Show Notes

In this episode of the Vegans Fitness and Nutrition Podcast, we unpack the intricacies of dietary fats, comparing their caloric density to proteins and carbohydrates and stressing the importance of mindful consumption to manage your calorie intake effectively. We dive deep into the necessity of accurate portion measurements for high-fat foods like peanut butter and the critical role of essential fatty acids.We also break down the various types of fats, identifying polyunsaturated fats as the champions for health.

Switching gears, we share our most recent culinary escapades in Chicago, including a quirky chat about the outrageously entertaining shark movie “Under Paris.” Imagine mutant sharks wreaking havoc at a triathlon event! We also spotlight a surprising vegan hit from the Republican National Convention: vegan jackfruit brisket. Despite our personal struggles with jackfruit, we can’t ignore its BBQ potential. From Voodoo Donuts to Chicago Diner, we highlight our favorite vegan eateries in downtown Chicago. We even have a special shoutout to Pie Pie My Darling for their exceptional vegan bakery delights. And for those planning their next vegan food adventure, stay tuned as we prepare to explore Milwaukee’s vegan scene, with an open call for your recommendations!

Full Podcast Transcript

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Hi, welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition Podcast, episode 14. I am the muscle deficient vegan here with the protein deficient vegan. Do you want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Hi, everybody.

So today we’re going to talk about dietary fats a little bit. We’ve done a couple of episodes about carbohydrates and another episode about macronutrients, and then we also did one about fiber. So now we’re going to talk a little bit about dietary fat and next week, I think we’re going to talk about protein in a little more detail.

So right off the bat, dietary fat has nine calories per gram of fat. Protein has four. Carbohydrates have four. So fat is over twice as calorically dense as protein or carbohydrates.

So that means you have to pay extra attention to fat sources when you’re trying to count calories because you can get a handful of almonds or walnuts or something, and that’ll be, you know, maybe 200 calories. So it’s really easy to get a lot of calories from something that’s high in fat.

It’s also pretty easy to go over your calories with oils. If you put an extra tablespoon of oil in something, that’s like an extra 120 calories, and people are pretty generous with oil if they’re not measuring calories at all. So you gotta be careful with that.

That also includes restaurants. Restaurants, even if they just make you some vegetables or something, they’ll tend to put a lot of oil on that. So you really gotta be careful with oils in general.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You know, what’s really deceiving?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: What is?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Freaking peanut butter, man.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh peanut butter. Yes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, this is it.

This is two tablespoons. No, it’s not. That’s a half of a cup.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. If you actually pull out a serving of peanut butter, you’ll be very disappointed and quickly realize you have never made a sandwich with probably less than like three servings of peanut butter.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I always weigh it because it’s like the most deceptive thing in the world.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And I’ve still got it in my mind, that peanut butter is like protein, right? So I’ll make a PB and J. Be like, oh yeah, I’ve got my high protein sandwich. It’s, it’s really not at all. It’s not even close.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Five grams or something.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But, you know, that’s what I tell myself to feel.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, for fats specifically, they’re made up of something called fatty acids, right?

So there are a lot of different fatty acids. We’re only going to talk about a couple that are kind of relevant and in general, fatty acids are broken up into essential fatty acids and non essential fatty acids. All right. So.

Protein Deficient Vegan: We have inclement weather, the non-essentials they can go home.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Actually they can go home all the time because you don’t ever need them. So they can just fire. Not essential fatty acids are fired.

So the essential fatty acid, and we’re talking about nutrition. Essential means is your body can’t make it on its own, so you need to get it from food. Right.

So the essential fatty acids are Omega-3 and Omega-6. The Omega-6 fatty acid is one called linoleic acid so it’s just, LA. You won’t really go hunting that one out.

We tend to get quite a bit of Omega-6 in our diet.

So on the omega-3 side of things, which is typically where we want to focus on. Uh, because we have a lower amount of that in our diet in general, and it’s a really beneficial for health. In the plant world, we also mostly only get that in a form called ALA, which is alpha linoleic acid. And that’s not quite as bioavailable as the forms you might get outside of plants that are called a DHA and EPA.

AlA will turn into those forms that your body needs, but it’s at a lower rate and it’s less bioavailable than just getting EPA and DHA directly. So one way that we can kind of get around that is to use a vegan algae oil supplement for Omega-3 because that is directly EPA and DHA, instead of being ALA.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I’ve heard from people that take the non-vegan kind. It gives them like, Fish burps.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. Yeah. You don’t get any fish burps with algae oil.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. We don’t hurt fish. And also we don’t get gross after taste.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Exactly. And Omega-3s in general are associated with a lower risk of heart disease. So. That’s good to try to get them in. It’s better to try to get them in and food, but again, with plant-based sources, you have to kind of get a lot more because of the conversion rate on the ALA is so low. So you can use a supplement to help with that, but you’ll also get it in your diet naturally.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Where do you get omega three from?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That is also from various seeds and nuts and produce.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Do you have any specific ones you would recommend people to eat?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Flax seeds and soy both are fairly high in omega-3 soy oil specifically, but you get soy oil when you eat something like tofu.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Tofu.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, maybe not so much. TVP since it’s de-fatted. Yeah. But yeah, straight tofu.

And then, so for the non essential fatty acids, those all fall under what we’re going to talk about here in a second, which are basically saturated fats and trans fats.

Protein Deficient Vegan: The like tasty stuff probably.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: In some cases. Yeah. Also mono unsaturated fats are non essential.

So overall.

Uh, there are four different types of fat. So there’s mono-unsaturated fat, poly-unsaturated fat, saturated fat, and trans fat. So the one we want to really try to get the most of is the poly-unsaturated fats. Those are the ones that really have big health benefits for, you know, lowering cholesterol, lowering the risk of heart disease and things like that. Uh, the next best is mono-unsaturated fat. So that’s typically you think of that as olive oil, that’s a big one for mono-unsaturated fat. And it’s healthier than saturated fat, but not quite as healthy as a poly-unsaturated fat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What would be a poly-unsaturated fat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: All the stuff for the Omega-3 and Omega-6 sources like we talked about. So seeds, nuts, soy, things like that.

For the polyunsaturated fat, they are typically anti-inflammatory so they will help with inflammation. Polyunsaturated fats are also necessary for your skin health.

They help with skin elasticity. And, in the modern diet, we get a ratio of about 16:1 for Omega-6 to Omega-3. It would be ideal to get that closer to 1:1, which is why you typically see people supplementing Omega-3 and nobody really supplements Omega-6.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So I think like everyone knows what mono versus poly is: mono’s like one, poly is a few.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Uh, so what’s the difference between saturated unsaturated?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Uh, I’m not quite sure. It’s, it’s very, in-depth science-y fat acid things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay. So I Googled it. Do you want me to tell you?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay, so saturated fats. Are tightly packed with no double bonds between them.

There are some exceptions, but most of them are solid at room temperature. An example for the vegan aspect would be coconut and palm oils.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, okay.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And since those stay solid at room temperature, some studies say that that’s what causes hardening of fats and arteries. So meanwhile, unsaturated fats are loosely packed, and they tend to stay liquid at room temperature.

And some of those things could include, olive oil, peanut oil, avocados, and then most nuts and seeds.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Awesome. Thanks for using your super Google powers to get us more information.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You’re welcome. I can type.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Cool. So move on to saturated fat.

So replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat in your diet has been shown to lower blood cholesterol. So, a lot of the times people will think of saturated fat as the bad fat. You know, there is some debate about this out there, but I think the studies are pretty clear that high levels of saturated fat in general tend to lead to worse outcomes as far as heart disease and blood cholesterol.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Are we talking about the carnivore diet?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Well, the carnivore diet is one diet that does tend to prefer saturated fat.

So it would fall in the category.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I always say trust in science.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I think there are also some other diets that do that. Keto. There’s a lot of keto people who do tend to do saturated fat, and keto diet has pretty good outcomes, but again, a lot of that is probably from eliminating junk food, like most diets.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They’re short term positive outcomes. There aren’t really any studies that show long-term that you would benefit from a high saturated, fat diet, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’m not aware of any.

So if anybody has any of those studies feel free to share it with us and we can talk about it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Things that make you go. Hmm.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I mean, we’re open-minded so if we see studies in the future or come across anything that shows positive benefits of saturated fat, we’ll come back and talk about that.

We can get saturated fat from a plant-based diet if we need to.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You guys keep waiting on that study information.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Although in our case, because it’s kind of hard to even get that as a vegan, I guess we would just end up having to eat a lot of coconuts. I think that stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Dude. I like coconut oil. Did you know, you can make instant hard shell chocolate topping out of coconut oil.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, I know.

I think everybody listening should know, but I am well educated in this magic trick.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay, this is really cool. You just melt chocolate chips and a little bit of coconut oil, and then you just stir that shit together and you pour it on ice cream.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Instant hard shell.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It works really well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So if you’re trying to get some saturated fats in your diet, That’d be a good way to do it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So the American heart association recommends limiting your saturated fat intake to about 5 to 6% of your overall calorie intake.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So maybe don’t eat too much hard shell.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. And I would recommend using all of that allotment of 5% of your caloric intake on the chocolate hard shell.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah, me too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Okay.

And then the last one is trans fats, which have no benefits in the diet. You should really avoid those as much as possible. You’ll mostly see them in like pre-packaged foods, frozen foods, things like ramen noodles historically had been pretty bad about having trans fats in them. The FDA has actually banned, in the United States, adding additional trans fats to food now.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which is hard to believe because they don’t seem to care about our foods at all here.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, not a lot of hard rules.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So it must be really bad if FDA cares about it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I think about how the food would be if they weren’t there though. It would probably be worse than now.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s true.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And just so you know, some trans fats do occur naturally in food. And the natural occurrence, isn’t really in a high enough amount to matter at all. So it’s not anything you have to worry about if you find some natural foods that have trans fats in them.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s more of the…

Muscle Deficient Vegan: yeah, the adding.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Chemically creating foods out of a lab, right? Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So something you might wonder is, does eating fat turn into fat? Right. So it was like, if you eat fat, does that make fat on your body? So the main way, obviously that you gain body weight, and that can be fat or muscle, is with a calorie surplus. But they’ve done some studies with like a handful of people, I think around 10 people and a metabolic ward where they matched calories and just swapped out carbohydrates for fat at different levels. And it looks like eating fat does convert a little more readily to body fat, but it’s such a small degree that I think, you know, overall calories are obviously still the main driver. But if you’re really trying to optimize. You know, you probably lean more into carbohydrates in your overall dietary plan, then you would have fat because that can store a little easier.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So, what are the benefits of eating fat?

Like what does it do for your body? Is it, does that, the only thing that helps the joints and stuff?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So fat helps with your joints. Fat helps, like we said, with, uh, skin elasticity. Fat is also required for a couple of the fat soluble vitamins. I think it was a vitamins A, D, E, and K. Those require fat to actually absorb into your body.

So that’s another big use case. Fat is good for developing your vision and neurological development.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So back to eyesight. It’s fat I need not carrots? Is this why my eyesight is so shitty?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Carrots have a vitamin.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, why am I negative six and a half?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Well, actually, uh, so fats are required for the vitamin that helps your eyes, which I think is vitamin A in carrots.

All right.

So that’s pretty much all we have on dietary fats. Uh, if you have any questions again, there are actually a lot of different fatty acids and a lot of very scientific details that we didn’t go into depth here on, cause it doesn’t really affect you once, you know, kind of what you’re supposed to eat. Um, but if you want to deep dive in that, feel free to reach out and ask questions and we can talk about it.

A couple cool things in the news this week.

We, again, we talked a little bit about the Olympics last week and the Olympics are going on now. Turns out there are seven vegan athletes in the Olympics this year. I saw a couple of them on team USA. Um, a couple of them were scattered throughout different sports in different countries.

So that’s pretty cool to see some representation there from the vegans.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Love that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Um, also the Olympics is really focusing on sustainability quite a bit. We talked last week also about the cardboard beds. They are doing two times the amount of plant-based meals as they did last year. And they’re also doing some stuff, like they have a headquarters, they set up for the Olympics. It’s going to be turned into office buildings after the Olympics is over. And then they have a lot of stuff that they’re using for housing staff and things like that that is all temporary housing. So it’s pretty cool. They are trying to not leave a trace as much as they can with all that huge event going on.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Very cool. And if you have not seen the movie about the sharks that inhabit this river in Paris. Netflix. Yeah.

It’s has nothing to do with anything he just said. But it was really good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that would make me not want to swim in that river, even though it was just a movie.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What was it called? Basically? They were having the Olympics there, I think. Right? Like they’re

Muscle Deficient Vegan: having a marathon.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, is it just a marathon?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I guess it’s a triathalon.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Yeah. But they were going to be in the river and there were all these sharks that were like having babies and shark babies were everywhere. And then they grew really fast. They’re like mutant shark babies, and they killed everyone.

Under Paris was that it?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, the movie it was called under Paris.

Protein Deficient Vegan: A solid 5.2 on IMDB. I would rate it for more, lots of shark deaths.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we kinda like those campy animals killing people movies though.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also at the Republican national convention, we saw that VegNews posted an article about some vegan jackfruit brisket that they were, I guess, selling at the event. And they said that it was really high in demand and it kept selling out. So that’s pretty cool to see. You know, a vegan, first of all, a vegan meal being available there at all.

And then a vegan meal being in such high demand that they can’t even keep it in stock.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hm. So I might have to attempt to make a jackfruit brisket though, I’ve never had actual brisket and, uh, I don’t know what that is.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I’m going to be honest. Most of the stuff I’ve tried with jackfruit, I haven’t been a big fan of.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think that’s because you and I don’t know how to cook it right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Maybe that’s it.

Yeah. We stick to the seitan and tofu.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, jackfruit is a weird one to me. Cause it’s like, doesn’t have protein really. Yeah, people use it as a protein substitute and I don’t understand it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It seems like it is usually in some kind of barbecue. And the texture does lend itself to it, but I don’t, I don’t know.

I’ve just never really, I much prefer seitan based barbecue.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Or like tofu even.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Tofu barbecues pretty good. But seitan is like the texture is like really, really good for barbecue.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Might have to Jack around with jackfruit though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Nice.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Maybe I can get less shitty with it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we don’t have any, new recipes to talk about this week.

You’ll still see something posted, but there are ones we’ve already talked about, but you know, we were hanging out in downtown Chicago for the weekend, not cooking our own food for once.

So that was pretty nice. Uh, if you ever happened to be in downtown Chicago, a lot of good vegan restaurant options. Specifically, if you like donuts, voodoo donuts has a lot of good vegan donuts.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Those were really good. The apple fritter, the vegan apple fritter was top notch.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That place is not all vegan, but they have a really good vegan menu for their donuts.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And then kitchen 17.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, kitchen 17. All time favorite out there for, they have a vegan pizzas and they are fully vegan and everything there is usually really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And if you don’t live in Chicago, they actually ship. Uh, I think across the whole country in the U S. You can get like any of their pizzas frozen.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And in our experience, the frozen ones are just as good as the ones we get in the store there. So yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They’re great. And they have a bunch of different flavors, but our favorite is just regular deep dish cheese. It’s always so good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

A couple of other good ones, elephant and vine had some really good breakfast options. There’s another fully vegan place.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And they had like a burger. Like a mammoth burger.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, mammoth burger. That was really good it’s basically like, kind of like a Big Mac, but without the middle, bun situation. I had like a, what they called mammoth sauce, I guess it was kind of like a Big Mac sauce.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Now if you’re from Chicago or have ever eaten in Chicago. We used to have herbivore, which had the Big Max, which was like our favorite thing of all time in Chicago, but that closed. Yeah.

About a year ago. Um, this gets pretty close. Yeah, the mammoth burger. Elephant and vine is pretty. It’s pretty solid.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Also though we had the Chicago diner. That was really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So that’s a vegetarian place, but I think you can make almost everything on the menu vegan. They have something called a pierogi quesadilla, which I’m definitely going to have to figure out how to make a recipe for that, because it was really good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Like sauerkraut and potatoes and a lot of stuff going on.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And like cheese and chives in a tortilla. And then, then it was a quesadilla, it was crazy. It was a carb overload. It was really good.

And, you know, if you’re ever in Chicago on a Saturday morning, Pi, Pi, My Darling is a bakery that only does presale on Saturday mornings. And you have to pre-order basically. She has certain cake flavors each week, but she does distribute through local restaurants. So there are a lot of restaurants in the Chicago area that sell Pi, Pi, My Darling cakes, and she is incredibly talented.

All of her stuff that we’ve ever tried has been super good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Vegan baked goods are hard to find ones that they get right. Like, Pi, Pi, My Darling’s always solid. Uh, the kitchen 17 pizza place we talked about always has really good vegan dessert, some baked goods. And then we go to another place here locally called Tiger Lily Cafe.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s hard to find ones that actually have moist, especially on cakes. A lot of them are not very like moist for some reason. Yeah. But yeah, those three always come through.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So, you know, totally useless information to anybody who’s never going to be anywhere near Chicago.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Unless you’re ordering pizza from kitchen 17.

Cause they ship.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That’s true.

There are a lot of vegans in Chicago, so there’s probably at least a couple out there listening to this.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And if you’re planning a trip, because we do this thing where we try to find vegan cities to go check out and just basically spend a week eating a bunch of random vegan food. You know, like lazy losers, that’s like something that we do. But anyway, if, if you are people like that, Chicago would be a great place for you to visit.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And on the flip side of that note, if you’re in a city and it’s got a really good vegan spot, please send that to us because we will go there and try it at some point.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes. We always look for recommendations. Yeah.

We’re going to go to a Wisconsin. Milwaukee. In a couple of months and trial their vegan faire.

Yeah. If you, if you have been to Milwaukee and have vegan recommendations. Tell us.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and we’ll report back without anything really cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: All right.

Well, I think that’s all we got for this week. Do you want to say, bye.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Bye.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Bye everybody.

Vegan that likes to pick up heavy things and put them down again.
USAW Level 1 Coach
NASM CPT

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