Only Plants Make Protein And The Benefits Of Beans

the next three questions um one tell us about the study showing the reduction in cardiovascular disease when women substituted beef with beans second question is it true that all protein is made by plants that no animal is able to take nitrogen out of the air and incorporate it into an amino acid and that only plants can do that so any protein you get from an animal source is a secondhand plant protein and third what tests should we get to make sure we are healthy where do we start should we get a blood test a urine test a stool test a hair analysis test a bone density test if we as concerned about our health and want to go to the doctor and say let’s see what’s going on with me where do we start what should we do

okay i’m going to snatch up that protein question before anybody beats me to it and the answer is only plants make protein and when i say that i mean only plants have the ability to take nitrogen atoms from the air break them apart red chemically reduce them and then incorporate them into the amino acids that ultimately make up all proteins any protein you get from an animal source is in one way or another recycled plant protein now animals can take these uh plant proteins and deconstruct them and reconstruct them into different amino acids but ultimately that nitrogen came from a plant so truly only plants uh make protein and you can take that to the bank

i think i would just add just to qualify the statement that that only plants make essential amino acids okay so there’s an ability to build proteins and animals but only plants so the thing that you need to remember is so many people say about quality of protein and you must eat animal products to get the essential amino acids they all come from plants plants make them it’s where they come from it doesn’t make any sense to me it really defies rationality to assume we can’t get them from planets it’s where they come from so just to add that

all right so folks i want to point out what these two sneaky devils just did they both ganged up on one question and left the other two for me just so we’re clear on that all right fine then so in terms of all the tests you ought to do let’s make this one short refer to the us preventive services task force best evidence-based repository of what tests actually produce a likelihood of benefit for you should you get a total body scan no will you identify tests you might want to do for specific reasons that are beyond this yes but if the question is what should everybody have done at what age varying by sex and health risk and so forth this is the best evidence-based repository of those guidelines anywhere on the planet the u.s preventive services task force let’s just leave that one there rather than get into minutia about all kinds of separate tests and then the other question was about the 2010 study by bernstein at all do you want to jump in about the usps

yeah about the test the one the two things that i would say that all vegans should have tested when you go to your doctor make sure they check your b12 level make sure they check your d3 uh aka i’m not i can’t say vitamin d i’m sorry um you’re uh d3 level um so to make sure that you are replete in both of those uh so whatever else they do make sure they check those two things

good advice so the the other question was about the this study this is a 2010 study bernstein at all out of harvard nurses health study cohort what was interesting about this so this was looking at variations in protein sources in the diet and cardiovascular disease and what makes it interesting because there’s a lot of literature on that and i think you’ve gotten our collective opinion on the topic this was very food specific so it looked at so if if people eat poultry instead of red meat what happens to heart disease and if they eat fish instead of poultry and if they eat fish instead of beef and that if they eat beans instead of poultry and beans instead of fish and beans instead of beef there’s a really nice chart in the middle of the paper showing the magnitude of risk reduction with every one of these substitutions measured in terms of the rates of cardiovascular disease and this this study was exclusively in women there’s no reason to think it would be much different in men but it showed that all of the substitutions you would expect caused reductions in cardiovascular disease but by far and away you go down this plot and you’re looking at bigger and bigger and bigger differences by far the the most massive risk reduction was the substitution of beans for beef which also offer the advantage of tremendous benefit to the planet massively less water utilization massively less greenhouse gas emissions almost all the other substitutions in the chart are in accord with what you would expect so fish was better than beef that maybe the one that was a little least clear but i think it was a very small cell in the study was beans replacing fish this question has come up a number of times at the conference what about fish but it looked like that substitution favored beans as well and again just to repeat what i’ve said before eating fish is certainly bad for the fish whatever the effects are on the people so you can kind of just see the magnitude of benefit associated with all of these individual food substitutions which is a nice level of granularity to superimpose on the high level message that we should be getting our protein exclusively or at least overwhelmingly from plants