, you just, you have to, you have to do what you can when you can, and maybe you'll be able to do more later and you'll, you know, that's just the way it is. Yeah. And then kind of the last category we wanted to talk about here is the nutrition argument. So this one comes up a lot. It's probably the most common like off the cuff thing that people say about veganism.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 57:32

Like it's hard to be a healthy vegan is what I hear.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 57:35

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 57:35

And like if you can be a healthy vegan, that's a privilege.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 57:39

Yeah. So some of the arguments for this are like some people have limited access to nutrition education, which is fair. I mean, most doctors don't have a ton of nutrition education. So most normal people have basically none unless they look into it intentionally at some point. Across the board, though. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Not just vegan specific.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 57:56

But across the board. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 57:58

There's also an argument that it's hard to get all your nutrients on a vegan diet. So it might take a little more thought. I don't know if I would necessarily say it's hard, but this is one of the arguments that comes up.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 58:08

Depending on where you live, I guess. Yeah. Kind of like back to our last point.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 58:11

Yeah, for sure. There's also an argument that vegans have to take too many supplements. So we'll talk about that a little bit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 58:19

Interesting. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 58:20

And then there's the argument that the vegan supplements you do have to take are expensive. And kind of getting all your nutrition on a vegan diet is also expensive because you have to have more fruits, things like that. So this is all the stuff around nutrition that kind of floats around for veganism. And then there's the whole protein thing. Not really going to get into here because that's basically our entire personality.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 58:41

Yeah, you can get protein. Go check out some of the other stuff we've talked about.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 58:47

But yeah, so talking about some of these in specific, basically vitamin B12 is really the only supplement that all vegans require. Right. It's the only thing we cannot get from the whole foods. So we do have to have that as a supplement most of the time. We can get a lot through like fortified milks and nutritional yeast and some other fortified foods and stuff. But it's usually just to play it safe. You just take the supplements.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:10

Yeah, why not, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:12

Yeah. So the pill form of a vitamin B12 supplement is like 5 to 15 cents a day. And there are also multivitamins that contain B12. And they're obviously more expensive than just B12, but they're still pretty cheap. You can get some multivitamins for like in the range of $10 to $15 a month.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:26

But like, okay, here's my thing. It's like ever since I've been alive, I've seen endless commercials on multivitamins for children, for adults, for men, for women, like whatever.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:36

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:37

The supplement industry is huge. huge if vegans were the only ones spending money there i don't think it'd be as big as it is since vegans are like what one to three percent of the population yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:46

I don't know if you've been in the pharmacy section of your local either pharmacy or supermarket but there are like three rows dedicated to individual vitamins and they're not selling most of those to vegans.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:56

Oh yeah i mean i think i think most people that are concerned about their health are probably taking a multivitamin Right. I would think.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:06

Also, GNC has been around a long time. Oh, yeah. So they're not selling most of their stuff to vegans.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:10

The vitamin shop.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:11

So this whole, like, supplement-vitamin argument is, like, the B12 thing is kind of vegan-specific sometimes, even though, like I've said before, I actually had to take B12 before I was ever vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:21

Oh, I did, too, yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:21

So, I don't know. It's always been pretty common. But, yeah, B12 is the one we have to take. Everything else is, like, a lot of people are taking multivitamins and supplements anyway, so this is not, like, a vegan-specific concern. Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:32

And I can tell you they don't all sell them to vegans because most of them have gelatin capsules and we don't buy those.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:39

Yeah. And other than the B12, a varied, mostly whole food vegan diet provides sufficient nutrients in almost all cases. And, you know, you might think, oh, there's the catch there. You said the mostly whole food vegan diet. Well, yeah, but even non-vegans who are not eating mostly whole food are still going to run into nutrient deficiencies.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:58

Oh, yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:59

So, I mean, whether we're a junk food vegan or a junk food processed food non-vegan, we're probably missing out on some nutrients there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:01:08

Oh, absolutely. I just think the thing that I find kind of interesting is like, you'll see this from a lot of people that aren't worried about their nutrition currently as an omnivore. Yeah. And I'm like, I don't know why you care so much about like my protein and stuff. Oh, I know. When you don't even know how much protein you're getting, bro. Yeah, or the vitamins. Or the vitamins.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:01:26

Like, oh, you can't get all your vitamins on a vegan diet. It's like, are you getting all your vitamins? Do you even know? Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:01:32

And the thing that's always kind of driven me a little insane is like acting as if taking a supplement is somehow like horrible and artificial and very bad because like, I don't want to ruin your day. But if you're getting your B12 from animal products, your animals are being supplemented. You're just like enjoying their supplementation. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:01:54

And, you know, to preempt a little bit the animal argument and a lot of people are saying like most cows or whatever won't get B12. They get supplemented with a mineral mix that includes cobalt, which is how cows make B12. Yeah. B12. And they specifically get cobalt in those mineral mixes so that they can get B12 because they don't get enough from the soil almost anywhere.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:12

Right. Because of the industrialized practices.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:14

Well, one, because a lot of cows don't even graze. They're like, you know, fed feed or whatever. But even the cows that do graze, a lot of those farms, because they've been used so much over the years, the soil doesn't really have enough B12 to support the whole system anymore.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:29

Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:29

So, I mean, they just throw some cheap cobalt into the mineral mixes. So remnants like cows use cobalt to make B12 in their stomachs, and that's how they get their B12. So even if they're not getting directly supplemented with B12, they are still getting supplemented with the cobalt, which is a supplement. So why does it matter?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:43

It's essentially, yeah, it's essentially the same.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:45

And in cases where they run into cows with deficiencies or other issues, they do just supplement directly with B12, which is pretty common too.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:51

And like the other thing is, I think a lot of people are on vitamin D just like because you have desk jobs that are inside. Yeah. Right? And like, I think most people wouldn't have an issue with taking a vitamin D supplement in the winter or something, you know?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:03

I don't know that I've ever met anybody that has never, ever taken a multivitamin.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:07

Yeah, yeah. You've been taking them since you were kids with their little Flintstone vitamins. Sorry, guys.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:14

So, yeah, it boils down to, yeah, most vegans should probably take a 10 cent a day vitamin B12 supplement. If that's like the whole crux of your argument, I don't think it's a very good argument. But some of the strategies you can maybe employ to make sure that you're hitting your nutritional goals as you try to move towards a vegan diet. One, you can track your nutrition with a free app like Chronometer. Basically, the Chronometer specifically is liked by vegans because it does a very good job of tracking micronutrients. Um, so you can put your food in there for a couple of weeks, make sure there's nothing you're like totally missing out on. But the main reason for this is not because vegan foods don't have nutrients. It's because when you switch to a vegan diet, you're still figuring out like your swaps and your replacements for some of the non-vegan foods. Uh, so there may be like other categories of food you never really ate as a non-vegan that maybe you should eat now. Or also kind of like we were talking about, maybe you were just a little deficient on your non-vegan diet. Right. And now you can keep track of it. You could also, even if you took a vitamin B12, a vitamin D, and an iron supplement, which are kind of the three most common you see talked about with vegans, you could do all that for like$15 to $20 a month, which is like one fast food meal, basically.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:19

Honestly, I've always been taking an iron supplement for like the last over a decade, even when I was a vegetarian. I just have low iron. Yeah,

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:26

I don't think.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:26

Anybody- It doesn't even matter how much I eat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:28

Nobody's surprised to hear that plenty of non-vegans have anemia issues.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:32

Especially women, because guys, we bleed a lot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:34

It's extremely common.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:36

I mean, my thing is, like, I even tracked my iron as far as, like, I would put it in, like, my fitness pal or something to see that I was getting at least 100% a day. And it's just, like, my iron's low. I don't know. My iron is low. It needs supplemented. Whatever. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:51

It's always been that way.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:52

Right? Yeah. It's really not a big deal. My doctor told me to take an iron supplement.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:57

There are also a lot of free resources available for learning about plant-based diets. Again, because vegans tend to really want people to stop eating animals. We tend to put out a whole lot of free advice and information and things like that. So basically, YouTube, great source of information. Specifically, nutritionfacts.org is run by Dr. Greger, who wrote the How Not to Die book we mentioned from time to time. But he's basically been making short YouTube videos on specific topics for nutritious plant-based food for like 20 years now. so if you go to his website he's got videos for like every topic under the sun really awesome source of information and it's all free, And then your books at the local library. If you can't get to the local library because maybe you have, like, you have to use public transportation or whatever, if you download an app called Libby, you can basically go to your, most local libraries have a website. You can go on there, like, sign up for a library card. You can actually do this right through Libby, but you can also use the website. But basically, you get your library card assigned through the email, and then you put your library card into Libby, and Libby will basically, like, rent you books on your device, like your phone or whatever, and even audiobooks, using your library card, and that's all free.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:11

That's how I found out about it, because I like to listen to audiobooks. Yeah. And someone at work was telling me that you can do that, and I was like, oh, my God, I haven't had a library card since I was, like, a kid. Yeah. And so I just signed up online. I haven't even been in the local library. I can rent stuff on Libby.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:27

Yeah, we have a library card to our local county library, and I get stuff through Libby. I've been in there once for something unrelated, but basically I get all my library books through Libby.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:36

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:36

It's all free. It's all free. The only catch is if it's a really popular book, they still only have so many slots for each book, I guess, of licensing or whatever. So a really popular book, you might have to be like, okay, put me on the wait list, and you might have to wait a week, and then you'll be able to read the book.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:50

But you don't have to worry about that because veganism isn't very popular. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:54

Also, no late fees for returns.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:56

That's true. That's nice. Yeah, they just snatch it back out.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:59

Oh, do you know, this is totally off topic. I saw something recently that said libraries, I guess, did some studies. I don't know which libraries, but they did some studies and found that people were actually more likely to return books if they didn't have return fees at all. That's interesting. So there are a lot of libraries now that basically switch to no return fees because they're more likely to get their books back. And people will use the library more because they're not afraid to like, if you have this book that's like late, you're like, I'm never stepping foot in that place again because I got to pay this fine.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:07:27

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:07:28

Oh. So they just say no fines. Then they get their books back. People use the library a lot more. That's kind of interesting.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:07:33

Oh, my God. Okay. This is a pretty embarrassing story. But the last time I applied for a job, right, was like five years ago. I was applying for this job.I'd gotten the offer. So they're doing the background check. Right. Yeah. So all of a sudden I get a call from the company I'm like trying to get hired to. Yeah. And they're like, we actually can't get your college transcript. And I'm like, what do you mean you can't get my college transcript? And they're like, yeah, your background check flew up a flag that you couldn't get. We couldn't get your college transcript. So I had to call my college. And it turns out I had, in fact, taken out a book on PVC, polyvinyl chloride, for my senior project and I never returned it. So they had a hold on my account. And so I had to call the school library and be like, can you please give them my transcript so I can have my job? And I really need to send it back.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:08:32

You still have the book?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:08:33

I still have the book.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:08:34

Oh, no.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:08:35

I know. We should do that. We should do that this week. Just like, I know I'm sorry. Honestly, the thing is like when you're exiting college, there's so much going on. You're like getting a new job and you're having to move. Like I was moving across state, like do different state and stuff. And he just happened to get wrapped up in all my other school shit. Yeah. And the thing is, is that it was always on my mind. It was in my trunk. It was in my trunk for like 10 years. And I just like knew it was in my trunk. And I was like, I should really like somehow give this back to the college. And I just never did it because I don't go to the UPS store much.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:09:11

And the bright side is probably still useful. I can't imagine the science behind PVC has changed much.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:09:16

It's like a book from the 70s. This thing's old because that was one of my other things. I'm like, this is a really old book. I just like, who's reading about this? Because I did a project on like, my senior design project was like, plan out a fake PVC plant. Like how much would it cost to like create one from scratch or whatever? So I had to learn all the ins and outs of like, I don't remember any of it. But that book was really handy. And so I guess no one's been able to pick PVC since I left. I should really send it back. Anyways.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:09:48

So yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:09:49

A warning to return your college books because it might prevent you from getting a job.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:09:53

It's really interesting.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:09:54

But I did pass the drug test, so. There you go.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:09:59

Yeah, so just to kind of recap everything we've talked about here, while vegan marketing or like online content and influencer content can feel very Western influenced and kind of whitewashed, the actual vegan diet is one of the cheapest and most accessible diets in the world. So don't let anybody tell you different, I guess.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:10:16

And I would go so far as to say, like, there are more plant-based people in other parts of the world than in America.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:10:23

Oh, absolutely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:10:24

Like.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:10:25

We are the minority of plant-based eaters.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:10:27

We might be the most annoying online and talk about it the most, but like, yeah, we're in the minority for sure. Yeah. We're just trying to educate, man.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:10:35

So is veganism privileged? Well, sometimes the way people talk about it is, and sometimes the products marketed under it are. And sometimes the influences that represent it are. But beans, lentils, rice, oats, potatoes, peanut butter, tofu, and vegetables are not like inherently elite foods. The real question is not whether every person in every circumstance can be perfectly vegan like today or tomorrow. The question is, where do we have the choices? And how can we reduce harm with those choices? And how do we make healthy plant-based options easier for more people to get access to?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:11:10

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:11:10

And then, you know, I mentioned it earlier, but I also want to really lean into the definition of veganism, including kind of the term as far as possible and practicable. And you can still make a difference even if you have constraints. And possible and practicable leaves room for those real world constraints. Someone in a food desert might have different options than somebody in like a major city with close access to a supermarket. Someone relying on food banks may have less control than somebody doing like weekly grocery visits. Uh, someone living with family may not be able to control every meal for whatever reason. Someone that's like traveling, um, hospitalized, deployed in the military, incarcerated, or living in poverty may face various constraints that they have to deal with. So the most useful version of veganism is not do everything perfectly or you're a hypocrite. It's like avoid animal exploitation where you reasonably can and work to expand what's reasonably possible for more people.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:12:06

Yeah, and I guess I'll end this with, if you're one of the people talking about all of these circumstances in which people can't be vegan, but you're also not vegan and you're not in any of those circumstances... Stop hiding behind other people.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:12:20

Yeah, you see that a lot. People like throw out, well, you can't be vegan because these people couldn't be vegan for whatever reason. It's like, what does that have to do with you?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:12:27

I know. Like, not everyone has to be vegan for all of us to make a difference and move towards plant-based and get rid of factory farming. Right. So, like, if you can do it and you agree with the ethics and morals, you should do your part. Yeah. I guess is my main takeaway, you know?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:12:43

And I will say, I think if society was able to move more towards plant-based food, I think it would help, you know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:12:49

All these other places.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:12:51

Help a lot of these other places and a lot of these other issues kind of be less of a constraint.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:12:55

Yeah. And I will say, like, the excuse that, like, oh, this group of people can't be vegan, so I'm not going to be vegan, sounds a lot like, well, my neighbor's allergic to lettuce, so I'm actually never going to eat lettuce again. Yeah. It sounds silly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:13:08

It does. Yeah. All right. So let's get into our myth of the week this week, which is that microwaves kill nutrients.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:13:14

Oh, my God. OK, so I eventually posted my bean bowl video. Yeah. Which is, I think, like one of my only recipes where I'm like actually only microwaving something. Yeah. And I keep getting comments like, microwaves kill all the nutrients in your beans. And it's like, okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:13:31

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:13:31

So tell us, is that true?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:13:33

Well, so cooking in general, not microwave specific, cooking degrades nutrients in basically three ways. Heat, water, and time. Water, because nutrients that are water soluble will leach out into the water.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:13:46

That makes sense.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:13:47

And then heat and time both kind of degrade the nutrient itself when it's exposed to those things. So microwaves specifically do not have any special properties that independently degrade more nutrients, right? It's just because it causes heat and time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:14:01

It basically excites water molecules, which move around faster, which make your food hot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:14:07

Right. So vitamin C is an example to start with because it's actually the vitamin that is most sensitive to water and heat. And it's actually usually more well-preserved in the microwave than it is with other cooking methods.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:14:19

Because it takes less time. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:14:21

It takes less time and you're not adding water. Can you guess what the worst is?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:14:25

Is it boiling?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:14:26

It's boiling because you add a lot of water that the nutrient leaches out into.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:14:30

It's like, feed me your nutrients. Right. I am water. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:14:34

And then obviously, you know, boiling takes a while and it's pretty high heat. So that's the worst way to do it. And so the one way to counteract this, if you boiled something in water, To get all the nutrients that were in the food, you kind of have to drink all the water you boil it in.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:14:51

That could be so much water. They're always like, put eight quarts of water in a pot and boil this thing. And it's like, oh, my God.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:14:57

Yeah, because that's what happens.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:14:58

That'd be your water for the week.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:15:00

It's a water-soluble vitamin.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:15:01

Yeah, it makes sense. So it's just going into the water. Chilling out. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:15:04

So. Wow. There is some data for this. There was a head-to-head comparison study. And in that, microwaving and stir-frying with oil both had 1.3 to 1.8 higher vitamin C retention than boiling.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:15:19

I wonder what deep frying does.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:15:21

Nothing good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:15:23

You'll keep your minerals and vitamins, but at what cost?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:15:28

In another study, reheating meals in the microwave retained an average of 3.8 milligrams more vitamin C than even reheating in a conventional oven.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:15:37

That's interesting. I think that's around the time, right? Like how long it takes.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:15:41

It takes forever. And it's higher heat also.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:15:43

But I don't think my pizza has much vitamin C anyway, and I'm not reheating that in the microwave if I can help it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:15:50

And yeah, and the reason the microwave typically preserves better is because the cooking time is shorter. You don't have any additional water for it to leach out into. And the heat is usually about the same, but it's only on the inside. So, yeah, shorter cook time, less water basically automatically means less degradation of nutrients.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:16:08

But what about the brain cancer of microwaves?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:16:10

So, microwaves use non-ionizing radiation.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:16:14

Interesting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:16:15

It's not that kind of radiation.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:16:17

You sound like the government. I think this is a conspiracy theory. We should all wear aluminum foil hats when we use the microwave.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:16:25

Yeah, well, you don't have to use your microwave. You can cook food however you want in your own house. But, you know, the studies we've done, microwaves actually tend to retain the nutrients better than any other cooking method.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:16:38

You know, this makes a lot of sense because all the comments I'm getting are specifically referencing one man. They're like, go read the words of this one man. And I don't remember what his name is. Yeah. But they're like, he knows the truth. And when it's like always that one man that knows the truth, that's probably conspiracy theory.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:16:55

Well, I look forward to seeing the studies that he's sure to produce.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:00

Those really solid peer-reviewed studies.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:17:03

Maybe he has them and I haven't seen them, but I don't think so. I've never seen anything to indicate that that's a problem.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:09

So, I'd say debunked?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:17:11

Yeah, it's debunked. The microwave is fine and retains all your nutrients. What I will say is it usually doesn't make the food taste as good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:18

Except for the bean bowl.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:17:19

Oh, the bean bowl's great, yeah. How else would you cook it?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:22

I don't know. Any other way might be sad.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:17:24

I think it's mostly just stuff. I don't like putting stuff in the microwave that has, like, bread on it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:30

A texture.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:17:30

A crust or a texture or, like, breading. Like, those things I really like putting.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:35

Back in the oven. If you want crispy, you don't want microwave. Yeah. If you want saucy, you know, mushy, microwave's fine. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:17:44

Yeah, there you go. That's perfect. So, myth busted. Microwave your food. Feel good about it. Or don't if you don't want. I don't care.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:52

Do whatever you want.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:17:55

Yeah. So, what updates do we have in protein-deficient vegan land?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:17:58

Okay. So, we've been trying out the vegan egg white powder. Okay. So, we did try it as like a egg white scramble. Didn't like it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:18:07

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:18:08

Didn't like it at all. I don't know if it's like it's, well, it was gritty. It wasn't very good. Yeah. And also, I don't think I like It's too close to egg whites for me. I don't really want to eat egg whites anymore, obviously. So, like, I didn't like that. But I did use it in, like, a high-protein crepe recipe. Yeah. And that was great.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:18:30

That was amazing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:18:32

Because, okay, so my dad, he, sometimes, this wasn't every weekend. It was, like, special weekends.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:18:39

I want one of these crepes right now.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:18:42

On special weekends, my dad would make crepes. Yeah. And, but I haven't had crepes for a really long time. Yeah. Right? So, yeah, I was like, can I do it? And they tasted just like it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:18:56

Yeah. You had like cinnamon, correct me. I think you had cinnamon, sugar, and then on top you had strawberries and like a Cool Whip.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:19:06

Yeah. Yeah. Was there butter? There was.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:19:08

And then butter also inside the crepe.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:19:10

Yeah. It's got like sweet, salty. Yeah. A little sour from the strawberries.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:19:17

Yeah. And I found, so we had some and I had to let, I like ate two of them and I had to let two like hang out while I was on a phone call. And the two, after I got back from the phone call, all the butter had like soaked into the crepe and it was just like magical. It was so good. And the strawberries and the Cool Whip are all just like perfect. They're really awesome.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:19:36

I would recommend you make these.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:19:38

And I know like my, a part of my role here is to hype up the food or whatever, but this This is, like, genuinely the best sweet crepe I've ever had.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:19:47

And it was, like, high in protein. Yeah. Like, the crepe, now the toppings aren't, right? But, like, the crepe itself has quite a bit of protein. I think it was, like, 70 calories for, like, 9 grams of protein or something. Yeah. But they're really, really easy to make. I will say that I tried mixing with a fork. Not going to work. Neither does a whisk. But we bought this, like, pretty cheap milk frother. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:20:09

Very cheap. Looks like it came from Alibaba or something.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:20:12

But it works super great. Yeah. I don't know what else we're going to use it for because we don't drink coffee, but I don't know what else you'd froth your milk. But it's a great little egg white powder blender thing. Yeah. If you don't want to get out a whole blender, which I didn't feel like.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:20:27

Yeah. Seems to work really well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:20:28

Yeah. It like incorporates the powder really well. Yeah. Yeah. So, would highly recommend. I mean, like, if you have the vegan egg white powder.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:20:38

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:20:39

We're going to try some other stuff, too. Also, I've been working on a high-protein cinnamon raisin bread.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:20:45

Oh, man.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:20:46

Which we had for breakfast.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:20:47

That's really awesome, too. I like how you got all the swirls and stuff that look just like the raisin bread you see at Panera or whatever.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:20:54

I was, like, thinking, how do people do that? And then I was like, I'm just going to try, like, that cinnamon roll method where you just, like, lay it all flat. and then, like, sprinkle it and then roll it. Yeah. Which was kind of hard because it's, like, it's not really, like, a full dough. Yeah. You know, because it's, like, the main ingredient is vital wheat gluten. So it's a little different than bread dough.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:21:17

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:21:18

But, yeah, I think it was pretty close. I need to make a couple adjustments, but hopefully I'll have the recipe out next week.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:21:22

Yeah, that's great.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:21:23

What about you? You got any updates?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:21:24

Yeah. So the, you know, we wrapped up recently a couple weeks ago the Veganuary giveaway training stuff. So now that that is over, I finally posted the page for like paid training clients. So I'm now taking some new clients now that I have the freed up slots from the couple of the Veganuary training people. So, yeah, if you're looking for, you know, any online coaching, personal training, nutrition coaching, check out my website and the show notes and see if it's a good fit for you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:21:53

He's really good and he's really nice. So you should do it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:21:59

Yeah, so we appreciate everybody listening. If you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, that helps us out a lot. You can also leave comments on Spotify and YouTube. Also, in the show notes, we have our Deficient Vegans Discord channel. We have a lot of people talking about cool things. I think we're going to be starting a kind of a step challenge type deal in there. We saw another group of people we know do something like that recently. It looked like a pretty cool idea. It's genius.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:22:24

They're geniuses.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:22:25

Yeah, so there's like a cool app where you can basically create a little step challenge.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:22:28

With a group of people.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:22:30

Yeah. Step up, yeah. So we'll have that going on in the Discord over the next couple weeks. Yeah. And then in the show notes, you can also find our website, social media, if you want to reach out, ask us questions. Especially on this episode specifically, you know, I learned a lot when I was looking through kind of the details for this one and looking through some of the data. I still want to learn a lot more about a lot of these different things. So if you have anything that you feel like maybe missed the mark on or you have additional, you know, information about, please share that, Whether it's in a comment or you can reach out in a DM if you just want to talk about it privately. I'd love to hear more about, like, some of these issues that people talk about.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:23:06

We're okay with being proven wrong.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:23:09

Yeah, obviously. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to put out bad information, so.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:23:12

No, and if you think of any other ways, like, where veganism is kind of a privilege take, like, let us know those. I think we tried to cover the majority of the, like, popular ones that we've been seeing, but, like, I'm sure there are others. So, if you have others. Yeah. You can share those as well.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:23:29

Yeah, whether you're a vegan who has heard some of these issues or you're a non-vegan who says, hey, I heard what you said. I don't really agree with it. Or you didn't cover this whole other area of things that are totally problematic. I definitely want to hear those.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:23:41

It's a huge issue. So, like, there's definitely going to be some gaps. Perhaps we had some bad takes. Let us know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:23:46

Yeah, cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:23:47

We have thick skin. Also... I wanted to apologize to the golfers.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:23:54

Oh. Yeah, so on the last podcast, we said something like, it was basically like golfing isn't a workout, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:24:02

Yeah. I didn't realize, because I've only been golfing twice, I'm so sorry. I did not realize people were, like, toting around their own golf bags and not using carts.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:24:12

Yeah, and I had been golfing, and Rog in our Discord reminded us that the golf bags are a thing. And I was like, oh, right. I do remember now. Those are so heavy. I do remember now hefting around the golf bag and that was a big pain in the ass.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:24:24

Yeah. So if you're like walking around with a golf bag, you're right. That's a workout. That's cardio. That's resistance training. I agree.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:24:33

Yeah. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:24:35

So if you join the discord, you can tell us how dumb we are. I have learned a lot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:24:41

Yeah. That's actually the best way to do it because you can really get in long and in depth about everything we get wrong.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:24:48

There you go.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:24:49

All right. Well, we appreciate you guys listening. I think that's all we have for today. Do you want to say bye?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:24:54

Bye, guys.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:24:55

Bye, everybody.