Episode 65 - Rapid Fire Vegan Myths Part 2

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:00

Welcome to the Deficient Vegans Podcast, episode 65. I'm the muscle-deficient vegan here with the protein-deficient vegan. Do you want to say hi? Hi. Hi, everybody. So last week's vegan myth-busting was pretty fun, but there were a lot that we didn't have time to get to. So this week we're going to do round two. But first up, new news.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:15

New news.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:17

So Faunalytics, back at it again. One of our favorite sources were like surveys, charts, data, things like that. They do a lot around veganism.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:24

I think they should be called Fun-alytics.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:26

I think so, too. We should let them know. But they had a recent study that showed that students who watched 16 minutes of the movie Dominion were less likely to eat meat afterwards.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:35

If you don't know what Dominion is, it's a vegan documentary that, from what I hear, is super, super graphic and has a lot of factory, farm, and slaughterhouse footage. Right. So there were 1,149

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:47

Canadian students that were asked to complete a survey and select a meal from the local cafe's menu before watching the video, after watching the video, and a week later. So the menu had a base meal of either a bagel, a sandwich, acai bowl, salad, or curry couscous, with the option to pick a protein, being bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, or none.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06

The answer is obviously tofu.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:08

There was an incentive here to answer honestly because they had a 50% chance of winning a voucher for the meal they chose.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:13

Yeah. So basically, every one in two people would get a voucher for specifically the meal they chose. Yeah. So if they chose something they didn't actually want, they had to eat it. Yeah. So it's not really like a prize, right? Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:25

So there was a control group that watched a 16-minute segment of a documentary about mushrooms.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:29

I'd watch that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:31

And then the other group watched a 16-minute segment of the Dominion documentary.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:34

I think specifically around the pig section.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:37

Yeah. The group who watched Dominion were less likely to choose a meal with meat afterwards. It dropped by 27% immediately after watching the video and was still 13.5% lower one week later.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:47

That's impressive.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:48

It is impressive. So the group was three and a half times as likely to choose a plant-based meal. And then a week later, they were still twice as likely to choose the plant-based meal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:56

It's pretty good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:56

It is pretty good. I wonder how it is like, you know, six months later.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:00

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:01

You have to watch Dominion every month re-up on your mentality there. The survey asked how they felt about the documentary, and many reported sadness and disgust. The ones who reported shame, though, were the most likely to go meat-free afterwards. So shame is a pretty powerful motivator. I wouldn't necessarily say we should shame people, but I think if you are watching something and you feel shame or you're listening to something, whatever, Whatever makes you feel shame is typically a strong lever for us to change our behavior.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:30

Yeah. I feel like, you know, the sadness and disgust part, it was probably something everyone felt. Right. But the shame people are the ones that connected the fact that they're eating animal products, so they're participating in the animal abuse and deaths. You know what I mean?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:47

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:48

So it's like the shame are the people that already connected it. Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, I don't think shaming non-vegans is going to, you can't, like, shame someone into it. Yeah, yeah. It has to be, like, a self-shame. Right. You know what I mean? Like, you have to kind of figure out on your own that you don't want to participate anymore. You know what I mean?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:06

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:07

This is interesting data, though. I don't know how we can practically apply it because you can't really force people to watch this.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:15

I thought we have a restaurant and every once in a while they do, like, a free dinner night. But in order to get the free dinner, everybody in the restaurant has to watch Dominion first.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:23

Ooh, I like that. Now, would it be a vegan restaurant?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:28

Well, it would at least be vegan food, right? Okay. Well, I don't know. Where are you more likely to meet people that would change their behavior?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:35

Not a vegan restaurant because you're going to make another bunch of vegans watch a documentary.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:40

That's a good point. Yeah, maybe it's a normal restaurant and then we just see what they choose. They should definitely have vegan options.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:46

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's an interesting idea. I like it a lot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:50

Yeah. The next piece of news we have is that the U.K. government has announced a 22 million pound investment in animal testing alternatives.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:57

This is pounds as in currency, not weight.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:02

Yeah, that's true. The investment includes a 20 million pound center to grow miniature organs from human tissue and two million pounds for nine projects, including lab grown ear models, AI modeling and beating heart cells in a dish.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:14

Ooh, I kind of feel like the ear models are most interesting to me.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:18

Yeah?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:19

Yeah. I don't know. Does that mean they can, like, maybe help people that are hearing impaired or deaf?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:25

Yeah, I'm not sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:26

Interesting.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:27

But any reduction in animal testing is a good idea.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:30

Definitely.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:30

And then the last piece of news we have is that plant-based athlete Venus Williams is set to return to the U.S. Open.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:36

That's crazy because she is now 46 years old.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:39

Yeah. If you don't know, the U.S. Open is tennis. She's a tennis star. I don't know much about tennis, but I know the U.S. Open is a big deal. She has followed a mostly plant-based diet for around 15 years at this point and has said in the past that it has helped her athletic performance and health.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:52

How long do tennis players stay in the professional space? Is 46 kind of old?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:58

A lot longer if they eat more plants, it seems like.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:59

Yeah. That's crazy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:01

Yeah, it is interesting. Still a pretty physical, intense sport. Like, it's no contact, obviously, but you're, like, sprinting the entire time. It seems, like, pretty physically active.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:10

I only tried playing tennis once, and I super sucked at it. So, yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:14

Closest I've come is racquetball.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:16

I'm really good at badminton.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:17

Oh, okay. I think the new fad these days is pickleball, but I've never played it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:21

I've never played that either. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:23

I think it's on a tennis court, but you have little paddles, kind of like badminton.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:26

Really?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:26

I don't know. We'll have to find somewhere and try it someday. All right. That's all we have for the news. Let's get into our main segment and do kind of another big rapid-fire list of myths. So, the first one we have here is that vegan protein is useless because it has lower digestibility.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:39

I saw this just this week, actually.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:42

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:42

I think I've seen it more than once this week, actually.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:44

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:45

So, tell us, personal trainer.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:47

Yeah. A lot of vegan proteins do have lower digestive availability, but obviously it doesn't mean they're useless because lower doesn't mean none. So, sometimes you just might eat a little more protein to make up for it if you're kind of on the low protein end of the spectrum. But it looks like actually, if you're eating at least 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight or lean body mass, there doesn't seem to be a difference for muscle growth between plant-based proteins and animal-based proteins. So as long as your protein is on that higher end, there's no discernible difference either way. But yeah, a lot of them that are not complete proteins, like that are not soy, are less digestible than some of the animal alternatives, but that they're still very usable. And it's typically like maybe 10%, 20% less digestible.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:38

Is that that PD-AAS number or whatever that's on those nutritional labels?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:42

There's two different scores. There's the PDCAAS.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:46

I was so close.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:47

Yeah, which is the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score. And then there's a newer one called the DIAAS, digestibility something amino acid score. I can't remember what the I stands for, but it basically is like something about the intestines. They're measuring it differently. Like they're measuring the, protein in the body differently for the two scores. The DIAAS is a newer one, supposed to be technically more accurate. But there are people who have kind of complaints about both systems. So they're still both used pretty interchangeably. But yeah, I mean, you can look at that score for different foods. And the higher the food scores, that means it's kind of a combination of both the quantity of amino acids in there and the digestibility and bioavailability of the protein, like the food itself that the protein comes in. So, yeah, you can take a look at that. Soy is really high up there. As you get into other vegan protein sources that aren't complete, they're a little less digestible. Their score is a little lower, but they're still usable, like 60%, 70% usable. and again if you have enough protein it doesn't matter that it was slightly less usable.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 7:51

Right and as long as you're not just eating that one food that's like 60 70 like

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:56

There are also a lot of things like you know it might be less less bioavailable if it's still like the whole the whole food but if you cook it or blend it or something like that it becomes more available so there are a lot of nuances there and that's not just a plant thing but But, yeah, it depends on a lot of things, basically. But as long as you eat enough protein, it doesn't seem to matter.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:17

Debunked.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:18

The next one we have is that vegans are destroying the environment by eating almonds and avocados.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:23

Wow. I see this one a lot. And my initial thought is, like, why do you think only vegans are eating almonds and avocados? Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:31

I've seen plenty of non-vegans down some guacamole in my time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:34

Me too. I actually used to eat a lot more almonds when I was vegetarian than I do as a vegan.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:39

Yeah, I mean, there are environmental concerns around the way that a lot of foods are produced, but this is not exclusive to vegans. I don't even know if vegans are necessarily eating more almonds and avocados than non-vegans. Almonds and avocados are very common foods.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:55

Right. And these are, like, interesting because neither of these is, like, a protein source. So, like, there are certain things that I eat as a vegan that I didn't eat as a non-vegan, or I eat, like, way more of as a vegan, but most of those are, like, protein sources because that's what I'm replacing. Right. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not just, like, chowing down on avocados every day. Yeah. And almonds. I don't know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:14

Yeah, almonds pretty easy to replace with other nuts. Especially, like, a lot of time this comes up with the almond milk discussion. Right. So, you can switch your milk to, like, an oat milk or a soy milk. Soy milk.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:22

Yeah. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:23

So, I mean, if you have environmental concerns, you can definitely work around things like almonds and avocados. It just doesn't really have anything to do with vegans.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:31

Yeah. And I think a lot of this comes down to the water footprint, which we had an episode specifically on water footprint of foods. Yeah. And avocados and almonds are still like around the same as dairy and meat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:43

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:44

So you're like cherry picking avocados and almonds that are higher, but they're not really much higher than like the dairy and meat that omnivores eat. Yeah. Also, I will say that veganism isn't really about the environment. So it's like people like to turn that around into like an environmental argument. And even though eating a plant-based diet is better for the environment, veganism isn't about the environment really. You know, it's about animal rights. So...

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 10:11

And so for vegans who are very environmentally conscious, there are definitely much lower impact ways to eat. And you probably would avoid things like almonds. Yeah. All right. The next one we have is that grass-fed beef is environmentally harmless.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:23

Yeah. I see this one come up. Basically, when people are talking about, like, the water footprint or whatever around agriculture, it's like, yes, the cows that are fed corn and soy, that's bad. Yeah. They'll agree with you on that, but they're like, but I buy grass-fed beef, which doesn't have the same environmental impact because we're not growing crops specifically to feed the cows. But there is still an environmental impact because there's still a water footprint associated with eating grass. There's also a huge chunk of land that is now being used for cows only. And then you have to look at the CO2 and methane produced by cows. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:06

Also, you know, very few cows that end up as beef are grass finished. So a lot of cows will eat in the pasture for I think it's like 70% of either their diet or their life. But then they're typically grain finished with the things you were talking about, like soy and corn and stuff like that. There are some that are grass finished as well, but that is really uncommon.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:28

Yeah. And it would be like a very, very small farm. It likely would not be anything that you're buying in the grocery store or eating at a restaurant. Right. Yeah. This one's always kind of weird to me.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:37

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:38

I think it just goes like to show most people don't actually know where the foods they eat are coming from. Or, like, the reality of, like, how really infrequent true small farms are.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:49

Yeah. The next one we have is that livestock only eat food that humans can't eat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:54

I've been seeing this one quite a bit. It was actually when I posted a carousel basically talking about where most of the soy goes. Because most of the soy that is grown globally goes to livestock. Yeah. And everyone was, like, not everyone. I mostly had support. There's just, like, a few trolls, you know? Yeah. But they were like, yeah, but the only thing that animals are eating is the stuff that humans wouldn't eat. Like it wouldn't pass human grade inspection or like food certifications. And that's just not really true. Yeah. I see a lot of people acting as if the like soy and corn that animals are eating is like a byproduct and prevents waste of like, we just don't want to eat 80% of the soy that we grow. And that's not really true.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:39

Right. Yeah. And if that was true, like, you know, you're still... Even if that was the case, you probably wouldn't be growing that much soy if you weren't trying to get all that byproduct to feed the cows. Like you would grow something that maybe humans would eat more correctly. Yeah. So you're still like making a choice to grow all this soy that you apparently humans can't eat most of or whatever the argument is. But it's because you're trying to feed the animals instead of just feeding the people directly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:06

Like we wouldn't be growing all of it if the animals weren't going to eat it. And the other thing that I think is actually kind of interesting around this perspective is there's a lot of new technology happening in the plant-based protein space. We talked about it a few episodes ago, specifically around like alfalfa. They're actually pulling protein from alfalfa so that it's digestible by humans. So if we weren't using animals as food, there's probably a whole lot of other like food technological advances that would happen trying to figure out how to like actually use the plant based foods that we grow and have land availability for for human food, even like grass, you know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 13:43

A lot of options. And I think, you know, if we looked at it today, if we just did a thought experiment of like, OK, starting today, let's think about what the best way to efficiently make food for humans would be. I just don't feel like it would involve animal farming at this point.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:58

It never would involve animal farming. You know, what I, I, um, I don't know anyone listening has watched this show, but Paradise is a really great show. And it's kind of, I'm not going to give any spoilers, but there is a vegan society aspect to the show. But it's really interesting because in the show, they basically like built society from the ground up on like what is the most efficient.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:19

Yeah, exactly. And they have like access to a bunch of modern technologies.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:22

And they decided on a plant-based diet for everybody. Um, so yeah, won't tell you why that's happening, but it was really interesting because it's like, obviously the show creators thought did that thought experiment of like, what would be the most efficient way to feed a bunch of people with the least amount of resources. And you're always going to end up with plant-based, not animal products. So yeah. Yeah, and I think that just raising animals for food prevents us really from, like, coming up with these food advancements on, like, how can we use this stuff more effectively, efficiently, because we don't even really have that option.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:56

Well, and also we end up in this really annoying situation where when we do have advancements, there's pushback because it can kind of harm the like livestock industry, which is annoying just from a scientific progress perspective, but also from like an efficiency perspective, like we're trying to feed the world. Why are we holding back on these options that are way more efficient?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:19

Yeah, it is really interesting, especially when you look at it from like a what's best for everyone kind of thing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:24

Yeah. All right. The next one we have is that veganism causes monocropping.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:28

If you want a full breakdown on this, we did like a pretty long episode on monocropping. Yeah. Essentially, monocropping is more of a byproduct of how much food we have to grow, specifically like soy and corn. And like we just talked about, the vast majority of that is going to animal feed globally. So it's really more about like optimization. How can we grow enough? Yeah. Yeah, it's more about, like, the quantity that we have to grow that requires us to go the monocrop route based on, like, we just don't really have the land to not monocrop. But it's not really a vegan thing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 16:03

Yeah, I think, you know, if veganism was global, then there might still be monocrops. But that's more of, like, a capitalist incentive. Yeah. Just, you know, to make the most money, make the most use of the land, whatever. Like, there are probably still other issues. And monocropping would still probably be chosen for those reasons. But it's not because we have to grow all this food to feed to the vegans or something.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 16:29

Right. And, you know, we kind of talk about the history of like how monocropping really like started ramping up to becoming the most popular form of farming in our episode that covered monocropping. But it really goes hand in hand with the animal ag industry because we were requiring more and more monocrops like soy and corn. Right. with like less and less land because before that farmers were growing like a variety of different vegetables and grains and all that kind of stuff and then they had to start specializing because we were like making everything more efficient and optimizing and getting specialty farm equipment and stuff yeah plus

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:06

All like the industrial pesticide application like it all needs to be kind of the same and just, there are a lot of reasons why having an entire field of the same thing makes things a lot more efficient right um but yeah mostly that's because we have to feed so much damn food to the animals.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:21

Right and if we eliminated animals from like our human food chain and we just went entirely plant-based we'd have a lot more land availability from where all the animals were basically and we could probably grow around the same amount of crops yeah with like way less land and i think it would give the option to maybe go more back to like traditional farming methods potentially yeah um but yeah like you said it's more of like a capitalism driven thing to optimize and get the most profit than it is anything to do with vegans or soy in general yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:54

I mean farms are a business so they do certain things to.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:58

Optimize yeah and i think based on several of the documentaries we watched i think most farmers wish they could go back to just Doing things the way they want and not having to buy the special seeds from certain companies.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:11

Oh, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:11

And like special.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:14

The special pesticide to go with the special seeds. The next one we have is that we couldn't grow vegan food without animal manure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:20

I've heard this one a few times. Or I've heard you're not vegan because you eat vegetables and those are grown with animal manure. Yeah. And I think this is another one similar to basically like livestock eats only the food that humans wouldn't eat anyways. It's like, or is it that we've created so much manure that we had to figure out something to do with it? Right. So like we found a use case for it. Yeah. That doesn't mean that's the only way to grow vegetables. Yeah. We grow vegetables in our backyard and we don't use animal manure. So like it can be done.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:53

And I'm sure it is like the cheapest manure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:55

Right now, right? Right. Because like we have an abundance of animal shit because we factory farm animals. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:01

So, yeah, I mean, we'd probably have to figure out something else, but I'm pretty confident that the world would figure out something else.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:08

Well, technically, we could use human waste if we were all plant based.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:13

I guess that's true. Oh, man.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:17

You could get paid to shit in a bag.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:20

All the public bathrooms are just collection facilities.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:22

Well, kind of like we read about. Oh, actually, we covered this in New News a couple of weeks ago. But Oatly was working with Manchester or something. But they were collecting pee from the soccer team's bathrooms, urinals. Yeah, at the stadium. And they were turning that pee into like dried fertilizer pellets. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we could just do that. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:47

And we could collect the poop.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:49

Yeah, we could collect the pee and the poop and you could get paid. Government subsidized human waste. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:56

And then maybe there'd be, you know, whoever hosts the bathrooms would be making enough money to clean them all appropriately.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:02

That'd be great. That'd be really nice. Right. Maybe they'd even make them bigger for like women because the line's always like 30 minutes long if you go somewhere.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:11

Yeah. Every time you talk to me about women's bathrooms, I just remember the Taylor Swift concert in Chicago where every bathroom in the stadium turned into a woman's bathroom. All the men's bathrooms were just lines of women. I've never seen anything like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:27

What a wonderful world that would be no because like women's bathrooms they aren't just women's bathrooms they're also kid bathrooms right like everyone always brings their kids into the women's bathrooms because they're safe you know so yeah it's just a whole thing women's bathroom should be like i think 70% larger than men's bathroom yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:47

It has to be all stalls it kind of.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:48

Makes sense

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:49

We get urinals which are pretty space efficient, Anyway. All right. Next, we have vegans claim their food and lifestyle is harmless, which makes them hypocrites.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:59

Yeah, I don't. I feel like this is just one of those gotchas. And I hear it a lot. It's kind of like in line with, oh, you use a phone and, you know, phone screens aren't vegan. And, oh, you drive a car and sometimes you're going to hit a bug and that's not vegan. I don't think any vegan is saying they're perfect. Yeah. Or that the harm is zero.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:17

I would definitely not say that my life is harmless. Like, I don't know. Like, as you said, like, there are a lot of things that are just unavoidable. But it's, you know, we're trying to reduce, especially the intentional, like, animal exploitation and stuff. Like, driving down the car, you hit some bugs. Like, it's not like, that's not why I'm driving the car.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:37

I didn't breed the animals in captivity and, like, force feed them in tiny cages.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:42

So, yeah, when you're when you're eating food or like using leather or whatever, you are doing that on purpose.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:48

Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:49

So there's a difference there. But also it's mostly about like the reduction of these big industrial processes and not things that are like incidental harm that you have by just living in the world.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:01

Yeah. No vegan can be perfect in an omnivore world. Like that's just impossible. Yeah. You do as much as you practically can. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:09

The next one we have, if we didn't eat farm animals, they would go extinct. Do you want them all to die?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:15

I've gotten, this is one of the reasons I had to stop going to threads. Yeah. I got in this argument so many times and it was like, it is so funny to watch omnivores that are arguing with you that they should be able to eat as many animals as they want and like institutionalized factory farming and slaughterhouses. But then as soon as like the idea of like a fully plant-based world comes up, They're like trying to protect the animals.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:41

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:42

Because we don't want them to all die. They'd go extinct. I'm like, but you didn't care. You don't seem to care about the animals day to day. Why do you care if they all go extinct? I don't understand.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:50

Yeah. I mean- This one is tricky to think about, but at the same time, it's like, I almost think of them, a lot of those animals as kind of functionally extinct already because they don't live in the wild.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:01

We removed them from the natural food chain. Yeah. And the ecosystem, effectively. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:08

I think the last wild ancestor of cattle, for example, was something called the aurochs. And it went extinct. So there's, like, effectively not a wild cow anymore.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:18

Yeah. For, like, chickens, they're, like, wild chickens, I think.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:22

Yeah, jungle fowl.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:23

Yeah. And you've got, like, turkeys that are wild. Pigs, there's wild boar. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I guess the cows are gone. Yeah. But, like, I don't know. For me, as a vegan, I'm not really, like, sad about the idea of cows going extinct because, like, that seems better than endlessly breeding them just to eat them. Like, no life is better than a horrible life.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:47

Yeah, and if there was somewhere where you could release a cow and they would roam free again in the wild, I just don't think that exists anymore because the last ancestor has gone extinct because of that problem.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:56

Right. And it's like effectively because we are mass breeding animals and pulling them out of their natural environment, we have effectively taken them out of the ecosystem and out of the natural food chain. So it's like, where would they even fit in? Like, they'd probably eat something. I mean, I just it's like once you pull something out entirely, like every other animal that would have interacted with them naturally has like figured out a different path. Right. So like they're just not in the food chain anymore. They're not in the ecosystem anymore. That's just how it is. I don't really think it's that sad. I mean, like, I really like the idea of no cow ever being in a factory farm again or a slaughterhouse, even if no more cows exist. I would say most vegans feel that way.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:36

So just as an aside, if you are listening and enjoying the episode or you like the things that we do, if you could please subscribe and follow and leave us a review, that helps us out a lot.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:46

Please and thank you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:47

All right, let's continue here. The next myth we have is I know farmers who love their animals and treat them well. Stop spreading vegan propaganda.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:55

Ooh, I got a lot of this when I posted about honey and eggs.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:00

The beekeepers were crazy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:01

The beekeepers were pissed. And all the people that buy from beekeepers, they were also pissed. Yeah. Um, I will say that there could be farmers that like their animals and treat them better than other places that farm animals. But, like, I don't really see how you can say they love them and treat them well if they kill them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:23

Yeah. Also, based on the conversations with the beekeepers and small farm people who we talked to over the years, there's a real disconnect between the way that a lot of people raised their bees or their animals on their family farm and how the animals are raised that end up in the grocery store. It's a different world.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:48

Yeah. And unless you know a guy or gal, you're definitely not. like buying like the small farmed animals at the grocery store. So this argument kind of always falls apart for me because it's like, what kind of animals do you think you're buying? Because like I for sure know you're eating at restaurants and shit. So like you're definitely not only eating animals from small farms where the farmers loved their animals and treated them well.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:14

Yeah. I think all the farmers that love their animals and treat them well are running animal sanctuaries. And the animals don't end up as some kind of product.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:23

I would agree. I don't really think there's a universe in which you can truly love an animal and then kill it. You know, like, I'm just thinking of pets here. If you love your dog, you're definitely not killing it and eating it. That would be an insane thought to even consider. Like, I think even if you were in, like, a dire situation, you still wouldn't do that with your family pet. So, yeah...

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:45

Yeah. And I'm sure they feel like they are treating them well and they're like kind to them or whatever up until like the slaughter, which is, you know, for cows, it's like 15 years before they would have died naturally.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:00

Right. Exactly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:01

So that's the real problem. Like you're cutting that life so short. How is that like a kindness, I guess?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:08

Yeah, and I think the other thing with like the farmer thing is like, like you said, a sanctuary. The sanctuary isn't making money off of the animals they keep. In fact, they're like spending a lot of money to give the animals a good place to live.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:21

Which is like a pet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:22

Yeah, until they naturally die, just like a pet. But like a farmer is incentivized by how much it can sell their animals for. Right. So.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:33

Or even, again, if it's just a small farm, you're incentivized by feeding your own family with the animal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:38

Right, exactly. Like, there is an incentive, right? Yeah. And if, it's kind of like the chicken thing, the chicken and the egg thing. It's like, yeah, maybe you treat your pet chicken who lays eggs for you really well while they're laying eggs for you. But, like, do you allow the chicken to keep living and eating food at your place when they stop producing eggs? Yeah. If the answer to that is no, then you don't love your animal. You know, like it should not be contingent on the money that you can make from that animal. That's not really how love works.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:10

The next one we have is I can eat eggs because I only buy cage-free.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:14

Boy, let me tell you something about cage-free eggs. It really just means that they get to stand outside of a cage, but they're still all standing on top of each other.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:25

Yeah, they basically get around cage-free by turning the entire enclosure into a cage.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:30

Exactly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:30

The warehouse or whatever.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:31

It's probably cheaper for them, actually. Yeah. They don't have to buy metal cages. They don't have to buy cages. It's just one big cage. Yeah. Yeah. We watched some crazy shit where basically they were like, they're like standing on dead chickens and stuff. Yeah, they like walk all over each other. It's really, really sad.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:45

It is sad. And then kind of the same with free roam. That basically means there's a door and most of them can't even get to the door.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:51

Right. Yeah. And like the space outside is really small and like maybe a couple would be able to be out there anyways. Right. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:59

Yeah, these are all just terms to make them, you know, basically be able to sell it a little more premium and make people feel better about eating it. But they don't really change the existence of the animal much.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:09

They almost don't mean much at all. Same with like humanely raised, sustainable, dolphin-free ones are really interesting. We watched the Seaspiracy documentary on that was pretty crazy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:19

That was crazy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:21

It was basically like this label's meaningless.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:22

Yeah, it was like we send people out every once in a while to check on the label. They usually get bribed and sometimes they never come back. Yeah, exactly. That's like how the dolphin-free auditing works. It's pretty crazy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:37

So just, you know, in general, wouldn't trust any of those labels. Like, if that's what you're basing your whole rationale for continuing to eat animals and animal products, I got some bad news for you. Yeah. They're fairly meaningless.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:50

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:51

And they definitely don't imply that the animals weren't harmed. So.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:54

Well, obviously, yeah, because you're eating it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:56

You're eating it. Yeah, it still has to die.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:58

Next up is veganism is wasteful because who's going to take the excess wool, eggs, honey, leather, etc.?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:04

Ooh, heard of this one a lot with the honey post. I have never gotten so much trolling as when I posted my honey post. But basically, people were like, they create an abundance of excess honey. Like, it's just going to sit there and rot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:19

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:19

And it's like, okay, well, let it i don't know

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:24

Also it's not that much like maybe if there was a world where you had all these bees for some reason that wasn't honey and you were like oh there's a couple extra tablespoons here that like okay whatever but that's not what's happening again you're like trying to resell it or you're filling bottles or whatever like um yeah and plus the bees are trying to like store up for a bad situation or like an emergency or something.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:47

Yeah and a lot of this other stuff Like the eggs and actually the honey, a lot of this, there's excess because we have genetically bred them to produce excessive amounts of stuff for human consumption at their own detriment, especially the eggs. Yeah. We talked about this, I think it was a couple podcasts ago, talking about vegetarian myths. Um, but because chickens lay an egg nearly every day in industrialized farms, that actually pulls a lot of the calcium out of their bones and they're left with all these health complications. Right. Because we genetically bred them to produce an excessive amount of eggs. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:22

Yeah. So there really isn't excess because you don't need, you don't know necessarily, when the animal might need it itself.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:29

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:30

Um, so yeah. Yeah. The honey, there are a lot of really nuanced arguments about the honey. And most of them are from, like, I raised a couple colonies in my backyard or something. And it's like, okay, that's a totally different situation. And, like, what is your incentive? Like, are you partnered up with some big honey reseller? Or are you just using honey for your house?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:50

Right. But then the other thing is, like, even with the honey, just even pulling the honey out, like, having to beekeep and instead of letting them have their own nests and stuff. Like, you always accidentally kill bees when you open and close those spaces. like we had beekeepers say that in our like while they were arguing with us they were like well yeah you're always gonna accidentally kill like 40 to 50 bees when you open and close that it's like okay well yeah that wouldn't happen with their hives right like they would just be able to go in and out freely yeah why

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:20

Are they in your backyard at all just let them be bees.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:23

Let them be yeah and then like the wool thing i mean all of these things it's like they're the animals are only there because you're trying to use them in the first place so is it wasteful or are we just like confining animals to use them and then the quote-unquote products are there yeah because like why aren't the sheep just like free roaming the countryside i don't you know

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 32:44

Yeah all right next up um if you eat vegetables but have issues with honey you're a hypocrite.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:50

Yeah, this one comes up a lot because bees are used to pollinate a lot of foods. So people are like, if you're going to eat foods that were pollinated by bees, what is your issue with honey? Because they say honey is a byproduct of all of these foods being pollinated.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:05

Yeah, we covered some of that in our honey episode and the honey blog post. We'll say when I was looking through that, one of the things I didn't know and I was kind of surprised by was that like honeybees basically got hired to pollinate farms and stuff. That was pretty interesting. But also there are a lot of plants that are self-pollinating that don't use pollinating insects and things like that. But also bees aren't necessarily the only things to do pollination. So this is, again, where it's more like because of the amount of food and like the monocropping situation, all those things kind of compound to the most efficient way to do this is to like hire a bunch of bees to come in and pollinate this thing. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the way it's done.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:46

Right. And in some cases, it's like to the detriment of the natural order of things and other species of bees that would normally pollinate.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:56

Yeah. And again, most of the vegan staples are self-pollinating. I can't remember the exact list right now, but I remember it was like most of the things we actually eat the most of. The next one is veganism means believing an ant has the same value as a human.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:10

I've seen, have you seen this one come up before? Because I have.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:13

Not ants specifically, but I've seen the general argument.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:15

Just of like, oh, so humans and XYZ animal are equivalent then. Yeah. And it's like, I don't think that's exactly what anyone is saying. I think it's just, why are we using animals if we don't need to? Like, all life has value. So like, why are we like harming animals when we don't need to be doing that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:32

And we like, as humans, we know better. We can think of alternative solutions. It's not really the same as like a wild animal. Yeah. And then, you know, while it's not necessarily that they're equivalent, I do find it helpful to think about the ethics kind of in the way where I'm like, how would I feel if this was being done to humans?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:51

Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:52

Because I think that really helps draw a line of like, okay, are we actually exploiting this animal or are we caring for this animal?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:00

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:01

So, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:02

Well, it's like, okay, yeah. So, if you use that line of thinking, just think of like, okay, you're walking, right? Right. And you accidentally step on an ant. But imagine that we were ants and they were big ass giants. And they were intentionally like breeding us in captivity to eat us. They were just like walking and they couldn't see us from way, way, way up there. And they accidentally stepped on us. I don't really think that's like cruel and inhumane. That's just like what it is. Like you're just huge and you can't see us.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:31

Right. Next up is vegans can't own pets.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:33

I hear that one a lot. And I think this is like, from what I can tell, kind of a gray area. There are some vegans that are like, I don't want to say extreme, but like they have very, very black and white views. Yeah. And they would say that, yeah, vegans can't even have companion animals. Right. But I know a lot of vegans that do.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:51

Yeah. And I don't know that I look at it the same way because I don't think it's, it's not exploitation. It's kind of a coexistence more than anything. Like, and you're not really getting anything out of it. Like we were talking about earlier with the farm sanctuary, you're basically just like using a lot of your resources to give the animal a better life. Right. And there's no end goal. Like you don't get anything out of that, you know, physically, like no product or anything like that you can actually use. So.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:18

Yeah. Just, just like, companionship and friendship.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:21

Yeah. So, yeah. But like you said, I think it is a little bit of a gray area, but I definitely don't consider it animal exploitation personally.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:29

I personally think vegans can have pets. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:32

I mean, like the definition of veganism is basically exploitation and harm. And I don't think it really falls under either of those.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:38

Yeah. I don't think so either. I think especially if you're rescuing a pet from a shelter, you're going to have a better life with you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:45

Yeah. Next up, animal rights take attention away from human rights.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:49

I've seen this a lot in politically left spaces. And I think there's a big flaw to this argument because, like, why can't we care about both? And then the thing that I think is funny is I've seen, like, leftist creators say this. And, like, they shit on vegans. Like, oh, you're taking attention away from blah, blah, blah, blah. Not that they disagree with us. But I'm like, cool, you can keep talking about human rights, but like what's keeping you from not eating animals? Because like you choosing a veggie burger over a burger didn't take anything away from you focused on human rights. You could just change your diet to be vegan.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:23

Yeah, you don't have to be like an advocate necessarily for it. You just you make the personal decision that doesn't like like you said, you eating something different takes nothing away from whatever attention you want to give to your human rights or whatever the cause you care about.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:34

Absurd because i'm like you could just change your it doesn't take any extra like attention even yeah you know what i mean and like in some cases it's it's cheaper to eat a plant-based diet so then you could go spend that money uh to donate to human right causes that you care about yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:49

I mean different people care about different things differently and feel like connected and called to do different things like yeah this is a vegan podcast that doesn't mean i don't care about human rights. I care a lot about human rights, but I just, you know, feel like I'm well positioned to talk about vegan stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:09

Exactly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:09

You can't do everything, you know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:11

Yeah, there's obviously going to be some people that need to talk about some different things. Yeah. But like if your whole thing about being anti-vegan is that it's taking away from human rights, but you're also not eating a vegan diet. I don't understand that because that doesn't take your attention away from what you're doing as an activist for human rights.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:28

It changes nothing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:30

And I will also say that human rights and animal rights are actually a lot more connected than you would think they are based on the human conditions. And a lot of these factory farms and slaughterhouses, just worker conditions are atrocious.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:43

Not only that, but I think veganism is kind of in favor of human rights because, a vegan food chain is significantly more efficient than an animal product-based food chain. So we would be able to more easily feed everybody on the planet if we were, you know, way more towards the vegan end of the spectrum in the diet. And I think that providing food to people who need food falls under human rights.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:10

Yeah. And I will say the environmental justice piece also falls under veganism because there are a lot of environmental justice issues with factory farms that are like in generally more poor or non-white communities. Yeah. Where it's like these pig farms are just horribly unhealthy for people to live next to. Yeah. Right. And they seem to only exist almost in like poor non-white spaces. So it's like, I feel like there's a very large intersection between human rights and animal rights on that space as well. Like just the environmental justice piece and environmental issues in general, which also I would say lump in with human rights because we all want to live on Earth longer in a less polluted, nice place.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:56

Yeah. The next one is if an animal lived a good life, killing it painlessly has no ethical issues.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:01

Yeah. I've seen that one a lot of like the small farms of like, well, we took really good care of it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:07

For four years.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:07

For four years. And then they could have lived to 20 years, but then we just killed them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:11

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:12

I don't know. Is it ethical to kill somebody at five years old if they could have lived to adulthood and then eat them?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:20

Yeah. Also, we just read the book Eating Animals and they were talking to people who were in some of the slaughterhouses. And I think it's like assumed that it was painless. Yeah. But there are a lot of times where it just goes wrong. and like the first time doesn't work.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:32

It's an insane amount of times. Yeah. Like if you want to be able to sleep at night, probably don't read that. But the amount of times there's just a big fuck up and the descriptions were pretty horrific. But yeah, I definitely wouldn't call them painless. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing is a lot of the smaller farms are having to use the same slaughterhouses as large factory farms. Yeah. A lot of the smaller, quote unquote, more humane slaughterhouses that actually like take the time to quote unquote, go do it properly so that it is painless or as pain-free as possible, those are, like, going away.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:06

Yeah. I think there's a quote that's like, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everybody would be vegan or plant-based. Yeah, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:12

That's the exact quote. That's definitely true. Yeah. All right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:14

The next one is, you can't be vegan if you live in a rural community.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:17

Now, I will say, depending on where you live, it could be more challenging to be vegan. But there are vegan protein staples that exist at all grocery stores almost.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:26

Yeah. I grew up. Beans, lentils. I grew up in a rural community. We had plenty of beans. So I don't know. It would be definitely harder maybe for like restaurants and stuff. But it's not really harder at the grocery store.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:38

Yeah. And I would say even if your grocery store doesn't carry like TVP or Vital Wheat Gluten or stuff like that, you can get that stuff online. And I'm more saying this specifically for the United States is like. You can almost get, like, shelf-stable foods delivered to your house anywhere in the U.S. specifically.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:54

And actually, a lot of the—it might be slightly easier in some ways if you're farther away from a grocery store. Like, if you're really out in the sticks and it takes you an hour to get to a grocery or whatever. Like, most of the vegan staples are dry goods, shelf-stable. Whereas, if you were trying to do that with meat, you'd have to stock up on meat, buy it in the freezer. Like, keep it all—like, there's a lot more that goes into that than just keeping a ton of, like, oats and beans and TVP. and things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:19

Shelf-stable pantry items. Yeah. That's funny because I knew this girl that lived in like the middle of nowhere, Iowa. And I was talking to her because I was there for a haz-op or whatever. Yeah. And she was saying that like the closest like legitimate grocery store was about two hours away. So she would just do like a monthly trip and get like a shit ton of frozen stuff. And just like she had a massive freezer to hold her for a month. But yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 42:43

If you want to go vegan, convert your freezer to storing frozen fruit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:47

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 42:47

You can get that in bulk.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:48

And then you can just store all your pantry items. There you go.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 42:52

Yeah, a big deep freeze full of berries and fruits and pineapple and whatnot. Vegetables. And then a big bag of beans and TVP. You're pretty much set.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:59

Vital wheat gluten, yeah. Soy curls, silken tofu that's shelf stable. Lots of options there.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:05

The next myth is vegan food is gross, boring, et cetera.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:09

I see that. Like, why do people think this? I don't know. You know what's sad is I used to think that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:15

I was going to say, I say I don't know, but I also used to think that. Why did I think that?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:19

I'll tell you why I used to think that. But it's because back when I was a vegetarian, for some reason I had this misconception that vegans were doing it for health reasons. Yeah. So, like, I just assumed all vegan food was, like, quote-unquote healthy food. Like, they were literally just eating boring, bland salads and stuff. Like, I didn't realize that vegan junk food really existed when I was a vegetarian. Right. Because I just thought it was, like, a health-based thing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:42

Yeah, I thought vegan, you know, for a while early on, before I started looking into, like, whole food plant-based diet and stuff, I thought vegan was, like, salad, basically. I don't know why. It's not. That doesn't make sense. But back, you know, probably in like the 80s and 90s, vegan was probably mostly salads.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:56

Right. I think it's also how is it represented on TV and movies and stuff. Or like when you go to a restaurant, what do you see as a vegan option? Because when I go, it was like bland, horrible food.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:07

Like the stuff you see on the menu that has vegan or even vegetarian is usually like the salad. Yeah, exactly. And everything else is like go fuck yourself.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:14

Exactly. And there's never like a protein option. Right. Um, yeah, that's just because restaurants don't know how to cook good vegan food. And I will say even healthy vegan food is really good. It was funny because we posted something on Reddit the other day that was, like, a bunch of pictures of different vegan food. And almost all of it was whole food plant-based. And some guy was like, this is all heavily processed with saturated fat garbage. And it's, like, it's literally blended cashews. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:41

I will say, if you ever want to be disillusioned of the idea that vegan food is gross and boring, you just go to ProteinDeficientVegan.com and look at the homepage. And then you're like, oh, shit, this is real fucking food.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:52

Yeah. I like cravings food. you know like i need comfort food yeah or like fucking uh yeah if you don't care about protein go look at nora's website yeah because that was like the first recipe website i discovered as a vegan and i was like oh vegan food isn't just salads holy shit

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:12

Yeah i mean she has good recipes but yours is like the stuff that people are thinking they'll never get to eat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:16

Again that's true so we're actually making pizza today yeah yeah this can be very exciting

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:22

Yeah nora's She has a lot of great.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:23

Recipes. She does.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:24

They're actually the ones we pretty much made when we first started going vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:27

Because we didn't know what to cook. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:29

But now, I prefer ProteinDeficientVegan.com.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:33

I'll pay him $5 later.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:36

All right. The next one is, all vegan products are super processed. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:41

I think this one's funny because, tell me, you only know about vegan food based on the grocery store aisle.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:47

Also, this one really gets to me because people will say, like, all vegan food is processed. And then my response almost every time is like, what food are you talking about? Like, yeah, like because vegan food is the ingredients. It's like beans, cashews, lentils, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you're talking about vegan products, then yeah, like anything in a box in a box at the grocery store is processed. So that's a different thing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:11

It's funny because it's like, yeah, vegan cheese is processed. What do you think dairy cheese is? Or like, oh, vegan burgers are processed. Vegan chicken nuggets are processed. I'm sorry. What did you think your meat chicken nuggets were? Yeah. Yeah, all food in boxes is usually processed. Sorry. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 46:29

So, yeah, and there, you know, there are different levels of processing. There's like a whole grading system for that kind of thing. Now, there are super processed vegan foods, just like there are super processed.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:38

And they're usually delicious.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 46:40

Yeah, like ice cream, super processed, delicious. But yeah, as a blanket statement, this doesn't make any more sense than just saying all products are super processed. Yeah. Because there are vegan ingredients that are just whole food ingredients. And then there are processed products, just like all the other food products there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 46:57

Yeah, and you can do a whole food plant-based diet pretty easy if you want to. And it's still going to be tasty food.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 47:03

Yeah, your taste buds might disagree with you for a couple of weeks, but they'll come around. The next one is, if a vegan company is owned by a non-vegan parent company, buying from them isn't vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 47:13

Okay, so I've actually seen people say this from both sides. I've seen non-vegans say this, and I've seen really, really intense vegans in the vegan subreddit say this. And I think it's like When will the madness end? Right. Because it's like for me, I'm buying a vegan product and I would prefer to buy from a vegan brand. But like if there isn't a vegan brand option, but I'm still going to buy the vegan product from a non-vegan brand because I need to eat and I need things. So I'm not going to put this on like super, super difficult mode. And then I will say, like, if you're like, oh, I can't buy a vegan product from a vegan brand if that vegan brand is owned by a non-vegan company, where does that end? Because and then it's like, are you shopping at a fully vegan grocery store? Because even giving your vegan money to a non-vegan grocery store is like doing essentially the same thing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:04

Yeah, I agree. And then like the food supply specifically is so complicated as far as the companies that own each other.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:13

It's like incestuous in a way.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:15

It's probably like in the whole grocery store, there are, you know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:18

Six brands. Six brand companies.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:20

So there are maybe a couple of little independent vegan brands that are like twice the price and they probably won't exist in a year. Yeah. Or you can show the bigger companies that like, and I'm not saying don't buy from the vegan brands, obviously.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:33

But some of the vegan brands are owned by bigger companies too. Yeah, exactly. Because eventually they get big enough, they need to do that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:38

Yeah, at some point they'll get big enough, they get bought by one of the bigger companies.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 48:41

And they kind of need to do that for distribution and stuff. Right. If you want to see it in the grocery store. Right. You almost need that. Like if you've ever watched Shark Tank, which I watch all the time. Yeah. It's just how it works. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 48:52

So, I mean, yeah, it's definitely great to support vegan brands. We'll do that when it's available, when and where we need it, things like that. But I have no qualms about buying a vegan product from a brand whose parent company's parent company makes other food. Like, we're showing them demand. They are getting more on board. They start developing more vegan products. I mean, I think it's a win all around. But, yeah, I mean, ideally, it'd be great if we can only buy vegan products from vegan companies, but there just aren't enough vegan companies and vegan products to really support that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 49:26

Yeah, and I will say that, in my opinion, the people that need the vegan products, like on the shelf, like I'm talking like vegan cheeses and vegan meat alternatives. It's usually like beginner vegans are going to rely on those more heavily than people that have been vegan for several years. So we don't want to get to a point where there's nothing in the grocery stores for beginner vegans to start on because that's going to make it harder for people to go vegan in general. Right. Like you need to keep the demand up so that the shelves are always stocked with vegan food and it makes it easy for people to transition.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 49:55

That's already a problem with like some of the things we like to buy or need for recipes or whatever. It's like, oh, you got to go to their own website and buy it and wait four weeks for it to show up. It's like, I would love for a big non-vegan brand to make this vegan product in that case. Like, so it would be more widely available. People can be more exposed to it, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I think if it's a vegan product, it's a vegan product.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:16

And you're going to buy it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:18

Yeah. I think we need to show demand even if it's, especially when it comes to like restaurants, like trying to. Oh, yeah. Like Burger King, Taco Bell, like when they drop vegan options, I think we should show like, hey, we appreciate there being vegan options. Like, obviously, we go to a lot of fully vegan restaurants and we support vegan owners and stuff. But, I mean, I think it's definitely a good idea to show the bigger non-vegan restaurants, food producers, et cetera, that there is demand for these kind of products.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 50:42

Exactly. Because, I mean, most cities, unless you're in a pretty big city, don't even have fully vegan restaurants.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 50:48

Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, this is like a real luxury if you're in a place that has more, maybe even has one fully vegan restaurant. Right. And then you'll probably have a couple of places that have like one or two vegan things on the menu. Right. And then when all else fails, go to Burger King.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 51:02

Exactly. I mean, we used to have vegan orange chicken at Panda Express.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 51:06

I know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 51:07

And they took it off the menu. That's what happens if we don't buy enough of stuff. Yeah. I used to love that, too. Really disappointing. Yeah. And Taco Bell, get back your vegan nacho cheese sauce that only lasted four days.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 51:17

Oh, that was a real disappointment.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 51:20

And just, like, in general, though, veganism, like we said, isn't about perfectionism. You do the best you can with what you have. and you will drive yourself absolutely batshit crazy if you try following the chain all the way up to like oh who owns this vegan brand well who owns that brand and who owns that brand and where does that money come from not

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 51:39

Only that but like okay say this is a fully vegan brand who are all the part owners of the company what other companies are they in like there are some companies who like have a fully vegan brand have a fully vegan product but then the owner has another food business that is non-vegan so that's kind of the same situation it's just a lot harder to see.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 51:58

Right it's like if yeah so if you go that direction right it's like oh it's this vegan brand but it's owned by another vegan brand but the owner of that brand he's not vegan and he's using all of his money to i don't know do a bunch of horrible shit start deliversteaks.com

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 52:14

Or something right that's not a real.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 52:16

Website yeah i know you just drive yourself insane yeah and for So, like, in my opinion, like, very little benefit, I think, is the main thing is, like, do the most you can with the time you have. Is that, like, a good use of your time? Are you really going to make, like, a huge difference? Like, basically, I don't know, boycotting all of the stuff in the supermarket? I don't know. I think you just make it harder for new vegans to go vegan. So, I think it's actually detrimental to a certain degree.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 52:41

Yeah, I agree. A lot of thoughts about that one. All right. The next myth is ending factory farming would destroy the economy and millions of farmers would be unemployed.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 52:50

I think that millions of farmers would need to find other things to farm. What was the documentary we watched where there was this one guy that was like a chicken farmer? who used to be like a chicken farmer and he was like doing his own thing. And then he eventually had to report up through one of the large chicken companies. And basically they were forcing him to do all the stuff that he didn't want to do and he felt really bad about it. And so eventually he turned his chicken farm into a mushroom farm.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 53:16

Yeah. I can't remember which one it was.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 53:18

Was it Eating Animals? I think it might have been the Eating Animals documentary.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 53:21

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there are options. I mean, you know, obviously I grew up around farmers. I don't want to put a bunch of farmers and farms out of business or anything. I think that shouldn't necessarily stop us from, you know, pulling back on exploitation of animals. Like, at a certain point, certain jobs or certain, you know, operations don't make as much sense for society as they used to. We've been through that for our entire history of humanity over time. There are plenty of jobs that existed a thousand years ago that don't necessarily exist or exist in the same way anymore. Yeah. So I think that's just changing with the times and, you know, with the different, the evolved ethics. And as things like we start to realize some things are bad, some things are good, it just changes. And hopefully a lot of farmers decide at some point, like, I can go another direction or I can start doing something else. And I'm sure there are plenty who aren't going to be able to ever do that. And maybe like the next generation of farmers will be able to make it a lot less dependent on animals.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 54:22

And the other thing to keep in mind is that factory farming doesn't end overnight. Like, we're talking about, like... basically a hundred years of decreased animal usage maybe longer than that before we get to like a fully vegan plant-based society so there's going to be plenty of time for people to figure out different careers it would kind of be like if you were going to college right now and you heard oh well i kind of wanted to do this job but it seems like it's not there aren't that many jobs for that anymore. Yeah. Right? The demand is low on that job. Yeah. I'm probably not going to pick that job. I'm going to go pick something else. Right. That's the situation where, and it's not like every single farmer loses their job overnight. That's not how this works.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 55:08

And maybe a lot of these will be able to, you know, change to something that's even more profitable. Like some of the newer technologies, maybe they have like, like you said, like a mushroom farm or something like that, or maybe like facilities where they're producing some of the lab grown meat. I don't exactly know farming well enough to know like what the options are there, but there could be other opportunities to use that land or those resources or the knowledge of the farmers for that could even be more profitable than like livestock farming.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 55:36

Yeah. I mean, I think it's very similar to, you know, I worked in oil and gas for a long time and I think it's very similar to those arguments where it's like the dependency on oil and gas doesn't go away overnight. Yeah. This is a gradual thing that's going to take decades and decades and decades to move toward different energy sources. People aren't just going to lose all their jobs overnight. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 55:57

And I will say, you know, just looking at the news, livestock farmers, ranchers, it doesn't exactly look like they're... You know, living on easy street as far as just being able to run their operation because the government's always getting involved and changing the rules on them and things like that. So, I mean, maybe some of them will just get fed up with having to deal with all that shit. And then they can start thinking, what do I want to do next? And maybe that could be some kind of plant-based situation.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:20

And the other thing is most of the farmers are now reporting up through these massive corporations where they don't have much free will to do things the way they want anyway. They're just having to do whatever they're being told.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:30

We've watched a lot of documentaries, and I think that for all the chicken farmers, especially poultry farmers, that has seemed like a real frustration across all of them is basically like we have to do it exactly the way that big company tells us to do it for us to be able to give our product to them, and we all really, really hate that. They're all, as far as I can tell, everybody, at least in those movies, is like itching for a way out.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:53

It's what it seems like. Yeah. I don't know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 56:55

We'll see how, again, this is like 100 years, 200 years.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 56:58

Yeah. It's a long. It would be a gradual shift. Right. And I think people could adjust to it because they would see it coming.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 57:05

Yeah. And then the last one we have is that veganism is just a diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 57:09

Veganism is definitely not just a diet. There is a vegan diet that is basically, you know, a fully plant-based diet. But veganism as a whole is, I would say, an ethical belief system.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 57:19

Yeah. It's like complete reduction or elimination of exploitation of animals. So it's like leather, riding horses, zoos, circuses, all this stuff is involved and related to veganism. It's not just the food. All right. Well, that is our myth list for the week. And then next week we'll have a different topic that is not a list of myths. But it's been fun to do these two because there's a lot of things like these arguments we've covered in the last two episodes we see come up over and over again when we talk about some of the other topics we've covered online. Like this could effectively be like a collection of all the feedback we've gotten about the last 60 episodes and like all the topics we've covered in those. So, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 57:59

This is the stuff I'm seeing like daily on social media that makes me never want to log into social media. Right. It's exhausting. All right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 58:07

So that's it for the main segment. Let's move into the bite-sized coaching. So if you don't know, I am a personal trainer. So in this every week, I try to do a little brief segment on some coaching topic that maybe my clients have asked me. Sometimes I think clients might ask me or somebody online has asked me because I do like ask me anything post on Reddit and Instagram. We also have our Deficient Vegans Discord community where people are talking about fitness on one of the channels there. So a lot of different places that a lot of different people are asking questions. But here in the segment, you get to ask the questions.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 58:37

I'm always really happy when you remember that I get to ask the question. So this week's question is, can I build real muscles with two-pound dumbbells, if that's all I have?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 58:47

Yeah. So the answer is potentially, but probably not for long. It really depends on how you use them. So one of the big principles for being able to build muscle long-term is to be able to make the exercise that you're doing for that muscle more challenging over time. So if you only have two pound dumbbells and you get to a point where you can do that exercise for like 20 reps, 30 reps, whatever, then those two pound dumbbells are no longer challenging enough for you, which means that your muscle growth won't be as good. And potentially, like, it'll be maintenance. So if you're able to do, like, if we're talking about curls or something. Oh, yeah. With two pound dumbbells, I mean, you could just do that all day until your shoulders get tired, basically.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:29

Then it becomes more like cardio, really, right? Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:32

And so something you could do, I mean, so I guess the way I think of it is like two pound dumbbells specifically basically don't exist. So we're really just talking about like, what can I do with my body weight is how I consider it. Because you don't have other dumbbells. The weight's never going to change. You're basically adding four pounds to your body weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 59:46

Right. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 59:47

So I would actually, if you're just using two pound dumbbells, just like keep them on the shelf and just use your body weight for the exercises. So, yeah, something like maybe a lateral raise could be lightweight where you're like raising your arms out to your side with the weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:00:00

Those hurt.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:00:01

And you know two pounds you might like you might go to do them with two pound dumbbells and the first week you do it you can only do 10 but then, next week when you try to do it again you're probably going to get like 15 and then the next week you might get you know 20 or whatever at a certain point that's not more than a month or two away definitely you're going to be like oh this is way too easy i need heavier dumbbells and now you're stuck so i would say that they're about as effective as your body weight and that's not to say you can't make progress like you can do things like lunges, split squats, a lot of stuff. If you're relying on your body weight, you can just limit your limbs. So maybe squats are not challenging enough with just your body weight, right? But if you're doing single leg squats or lunges, that basically makes it twice as hard for each leg. Not exactly, but roughly twice as hard for each leg. So you can make it a lot further. A lot of people, body weight lunges, they'll be able to progress on that for a long time in reps. Maybe sometime, maybe you can only at first do like 10 body weight split squats or body weight lunges or something. So if that's the case, you've probably got, you know, six months of runway before you need to start adding weights to that because you could always like add more sets, go up to eventually like 25 reps, something like that, or you really needed to. But eventually you will need to add weight, especially the leg exercises because leg muscles are so big and strong that it's really going to be hard to keep making progress, at most six months in you would probably need to add weight and something much more than two pound dumbbells you also can't really like again you're gonna add your two pounds and then where do you go from there yeah when it needs to be harder again.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:01:34

So basically your advice is if those two pound dumbbells just do specifically body weight exercises yeah and then eventually get get more weight

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:01:43

Yeah like adjustable dumbbells or a barbell or depending on what your setup is go to the gym yeah ideally gym membership yeah gym membership is the cheapest way out of this probably but But yeah, so two-pound dumbbells, they're like cardio where you hold something in your hand. A lot of those exercises that I've seen with them, but they're not really doing much for you. Again, it's like if you're holding a two-pound dumbbell in each hand, you've added four pounds to your body weight, which is meaningless almost.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:02:08

Now, could resistance bands on top of your body weight exercises lengthen that period before you need to buy heavier weights?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:02:16

Yeah, resistance bands are good because you can actually get resistance bands. they go up to almost, I think they actually have really good ones that are like 80, 100 pounds of resistance. So if you had progressive resistance bands, where you had like the 20 pound set, the 40 pound set, whatever, that would be a much better way to progress if you didn't have weights yet. But there are some issues with resistance bands too. Like, you know, it's hardest when they're totally stretched out and that doesn't really align with some exercises. And then also So like the difficulty changes the more you stretch it and things like that. But if that is what you have available, it's definitely a good tool. So resistance bands will probably get you for a while, but, you know, at a certain point, your legs are going to need, like, 100 pounds, 150 pounds of weight to really make progress, especially with something, like, where you're using both legs, like squats, things like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:07

So if they were starting with body weight, isn't there a subreddit for that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:10

Yeah, on Reddit, there's the Body Weight Fitness subreddit, all one word. And in their sidebar or in their wiki, they have, like, recommended body weight routines. So they have some really good ones. I think they have three or four. I would check them out there. Also, the fitness subreddit, just the normal fitness subreddit, has a wiki as well with routines, and they have a bodyweight section. So, yeah, I would say go look at some of those if you don't really have equipment to use at home. And they'll have, like, really well-structured, progressive bodyweight routines that'll help you out.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:40

All good places to start for free.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:03:42

Yeah, for sure. All right. What updates do we have this week? We have the book club starting very soon.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03:48

It starts on Tuesday. Yeah. If you don't know about this yet, we will be reading The Impactful Vegan by Robert Cheeke. It's a really good book, especially if you're a vegan and you want to spread more good because it basically gives you a lot of ideas on what you can do to further increase your impact with veganism.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:07

Yeah. So if you're interested in joining the book club and reading that book with us, we do that in the Deficient Vegans Discord, which is linked down in the show notes. We've got like almost 500 people in there now. Yeah. Yeah. Which is crazy because I think the last update we gave was like 250 people. It's really blown up.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:22

It's popping. But the book club is all 100% chat based. We don't do meetings because we have people from a ton of different time zones.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:30

Yeah. And countries.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:31

And countries. Yeah. So we do like one discussion question a day. And then, you know, obviously you can post your own discussion questions. It's very free form. But yeah, we handle one section of the book a week and we divide the book into four sections. So it's going to be a four-week-long book club.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:04:46

The last book we read was Eating Animals. That was the first book of the book club. So this one will be the second book, The Impactful Vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:04:52

And then in October, we're actually doing Tender is the Flesh. Oh, yeah. For an October Spooky Book Club special edition because normally we only do one a quarter. So that'll be fun, too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:05:03

Also, I think you maybe had some new recipes come out. What do you have?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:05:07

I made the most delicious high-protein chocolate Rice Krispie treats. Oh, those are so good. How many did you eat?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:05:13

Uh, yes. You were like, please leave me one of these for the pictures. I was like, challenge accepted.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:05:19

I can do that. No, they're really good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:05:23

Yeah, they're outstanding. And they're a little softer than some of the other ones. Yeah, yeah. So I know some people, like, I liked the crunchy ones, but I know some people were like, oh, these are a little too hard. But these are much softer, so.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:05:33

Yeah, they're kind of perfect. Yeah. um and then so that one's already on the website and then i'm also working on a high protein zucchini bread oh yeah with vital wheat gluten because i've been asked about it many many times i've gotten several requests about this one yeah and we are working on a high protein crunch wrap with TVP that one uh so we've made that the last two nights and it was pretty fucking good i think we

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:05:57

Need to keep testing we might need an iteration every day for that one just to really dial.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:06:01

Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we need some more testing. I agree.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:06:06

So, yeah, those are great. I get to be the guinea pig, which I'm very excited about. All of those have been really good so far. So, cool. All right. Well, we appreciate you guys listening. If you are listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, if you could leave us a review, that helps us out a lot. Listening on Spotify or YouTube, you can also leave us a comment. We love seeing those. And then, yeah, we've got links to our websites, our social media, the Deficient Vegans Discord, all that down in the show notes. if you want to get in touch in some other way. All right, I think that's it. Do you want to say bye? Bye, guys. Bye, everybody.