Can You Get Enough Protein on a Vegan Diet? Plant-Powered Protein with Brenda Davis RD & Cory Davis

Intro

hey everyone and welcome to Chef AJ live I’m your host Chef AJ and this is where I introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that I think you should know about I have two for the price of one two great guests today and it’s really a follow-up to yesterday’s show about a wonderful new book called plant power protein and today I have two of the three offers authors yesterday I had with Santo Molina on and I’ll link to that show below but today I have mother and son combination Rd by star D Brenda Davis and her son Corey Davis this will be his first time on the show please welcome them both hello what a what an accomplishment to write a book with a family member oh it was just a joy yes it sure was

well well Brenda I think at least to my audience and probably in the plant-based world you need no introduction but I’m not sure everyone knows who Corey is I only know of him by way of you and a story you used to tell about when he was a little boy going to McDonald’s finding out for the first time that hamburgers were actually made of cow I don’t know if that’s embarrassing to him or he wants to share that but welcome Corey tell us a little bit about yourself how you came to write this book with your mom and how you even got into this lifestyle in the first place

Meet Cory Davis

oh well thanks so much AJ you know I’ve been born and raised a vegetarian and went vegan in my early teens uh and I’ve been in animal rights Advocate and environmentalists for as long as I can remember ever since that story and I love that story so much of finding out that burgers were made from cows what what a disillusioning moment for me it was really a life-changing moment that altered the trajectory of where my life was going do you remember how old you were at the time I was three years old oh three that’s really even young because I mean think about it kids aren’t really told where their meat comes from and we don’t even name meat the name I mean once in a while we say fish or lamb but for the most part you know burger hamburger I mean that it doesn’t even indicate where it’s coming from yeah that’s right yeah so yeah it made it clear for me

uh since then you know I’ve been working in environmental work for over a decade in natural resource management I’ve been doing animal rights advocacy since I was a teenager on the care tour the compassion for Animals Road Expedition with Mom and Anthony Marr been volunteering with tracks the responsible Animal Care Society when I was a teenager so it’s always been a big part of my life and now I’m a professional agrologist oh what is just a professional agrologist okay you’re gonna have to explain that I’ve never heard before

professional agrologists work in food so we use Natural Sciences to inform food production and Reclamation Environmental Conservation of lands or aquatic habitat that produces food right now I’m currently in my day job I work on the regulatory side of thing but in my off time I like to do research and public Outreach on those topics and that’s what led me to writing the book with Mom it’s been a huge passion of mine the environmental aspect of the food we eat and I’m on a mission to reduce my impact and I think food is one of the biggest impact decisions a person can make

you know it’s interesting sorry because you know you know when I went vegan almost 50 years ago it was purely for ethical reasons and then around the early 2000s when Forks Over Knives came out people were going vegan for their own personal health but now the planet is is a thing especially I notice with younger people that may not even have been interested in the ethics or the health agreed 100 so now it’s it’s amazing when I was growing up there was very very few vegetarians I was always the outsider in that sense and of course food is such a powerful source of cultural Pride that everybody loves to share right

Why Cory is a vegan

but now you know it’s so common to have plant-based options when you go to your friend’s houses I I rarely have to even mention that I’m a vegan uh when I go because there’s always something and you know I just the other day I realized that I’m new to this neighborhood in Courtney British Columbia but just the other day I went out and saw my neighbor he’s wearing a shirt don’t ask me about my protein I want to ask you about your cholesterol oh I love that shirt yeah found out him and his whole family there are vegan uh so really nice to be in this this kind of community the world’s changing so fast yeah absolutely

Animal agriculture and climate change

why do you think that animal agriculture needs to be included in a discussion about climate change well I’ll tell you a story when I was a student at a university in environmental Sciences we had to calculate our carbon footprint and submit to our professor it is an assignment so as it turned out I had the lowest carbon footprint in my class and one student with a higher footprint protest that said but he drives and I ride my bike now I always ride my bike now I ride my bike to work to the gym to go get groceries but the professor looked at him and he looked at me and he said it’s because he doesn’t eat meat

and animal agriculture is a significant emitter often overlooked in the climate change discourse the impact and I think at a minimum is similar to that of all the missions coming from the tailpipes of Planes Trains and Automobiles and boats so as much as we hear the call to ride your bike walk fly or fly less Buy Local Buy hybrid car share if we’re being rational about this uh we should hear with that same level of passion and vigor eat less meat or no preferably no me fight I agree or know me yes

so Brenda implant power protein which I think is like your millionth book with the Santo or something like that 13 13. you talk about what the advantages are to choosing plant-based protein over animal protein sources can you talk about what some of them are other than the environmental effect

yeah to me the evidence is just so Crystal Clear protein-rich plant foods provide a more healthful a more ecologically sustainable and a Kinder way of providing protein to a very rapidly growing human population and in my opinion it just makes no sense to Source protein from animals when it’s not only unnecessary but it hurts humans it’s one of the biggest contributors to climate change and environmental degradation and it causes so much suffering for billions of animals every year who are raised and slaughtered for food and to me I I just think choosing plant protein sources is the least we can do as conscious human beings thank you

so Corey when it comes to animal protein sources or even just protein sources in general which ones have the highest greenhouse gas emissions which have the lowest sure well the ruminant animals cattle sheep and lamb that that all has the highest by far in dairy products as well as right up there with the highest footprint of course they emit methane and some of the lowest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions are peas beans pulses soy so tofu um tofu emits about 25 times less emissions than beef uh when we’re talking per gram of protein about 31 times less than beef if you’re talking per kilogram well per kilogram you know lentils reduces if if you’re doing a comparative analysis between beef and lentils for example it’s a 98 reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by choosing lentils I mean the relative reduction there is massive if you want to transition from a meatloaf to a lentil loaf to put that into comparison

I say animal agriculture is at a minimum comparable to all Transportation if you’re switching from a hybrid car or to a hybrid car that’s about a 46 percent reduction in emissions switching from beef to lentils in a in a loaf is 98 reduction so the scale there is massive

Where do you get your protein

yep thank you you know Brenda I’m sure you’ve been vegan almost as long as me or longer and I’m sure you get this question a lot and you address it in the book if you don’t eat animals where do you get your protein it sure is the number one question that all plant eaters seem to get um it’s so predictable because in our in our culture we we’ve literally been brainwashed to believe that the only real sources of protein or animal products and the reality is when somebody asked me that I just simply answer I get it from plant plants like beans and lentils and seeds and Grains and you know all plant foods provide protein and if time permits and they’re open to hearing more I usually explain to them what the RDA for protein actually is or the recommended dietary allowance you know it averages 46 grams for women 56 for men and most people think it’s like a hundred or more so they’re surprised at that

and and you know the largest study that that we have looking at protein intakes of similar health conscious individuals reported 75 grams a day for omnivores no that’s way less than the average Western diet eater this is you know health conscious individuals who are Adventists it was 73 grams a day for Pesco 71 for lacto opal and 71 for vegans so you know we were all well above what’s recommended and I think a lot of people just don’t don’t really realize that wow that’s something

Corey which animal proteins require the less amount of land and the most amount of land and same thing for plants like is there a hierarchy not that I want anyone to ever eat animals but you know yeah well half of the habitable land on planet Earth is used for agriculture it is the most extensive land use in the world and of that half about 75 percent is used for animal agriculture which only which only provides about 18 of the calories consumed

beef and lamb the grazing animals use the most amount of land by far and most of this is pasture land so it’s not crop land pasture is land that animals use to graze to forage for grass and it’s one of two things it’s often land that’s been converted to pasture such as Forest that’s been cleared of trees which so it was a carbon sink and now it’s a carbon source or it’s grasslands some of the most endangered threatened ecologically valuable misunderstood ecosystems on planet Earth um and they’re fed those animals who graze that land also use cropland they’re fed grains

um even prior to the feedlot it’s called creep feeding you want to introduce grains into their diet so it’s more acceptable when they enter the feedlot we often think about these small Family Farms where with cattle grazing in this picturesque landscape but that’s only one step in the supply chain because after that they go to the feedlot I live here in British Columbia where 90 of our cattle get auctioned off in the fall and end up at only two feedlots in Alberta some end up in the United States and elsewhere as well so certainly livestock used the most in terms of the lease I mean soy milk soybeans is really good Keys you could produce a lot with peas peas are such a good sustainable source of protein if you want to minimize your land print but also your water print your greenhouse gas emissions print and even water pollution print

Labgrown meat

wow I’m just curious what both of you think about lab-grown meat both nutritionally and environmentally do you want me to start Corey well I’ve been hearing you I’ve been hearing of late that it may be the case that lab-grown meat will be intensive and greenhouse gas emissions so I don’t know what it will look like in the future as the technology evolves but right now it does look like it might have quite a greenhouse gas emitting print in terms of land use I would I would suspect that it would be much smaller than it is today so it depends on how you’re weighing the different kinds of environmental impacts

yeah and and in my opinion of course if it’s lab grown uh it’s going to be very similar the flesh produced is going to be similar nutritionally to the flesh that you would get from animals that are that are raised and slaughtered for food however they are making some adjustments to try to produce lower fat lower saturated fat so they can make some of those adjustments but but in my view I even though this isn’t going to be a health food by any stretch of the imagination it’s still you know often red meat and red meat has a a ton of potential negative properties from the new 5gc the tmao production the saturated fat the cholesterol the heme iron and so on and so on but as an animal rights uh Advocate i s i i celebrate anything that closes the doors of slaughterhouses and if if we could raise meat that way instead of torturing billions of animals every year I’m putting on my party hat even if I don’t eat the stuff myself

Protein needs

great you put on your party hat Corey you bet I would oh that’s great you know Brenda maybe you could talk about and I’m sure and you I mean I know I’ve read the book but not everybody has which is why there’s a link below in both the chat and the show notes you can pick up this great book with beautiful pictures and beautiful recipes can you talk a little bit about if and how protein needs change whether one is on a vegan diet or not from the Cradle to the Grave

yeah absolutely so it’s interesting if you look at the RDA or the recommended dietary allowance for protein what you see is that during infancy you start out needing about 1.5 grams per kilogram 1.52 to be exact but but per kilogram body weight and that declines to about 1.2 during the last second half of the first year of life and then it goes down to about one it’s 1.05 for toddlers And 0.95 for children up to the age of 13. and then after that it’s 0.85 for for teenagers and just to clarify a kilogram is 2.2 pounds and then for adults it’s about 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight now it does go up to 1.1 uh during pregnancy and 1.3 during lactation and there is some discussion about needs being somewhat higher for seniors as well because their ability to absorb protein from food it declines because they’re not producing as many enzymes and acids and so forth and so there are a lot of authorities now saying one to 1.3 uh for seniors in some countries actually have adopted a plus 25 for seniors because of that um and it’s really to reduce the risk of sarcopenia you know muscle wasting and maintain bone density and all of those kinds of things so so that’s kind of how we go with with our needs and of course athletes need a little bit more um 1.2 to 2 is is usually what athletes are told to get and that we’re not talking about people that exercise for an hour a day like like we do but you know we’re talking about people that are competitive athletes and they do need more but they also eat more so it’s it’s pretty easy for them to meet their their requirements for protein

but is animal is plant-based protein really is good as animal protein and you can address press it nutritionally Brenda and Corey you can address it in your environmental essence yeah well from a nutritional uh standpoint um you know is it as good well it we’ve got actually several studies showing that that you know pitted against animal protein for for muscle hypertrophy muscle growth all of that that um if we provide the same amount of protein um we get the same results in terms of muscle growth there’s no no difference at all um in terms of uh of other impacts it’s way better I mean it causes less inflammation less less oxidative stress uh it has um you know contains fiber and you know with foods that are packaged with you know plant foods that are packaged with protein come with all of these protective components like phytochemicals and antioxidants and sterols and stanos and all sorts of things that promote health and whereas animal products come with things that tend to have more negative impacts so I I think and and I yeah I can’t tell you the number of athletes I’ve met that tell me that their recovery when they switch from an omnivorous to a plant-based diet improves dramatically and I think it’s because it’s a more anti-inflammatory diet and a Diet with you know that promotes less oxidative stress and so forth so I actually think it has huge huge advantages

no what about you Corey I also think plant protein has massive advantages on the environmental front and when I talk about the environment it’s really important to note that the environmental crisis we’re living in is just as much a social crisis it’s just as much a social crisis our environment impacts us and it’s disproportionately impacting minority communities more vulnerable countries and so forth so those impacts are not evenly distributed so we’re in a position of immense privilege to be so far removed from that mentally geographically in time

um you know this reminds me of a paper in 2018 I believe it was called the opportunity cost of animal agriculture on food losses and what they found out this was a paper from the United States so it just discussed agriculture in the United States but it looked at how much food we could produce with nutritionally equivalent or comparable plant-based alternatives to the major meat categories beef chicken to eggs and they cited eggs as being the least resource intensive meat product and what they found was you could produce 20 times more comparable plant-based alternatives to beef and two times more plant-based comparable nutrition wise to eggs and if the United States went 100 plant-based they could feed an additional 350 million people

think about that the United States alone right now there’s over 800 million people in the world who are who are starving 45 of all child deaths globally are related to starvation and we are so privileged to be able to make such an inefficient use of our food resources and this inefficiency is more than all food losses is what they found we wasted we lose about 30 percent of our food due to Leaky Supply chains and spoilage if we were to go 100 plant-based that would create more of an impact on food security than reducing all food losses so it’s major the plant protein is certainly Superior from an environmental footprint perspective and a social footprint perspective great thank you

Can seniors increase their protein intake

Brenda because they knew it we had a dietitian and a few people actually wrote in questions in advance so I’d like to ask a couple of those if it’s okay sure absolutely thank you and the first one is for Jean and she says it she wants to know that she hears that seniors should increase their protein intake to avoid sarcopenia but she’s also heard about the risk of oxalate in foods like beans quinoa Chia and soy foods which are also high protein sources so she wants to know what does that leave for her if she’s a senior with limited mobility and energy

oh that’s interesting and and it’s true oxalates can be a concern for some people especially if you’re prone to kidney stones but for most people you really don’t have to worry about oxalates and foods and a lot of our food preparation techniques can help to reduce the oxalates that are naturally present in Foods as well even cooking can reduce oxalates in Foods so and you know I think that that probably the most important thing that people can do is include a variety of foods in their diet not rely on you know the same you know spinach in their smoothies spinach and their salad spinach and you know you want to be eating a a diverse range of greens you want to eat a diverse range of beans and seeds and other foods and use food preparation techniques that helps to reduce energy nutrients like soaking and sprouting and fermenting and all of those and even cooking boiling and so forth so I think that’s the most important thing then of course if you are at high risk for for oxalate Stones calcium oxalate Stones then you’re going to need to you know take it a step further but for the average reasonably healthy individual that’s all you really need to do thank you

if I could just add to that Mom is promoting to diversity right this is so important because agro-diversity the diversity of crops we grow contributes to biodiversity as the United as the United Nations describes it and right now we have we’re growing we I think we get most of our calories from just 12 plants and five animals whereas there’s 350 000 edible plants on planet Earth and we’re currently cultivating about 150 of them so promoting diversity builds in resilience to the crops we have right if we’re only growing one kind of crop and then they suffer from an event such as drought pest disease it gets Amplified up the food chain and it’s really an affront to our food security so if we promote diverse crops and then a climatic event or a disease event a pest event occurs we have some some enforcement some extra security there with our diverse crops that we’re growing in our country so I just think I just want to throw that in because what she’s saying is not just important for the health of our bodies but the health of our ecosystems and food security

what are the 12 most common crops I’m guessing one of them’s potatoes yeah I believe it’s right I don’t know them all off the top of my head but rice um is certainly huge there’s huge there’s a few grains wheat is another one I think we get 60 of our calories from wheat corn and I can’t fight myself and rice that’s right so a vast majority from just a few right kasifa is in that 12 I believe around the world it’s quite popular but eat diversity right don’t just eat rice at your meals eat quinoa and amaranth and Camus berries and barley I mean there’s just so much out there we could have so much fun with so I really encourage people to just explore right and try new things new plant Foods because it’s good for you and the planet even if they don’t try new plant Foods just try plant Foods exactly and Cory’s the king of trying new flat Foods I just cannot ever I wrap my brain around everything he’s trying the roasts he makes the the you know the the flatbreads and the uh the pumpkin seed scrambled eggs and you name it it’s amazing he’s he’s very creative in the kitchen

I really try to cater to the palettes of my friends and family that I live with at home and I see on a regular basis so I’m always really trying to make these healthy Innovative recipes and products or whatever I might see online and inspire me to cater to them right get their foot in the door maybe it’ll Inspire them to try something at home and include more plants into their diet I think that’s such a powerful tool we have in the animal rights and the nutrition movement and the environmental movement it’s our social influence is so powerful thank you

okay uh Brenda another viewer wrote in a question her name is Judy and she said I need to occasion I need to supplement calcium if I’m not getting enough from vegetables or other plant-based Foods since I’m sometimes limited on the amount by gut issues I have read that a magnesium supplement should be taken to counterbalance calcium supplement intake uh Dr cooperman from consumer lab recommends separating medical minerals by a couple of hours each however an Australian nutritionist states that calcium needs magnesium to transport to bones and teeth and they should be taken in the same time in a one-to-one ratio of 300 milligrams each so each is properly absorbed and there’s no risk of magnesium deficiency taking before bed promotes a good night’s sleep you have said that calcium from fortified plant mix is considered a supplement as well so maybe you can comment on calcium magnesium take them together

yeah I would agree with the Australian that you know take them together just before bed the ratio all of that sounds good to me uh and and in terms of we don’t consider necessarily um fortified non-dairy melts as a supplement rather we think of them as a food that’s rich in calcium and that can help you if you’re if you’re really striving to meet that say you need 1200 milligrams a day because you’re over 50 as a woman or over 70 as a man uh then it to meet 12 to get 1200 milligrams a day from Whole plant foods can be really challenging and if you have osteoporosis and you really want to hit those targets including a couple of servings of non-dairy beverage like an unsweetened uh soy or or or you know cashew or oat or whatever kind of milk can really help get you there easily because most of them have three to four or 450 milligrams per cup and so it just it it’s it’s actually a very reasonable way to get there and the milks are also fortified with B12 and vitamin D and so it it helps boost a number of nutrients terrific

or you say that only 10 percent of agricultural land is cropland and the rest is used for grazing animals and it’s not productive to crops so with a growing population would it be unwise to not utilize it but also if again I I don’t want people to raise animals but what I hear is like you know what are they going to do with all the animals and can those Farmers be you know tell us the vegan Vision in other words so that’s the old adage this is something one of my college instructors said in a sustainability class only 10 percent of agricultural land is cropland the rest is marginal they call it they call it marginal land and um I I really it bothers me classifying land as marginal like that because that land was somebody’s home once upon a time and we come in and we classify it as this and that um so I I really don’t like that term marginal land it’s marginal and it’s agricultural capacity is what they say but I disagree

um Joseph poor for example he’s the author of the most cited paper on the environmental impacts of food consumption um he he said recently that if we were to transition to a plant-based diet we would reduce the amount of crop land we require by 20 percent so that’s a massive amount that’s a an absolutely massive amount live stock proponents they often point out how Pastor um is marginal and you can’t grow anything on it so it’s the sufficient use uh in reality you can grow some things on certain pasture like peeing like peas and legumes um but yeah what they’re talking about is it it’s grasslands and in North America especially United States cattle exists almost ubiquitously and of course earlier I said they are threatened beautiful ecologically valuable ecosystems here in British Columbia we live in uh we have semi-arid grasslands about four decades after cattle were introduced to BC 90 of the grasslands in the southern interior were overgrazed and folks in the 1920s were describing that area as a dust bowl we we completely overused that land and we don’t know what the ecological function of these grasslands were prior to cattle grazing so we really don’t have that reference point

um and of course we could just grow so much more crops than uh and feed people directly with those crops than by feeding them to animals so that would be my vision for sure of course this is a transition if we were to completely remove cattle from the landscape immediately there would be cascading impacts to the environment because what we essentially did here was remove bison from the landscape and replace bison with cattle prior to Western settlement there are about three 30 to 60 million bison that roamed the the plains in the in the Great Plains and the Prairies in the United States and Canada today there’s 110 million cattle and they say that we’re mimicking bison Behavior with cattle on the landscape and it’s true you have to have some grazing there present right but also what we did not just removed the Bison we removed the Predator from the landscape and of course ecologists described the role of predators and ecosystems through trophic Cascades Predators mediate herbivore populations through preying on them but that’s just the beginning those trophic Cascades and and they mediate those populations because if those populations get too big it has impacts on the vegetation which then have impacts on the soil the soils could get exposed to Sun it could erode it can impact all kinds of things and you remove that Predator what they say is it simplifies the environment right so so it simplifies the environment also in the plant communities

what we’ve done is we’ve removed a lot of the Predators we’ve removed that top down force in the ecosystem replaced the big herbivores the Bison with cattle and then we remove them from the environment so natural ecosystems would have the Bison roaming the Great Plains a predator would eat them and there’d be all this biomass in the ground and early explorers or early ecologists who were surveying the lands would call this they would describe it as like this Bastion of biodiversity here would come the vultures and there’d be all of these microbes and and insects and other animals coming to feed off of the Bison Distributing the nutrients from the Bison across the landscape really fueling the ecosystem but now we graze cattle a wolf comes in Absa cattle a cal you compensate the Rancher they kill wolves constantly there’s this campaign to kill wolves to kill bears grizzly bears black bears even elk other other herbivores there’s campaigns to call is what they call it the cola the elk because there’s this perception that elk might transmit these or they’re competing for forage with cattle and so we’re really surveying the land thinking well how could we best raise cattle not what’s best for the ecosystem but what they’re telling the public is that oh we’re mimicking bison populations and that’s true they’re trying to they’re not mimicking bison perfectly by any stretch of the imagination and there’s a lot more pressure from cattle on the landscape than there was from bison bison by the way used to migrate long distances whereas cattle are kept within a certain range from the ranch of course and then we’re removing them and putting them into our wastewater treatment system so it’s not a direct it’s not a direct mimicking but we can’t just remove them either we have to slowly replace cattle again with bison or something and reintroduce Predators if we want our ecosystems to be resilient so it’s it’s a long road ahead if we do it would be a slow transition but first and foremost I don’t want to see another cattle slaughter a cow slaughtered it just breaks my heart how we treat these animals so the transition I want to see is a Humane one but um that would be my perspective what I would want to see

Can athletes get enough protein

thank you Brenda to switch gears for a bit could you talk a little bit about athletes and if they have special needs is plant protein adequate can they get enough protein on a plant-based diet good enough to not only build muscle but maintain muscle and do they require protein powders yeah well first of all athletes do as I mentioned before require more protein per kilogram body weight or per pound body weight they need 1.2 to 2 grams per kilogram body weight for most athletes for most competitive athletes and and um it’s you know if you think of a you know an 80 kilogram athlete perhaps it might need 120 grams of protein per day but if that athlete was consuming 3 500 calories which would be very typical that’d be less than 14 of their total calories and that’s you know just par for the course for any plant-based eater so it’s not as difficult as what a lot of people think

and and certainly they do need to get enough you know there’s some amino acids that are especially important for athletes like Branch chain amino acids it’s like like you know leucine and other branched chain amino acids and and so those amino acids were getting more from I mean they’re more concentrated in animal products but we can still get plenty from from legumes and seeds and nuts and Grains and especially you know seitan and all of those kinds of things can provide uh plenty of of Branch chain uh amino acids now you asked if if they require a protein powder and the answer is no nobody requires a protein powder that’s not to say that a protein power couldn’t be an option or may not be helpful for some athletes who have especially High needs who are doing really intense training and who are having a hard time eating enough um it may be of value for them

but if you are using and I you know I like my husband likes to have these smoothies and I I like to to make them reasonable sources of protein for him and but what I do is I add hemp seeds and frozen peas and and a soy milk and you know just different things that are more whole or very minimally processed foods rather than uh something like a a protein powder but if you do you’re determined to have a protein powder you want to be choosing you know a mix of of proteins I think you know soy pumpkin hemp pea you know are all good options but what came as a really big surprise to me when I was researching the amino acid content of these different uh sources concentrated protein sources the one that came up number one for for protein and for leucine especially was corn protein and the second was potato protein which was really surprising so you know these Foods aren’t as concentrated in proteins but if you extract the protein from them the amino acid profile it’s actually really impressive

um so you know and then the next thing you want to do is look at the ingredient list so you want to be really wary of protein powders that contain a lot of fillers and additives and preservatives and sugars and thickeners and colors and you know all that sort of stuff you want to make sure you’re not getting with your protein powder lead and Arsenic and cadmic and mercury and you know all of the pesticides and so on there’s actually um a group called The Clean label project and and and they you know they they’ll provide you with sort of a list of which protein powders are clean and which aren’t so clean there are some vegan protein powders uh that I think have actually done a pretty good job of it uh and then there are some third-party certification stamps on labels to show that the product has been screened for safety all that having been said very few people actually need protein powders right and if if they did desire one is there a brand you might be able to recommend well there’s one called complement that is uh a vegan um I think it’s called compliment right yeah and um it’s it it’s a wonderful uh ethical clean vegan product terrific thank you

so Corey why do you think that animal agriculture needs to be included in the discussion about water scarcity well water scarcity it’s a dangerous problem uh 2020 study published by Nature sustainability a journal of nature one of the most well-respected Journal Publishers in the world assess the primary users of river water in the Western United States that entire region and found that the irrigation of animal feed crops and in particular specifically cattle feed crops was the largest user and they insinuated that the beef and dairy industry are the leading drivers the leading drivers of water shortages and fish endangerment in the Western United States and of course fish are such a precious resource they provide sustenance for indigenous peoples they feed Wildlife they provide nutrients to the land they’re keystone species and Aquatic ecosystems we can’t under we can’t undervalue fish in our aquatic ecosystems and just let that sink in for a moment they were the biggest user was animal feed crops we’re growing almonds we’re growing all this other stuff out there it was cattle feed crops we’re also growing crops for all kinds of other animals but it just goes to show the inefficient inefficiency there especially when drought in the Western United States can force ranchers to call their own cattle as a result it’s quite disturbing

agriculture is confidently the largest user of freshwater resources in the world you know we often attack industrial practices such as fracking which uses about 70 to 140 billion gallons of water annually fracking is a method of extracting oil and gas from Rock our home water use for example makes up about four percent of Humanity’s total water use it’s a fair chunk indeed we should certainly uh not water our Lawns so much take shorter showers I agree with all of that but agriculture is by far the largest water usage in the world it’s responsible from anywhere between 70 to 85 percent of our total use in any given year that’s tens of trillions of gallons annually so if there’s one thing a consumer can do to minimize that impact it would be to choose or Trend towards slant towards low water use Foods because the relative reduction in water use is massive and it’s on a daily basis so I really think animal agriculture is a huge it’s a massive user of water an inefficient one at that you know the BC assembly of First Nations here they they call water the lifeblood of Mother Earth and we’re treating it with very little respect bleeding her dry for inefficient reason we don’t valuate water properly for its true value on the market it’s not a commodity like that to be traded on the marketplace like bottled water might be but we’re paying for convenience with the bottle of water agriculture users they get to use that water for next to nothing yeah and we don’t see that reflect we don’t see the true cost reflected in the food prices so that is very true

so there’s a question from a live viewer named Judy and she wants to know how many recipes are in the new book and do you guys each have a favorite okay um I I think there’s about 30 but I’d actually have to count um Corey do you have a favorite yeah I have many favorites I mean those chocolate cookies are amazing uh but one of my go-to’s is the chickpea smash I love that one it’s so good it’s so easy and it’s easy to take for lunches or share with friends when you go on a on a hike or anything like that so I really like that one of course visanto loves the godogato and I’ve got a second that it’s a really good recipe all of our recipes by the way uh were tested by professional recipe testers we went back and forth until every single one got a five star rating yes it was quite the process indeed that’s all quite all quite delicious

I I love the the big bowl I love bowls I just think they’re so much fun you have your you know your base of you know sweet potato or quinoa or something and then all the steamed veggies and then your protein whatever beans or tofu or what whatever you’re putting and then some sort of delicious sauce and I always like to put a few Sprouts on top and make it really pretty and so I love bowls and I think the the um uh peanut edamame noodle salad is great I love the carrot cookies myself um so anyway there’s lots of fun recipes definitely nice where did this obsession with protein come from and are there any side effects that is it possible to get too much protein and if so are there side effects to that

yeah so you know the obsession with protein uh actually I would say stem from a very very early concerns about malnutrition uh so you know way back when in the you know late 1800s early 1900s hunger and malnutrition really were the the most serious Public Health uh problems that we had and and we had a lot of nutritional deficiency diseases and protein was was one of them and so you know the government ended up subsidizing and supporting uh animal products to ensure that people got enough of the nutrients that seemed to be lacking and it it kind of placed a Halo on those foods and on protein itself and that protein is super important I mean it it’s necessary for structure function for energy for it just for our bones for you name it protein is a really important nutrient but we as I mentioned don’t need as much as what we often think we do and my own personal opinion about can we get too much it’s actually probably not very easy to get too much from Whole plant Foods I think if you eat whatever range of whole plant foods you eat you’re not going to get too much protein most of them have somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of calories from protein but and and I think that’s within a fairly safe range but if you’re eating a diet like a you know a very animal heavy diet

um such as a very low carbohydrate diet low carbohydrate diets are generally by definition fairly High animal food diets because all plant foods contain carbohydrates uh you know all whole plant foods and and animal products contain none except for milk of course with lactose or very very little and and so in low carb diets animal products tend to be featured more heavily and we know um we have unbelievable amount of the evidence that eating too much animal protein is not a good idea in fact there was a a study in 2020 that showed we would have a 10 drop in overall mortality if we replace animal protein just three percent of calories from animal protein that’s about 60 calories with plant protein and and so you you know we and and the studies are so consistent that replacing animal protein with plant protein provides an advantage in fact there was a study from Japan and this is a study of close to 70 000 or more people that mortality dropped 34 when just three percent of calories from red meat were replaced with plant protein and 46 when three percent of calories from processed meat were replaced with plant protein

and there’s another study that you’ve probably heard of this one by Levine in 2014 that actually looked at people eating at least 20 percent of calories from protein and they had increased risk of mortality and of all of the diseases heart disease and cancer and diabetes and all of those things and it was you know pretty dramatically higher but that um that increase in Risk was was pretty much wiped out if that 20 came from plants and not from animals so so generally we see increased risk with animal protein decreased risk of plant protein sounds good

Lori what can we do to minimize our water use through our diet yeah so our dietary our dietary choices they are profoundly the most impactful tool we can consider when minimizing our water footprint you know per weight though know that cheese and nuts farmed fish prawns rice lamb beef and poultry I’ll use the most water barley soya milk root vegetables tofu corn peas and legumes use the least uh nuts was at the top there typically a serving size of nuts is about one ounce serving size of cheese is about one and a half to two ounces whereas a six ounce steak is common so we’ve got to think about this in relative terms eat nut sparingly you probably already do so when you look at the most water intensive Foods you find that they’re mostly animal products so when you look at the least intensive Foods they’re mostly plant products so slant plant is what I really think especially when we think in terms of protein sources minimizing our water use in our diet

uh beef from dairy cows uses a lot more water than non-dairy cows they live a lot longer not non-dairy cows so to be fair I like to compare tofu with non-dairy beef tofu requires almost um 150 liters or so of fresh water per kilogram of product non-dairy beef requires over 1400 liters of water per kilogram of product on on average so that’s almost 10 times over nine times more water that’s almost a thousand percent more water to produce beef than tofu then you know people often opt for farmed fish is a healthy option but Farm fish requires over 3 500 liters of water per kilogram just astounding amounts of water 23 times more than tofu it’s a lot poultry uses a moderate amount of water by no means the most intensive of the water users water users it’s about 660 liters of water per kilogram of product which is four times more than tofu so just switching from poultry to tofu you can minimize that water footprint by four times fourfold it’s massive so just little changes in our diet slanting towards plants eating more of those low resource intensive plant foods can really make a dramatic decrease in your water footprint horrific

Brenda Clark would like to know if the recipes in the book are SOS free meaning free of salt oil and sugar well you know I thought they all were and I think mine were I think we had a couple that have oil as a as an optional ingredient um and it’s mostly just for flavoring like in the tofu fingers that are air fried it’s a little tiny bit of sesame oil I think but it’s you know certainly not uh critical part of the recipe I would say 90 of the recipes are now but I should say they’re they’re free of of sugar and oil mostly but not necessarily of salt so again uh the um uh some of them have tamari and things like that that are salty seasonings so but of course those are things that don’t you know you can you can modify uh uh to go with your diet if you prefer not to use them you certainly don’t have to great

well let’s talk about soy now because uh one of the viewers is saying tofu is high in estrogens so maybe tell the truth about soy and if it’s a good option for women that can’t breastfeed to feed a soy formula okay so yeah um first of all I I think soy has unfairly received a lot of negative press and I think we probably have more research on soy than any single other food out there um the estrogens in soy are called phytoestrogens and and there are selective estrogen receptor modulators so when they uh for example um attach to an estrogen receptor site in some cases they act like weak estrogens and in some cases they act more like anti-estrogens as they do and it seems in in breast tissue and so that you know for breast cancer for example the study’s overwhelmingly suggest that they not only um probably reduce risk especially if you consume soyas and Adolescent or a child um but they also seem to reduce risk of of recurrence of the breast cancer and risk of dying from the breast cancer and so the estrogens in soy are are extremely um weak relative to human estrogen and so in many cases they can actually keep human estrogens off the estrogen receptor sites which can be an advantage and it can also be an advantage in terms of prostate cancer for men uh can it can be an advantage in terms of well the protein can in terms of cardiovascular risk and and certainly in terms of kidney disease soy has a lot less impact than animal proteins and and so it’s it you know and and the other thing is for symptoms of menopause there are a number of studies that show soy reduces symptoms of menopause and I know when I went through menopause I’m 64 years old but when I went through menopause I really didn’t have hardly any symptoms at all I felt warm once in a while but not not sweaty or hot just slightly warm and that was it and it it it was very you know very quick to go through it and and it wasn’t really much of an issue

um now in terms of soy for for formula I know a lot of people that can’t breastfeed if they’re vegan they Wonder well what can I feed my baby there there’s actually a couple of formulas out of Europe that are non-solute formulas that are entirely vegan and one is rice based one is sort of rice and pea based they’re not very um easy to get in North America they’re kind of expensive because they have to be shipped in North America there is um you know organic soy based formula and then there are several non-organic non-GMO uh soy based formulas in the American Academy of Pediatrics says soy formula safer term infants um and it doesn’t affect their sexual development their thyroid function their brain function their immune system we’ve got a lot of studies on this uh so generally they’re they’re thought to be safe my biggest concern about soy formula is that it’s higher in aluminum than breast milk or cow’s milk formula for that matter um yeah it’s it’s thought that the amount of aluminum there is safe for full-term infants but it’s not safe for free turn for pre-term infants that weigh less than four pounds it’s not safe for babies with compromised kidneys it’s not safe for babies with congenital hypothyroidism so you know it’s in those babies you might want to use a hypoallergenic formula that’s an amino acid-based formula or try to get a formula from Europe or use um you know donor breast milk although that can be very expensive but there are options yeah this was to ask you about donor milk

hey Corey one of the live viewers named Lori said is there anywhere to get more information from you do you have a YouTube or social media presence anywhere please check out our website plantpoweredprotein.com and perhaps one day I’ll put out more on social media so stay tuned yeah so your mom’s an avid athlete I know that she can do her agent push-ups you’re obviously younger than her but are you as Avid of an athlete as Brenda I try but gosh is it hard to keep up with Mom I’ll tell you and Cory you might want to give your email address just if somebody really wants to touch bases email address is on the website so please check that out I think it’s Corey Davis at plantpoweredprotein.com something like that

yeah so I don’t know if you watched the show before Corey since you’re a First Time guest you have to get the question that every guest gets and Brenda can answer it to what do you eat in a day well for me I eat diversity I I must eat something different every day I really like um like a cooked cereal for breakfast so sometimes I do muesli sometimes I do camo berries sometimes I do amaranth which is one of my real favorites and I like doing mix sometimes always throw in a little bit of seeds and prunes some fruit so delicious for lunch it’s grab and go whatever I could get that chickpea smash is fantastic I always like to keep a lot of chopped veggies in my fridge so when I’m grabbing my lunch it’s boom grab a bunch of veggies and some hummus and off I go uh and for dinner it’s different every time so right now I have my in-laws staying with me who aren’t vegetarian but I have been cooking for them and they’ve been cooking for me vegan dinners and in fact they love the vegan dinner so much they’re going to carry on this tradition and so just sharing food is so impactful but they’re from Asia so I get a lot of real good authentic Chinese food for dinner and oh is it good nice nice

Brenda someone’s asking if you’re going to do any future cruises oh you know what I I was asked to go on the cruise this year and I declined because I was still a little bit nervous about it um but I think I probably will agree to do one again in the future thanks for asking well you know they I I just I was at a meet-up Sunday with a lot of people that got covered on that ship just so you know okay that was my concern one of my concerns yeah yeah so it was a nurse and her husband and she was telling about all the people that succumbed even uh even this year so maybe you made the right decision

well this is great guys and this book is called plant powered protein the link is in the chat in the show notes if you want to check it out there’s some beautiful pictures like look at these cookies Corey do you actually make the recipes though oh yeah oh you bet I do you bet I do that’s great well congrats will this be the first of many books together as a family I’m I’m not sure but I kind of hope so me too yeah I hope this is the first yeah not the last thank you guys so much I wish you every success with the book and thank you both for what you do for the planet the animals and human health uh it’s been a pleasure such a blessing you know with you today

do you know Corey you have like literally the nicest mother on the on the planet I do she is just the most competent person empathetic uh she’s always seen the best in me even at my worst she’s always uplifted me and her positive energy can uplift anybody I feel so lucky vegan Mother Teresa I swear oh you guys thank you I’m I’m so so proud of you Corey and I’m so grateful to you AJ for all you’re doing uh to make the world a better place and thanks so much for having us and anytime you I mean you can come on anytime and come on every month if you want people love for you to answer have a great rest of your day too and thanks all of you for watching another episode of Chef AJ live please come back earlier tomorrow at 10 A.M Pacific time for two old salts those are Dr mcdougall’s worlds they’re going to talk nutrition Dr John McDougall and Dr Clarence