But You Still Eat Fish, Right?
This week we cover the discussion around whether or not fish is "meat". We tackle this from multiple angles like the history, the emotions and connections around fish, pain response in fish, intelligence/sentience and more. Chapters 0:06 Fish, Meat, and Myth 2:48 Daring’s New Meals 4:08 Beans Beat Beyond 5:57 Beyond’s Protein Pivot 8:03 Fish Are Not Dolphins 11:55 Lent, Loopholes, and Fish 16:50 Government Splits Seafood 19:13 Words About Vegetarians 20:50 Pescatarians and Labels 27:11 Fishin...
This week we cover the discussion around whether or not fish is "meat". We tackle this from multiple angles like the history, the emotions and connections around fish, pain response in fish, intelligence/sentience and more.
Chapters
0:06 Fish, Meat, and Myth
2:48 Daring’s New Meals
4:08 Beans Beat Beyond
5:57 Beyond’s Protein Pivot
8:03 Fish Are Not Dolphins
11:55 Lent, Loopholes, and Fish
16:50 Government Splits Seafood
19:13 Words About Vegetarians
20:50 Pescatarians and Labels
27:11 Fishing Versus Hunting
32:22 Catch, Release, and Death
37:46 Fish Feel Pain
43:23 Fish Are Smarter
47:23 Tool-Using Fish
48:29 Fish Farming Numbers
55:18 Why Fish Aren't Meat
1:03:46 Summer Bodies Debate
1:08:39 Black Bean Brownies
How to Get In Touch
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Deficient Vegans
Muscle Deficient Vegan - Fitness & Nutrition
Protein Deficient Vegan - Food & Recipes
00:06 - Fish, Meat, and Myth
02:48 - Daring’s New Meals
04:08 - Beans Beat Beyond
05:57 - Beyond’s Protein Pivot
08:03 - Fish Are Not Dolphins
11:55 - Lent, Loopholes, and Fish
16:50 - Government Splits Seafood
19:13 - Words About Vegetarians
20:50 - Pescatarians and Labels
27:11 - Fishing Versus Hunting
32:22 - Catch, Release, and Death
37:46 - Fish Feel Pain
43:23 - Fish Are Smarter
47:23 - Tool-Using Fish
48:29 - Fish Farming Numbers
55:18 - Why Fish Aren't Meat
01:03:46 - Summer Bodies Debate
01:08:39 - Black Bean Brownies
Welcome to the Deficient Vegans Podcast, episode 67. I'm the muscle deficient vegan here with the protein deficient vegan. Do you want to say hi?
Protein Deficient Vegan:Hi!
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Hi, everybody. So this week, we're going to talk about fish and whether or not it should be considered meat. We're talking about this because when you talk to people about being a vegetarian or vegan, a lot of the times you'll hear something like, but you still eat fish, right?
Protein Deficient Vegan:I know this all too well. Ten-minute Taylor's version.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:We're going to talk about where the idea that fish isn't meat comes from, why fishing sometimes gets like a mental pass that hunting doesn't, what the science actually says about fish and pain, which is pretty interesting, and just how many fish we're talking about in terms of volume.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Spoiler alert, it's a bunch.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It's a whole lot of fish. But first up, new news. New news. So the brand Daring Foods has released some frozen skillet meals. You might know Daring Foods from some of their frozen plant-based chicken pieces. You just kind of throw them in a pan, cook them up for a couple minutes. I really like the Cajun ones. I've had those several times. They're very close to chicken.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. A little too close for me. Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:But the skillet meals they just put out are kind of a dish all in one and not just chicken pieces. So they have six different flavors they came out with. They are Mediterranean Spiced Chickpeas and Veggies. Smoky Veggie Chili. Power Grains and Greens.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Smoky Veggie Chili is an interesting one for a skillet.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, I think it's just like chili flavor. but not oh okay yeah cause it looked like a stir fry when I looked at the picture so Um, there's also lemon and garlic rotini.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Teriyaki veggie stir fry.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That one sounds good to me.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, you like the teriyaki stuff. And then penne pomodoro.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Which is like tomato-y?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Tomato pasta stuff. And all of those do include the plant chicken pieces, so they have a pretty decent amount of protein in it. I think one of the examples I saw was like 31 grams of protein for about 500 calories for the meal.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Pretty good macros. Yeah, not bad. Especially for like an easy, quick meal that you don't have to really put effort into. Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:They are at Sprouts right now is where they're releasing first, but the other Daring products are in basically every store. So I have to imagine if they do well enough, they'll be everywhere. I don't know how much they are. I didn't see prices.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I miss having a Sprouts. Sprouts is such a good store.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, I've never been near a Sprouts. Closest I've come is Whole Foods.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's so sad.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Sprouts seems to always get the good stuff first, though. I know. They have a lot of partnerships.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I feel like they take chances on smaller brands, but first, you know?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, like Blackbird, who we used to get the seitan from, they released a lot of Blackbird products first at Sprouts, I think.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I miss it.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. So try out the daring stuff. Let us know if you try it and how they are. I have a feeling I would probably also like the teriyaki veggie stir fry. Sounds the best. And probably the penne pomodoro. I like that kind of thing, too.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Hmm.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. The next piece of news we have is for the TV show Lanterns. This is a show based on a DC comic about Green Lantern, who's a superhero. But the main character in the show, John Stewart, is a vegan in the show.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's funny because the comedian Jon Stewart is like, I don't know if he's technically a vegan, but he follows a whole food plant-based diet. And he and his wife own like a 45 acre animal rescue.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, that's really cool.
Protein Deficient Vegan:With like rescued farm animals.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Interesting.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Jon Stewart. Yeah. Apparently they're all vegans.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I thought this was pretty cool for the TV show Because his character in the comic books is not a vegan So this was just something that they created for the character just for the show
Protein Deficient Vegan:That makes me so nervous. Are they going to try to humiliate vegans on national TV?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Use it as some kind of plot point where he has to not be a vegan anymore.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Maybe there's like a vegan producer of the show or like there's a vegan somewhere in the writing room that's like having a hand in it. I'm interested. We should probably watch it.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I was asking people that are currently watching it if you needed to watch anything beforehand and it sounded like maybe just the last Superman movie.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. I think the guy, the Green Lantern guy from the last Superman movie is supposed to show up in the show at some point. So that's probably the tie in there. We'll see. Yeah. And then the last piece of news we have is there was a report that came out called the Britain backs beans report. Uh, so the report showed that in Britain, a lot of the plant-based kind of meat imitation alternatives, like beyond and impossible.
Protein Deficient Vegan:And daring.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And daring, I guess. Uh, their sales have gone down year over year slightly. I think it was like two to 3%. But, um, some of the less processed kind of vegan protein staples, like beans, lentils, tofu, tempeh, all their sales were up. I think like some of them were even up like 10 to 15% year over year.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Pretty interesting.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:While the sales of, like, Beyond has been in trouble for a while, impossible sales come down, like, that might be seen as a sign that people are, like, moving away from the plant-based protein sources. But the report is showing that's not really what's happening. They're actually buying more plant-based protein sources. They're just using less processed ones or, like, closer to whole food.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, that makes sense because they're a lot cheaper, too.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. Yeah. And, you know, healthier on balance.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Speaking of Beyond, I saw they launched a bunch of random new products in their test kitchen.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:They've launched all kinds of stuff, like protein powders, those jerky bars.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. I was looking at it, and I was like, okay. We've maybe potentially lost the plot. I don't know. Maybe it'll be good. I was actually doing the cost comparisons on the protein powder, and it was pretty steep compared to other protein powders.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Beyond has that problem in general with a lot of their products. They're just like a big premium, which... you know, maybe five or six years ago that would make more sense. But now I think like the vegan options are pretty varied. So it's a lot easier to find like a vegan protein powder that is like basically the same price as a whey protein powder. Like with, you know, Ghost is the protein powder I typically use. I don't think their vegan version is actually a different price than their whey version right now.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I was surprised they are pulling out a protein powder because the protein powder space is really saturated and it doesn't seem like there's much like uniqueness about it yeah i will say i was shocked when um, the eat just brand that makes Just Egg came out with a protein powder but their protein powder is actually pretty unique because it's like 90 something percent protein right and it's mung bean protein and so you can actually use the eat just protein the unflavored one to make basically your own just egg at home yeah really easily and.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Also there are a lot of people like can't have soy maybe a lot of people don't really like the taste of pea protein yeah so at least at least just is bringing like a different option with the mung
Protein Deficient Vegan:Bean right i was just surprised because the beyond it looks like it's just like.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It's just another
Protein Deficient Vegan:A pretty generic protein blend not.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Even interesting flavors or
Protein Deficient Vegan:Anything no it was like chocolate and vanilla.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:But maybe you have to do that when you first launch it see if it's gonna work out i don't
Protein Deficient Vegan:Know but yeah i did like the cost math on it and it was like five or six grams of protein at all or something, it's twice as much.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. So...
Protein Deficient Vegan:I don't know. If you try it, I'd like to know if it's like super duper good or something. Now, I think if you don't follow her cat eats plants on Instagram. Yeah. She said somewhere that she was thinking about buying the meat sticks. So I'm interested if she'll do a review on those because I'm wanting to know if those are any good.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. We'll see. I like jerky, but they were also like $5 a bar.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. They have all kind of like weird space names too.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I don't know. I feel like it made me more think, like, is this weird astronaut food that you would only eat when, like, you're stuck in space? I don't know. Yeah. Maybe it's good.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I think, like, one of the first non-dairy, like, way identical replacements or something was space milk. Right. So maybe they're trying to play into that or maybe they're partnering with them. I don't really know.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, it's very odd.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:They're definitely trying a lot of different things right now.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And this is still in their test kitchen, so I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they're just seeing, like, is there interest in it?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:But yeah, a little surprising. It seems like they're deviating pretty hard. Also, like their branding seems to be like, completely different than we've ever seen as well which i thought was kind of odd.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah all right let's get into the main segment and talk about fish um not dolphins
Protein Deficient Vegan:Fish are still not dolphins and dolphins dolphins aren't.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Fish yeah we learned that in the last couple weeks so we
Protein Deficient Vegan:Even bought a.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Book we didn't actually learn that we you definitely knew that i knew i guess it's questionable if i knew that but i i knew that
Protein Deficient Vegan:He knew it wink.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Wink okay
Protein Deficient Vegan:Um He knows it now. We've been studying.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Been studying.
Protein Deficient Vegan:We've been studying our new book.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Dolphins are not fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Dolphins don't look like fish. Okay. Dolphins don't even swim like fish. But they do all live in the ocean.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:That's true. They don't breathe like fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:They don't have babies like fish.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It's a very informative book.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Learned a lot.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:All right. So if you're a vegan or a vegetarian, have you ever been asked, but you still eat fish, right?
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:No, I've definitely been asked that.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Somebody did ask me that one time when I first went vegan. They're like, can you still have fish? I was like, no.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's interesting. So since I went vegan, I have not been asked that. But when I was vegetarian, I got asked that all the time.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It was like, but you eat fish, right? And chicken. And it's like, no, I don't eat either of those.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, apparently there's quite a bit of vegetarian-pescatarian crossover. And there's a study I'll mention in here at some point, but a lot of people who identify as vegetarian also say they eat fish. Interesting. Yeah, I think it's a little confusing for everybody involved.
Protein Deficient Vegan:When I was 12 and I wanted to stop eating meat, my dad actually made me continue eating seafood for a month because he was very worried about the protein.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Um, but I did a lot of hunger striking and eventually he realized that we were going to have dinner fights every night. So. Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Sometimes also for vegetarians, people ask, like, if you eat chicken. So, a lot of people only really think of, like, I guess the restriction for vegetarian or vegan as, like, beef and pork for whatever reason. Yes, very weird. So, yeah. Yeah. But we'll talk about some of the reasons why that might be true. So just to start with a dictionary definition, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines pescatarian as, quote, one whose diet includes fish, but no other meat. So the dictionary seems to think that fish is meat.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right, which makes sense. But then their own definition for meat has basically a definition that includes as opposed to fowl or fish. So it's saying like meat is these things and it's not fish or fowl.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Make up your mind. Right.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Pescatarian itself is a word has only been there since the 1990s. It's fairly new. So I think maybe before the 90s, there were vegetarians that ate fish and they were just vegetarians. Yeah. So there are a lot of people today who've been like around vegetarians who ate fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's interesting. Were vegetarians eating fish or did pescatarians come out? because there was all this talk in the 90s about how fish was like the healthier meat option. And so then the health people switched to only eating fish and they didn't have another word for it. So they called themselves vegetarians.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I think they were probably eating fish based off of the surveys we're going to look at later, but also based on the fact that the term strict vegetarian used to be a lot more common before pescatarian came around. So strict vegetarian is what we think of now as a vegan diet. But I bet it was also the difference between like a vegetarian who sometimes ate fish and a vegetarian who never ate animal products.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, it seems like just the words in general have changed meanings a lot over the last couple decades.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, and that doesn't help when the people that you're trying to explain it to have lived through all the iterations of this. Yeah. Understandably, they're probably pretty confused on what it actually means. So anyway, let's get into a little bit of like the history of where the idea that fish isn't meat comes from. And you'll never guess this, but it probably starts with religion as a big component.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You know what? That does not surprise me because when I was a kid, we went to a Catholic church and then it was like for Lent. I think it was like we only ate fish on Friday or something like that.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, you can't eat meat. You have to eat fish on Fridays.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right. Yeah. And I just remember we went to McDonald's and we just got fish fillets.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:But then I never ate meat after that age, but then we stopped being religious after that age also.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Then I totally forgot about Lent.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Originally, I think it was like Catholics had to do that every Friday. Oh, really? But I think now it's only during Lent.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right. Yeah. Yeah, you have to give something up, I think.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Get the sacrifice. Make a sacrifice. Well, that's actually separate. You have to make your—if I remember right, it's been a while. Like, I also grew up Catholic, but it's been a while since I've paid attention to the rules. But I believe you give up something for Lent for a sacrifice. Yeah. But then, like, everybody follows the meat rule. But the thing you give up is actually a personal vice.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's interesting. Yeah. A couple of years ago, I was in the control room at work and I saw this guy. Somebody ordered pizza or something, right?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:And he was just pulling the cheese off the pizza and just eating the cheese. And I was like, what are you doing? And he said he gave up carbs for Lent.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. See, that's how it is. Like, you give up a thing for Lent.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Is carbs a vice? Like, I just don't.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Well, you just decide for yourself. If it's like you want to be healthier, maybe you want to stop smoking. I don't know. You decide for yourself what you want to give up for life.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, okay.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:That's how it goes.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Hey, man, I don't know. I haven't been to church since I was a child.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, so the U.S. bishops explain it, and this is like U.S. Catholic rule. Rules are different everywhere, right? So like the U.S. Catholic Church has its own rule. Their explainer is, quote, abstinence law considers that meat comes only from animals such as chickens, cows, sheeps, or pig, all of which lives on land. so because they consider fish a different category of animal so it's it was originally kind of split into like land animal versus sea animal and that was like in medieval times like the original catholic church the current version is more like cold-blooded versus warm-blooded because now on fridays they've decided you are allowed to eat like amphibians and reptiles so you're allowed to eat like alligator
Protein Deficient Vegan:Are those people in louisiana.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It is yeah that actually is what it is yeah so anyway the split is and where this originally came from mostly is like fish is a different category of animal for like the religious component and that was obviously a huge influence across the west at least for like a lot of history there is actually kind of an interesting loophole here and i guess going back to medieval times they considered a beaver to be a type of fish so you could actually beaver was not considered meat for the purposes of lent
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So, yeah, because it had like a tail, basically, like a flappy tail, and it swam in the water. So, it's considered an aquatic animal, like a fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Man, these definitions are pretty loosey-goosey, huh? Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It's hard to interpret.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Ancient text.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Ancient text, yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay. So, beaver is a fish.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:For these purposes. I would not say beaver is a fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:The old beaver loophole.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:The old beaver loophole, yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:There are also some other animals I don't have specifics but like they would consider back in medieval times I guess a lot of animals that lived in the water for a lot of their life I think even like snakes you can eat snake those are all considered not I don't know if you say considered fish but they're not considered meat
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay. Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Anyway, that was a fun little history lesson on religious dietary restriction.
Protein Deficient Vegan:So interesting.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:For Catholicism specifically.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I just always assumed meat meant stuff from animal. Yeah, flesh. Like the flesh of the animal.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Well, apparently, like from these definitions, it is that. But flesh only counts for land animals, warm-blooded mammal-type animals. Hooved animals is another way to think about it.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay. Yeah. Do we not have meat? Is human meat not a meat?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, that was interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think there's a ruling on that. I think you're not supposed to eat people.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay. Okay.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, so as far as how the foods were split up kind of from medieval times and through religion and all that stuff going into today, that is a little less concrete for, like, the general public, right? Because not everybody's Catholic. Not everybody's religious. We're well past the medieval definitions of this stuff. But the interesting thing is that the U.S. government and, you know, other governments do it differently. But the U.S. government specifically splits it up kind of the same way, actually. Because, and I actually didn't know this until I was researching this specifically. But meat, poultry, and egg products are inspected by the USDA, which is the United States Department of Agriculture. But seafood falls under the FDA, which is the Food and Drug Administration.
Protein Deficient Vegan:What? Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So two different agencies for two different types of food, and they're kind of the same split we were talking about before. So it's almost like by policy, fish are not necessarily considered meat.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Oh, because of religion?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Well, I don't know if that's why, but that is how we also ended up splitting it in the government.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's so funny. odd.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:The one exception to this is catfish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Because they're named cat?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:No, I don't think so.
Protein Deficient Vegan:What about seahorse?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:No, it's just catfish. Okay. So we had a couple of farm bills back in like 2008 and 2014 that moved catfish over to the USDA under the Federal Meat Inspection Act.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You know about noodling?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, there was a whole TV show about it.
Protein Deficient Vegan:There was?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:What how do you know about it without knowing the tv
Protein Deficient Vegan:Show okay so i had a friend so we we co-opted the same company but he was located in kentucky right yeah so co-op internship basically yeah, anyways he was in like kentucky over by virginia and, one day he sent me this email where he had basically they were doing co-op newsletters, and he made this like fake he wrote this fake story about how he and another intern went noodling and they did stage pictures but they didn't actually go noodling oh wow and it was like the funniest shit i've ever read yeah, Anyway, that's how I learned about noodling. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like and subscribe and leave a review if you could. It really helps.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:We appreciate it. We were talking about the government. So the MyPlate, which was the previous version of the U.S. kind of nutrition recommendations, that did put seafood together with the other protein sources like meat and soy and beans and nuts and things like that.
Protein Deficient Vegan:What about the upside down pyramid we have now?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I think that also has it there, but I'm not really sure. I don't pay too much attention to that one.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I just feel like it should just be protein and then throw in the vegan protein sources, too.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yep, I agree. Also, another dictionary definition thing, the Oxford Dictionary defines vegetarian as a person who does not eat meat or fish. It has to specifically say fish because people who are reading it won't think of fish as meat.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's so interesting.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Because if you just say, I don't eat meat, or if you go to the store and you're like, pick up some meat, you almost never mean fish. You have to say, pick up some fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's true. And I feel like when you say pick up some meat, that probably also wouldn't normally include chicken.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's very odd.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. The Vegetarian Society, on the other hand, says vegetarians don't eat fish and they never have.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Hell yeah. That's what I'm saying.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And I think the people who claim to be vegetarian disagree with that sometimes.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Well, they can disagree all they want, but they can't change the definition of words.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Something else that's interesting are like the things that we do consider meat get like an alternate name when they turn into food. So, like, cows become beef, pigs become pork, deer turns into venison, but some of the things that we don't think of as meat as much just keep their same name, like chicken and fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It is interesting.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Like, we do say poultry. Poultry is not for an animal, though. It's for, like, a group of animals. Right. Because poultry can include turkey and stuff like that. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's almost as if. They picked the animals that just kids, people, whatever, have the most affection towards. Right. It's like you see cows in the field all the time. You're like, oh, man, that cow's so cute. Or you see movies with pigs and you're like, oh, my God, that pig is adorable. Yeah. And so you make up fake names for them so that you can disassociate when you're eating. You're like, I'm not eating a cow. I'm eating beef.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Okay. So now let's talk a little bit about vegetarians and the relationship with fish. So pescatarian, we've talked about a couple of times, basically means vegetarian, but you eat fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. So like we said, that word goes back to the 90s, like the early 90s. Fairly new.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And there's another word that means like vegetarian, but I eat chicken. And I don't remember what that is.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, I don't know that one.
Protein Deficient Vegan:In my brain, I'm like, it's a pollotarian, but that's just the Spanish word for chicken.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.
Protein Deficient Vegan:A pollotarian.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Chickatarian.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Dude, apparently. So I do watch Love Island and in one of the seasons of Love Island, Australia, I found out that they have kangatarians in Australia.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, wow.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You're vegetarian, but you eat kangaroo because apparently they're kind of like, I don't know if the word invasive is proper, but it's like kind of like deer here where it's like there's a lot.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:So they eat kangaroo.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Interesting.
Protein Deficient Vegan:So there's a variety, pescatarian, kangatarian, ovolactovegetarian, whatever.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So, while the Vegetarian Society says vegetarians don't eat fish and never have, there are a lot of people who call themselves vegetarian who do eat fish based on several studies. The data is a little older, but it's been consistent across multiple studies over the years. So, there was a USDA National Food Survey back in the 90s, right? So, this is like 94, 95. So, this is about the same time pescatarian would have come around. um so there were like 334 people age six and up and they said yes to do you consider yourself a vegetarian Out of those people, 64% of those reported that they had eaten some sort of meat on two of their days of the diet that were being tracked. At least two of the days.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's kind of crazy. 64%?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And also the ones who did eat fish ate almost twice as much fish as non-vegetarians.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. That's what I was saying, though. I think in the 90s, a lot of people were just replacing meat with fish because some study came out that it was healthier.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. A little bit newer study in 2002 in Vancouver with women. Out of 90 people of that study who self-reported as vegetarian, 57% of those reported occasional fish and 14 of them even said chicken. What? Yeah. Occasional meaning mostly less than weekly. And only 12% of those ate fish weekly.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I feel like that's just, I don't know, or a flexitarian, I guess, is the new word. Yeah. Okay. No wonder people are confused.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. So they were talking to the women a little bit, like they did interviews about maybe why they decided they could eat those things. And they said, basically, like you were just saying, fish and poultry were like generally perceived as better choices than red meat, like healthier. and they didn't feel as bad about eating fish and chicken because they were seen as less similar to humans than cows were. And then there were some things about like the chicken that was labeled as free range, organic, no antibiotics, stuff like that alleviated some of their concerns about animal treatment.
Protein Deficient Vegan:These labels, they're liars.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. They said the ones who did worry about fish worried about environmental contaminants and like overfishing, pollution, things like that. But none of them raised the fish's welfare as one of their driving factors.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's pretty interesting.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And then there was also a 2019 paper that found in two online U.S. samples, and one of them 37% and the other one 25% of pescatarians called themselves vegetarian.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Stop doing that.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I think that's the real issue. And we have that with veganism, too. People will be, like, mostly plant-based but call themselves vegan. So I think this is the same thing. You've got, like, flexitarians and pescatarians who are calling themselves vegetarians. It's not necessarily that vegetarians are eating fish. It's that pescatarians and flexitarians are calling themselves vegetarians.
Protein Deficient Vegan:They're mislabeling. Right. Which... I've seen some people talking about this, like people that are doing it, and they said it's just easier socially. Like people know what the term vegetarian and vegan means, so they'll just use those even if they're not fully those definitions, which to me is like, you know, a little frustrating. I understand like the knee-jerk reaction to want to get out of a conversation around that. It's like, oh, why aren't you eating meat? And you're just like, oh, I'm a vegetarian instead of getting into the nuance of like, oh, I'm a vegetarian, but fish, we call ourselves pescetarians. da da da da da da da da yeah because those conversations are awkward but it does suck that we're mislabeling so.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I never did the vegetarian thing i went straight to vegan but when you first went vegetarian did you think of fish any differently than like chicken
Protein Deficient Vegan:Um i don't think i did right so when i went vegetarian i didn't want to eat any meat and i viewed fish as meat but my dad was like pretty, i don't know he was just very concerned about the protein thing So he did make, he like made me eat fish for like, I think a month after I decided I wasn't eating meat anymore. And then we had like a lot of back and forth. many dinner fights where i was like i'm literally not going to eat that and i would like sit at the dinner table for like two hours like hunger strikes and stuff so, eventually i got my way but like i don't think i necessarily viewed him that much different it was just like he definitely did yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It's interesting like that's what i was gonna say is like even there it came out as like a carve out basically like okay well you're gonna you can be vegetarian but you're at least gonna eat
Protein Deficient Vegan:Fish right it was more of like uh i want to make sure that you're getting protein and like yeah i kind of feel like he thought that was like a good compromise.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And i see that online a lot when people are talking about like being vegetarian this comes up a lot when you're i guess with kids who still live with their parents but their parents are like okay but you still have to eat fish or you still have eggs because i'm worried about your nutrition and your protein like they think they're magical foods still but
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah you know i just hope that with more free resources and information, education yeah it's easier to educate yourself than it was back when i went vegetarian because nobody was vegetarian in our small town i think it was like the only vegetarian probably in the entire town right you know and i don't know where we would have learned about it because we had dial up internet it's like, and you know people didn't have blogs and stuff even up until like probably 10 plus years ago when people started like actually putting work into food blogs that were free and like a bunch of resources that just stuff just didn't exist.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah it's interesting the next thing i wanted to talk about a little bit is kind of comparing fishing to hunting yeah And, you know, how this is seen differently as well. So, a lot of people grew up thinking that hunting was maybe, like, cruel or just something they couldn't do or didn't want to do. But they, those same people might still, like, go fishing every summer.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Like, you know, I grew up in the country, so I knew a lot of hunters and I knew a lot of fishers. But I would actually say, like. Almost everybody I knew fished at some point, whereas people who hunted were maybe like one out of every 10 or 20 people. It was not nearly as common, even though it was pretty common in Kentucky. Yeah. But it was like everybody had fished. It was like a thing you do when you're a kid, like with your grandparents.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, you get like the first fishing pole with Mickey Mouse on it or something.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And some people get guns like that too, but it's not nearly as common. Yeah. So, in the U.S. in 2022, there were about 40 million people who fished who were over 16 years old, but there were only about 14 million people who hunted who were over 16 years old. And those numbers come from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, who has to issue licenses and stuff for that. So, that's almost three to one difference. Hmm.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I actually thought it would have been a bigger.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You know.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Roughly 57 million Americans that were over six years old fished in 2025, which is about 18% of the Americans who were over six years old.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Wow.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. So it's like, really, 18% is pretty common. And I think the only reason that's not higher is because so many people live in the city. So I think like, if you go out to rural areas, it would probably be like, 85% or something. Oh, for sure. And then 86% of current fishers fished before they were 12 years old which is also kind of different for hunting you don't hunt until you're older typically so you probably think of it a little differently anyway um so yeah it's definitely like a childhood thing like you're always you're going out with your family and going fishing or whatever it's not really considered like you're when you're going fishing you're not really thinking like i'm going out and killing something like you do when you're hunting it's a really different mentality even though you're effectively doing the same thing
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah that is.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:True did you ever fish when you were a kid
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah my dad used to take me fishing when i was like i don't know probably like a five to seven.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Ish yeah
Protein Deficient Vegan:But i was always really freaked out about the worm thing like killing the worms so i remember that was like a whole thing and i never wanted to kill the fish, so yeah i think that actually probably made me more sensitive to like fish aren't meat or are meat you know like yeah, Yeah, did you?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, I went fishing a lot with my grandfather, and we went fishing with my mom and dad quite a bit for a while there, like, every year. But, you know, I didn't really think of fishing as much of anything, but I probably wouldn't have gone hunting. That never even really came up. But it definitely, to me, it was, like, totally different. I had to shoot something. For whatever reason, it's like, I had to shoot something. It's totally different than I'm, like, fishing. It's just such a common, casual thing.
Protein Deficient Vegan:This is going to sound mean, but, like, even from a young age. If someone told me they hunted, like, when I was a kid, I was just like, ooh, I don't like you. Like, I remember, like, intentionally being like, oh, I wouldn't be a friend with that person. Like, someone that's going out hunting every weekend with their dad, like, that's not someone I'm going to be friends with.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I didn't really have that because my grandpa was a big hunter. So, I was, like, around that kind of thing a lot, even though I didn't go.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So, that was still pretty normal to me. He was all into fishing while, like, watching bass competitions, bass, but the whole thing. Even to me, it was like, I still felt hunting was different than fishing. Yeah. But I didn't really feel like negative about hunting. I was just like, I don't want to do that.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's interesting. Yeah, I know. Maybe you remember this because we dated in high school. But I would ask anyone I was going to date in high school. And I still ask this. Like, did you, have you ever hunted? And if they say yes, I would never date that person.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:What do you mean you still ask this?
Protein Deficient Vegan:Well, I don't ask it anymore. Because we're married. But back in the day, that was like one of the questions I asked.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, okay. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:And, like, if somebody said yes, it was like, nah, that's going to be a strong no for me. Because I was just like, who could do that? Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, that is how strongly I felt. Do you remember me asking you this?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:No, I don't remember that.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, no, I definitely did. That's funny.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I'm glad I never did it.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Especially since you were from Kentucky. I was asking a lot of Kentucky boys, do you hunt? Yeah. Oh, you do? Okay, we can't be friends. Yeah. I just like slipping in there just real casually. That's funny. Have you ever been hunting with your family as a child? No?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Okay. You're good to go.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You're good. No, I don't know. It's always like really revolting to think about. You have literal blood on your hands? No. Sorry. Give me a no. But my uncle used to hunt. Yeah. And that was like one of my first things that really like made me very sensitive to the whole animal welfare anyways.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Is because I like came, my dad took me to his house once and there was like a deer hanging up and it was just like very, very upsetting for me. So I think, I mean, I would say like maybe that was a good thing. I saw that because I think it probably opened my eyes and it was like one of the first seeds planted. But yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Well, when it comes to fishing specifically, one thing that comes up a lot is kind of an objection or excuse is like catch and release. So catch and release is often seen as like a kinder version of fishing or a better version of fishing. Thank you. And the wildlife agencies even promote it for conservation. It's like, okay, you want to go fishing, just release the fish back in the water so we still have the fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, I mean, I definitely remember that conversation with my dad as a kid. Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they call it a great conservation strategy. And they're mostly talking about saltwater, like ocean fish in this case, by catching the least to keep them in the water.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Do you know what's even better for conservation?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Just leave them the hell alone.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Just don't go fishing.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You know, they actually, remember that handheld game where it was like this little handheld game and it had like the reel on the side? Yeah. I used to play that all the time. Yeah, yeah. Why would you ever go fishing when you can do that in a boat? Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:But the issue is a lot of the catch and release fish still die.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Anyway. So there was a 2005 review that pulled a bunch of different mortality estimates with 53 different studies. And they found that on average, 18% of released fish will die.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's insane.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Almost 20% of your catch and release is going to die anyway, and they'll typically die within the first 24 hours. So you might as well have taken the fish in a lot of those cases.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, and they're probably dying like a much worse death than if you would have taken them. Yeah. Right.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And the biggest factor is like where the hook lands because, you know, some places are basically fatal and some aren't. There are also, in an older review, some of the mortality got up over 30% for some species and even over like 68% for a couple of species like spotted sea trout, bluegill, crappie, striped bass, and coho. And like the bluegill, crappie, and striped bass, that was like basically the kind of stuff that we grew up fishing for because that would swim in the lakes in Kentucky.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Crappie? Crappie. I always thought they were called crappie.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:People might say that. We called them crappie.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Crappie. Interesting. 68% is wild. I feel like people don't know that.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And even NOAA's own catch and release page says, simply letting a fish go does not guarantee it will live.
Protein Deficient Vegan:So leave them alone. Yeah. If you don't want to hurt a fish, don't go fishing.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And also catch and release is like most fishing now. Right. So back in like 1981, the release was like 34%. And then by 99, it was up to 58%. And now as of like 2023, the last checks, it's like 65%. So north of 60% of fish that are caught are just released anyway. And then maybe up to 20% of them just died within the next 24 hours.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And I think part of that is like back in the day, people were eating that fish. Right. Like they needed that fish. It was like almost like, hey, we're going to save some money grocery shopping this week because we're going to go fishing this weekend. Yeah. And now it's like, oh, it's just like this fun bonding activity and it's totally wasteful and horrible. And also we're too lazy to actually take the fish and eat them.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Those numbers specifically were just for saltwater fish. So that is like probably a lot of like ocean sport fishing. Like you're not, if you're out there fishing a lot of the time, you're not out there fishing for food. Whereas if you're fishing like a rural lake or something, you're more likely to be doing that for food. But also nobody really counts those numbers. Right. Like they do in the ocean.
Protein Deficient Vegan:How could you? It's probably a huge number. But yeah, I just feel like the people that are objecting to fishing and eating the fish, they probably don't know these numbers as far as like how many fish actually end up dying. Because I think if they would, if they were like, well, I don't want to eat a fish, I don't want to hurt a fish, I don't want to kill a fish, you just wouldn't go fishing anymore. Right.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And a lot of the catch and release, at least in one of the 2005 reviews, they said was basically due to like the size limits and the bag limits. So you caught a fish and it was too small and you have to release it. Which the intention of those rules is like that fish still needs to grow and be part of the ecosystem. But there's a 10 to 20 percent chance you just killed it anyway. Right. So, I mean, it's not really doing what it's intended. But yeah, a lot of the reasons are like it's just not the fish you want. It's not the right size. You already have too many fish. You were looking for a different type of fish, something like that. So yeah, if you have like 700 million fish that are released in one year and you say like 18% of those fish die, then like 125 million fish that were released are going to die anyway in the next 24 hours, basically for the U.S. saltwater numbers. Also, we're talking about like the catch and release and the hook landing. Even if they do survive, you get into the idea of like, do fish feel pain? Right. which was pretty debated for a long time. And I think up until like 2002, which is fairly recent, like a lot of people who are alive now grew up like knowing this their whole life if it was in 2002. But up until 2002, they had not yet identified pain receptors on fish. So they thought that they just didn't have them and fish didn't feel pain at all. But since then, there's been a lot of studies that fish feel pain. So I want to talk about a couple of those real briefly. Before I get into that, what it was originally thought were things that looked like a pain response were actually just a reflex because they don't have pain receptors. So like you see the fish squirm or something and people thought that was just a reflex.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's stupid.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:That's what science thought.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Science thinks a lot of stupid stuff when they don't study it first.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:But there was a 2003 study that came out and basically changed that entire concept and changed the field. So they found that rainbow trout specifically do have pain receptors. They're called nociceptors on their face that respond to things like pressure, heat, and acid, just like ours. So, one way that they proved this was basically they gave them a mild acid injection in their lips, and then they would, like, rock side to side and rub their lips up against stuff, their breathing rate raised, so like we do when we're in pain. And it took them about three hours before they would start to eat again.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's really sad. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's good data to have to prove people wrong, but, man, that's sad.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It is sad. And, you know, they found that if they give them morphine or some other, like, pain relief like that, then the behavior basically went away. So they were like no longer in pain. So that was a pretty straightforward way to test, even though it is awful to test something that way. A pretty straightforward way to test like, yeah, this fish is feeling pain. Only the fish who we did the acid thing to are feeling the pain. They're reacting as if they're in pain. And then we give them a pain reliever and they stop acting that way. That's like pretty straightforward.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, I don't, you can't really deny it.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. There are also some other behavioral changes for fish that are in pain in the same study. So, like, trout that were in pain stopped being afraid of a new object in the tank because that's something they're typically afraid of.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, just because they were so distracted.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right, they were distracted. So, when they give them morphine, they basically were afraid of the thing again because the pain wasn't distracting them anymore. Then there was also one where they did a test with zebrafish where they had them in a tank that was, like, their ideal environment with the lighting and the water and, like, the decorations or pots or whatever.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Stuff they could hide and float around and play in.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Things the fish like. And then they had a second tank that was like very brightly lit and there was nothing in the tank. So it was just basically water. So not a very good environment. Not an environment the fish really wants to be in. But that water had painkillers in it. So they found that if the fish was in pain, they would go into the tank they didn't like. But that was the only time they would go into it. It was because they knew that the water could make them feel better. And they like learned this over the trials.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's actually really smart. I feel like that takes a lot of intelligence, right? Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, so they learned that like, oh, if I'm in pain, I go to this shitty tank I don't like.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Damn. Yeah. So they're smart and they feel pain. Mm-hmm.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, and they tried a bunch of different painkillers to make sure this wasn't some specific morphine thing, I guess, but they tried like aspirin, lidocaine, morphine. All of those relieved the behaviors that they were exhibiting when they were in pain. They did have a fourth painkiller called Flunixin I haven't actually heard of that didn't exhibit the same behavior, and I'm not really exactly sure why that was. The details are probably in the study for that. But in general, the painkillers were making them go back to normal behavior. So one useful point about this is that this isn't like a vegan-specific argument. There are official bodies that agree that fish feel pain. So some of those are the European Food Safety Authority, who in 2009 said, quote, the balance of evidence indicates that some fish species have the capacity to experience pain, unquote. And then the American Veterinary Medical Association in 2020 said finfish should be accorded the same considerations as terrestrial vertebrates in regard to relief from pain. But they did note that the debate is ongoing, although that study seems pretty straightforward to me. There are probably things you can pick apart inside the study that only the fish experts truly know about them. And then also in the UK law, the 2022 Animal Welfare Sentience Act formally recognized that every vertebrate as sentient, including fish, And the fish have been in there since the very first draft, but later on, octopuses, crabs, and lobsters were added before the bill was actually passed.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Good. They do crazy shit to lobsters.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And that just sets up a committee to scrutinize the policy. It doesn't actually add any welfare protections, but it is something that another oversight committee. So basically all these committees and laws and things include fish and all these welfare acts that basically are meant to reduce or prevent pain being inflicted on the animal. There are some, like, senior fishery scientists who say that the conscious pain hasn't been proven. So, this is still under debate. But the bulk of the research is definitely saying that, yes, they do have these pain receptors. Yes, they do have pain response. Yes, we can relieve the pain. So, like, all signs are pointing to yes in that direction. And personally, I'm pretty convinced. So, yeah. But, I mean, you know, science is what science is. Answers are never really permanent. There's always going to be some debate.
Protein Deficient Vegan:But even if you're pretty sure, why would you cause pain?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, exactly.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. I agree.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's like unless you're definitively certain that it wouldn't, why would you even be arguing?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, I agree. Also, something that makes people think of fish as like a lesser being or something typically is like the mental capacity of a fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, goldfish brain.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, goldfish brain, goldfish memory. That's a really common saying like you have the memory of a goldfish, meaning you can't remember anything. My grandma actually used to call it CRS. Can't remember shit. I've got that too. But yeah, so the goldfish memory thing is just a joke. That's not based on science. So in fact, rainbow fish that learned to escape a net in a lab tank were still able to do the same escape quickly 11 months later.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's crazy.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I'm not sure I could do that.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I don't think I could either. If you sent me back to the same escape room 11, months later, I'd be like, I don't remember being here.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:One really interesting one that I saw was the mirror test. So this is a self-awareness test they do for a lot of animals. And most animals fail the test, like chimpanzees, orangutans, dolphins, and some elephants pass.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, and we talked about the mirror test with pigs.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:And they failed it. Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Gorillas are kind of mixed, actually. And then dogs and most monkeys fail the test. So it's a sign of like only some of the animals we think of as the most intelligent so far have been able to consistently pass.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right. It's different from like understanding that the mirror is showing you something. It's being able to recognize that's me in the mirror. Right. Which feels like it should take a pretty high level of intelligence. Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So the way they do this, there's a fish called a cleaner wrasse. I think that's how you pronounce it. I'm not sure. W-R-A-S-S-E. But they passed the test. So basically, you put a mark on their throat. You just like draw like a marker or something, show them a mirror. And then three of the four marked fish tried to scrape the mark off of themselves. That's crazy. So they look in the mirror, they see the mark, and they realize, hey, I've got something on me. I need to get it off.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's crazy that they even understand that's not a normal mark. Yeah. And that they know that's them.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. So yeah, and they did, obviously, this is a study, so they did controls. If there was no mirror, they did not try to scrape it off. So this wasn't like something was irritating their neck or something like that. It wasn't that. It was that they saw it. And then if there was no mark, they also didn't charge it off. So if you like, they show them in a mirror, there's nothing on their throat. They don't do anything. If you show them in a mirror and there is something on their throat, they're like, oh, that's weird. There's something on my throat. I got to get that off.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's crazy.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And then if there's no mirror at all, they mark it on their throat. They also don't do anything because they never saw it in the mirror. And they replicated this five years later. Again, so this was a study that has been replicated. and 14 out of the 14. So every fish out of the 14 they tried was able to do this.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's kind of like crazy how smart they would have to be to know that. Yeah. What level of age would that be for a child, like a human child?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I don't know. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:To be like, oh.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:That's not supposed to be there.
Protein Deficient Vegan:What age could a human child that never learned from their parent what a mirror was, figure out what a mirror was and also know that's me in a mirror and also be like, I need to rub this thing off my neck?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I guess it would be like somewhere between two and three, but I don't know.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You think so? Yeah, probably. I don't know. I don't know.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Depends on the kid, I guess. Might have taken me till I was six. I'm not sure. Yeah. Also, in 2023, once fish had learned mirrors, this was in a separate study, they stopped attacking photos of their own face, but kept attacking photos of strangers.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's crazy.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So they, like, know what they look like in the mirror.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Which is nuts, because I feel like all fish really look similar. Wow. They do. They look so similar.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:They think that about us, too.
Protein Deficient Vegan:They probably do.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Um And the authors of that study called, and this was actually the same group, by the way, as those previous mirror studies, but it was a different study. So the authors called what it means for self-awareness, quote, uncertain and controversial. It's kind of like, oh, wow, these are way smarter than we think. What does that mean?
Protein Deficient Vegan:A little creepy. Should be planet of the fish, where the fish rise up and take over our world.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, man. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I'd watch that.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Make any legs first.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I'd watch the shit out of that.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, it's a good thing we don't live in the water.
Protein Deficient Vegan:The dolphins would lead the party of the fish.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I think if humans had to live in the water, we would not be on top.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Oh, we'd be so fucked if humans had to live in the water. Well, you know, the Earth is flooding. It could be soon. It's true. I don't know. I think I'm going to write this. I'm going to write this movie and get funny. It's going to be called Planet of the Fish. And then on the cover of the movie jacket, it's going to be dolphins.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, I don't think you should do that. People don't like that, apparently. Oh, and then not just the mirror test, but there's also a little bit of tool use in fish, which, what?
Protein Deficient Vegan:They can use tools?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So, there was a tusk fish on the Southern Great Barrier Reef that was photographed cracking a cockle with a rock and had broken shells lying near the rock. This was in 2011.
Protein Deficient Vegan:They don't even have hands.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:He was holding it in his mouth.
Protein Deficient Vegan:What the fuck?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay, this movie's definitely happening. Planet of the fish. They're going to beat our brains in with rocks in their mouth.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:That'd be a pretty big fish and a pretty big rock. I guess a whale could probably pull it off.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Oh, a whale can just eat you.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:That's a good point. There's a lot of stuff that can just eat you. You have to be in a shell for them to use a tool. So Sally Squirrel thing in SpongeBob, I guess fish would use rocks to break open your dome.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, you wouldn't be safe.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Interesting. Well, sharks kind of do that with like the shark cages. They try to ram those things and they destroy them all the time. It's not really tool used. I don't know who
Protein Deficient Vegan:Would go in one of those shark cages. It would never be me.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Losing a lot of arguments for why you would eat fish but not eat other meat. Yeah. They're probably just as smart as most of the things you're saying you don't want to eat. So now we've talked about this in prior podcast a little bit, but let's talk just briefly about the numbers, like how many fish we're farming because it's a lot.
Protein Deficient Vegan:The numbers are insane. I think a lot of the statistics we brought up before, like the number of land animals that are killed for food because it is a little hard to track how many fish are actually killed for food.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Well, yeah, and that's one of the interesting things, actually. Nobody counts the number of fish. They count tons of fish as opposed to cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals we count per head. We actually count fish as the amount of biomass, like the weight. So that's pretty interesting right off the bat. The numbers we do have about a number of fish per year are kind of reverse engineered from like average weight of a fish in that environment and total tonnage of fish. Right. So for the wild caught fish, it's estimated to be like 1.1 to 2.2 trillion per year from year 2000 to the year 2019.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's an insane number.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And then the farmed fish, again, this is number of fish, was about 124 billion. So that's like 10 times less basically than the wild-caught fish. Wow. Yeah. But still 124 billion farmed fish. For comparison, all the land animals slaughtered per year was about 86 billion in 2024. So 86 billion for all land animals and then 124 billion for just farmed fish per year. And then like maybe 2 trillion for wild caught fish. So it's like by far number of lives basically fish is like far and above.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's fucking crazy.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. So even the low estimate of wild fish alone is more than 10 times every farmed land animal combined. Wow. And then a lot of those fish, especially the wild fish, never actually make it into food. So about half a trillion to a trillion of those fish a year are ground into fish meal or fish oil. And the fish meal is mainly to feed farmed fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:What the fuck?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Also, you don't need fish oil. You just take algae oil.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. We're feeding fish fish. We're feeding fish fish, apparently. And also, like, it's crazy to me that maybe a trillion wild fish a year are just going to things that aren't food. That's fucked up. And then there's about 10 million tons a year that are thrown back as discards or like catch and release. Right. But at a giant scale.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right. Right. Because of the bycatch.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:No, the bycatch.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You basically accidentally, accidentally. Right. Catch things that you don't want, so you just chuck them back in the ocean.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And then for fish farming versus factory farming, by weight, counting shellfish, farm fish actually took over the wild fish for the first time in 2022. 22. So this is by tons. And we were talking about, so it's previously we were saying, okay, wild caught fish are like 10 times more individual fish than farmed fish, right? But as far as weight goes, the weight of the fish, farmed actually just recently overtook wild fish. And that's mainly because most of the stuff you're catching in the wild is like minnows, basically. They're like 10 grams of fish, 20 grams of fish. Whereas pretty much everything that's farmed is a much more substantial fish. So I think it's like 450 grams is the average for a farmed fish. So while more individual fish are caught in the wild, more of the weight of fish is now farmed fish for the first time.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Which sounds like it means it's getting more popular to do fish farming.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. Yeah. Which, I mean, I guess there's less bycatch in fish farming, but it has its own issues so yeah it's factory farming yeah right over 57 percent of the seafood that people actually eat shellfish included now comes from a farm as of 2022 wow yeah but just crazy to think about when you think about this scale of like wild fish catching stuff like that right fishing operation sounds
Protein Deficient Vegan:Like they're using a lot of that for fish food and also for fish oil.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And also bycatch but yeah wild numbers so for the farming that does include uh shrimp oysters and mussels if you only include fin fish um wild is still a little more weight than farmed so the the farming of the shrimp oysters and mussels is making up a lot of that but it's still pretty close it's like 77 million tons in the wild versus 55 million tons in the farm um so norway if you didn't know is the world's biggest farm salmon producer and they do a detailed annual report card they actually have a lot around like welfare of the fish, so they have a lot of data around it. But they said about 58 million salmon died in their sea pens in 2024 before they were slaughtered, which is like a 15% risk of dying at sea over the year. And then another 45 million died in the hatcheries. So that's over 100 million salmon that just died as a course of the operation in one year.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's not surprising based on the documentaries I've seen of just, like, what fish factory farms look like. Yeah. They're just, like, disgusting and super crowded. And obviously, they're going to the bathroom where they're swimming. It's just a pretty dirty operation.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:They also have a parasite issue with sea lice. So that's the biggest parasitic challenge. And then they have to do de-lousing treatments for the lice, which can actually cause injuries to the fish. and is the number one cause of reduced welfare for the fish farms. Wow.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's crazy that they make enough money that they can take a hit of 100 million fish dying before actually being used for food.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Like, that's insane to me.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, just the number of fish is, like, staggering.
Protein Deficient Vegan:100 million die before they ever even go to slaughter.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And then as far as, like, how the fish die, Most wild-caught fish that are still alive when they get pulled onto the boat or whatever just die of asphyxiation. Yeah. They're methods that don't kill them immediately. Like with cattle, we have a lot of stuff where you have to try to like stun the cow and then kill the cow. The fish are not like that. They basically just sit there and suffocate or bleed out.
Protein Deficient Vegan:They're not even trying. Right. Right? Because they're pulling in these massive nets of fish. It's like there wouldn't even, the way they fish, there wouldn't even be any way to like. quickly kill them all.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right yeah so in 2004 the european food safety authority said many existing commercial killing methods expose fish to substantial suffering over a prolonged period of time um and that's because like it takes uh trout like three minutes to lose its brain function in the air and if it's in ice or it's cold it takes like 10 minutes so it's even just prolonged
Protein Deficient Vegan:So they're basically like suffocating for three to ten minutes which.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Is Effectively, yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Horrific.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. So just some of the reasons why we, in general, don't see fish as animals. So some of the things that might be are like they live somewhere we don't. Like you just don't see fish that much, really.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right. And the fish that you do see would be like fish at pet stores. Right. Like cute little, you know, colorful betta fish or something. Yeah. Which you wouldn't be eating.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And a lot of people have fish tanks and stuff, but that doesn't really seem to make them less likely to eat fish, which I always thought was interesting.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I also think it's just a big disconnect from the kind of fish that you would keep as pets versus the kind of fish that live in the ocean. Yeah. Because you wouldn't keep a trout as a fish in a fish tank.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:You know? Yeah, right. That's true, yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's like all the colorful, pretty little fish that go in the fish tank.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, that's a good point.
Protein Deficient Vegan:But even so, I mean, people just in general, I think view fish a lot differently as pets than they do like dogs and cats. Yeah. You know, it's like, oh, just flush it down the toilet, kind of.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, the fish are more like artwork almost. Yeah. than an actual pet. It's very weird. Yeah. Um, also fish are nothing like us. We can't like read their expressions. They typically, most fish aren't making sounds we can hear. Uh, they don't have fur, they're cold blooded and they, it's easy to just assume like there's not much going on in their head, you know?
Protein Deficient Vegan:Have you seen that fish that has human teeth though?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh yeah, that's a creepy fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Nightmare fuel.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Also like most fish don't scream. So there's no aspect of like this fish is in pain or like Like when you're fishing, something I'm doing is really, really terrible. A lot of fish do make sounds, but nothing we'd really recognize as distress. And even when you're like, if you're fishing, you're not ever really going to hear a fish make a noise like you're hurting it. Right. Also, calling them seafood probably doesn't help much.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Right. Yeah, yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And it's not, you know, it's not sea meat or something. So you don't think of them as meat, but you just think seafood. And you're like, okay, well, this isn't meat, but it's just food.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's just food. They're not even animals. They're just food.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I think it's ingrained at such an early age, even earlier than something like hunting. And it's even different, I think, than like eating meat when you're young because that's just food to you. But when you're fishing, you're like, you're learning that like we catch this fish, we kill this fish, blah, blah, blah, like from a really young age. So it's for the people who go through the experience of fishing, it is like extremely normalized.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And I think it's like people don't want to reimagine what that was, that experience actually was when you start realizing that fish do feel things like you murdered a bunch of fish. Right. Even when you thought you were throwing them back in to go live their little fish lives, like they probably died.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And I do think it's interesting that until 2002, basically the current science was fish cannot feel pain. Yeah. Which I don't know. I mean, would that make it okay before 2002 for vegetarians to eat fish? Like, is that even a moral concern if you don't know that? It's interesting. But, you know, because I know that's one of the arguments that comes up with plants a lot. It's like if plants felt pain, would you eat plants? Yeah. Luckily, we know better now, so we don't have to come think about that on our own. So I think in general, people are more likely to eat things or be willing to eat things that they see as less like themselves or less like humans. Yeah. So if you think of it on a scale, like you would probably, I'd be just as hesitant to eat a, like a monkey, like a primate as I would a person probably, because I see those as really close to identical. People are less likely to think things like chickens and fish have feelings and emotions and pain and stuff like that. So they're more likely to eat them without any kind of moral qualms.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And I think the other thing is I actually think people that eat fish are more likely to want to buy into food. This, like, misconception that fish are stupid and that fish don't feel pain because that helps them be able to eat those without guilt, too.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You know?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, that's true. All right. So, to kind of pull it together in the closing, fish isn't meat is, like, a category thing, probably from religion and Lent and over the years. And, like, not knowing that fish felt pain and things like that. It's not really a fact about fish. This is just like an opinion and something that was pervasive over time. Now I think we know better about a lot of these things. So it would be nice if we could update our opinion of fish. And at the very least, like, we should acknowledge that fish is meat. Like, if you choose to eat meat, whatever. But let's not get in the situation where it's like, okay, I'm a vegetarian, but I also eat fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, then you're a pescetarian. Yeah. It's too bad that we're not like computers where we just get like an update.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, Neo from the Matrix.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah, exactly. like oh fish feel pain we need to update everyone's brains right like except software update except i i have a really hard time actually doing software updates so i'd probably be like six years behind anyways.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:God forbid it has a password on it
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's not a password anymore it's like give me your email address and we'll give you a special code.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Yeah. So fish definitely have pain receptors. They respond to painkillers. They change their behavior to avoid pain. They can remember things for like a year. They pass the mirror test. They're apparently one fish using tools out there now, at least.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's crazy.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It's funny because I think that's, I don't know if that's the only one I've ever seen, but that specific instance was like this one fish was doing this thing. So maybe he's just like the Einstein of fish. I don't know.
Protein Deficient Vegan:It's pretty cool.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:But yeah, like all these things combined, I mean, it makes it pretty obvious that fish probably feel pain. And again, at the very least, like you were saying, like if we're like pretty sure that should be enough to at least put them in the same category as these other animals. Absolutely. And yeah, we kill more fish than every farmed land animal combined almost like 10 times over. So it's a huge number of fish that we're getting.
Protein Deficient Vegan:The numbers are shocking. And all farmed fish are factory farmed fish.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right. I mean, there's not really like a free-range fish.
Protein Deficient Vegan:A hundred million fish die before they even reach the age of slaughter in factory farm fishing operations. Yeah. Because of the horrific living conditions.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, yeah. And even the wild-caught fish, you don't necessarily have bad living conditions. I mean, with all the bycatch and the catch and release and like suffocating on the deck of the ship.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Oh, yeah. It's just bad all around. And it's so, in my mind, it's almost even worse than a lot of the land animal stuff, because thought has gone into, like, managing the pain of death. I'm not saying it's 100% effective. Obviously, it isn't if you listen to any of the other episodes, but, like, at least there's, like, thought going into it. This is just, like, no, just throw them on the deck.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Fucked up.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And yeah, and then the reason that fish might not feel like meat to a lot of people are things like the distance we have from fish, how dissimilar they are from us, childhood memories, things like that. Also, there's something interesting. There was a thing called compassion fade in psychology where like you start caring less about something once there's a second victim. So it's like you hear one thing, maybe one victim, and it's like, oh, that's really terrible. I care about this a lot. But then a second victim happens, and you're like, huh, okay, like, wow, that could be cool if that stopped happening. But then you get to, like, 50 victims, and you're like, okay, well, this is just how it is now, I guess. Yeah, so, I mean, with, you know, a trillion, two trillion fish a year being fished out of the sea, it's really hard to have compassion at that point. Crazy. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:But you can do what you can, which is not eating fish. Because what did we learn from Finding Nemo?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Fish or friends.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Friends, not food.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. So, I mean, the whole idea of fish isn't meat was never really about the fish. It was about all these other human baggage and emotional things that we had and we brought to it.
Protein Deficient Vegan:But I do think changing, you know, if people ask you that and they're like, oh, you're a vegan or, oh, you're vegetarian, but you still eat fish, right? I think that you can push back on some of that, like, common thinking by just being like, well, fish is meat and you know they feel pain, right? So, obviously, I'm not going to eat them. Right. You don't have to go on like a diatribe, but, you know, you could explain a little bit just to fill in some of the misconceptions.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, I find it interesting that they just found out about the pain thing in 2002. Like, that's so new that a lot of people probably still think that it's just known that they just don't feel pain.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You got to give people their software update.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, exactly. Cool. All right. Well, that's it for the main segment. Let's get into the bite-sized coaching. If you guys don't know, I'm a personal trainer. I like to add a little brief segment here to the podcast each week that is like a question from one of my clients or people online or in the Discord or wherever, just to talk about things you might be wondering about, do an answer to. So you get to ask the question.
Protein Deficient Vegan:That's right. I sure do. Okay. I don't think this came from any of those but with fall approaching, and you know how there's always an emphasis on like summer bodies and getting in shape in the summer yeah okay so i thought it would be a cool topic to talk about summer is out but what about summer bodies yeah, so which summer bodies is a stupid term.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:It is a stupid term
Protein Deficient Vegan:I want to preface it with i think summer bodies is a stupid fucking term.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:And what if you don't know what that means what that means is like people just like to be leaner throughout the summer when they might be taking their clothes off a little more like their shirt off or you know wearing
Protein Deficient Vegan:But all bodies are summer bodies yeah yeah obviously all bodies can enjoy summer and all bodies can wear summer clothes.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah this is not like a judgment thing this is just what people mean when they say like i want to get a little more lean on
Protein Deficient Vegan:This yeah i want to get more in shape in the summer or like you know maybe you're eating healthier because you're eating smoothie bowls and you're like going out on your hot girl walks or whatever but like what about the fall yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So traditionally what people who like care about trying to who manipulate their body throughout the year do is once summer is over, you kind of go into a bulk quote unquote throughout the fall and winter where you're like putting on a little more weight because you're adding a little bit of body fat. You're going to be wearing long clothes. Nobody's going to see it. Um, so you would kind of bulk through the holidays too.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Thanksgiving, Christmas.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:If you're trying to lose weight through the holidays, like through Thanksgiving and Christmas, good luck to you. Godspeed. But yeah, a lot of people just like, they lose track of what they're tracking and like lose track of their calories through that time anyway. So you might as well just make it part of the plan is the general idea there. So you'd still be hitting the gym, obviously, but you typically just, you know, be at least maintaining weight maybe gaining a little bit of weight um over that season and then if you want to lean back up again for summer you start that in like the early spring maybe even late winter because like the idea is through the fall and through early winter you'd maybe gain like a pound a week or something like that this is
Protein Deficient Vegan:Specifically for people trying to build muscle.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Right yeah yeah yeah this is like if you if you're if you're wondering like i want to keep building muscle what do i do for the rest of the year um so yeah if you're trying to build muscle put on maybe like a pound a week throughout the fall and winter and stuff like that then when you get into early spring um you could like drop two pounds a week for a couple of weeks and get rid of any of the extra fat you may have added so that's how it's traditionally handled is basically you're bulking through the holidays and then you start to lean up a few months before summer um you don't have to do any of that yeah yeah you know that's just for the people who really care about like i like looking really lean in the summer you know you can pretty much just ignore the part of that I would always keep is don't try to lose weight through the holidays.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Really?
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:I will say that I fucking hate the summer and I've always hated the summer because it's hot and you got boob sweat and it's just not a good time. Like, I just don't want to go outside. I don't want to be productive. I just want to hide in an air conditioned space. That's just me personally. But when fall hits, oh my God, the weather is perfect. I'm in a better mood. You know how people get seasonal depression? I get seasonal depression in the summer. The summer, No, I'm not joking.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, I know you're not.
Protein Deficient Vegan:The summer is the most depressing time of year for me. I fucking hate the summer. Yeah. Like, I am so depressed in the summer. And as soon as the air starts turning crisp, as soon as we're getting below 70 again in September, I am like, this is my time to shine. And then I'm pretty much good until it gets hot again in May.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:So, for me... I actually am less good about sticking to stuff in the summer because I just don't want to go outside.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. And I was, you know, when I say the holidays, that's really just like. Two weeks. Thanksgiving to Christmas, basically. Yeah, yeah. That's really the hard part. You can still do most of the year. You can do whatever you want, anytime you want, right?
Protein Deficient Vegan:Or you can make my high-protein holiday recipes.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, that's true.
Protein Deficient Vegan:And you can eat as much as you want.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:But the problem there is you want to eat a lot of those. Yeah, you do.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. But anyway, yeah. So, like, the kind of bulk through the winter, cut in the spring, and then kind of maintain through the summer is the traditional way to approach it. If you think that sucks or that doesn't sound good, do something, do whatever you want, you know? Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:You can hibernate in the summer like me.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:And come back alive when September hits.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:You can also just maintain the same body weight all year round.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Or do whatever you want.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. Yeah. Do whatever you want.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Do whatever the fuck you want.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:So, a protein-deficient vegan, what new recipes did you have this week?
Protein Deficient Vegan:Okay. Pretty exciting one I just posted. Now, you know this, but I don't think other people know this, but I used to hate black bean brownies.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Oh, yeah. Now, the first one we made of that was not good.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Yeah. They almost always suck.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:That was not your recipe.
Protein Deficient Vegan:No. But we figured out how to make them good because basically my issue with them was they were like chalky.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, yeah. That was my problem, too.
Protein Deficient Vegan:They were chalky. And they also, by the way, tasted like beans.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Which is, I don't know.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I love beans. I love beans. I'd rather just eat a bowl of beans. Exactly.
Protein Deficient Vegan:So we figured it out. So basically, we blended the beans and the bean juice. So it's not chalky at all.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, very moist.
Protein Deficient Vegan:But we also added peanut flour, which seems to, like, mellow out the bean taste. I don't even really taste the beans anymore.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, I don't either.
Protein Deficient Vegan:And by I don't really, I mean, I don't taste the beans anymore, and I'm pretty picky, so... I would know. Yeah. But they're really good. And we've made them like several times because.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:I don't know. You got to get the recipe just right. Yeah.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Plus we were making them right before Big Brother because we've been watching Big Brother because there's Survivor Players this season. Yeah. But yeah, we're calling them our Big Brother Black Bean Brownies because that's a fun title for it. But anyways, it's on the website and they're really good.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:They're not called that on the website. We're not saying they're officially related to Big Brother. That's just how we call them in the house.
Protein Deficient Vegan:Big Brother didn't sponsor my black bean brownies. But they are a great snack if you're watching Big Brother. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so go check out the Big Brother black bean brownies. Go Dee, go Devins.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah, and then for our Deficient Vegans community on Discord, we're still doing the book club. We have just started week two of the book club for the Impactful Vegan by Robert Cheeke. There's been a lot of discussion about some of the topics and like whether or not you agree with them and what you think about, you know, the approach and things like that. So I think there is some some good stuff coming out of it. I saw it just in the first week. There were at least a couple of people who was like, oh, I read this and it made me go do this or made me think I want to go do this.
Protein Deficient Vegan:There's some like tangible takeaways. Yeah. It's not too late to join if you want to join because and even if you join late, we have all of the discussions separated by week. So you won't get spoilers. you can follow along because we pinned the discussion questions. So yeah, if you want to join, you're never too late to join.
Muscle Deficient Vegan:Yeah. It's in the Deficient Vegans Discord server. The link for that is down in the show notes as always. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, if you could rate and leave us a review that helps us out a lot. And if you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, you can leave us a comment. We love seeing those. Also down in the show notes, you can see links to the Protein Deficient Vegan website, my Muscle Deficient Vegan blog, as well as our social media if you want to get in touch. And yeah, we'd love to hear from you guys. All right. I think that's it for this week. Do you want to say bye? Bye, guys. Bye, everybody.
