Show Notes

Can a vegan diet truly provide all the protein you need for optimal health and fitness? Join us on this enlightening episode of the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition Podcast, where we uncover the remarkable benefits of protein for vegans. Promising insights into how protein functions as a fundamental building block for bones, muscles, organs, and even hair, we emphasize its crucial role in muscle growth, recovery, and overall wellness. You’ll learn how protein helps curb cravings, supports weight loss, and maintains bone health, particularly vital for women aiming to prevent osteoporosis. Discover why protein is an indispensable part of a balanced diet and how it stands up against carbs and fat with a higher thermic effect.

Links mentioned in episode
Protein Deficient Vegan Free E-Book
What I Eat in a Day Reel

Full Podcast Transcript

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition Podcast episode 15. We’re going to talk about protein. I’m the muscle deficient vegan here with the protein deficient vegan. You want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Hi everybody. So first things first, let’s talk a little bit about what protein does. So protein provides the building blocks for all the cells in our body.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It gives you what you need to build bones, muscles, organs, and your hair.

Protein Deficient Vegan: How often are you building organs?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I guess that’s a good point.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I mean, you’re not a woman, so I guess you would never build organs, huh?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That’s true, yeah. But, you know, it helps maintain your organs, I guess. I’m not really sure. But it does play a part in the organs.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So also, we’re just going to talk through some of the benefits of protein. So the big benefit for us for fitness is that it provides the amino acids you need for muscle growth and muscle recovery. Especially when you combine this with strength training or resistance training because, you’re not really going to build a lot of muscle if you’re not lifting weights or doing some kind of resistance training in the gym.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And it doesn’t necessarily need to be lifting weights. I mean, any kind of training that is qualified as resistance training, that could be sport training, or riding a bike, or something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or Pilates.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Or Pilates, yeah. Your muscles are going to adapt to any kind of training like that, and having more protein just helps the muscles grow and recover for those activities.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Protein also helps you feel more full for longer out of all the macronutrients. It’s the one that is the most satiating. So if you load up on protein in your diet, you won’t feel as hungry as often.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, or if you’re like me and you ever drink a protein shake, you’ll feel like shit forever because you feel so bloated.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Does that only happen, does that happen to you?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That doesn’t really happen to me, especially with the vegan protein shakes. I used to feel a little, I guess, gassy, I don’t know, bloated on whey protein shakes. Some brands. Um, I haven’t really found any vegan protein shakes that make me feel that way.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I don’t know what it is. Drinking like two servings of protein powder makes me just not want to eat for like, like a day.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, some people just don’t like protein powder. You’re one of those people.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also, it helps prevent muscle loss while you’re losing weight.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: For some people who have weight to lose, you know, when you lose weight, you’re gonna lose some fat and some muscle. If we keep the protein up and we keep doing some kind of resistance training during that weight loss process, we can lose a lot more fat in comparison to the muscle we’ll lose.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Eat protein. Lift weights.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It also helps to maintain your bone mass as you age. It gives you a lower risk over time of osteoporosis and bone fractures, which can be a big issue for people as they get older, depending on their diet.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I think this is especially something that happens with women.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I read about that after menopause. I think it’s especially important.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Is this, okay, so is this protein paired with resistance training or does protein alone help with that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: From what I read, protein alone helps with that, but strength training, resistance training also helps with bone strength. So I think combining them is probably the best course of action.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Protein also helps to reduce cravings. I saw an article on Healthline that said one study showed that increasing your protein up to 25 percent of your total calories reduced cravings by 60 percent and the desire to snack at night by half.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Is that just because you’re not hungry you think?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I don’t know if they showed a causation.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: There was something in there about one of the hormones that triggers your brain to say that it’s hungry.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Is that the gremlin?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Ghrelin.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Gremlin?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, the gremlin. The hunger gremlin is what we call it. And, uh, they actually had a follow up study, I think, with a group of adolescent girls that pretty much showed the same results.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So it seems like it’s been confirmed at least once.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Protein also has a higher thermic effect of food than carbs or fat. So the calories you burn processing the protein will be a little higher than processing carbs or fat. So if you have a little more protein in your diet, you might burn a hundred more calories a day just processing that food.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also helps to maintain muscle as you age. This is kind of like the bone health. This is a big issue for people as they get older. They tend to lose a lot of muscle mass pretty quickly. Especially later in old age. So sarcopenia is the common term for that. And that’s a really big issue. So, the more you…

Protein Deficient Vegan: What was that again?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Sarcopenia.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay. I’ve never heard of that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so that probably leads to like falling and a lot of the injuries. Right. Old people end up having.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, exactly. And that’s one of the main way that old people become disabled or even die is falling, breaking a bone, something like that. So, keep your protein up, keep exercising, lifting weights, some kind of resistance training.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Keep that grip strength.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, for as long as you can. Yeah, so grip strength was one of the things that is most closely linked to longevity, basically. So In studies, the stronger your grip is, the longer you live as a correlation. It’s not necessarily like, get super strength in your grip and you’ll live forever.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But it tends to correlate with longevity.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also, the last big benefit, there are a lot of little benefits, the last big benefit is it helps with your immune system. Protein is actually used to help create antibodies. So if you have a higher protein diet, your immune system is a little more resilient.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, it’s interesting. So if you’re sick, you should eat more protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it can also help with recovery from injuries. So not only sick, but recovery from injuries. Because again, it’s kind of the building block for all the cells, so all the different things that need to be repaired from an injury, protein intake helps with as well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s unfortunate, because when I’m sick I just want to eat like, toast.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, a lot of people don’t care.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Better than not eating.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Absolutely a bland food, and not protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So if you can stomach it, protein’s better.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Isn’t protein also supposed to be the macro that leads to the least amount of fat created if you go over on calories, isn’t there something about that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’s, I think it’s hard, especially compared to carbs or fat. It’s harder for protein to find a way to get stored as body fat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Yeah. That was it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But we should probably address this. Now there is another camp that says too much protein is bad.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And we are unbiased, so we will be talking about this.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So, I see a lot of this, especially in the vegan community, that’s more protein equals more bad. Uh, basically they say that actually has bad longevity things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So that’s the technical way to say this.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I’ve seen some of that. And so ingesting protein increases some markers, I think like IGF 1 and some others that the argument is they can cause growth, like cancer to grow faster and things like that. I think one argument, um, Um, We’ll assume that’s true, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Because some really smart people have said that. And I think there probably is some correlation there. But even if it does cause some of those diseases and some of those things to go a little faster, I think the tradeoff is still that you go into older age with more muscle mass and more ability to move around.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So, I mean, everything is kind of a tradeoff. So for me, I’ll take, you know, A slightly increased risk of some of these diseases over not really having enough muscle mass to take care of myself in old age.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that’s fair. And I guess it’s also like, quality of life as well.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, for sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You know, you could be like Mr. Glass from, uh, what is that movie? Unbreakable? Yeah. Where you’re like, your bones break by flicking them. Yeah. You know, but you could live to be really old.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you can get by, and there’s probably some perfect balance out there, if you eat just enough protein to stay just mobile enough, and if you have a perfect plan for that, have at it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But, it’s hard to plan for all those eventualities, so for me, I think, just focusing on, you know, quality of life and movement. Uh, is what I’m going to prioritize.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and there is a range for protein. So like, if your goals aren’t, you know, get really massive in the gym, you don’t have to go to the upper edge of that range.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You know, you could go more for like the minimum required amount or like slightly above that or something, depending on what your goals are.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But it is really important that you get enough protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, definitely. And we’ll talk about some numbers here shortly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So as far as vegan protein sources, just in general, we’ve got soy sources like tofu, TVP, tempeh, soy milk, uh, pretty much anything based on soy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Mm hmm.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s probably gonna be like the go to source. Yeah. Unless you have like a soy allergy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I, me personally, I don’t like tempeh. So, do the other ones.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, tempeh, I mean, there’s probably some way out there that I would like it. You know, like everything else, I didn’t think I liked it before. But I haven’t found a, a, a version of tempeh that I really like that much.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So it’s not really in the rotation for me.

Protein Deficient Vegan: We need to, uh, Play with it a little bit, but yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Uh, the next one is wheat gluten based sources like seitan and even oats are based on wheat, so they have a protein a little bit, but seitan is like a really high protein version of wheat gluten. Next you’ll see, you know, these are the common ones that you see when you ask about vegan protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s like beans, lentils, seeds, and nuts, but they’re not really a lean protein source. They’re either kind of heavy in carbs or heavy in fat, depending on if we’re talking about beans or nuts respectively. So while they do have protein. Uh, it’s not really something you’re going to really focus on your protein goals, especially if you have a higher protein target.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And then protein powders, an obvious one. If some of this other stuff is hard to hit, you can just use protein powders. And those are usually a pretty good source of protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, or protein bars, or protein cookies, or, like protein wraps, you know, tortillas. Those are pretty nice. Most of those are made with like pea protein, I think.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Um, better bagels. Yeah. Have a lot of protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, if you want to know what the best options are, as far as protein, we can talk about complete proteins. So, you may have heard, and if you’ve looked at vegan protein at all, or plant based proteins at all, you’ve definitely heard, uh, the argument that vegan protein is incomplete, or they’re not complete proteins.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, we can talk a little bit about what that actually means, and how true it is, and it is a little true, and how we kind of deal with that as vegans.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, but the bottom line is, it’s not something you have to worry about as much as people say.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: If you’re eating a balanced diet with different sources of protein, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, absolutely. But it’s good to at least know what they’re talking about, so you can kind of make those decisions if they need to be made.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So you can tell them why they’re wrong.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Exactly. Yeah, sometimes you just have to get a little feisty.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Throw hands.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: There are nine essential amino acids, and this is what your protein gives you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So it gives you a lot of amino acids. Nine of them are essential, which means we have to get them through food, and we can’t make them on our own in our bodies. So, I’m gonna say them. They’re a bunch of really long, obnoxious chemical names. But, it’s good to hear them, because we want to talk about a couple of examples of where some are missing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, the nine essential amino acids are histidine, isoleucine, leucine, which is really the important one for muscle building, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine,

Protein Deficient Vegan: And if he pronounced any of those wrong, please let him know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, absolutely. Although, you know, pronunciation is kind of a personal preference thing in my opinion.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah, he’s from Kentucky.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Especially being from Kentucky, exactly. I’m surprised anybody can understand me at all.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Y’all.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So now that we know our nine essential amino acids, a complete protein is a protein source that has all nine of these in a sufficient amount. You might see some definitions online where a complete protein is just, it has all nine of these. That’s not technically true because all protein has some level of all nine of these.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And even a little further than that, almost all food has some protein. So almost all food has some level of all nine of these amino acids. So technically, a complete protein just means that it has all nine of them in a sufficient amount each. And you might be thinking next, obviously, what is a sufficient amount?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So the reference they use for a sufficient amount for a complete protein is basically the same of each of these that is already in human muscle. So the amount that makes up human muscle, again because human muscle is basically directly made up of proteins, the amount of each of the amino acids in human muscle is what they use for the reference to make a complete protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So the perfect protein source is human meat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That may be true. I haven’t seen anything to that, but, you know, logically it makes sense.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And it’s probably the cheapest protein source, if you think about it, because people die every day.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and if somebody tells you that you can eat their muscle, then it’s probably vegan, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think so. You gotta get consent, but yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that’s probably, we’ll have to check with maybe PETA on that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Okay. Anyway, don’t eat people.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Unless they’re rude. Said the great late Hannibal Lecter, apparently.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Okay, so now that we know what complete protein means, you should know that most plant protein sources are incomplete, because they have an insufficient amount of one or more of those nine essential amino acids.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So let’s talk about some examples using some of the common vegan protein sources. And what they’re lacking in that makes them not a complete protein. So, wheat based proteins like oats or seitan like we talked about, have everything they need except for the lysine. So they’re a little short on lysine, and that’s what makes them not a complete protein source.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It’s not that they have zero lysine, they’re just a couple percentage points short of what would be considered complete.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But if you made your seitan with tofu.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Then it would be complete.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That’s true. And that’s something called protein combining. Uh, and because of the way that your amino acids kind of pool up in your body, you don’t necessarily need to do that in the same meal, but you can.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, some other examples that people use are like rice and beans make a complete protein if you put them together. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, technically a complete protein if you put it together. So some people do that. It’s not really necessary, but if you do want to make sure that you’re getting them all in, you’re certainly welcome to combine them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The other example is beans. They’re short in methionine. So this would really only be a problem, like for the wheat, for example. If your only protein for the whole day was seitan, or something like that, uh, because normally you would eat other sources of protein throughout the day, and those would give you the lysine that you need, and then you’d have all the other amino acids from the seitan. So if you eat any like soy throughout the day, which is a complete protein, has all in a sufficient amount, then it’s going to give you the extra lysine that you were missing from the seitan.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So it’s not really that big of a deal. But it is technically true that most of your plant sources are not complete proteins.

So let’s talk about the vegan protein sources that are complete proteins, just so you know what those options are. And these are the ones that, if you wanted to, you could eat just this for your protein source, and you’d get all the amino acids.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Assuming you ate enough of it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right, which is what we’re going to talk about when we see these examples, because that’s really hard.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So soy is easy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, soy, an easy one for sure, because you can make it a bunch of different ways. You can eat it several times a day. You can get it, most importantly, in the right volume that you can hit your calorie goal and your protein goal using soy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Easily.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Easily.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So the other options are quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, spirulina, hemp seeds, chia seeds, and nutritional yeast. So, when you hear that list, you might think, wow, those aren’t really like things I sit and put as a major portion of my plate, and that would be correct.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Except for nutritional yeast.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we do use nutritional yeast basically as a main protein source.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s so good though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, yeah. It is really good. Quinoa is probably the closest you’ll get, but quinoa is very carb heavy. Uh, kind of like a rice. So you’re gonna have a lot of extra calories if you try to get all your protein from quinoa, but you can use quinoa and you’ll get a complete protein source.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, really same with most of these is they’re not protein first.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like soy is kind of like protein is the primary macro that you’re getting but the other ones are like either carb first or maybe even fat first.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we you know for various reasons basically, we tend to lean on soy as our main source of protein and then probably wheat like seitan is our secondary. But we always have soy during the day to, to make up for, you know, what we’re missing from the, the wheat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Um, so if you don’t have a soy allergy and you have an interest in protein goals and you’re, you know, into fitness and stuff like that, you’re probably going to want to lean pretty heavily in the soy direction.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and nutritional yeast is actually super high in protein as well.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But to eat enough for your daily target, I don’t know.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It would be pretty hard. It’d be challenging.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You’d have to eat like, uh, I don’t know, five bottles of nutritional yeast a day or something.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, you would. I don’t know that it’d be very economical either, but

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so on the note of protein goals, how much protein should you eat in a day? You know, we’ve kind of talked about this before, we’ve got some blog posts about it, but just so it’s here in the same place with all this protein information, we can talk about it briefly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Uh, and it’s important to note that there’s a difference between the minimum necessary to not be literally protein deficient as far as your health, and like the optimal protein range that somebody who’s doing some kind of resistance training should aim for to maximize their muscle growth and minimize their muscle loss, depending on if they’re gaining or losing weight.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, just for normal human health, the recommended daily amount is either 0.4 grams per pound of body weight or 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, depending on your measuring system. So that’s just to not have literal protein deficiency and be healthy. So if you’re not doing resistance training, you’re not lifting weights or anything that you’re expecting to grow a lot of muscle from, you can just make sure you get that as a minimum and not really even have to think about it anymore.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so let’s say you’re 150 pounds. That would be 60 grams.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Pretty easy to hit. Yeah. Even on accident, I think in a lot of cases.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Mm-Hmm.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Then if you are doing resistance training, trying to build muscle, trying to preserve muscle, you want to try to aim more for 0.8 to 1.2 grams per pound of either your lean body mass, if you know that, or you can just use your target body weight or your goal body weight. And then for kilograms it is 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So for the same example, if you’re 150 pounds, that would be 180 grams on the high end.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right. And that is the high end, and there’s a little bit of benefit going from the low end at like 0.8 to the high end at 1.2. But, if you just hit that 0.8, you’re probably going to get 80 to 85 percent of everything you’re going to get out of the protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So if you’re looking to optimize it a little more, and you don’t mind getting more protein in your diet, You can push it up to about 1.2. You won’t see much benefit at all beyond that. But, you’re going to get most of the benefit, anything above 0.8.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay, so then how would one find their lean body mass?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, there’s a couple of different ways. They sell calipers you can basically use to do a body fat pinch test, and you can figure out your body fat percentage, and then from there, anything that’s not body fat from your total weight is your lean body mass.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What about those scales?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: The scales, they have impedance scales, and I think a couple other methods that guesstimate your body fat percentage. It’s probably okay to get a general idea, but from what I’ve seen, they’re not very accurate. The most accurate method is something like an actual DEXA scan that actually uses radiology to scan your body for all the different components.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But like those scales are pretty cheap. So you think you get like a decent number?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a good starting point and you probably won’t get too far off.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or you could guesstimate because there are like… you can find pictures of people around your weight and then they’ll tell you like this is 20 percent body fat, this is 30 percent body fat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You can get estimations that way as well.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and I think that’s a pretty good way to do it because you’re gonna get it within probably 10 percent doing it that way. Just because everybody is different, but from each 10 percent bracket of body weight you can tend to pretty much know where you’re at in that range and that’s gonna be close enough to probably get your lean body mass approximate for something like a protein target.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So we talked a lot about the foods. We briefly mentioned protein powder. So you might be thinking, okay, well, do I even need protein powder? When should I use a protein powder? And I think it’s easiest just to think of protein powder like a really lean or really low calorie source of a complete protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Right, so it’s basically, like, the best possible source of protein as far as calories to the protein ratio goes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Are all protein powders complete sources?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No, they’re not. So you want to make sure the one you buy is a complete protein. They normally achieve that through some kind of blending. Like, you’ll see them blended with, like, watermelon seed and pea protein, a couple different protein sources.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So they’ll make themselves complete.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But they’re not automatically, so you should check.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Not automatically. And if you get a soy protein powder, those are complete.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: But I think most of the brands these days do make it a complete protein by default. But there are a couple that aren’t, so you want to try to avoid those only because if you’re using protein powder, it’s probably a pretty big part of your protein allotment for the day.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And you really don’t want a big chunk of it to be incomplete protein, if you can help it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And if you’re using protein powder, as someone who does not like protein powder, I’m going to offer you this. TVP is way cheaper than protein powder, and it’s a very similar percentage on a calorie basis, protein wise.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So, you should just use TVP.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and it’s soy, so a complete protein source.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s soy much better than protein powder, in my opinion.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: That’s a good one, I like that. Um, so yeah, you might want to use something like that when you’re having a little trouble hitting your protein target. So if your protein target is like 180 grams of protein a day, and you’re eating all the food you can, and you’re only getting to like 130, 140.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Then, you know, just throw in a protein shake once a day and just get an easy 40 grams of protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No big deal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Also, if you are unsure if you have complete protein, you can always do an EAA, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can do an EAA supplement, which is basically a concentrated dose of complete proteins with very low calories.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: And also if you have one of those days I talked about where you only ate seitan or some kind of wheat for the whole day and you just want to fill up the missing amino acids for lack of a better term you can just use a complete protein shake or again those EAA supplements to make sure that you have all the appropriate amino acids available for your muscles to use to grow.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and finding vegan ones are pretty easy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, especially these days. That’s one of the things that we do have a lot of good vegan options on. I really like Ghost for their vegan protein powders. I think they may have stopped selling their amino acids entirely. I haven’t been able to find Ghost aminos for the last couple weeks, but I have been using Jay Cutler’s brand. He has a product called Generate that is a vegan essential amino acid supplement that has a lot of really good flavors, a couple of like sour watermelons stuff like that. So I’ve been using that now that I can’t find Ghost anymore.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I don’t know if it’s temporary or what, but

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Okay. So also, we talked a little bit about the normal foods and some of the supplement options.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Now we got just a couple of vegan protein food tips. So some of the things we replace in our recipes to sneak in some extra protein. A big one we like to use is red lentil pasta.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so anytime we make pasta, we just swap in red lentil pasta, and protein on that is pretty good because they just use red lentil flour.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: One ingredient, it’s actually a whole food too, I think.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and it’s got a little different bite than normal pasta, but not really that different, and it’s way better for your overall health goals.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And they make it in all kinds of different shapes, like they make, uh, spaghetti, uh, Penne.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They make galaxy shaped ones.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah, those were pretty good. Next we use silken tofu in, I don’t know, everything to try to throw a little extra protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: My favorite way is just silken tofu in pasta sauces. That’s one of our main meals that we make is we’ll just make a silken tofu alfredo sauce with nutritional yeast with red lentil pasta and it’s a really high protein dish.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and really delicious.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You can also use silken tofu to make salad dressings, pasta, cheese sauces, any kind of sauces, as a mayonnaise replacement. As a sour cream replacement, you can pretty much use it for anything that would be creamy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: These are the smoothies.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Smoothies, yeah, we throw it in for smoothies and that adds some extra protein.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It really can be used in a whole lot of different ways and check out the Protein Deficient Vegan website. You can just search for silken tofu and you’ll come across, I don’t know, uh,

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s a hyper fixation of mine.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Lots of recipes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What can I put it in? Yeah. I put it in cupcakes this weekend.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I feel like it’s in almost every recipe in some way.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, if you have a soy allergy, you probably will hate our website. And I’m sorry. But I do have some stuff that doesn’t have it, so.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also we use TVP in a lot of different stuff. We use it in a lot of different ways. Baked goods, savory stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s kind of sky’s the limit on that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Really like TVP muffins. It’s like a easy high protein breakfast.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, plus it helps that you can get it in a 25 pound bag, so.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which we have.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Some other things we really like are Mission Tortillas, Better Bagels, there’s this Endurance, uh, like Tortilla Chips.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They have a nacho flavor that I really like. Those are, I think, 14 grams for 150 calories, so pretty solid macros.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’s kind of like a plant protein Doritos knockoff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, if you’ve ever had Quest chips before you went vegan, they’re kind of like the equivalent of that, but I actually like them better than Quest chips.

Protein Deficient Vegan: We’ve been using Vital Wheat Gluten a lot, that’s like 70 to 80 percent protein on a calorie basis, and you can sneak it into all kinds of stuff. We’ve actually been making a bunch of different kind of seitan. Seitan is shockingly easy to make at home if you haven’t messed with that. It literally takes like maybe ten minutes of actual effort and then you just cook it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And vital wheat gluten is pretty cheap on a gram of protein basis, so definitely use that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and you made a lot of cool stuff with it recently that I didn’t even know existed and I’m not sure it did exist before you made it. So, I usually think of seitan as like a meat replacement or something, but you’ve been using it for all kinds of crazy things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So, it’s pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I just have I wake up with these weird things in my brain and then I can’t think about anything else until I try to make them.

Yeah, so that pretty much covers all the information about protein. If you want to see some examples, or maybe get a little bit of a guide for how to get the amount of protein that you need in your diet on so many calories and see some meal plans or ideas of how you might put something like that together. Protein Deficient Vegan has an ebook on her site, and we’ll link that here in the show notes. And then also on Instagram, you can see examples of the recipes on Protein Deficient Vegan’s Instagram. On my Instagram, I’ve got a couple reels pinned that are like what I eat in a day that shows an example day.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I think those were at 2100 calories with 180 grams of protein. So if you want to just see a couple of example days of what that looks like for that specific bracket, you can check that out.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, my free ebook, the weekly meal plan that I have in there, it’s like 120 grams of protein each day for about 1, 500 to 1, 700 calories.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So, obviously, if your calorie goal is higher than that, you can just add in some other stuff, or maybe like double a meal here or there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But, yeah, we’re on Reddit pretty frequently, and it’s something that gets asked all the time, is like: Is it possible to hit 100 grams of protein? Or, can I actually eat 180 grams of protein on, I don’t know, 2200 calories? And the answer is yes, but it does take some finangling. Is that the right, is that a word?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Finagling.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Finagling!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Cool. So check those out. We’ll put links to all that stuff in the show notes. And then also in current events, only one thing I think for this week, VegNews posted that one of the gold medalist winners in the Olympics was a fencer from Hong Kong. So, they do the sword fighting, you know, that’s not offensive to any fencers, but maybe you don’t know what fencing is.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: So I’m just going to call it sword fighting for the moment.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. But it was really cool though. And you have the metal face mask things.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: It definitely looks cool. Always wished I would’ve had the chance to try that in some way, but I don’t know where you do it. But anyway, she’s vegan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They do it on Gilmore Girls.

Protein Deficient Vegan: They fence on Gilmore Girls, remember?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Oh, uh, yeah, that’s true. Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s my only knowledge of fencing. Sorry, continue.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: No, I was just gonna say, uh, they said, you know, she is plant based and she won a gold medal in the Olympics this year from Hong Kong.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hell yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Pretty cool.

Also a couple recipes we have coming up on the website. A couple forms of seitan. You made an apple cinnamon seitan that was super awesome.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That one was really good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so it was basically just like chunks of apple and then cinnamon and then you cook it like a normal seitan and make it into the little, uh…

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, shriveled balls.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Shriveled balls, that we made the chocolate version from.

Protein Deficient Vegan: For some reason they get real shrivelly. Like they puff up crazy big while they’re cooking.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then within 60 seconds of them out of the oven, they’re like these little shriveled sacks.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: I don’t know. It goes from like, uh, probably baseball size to probably a little smaller than a golf ball.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and super shrivelly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t mind it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And they tear really nicely. It’s really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. The textures look crazy. They’re so chewy and I really like them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, me too. You also made one that had coconut flakes instead of apple cinnamon. It was like a coconut version.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, that one was good, too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and I wouldn’t have thought coconut and seitan really go together, but…

Protein Deficient Vegan: But they do.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It works good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Really nice little snack, high protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Mm hmm.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Good to go.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Easy to make too.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Also, you made some really good coconut cupcakes. Do you want to tell us how you did that?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, so for the first time making cupcakes anyways, I used silken tofu instead of eggs, and I actually really liked the texture it gave it. Did you like it?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I liked it a lot.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I kept it like really moist, but it also didn’t get crumbly. Like I feel like stuff always gets crumbly when I’m baking, even non-vegan baking when I used to bake and I don’t like crumb.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I’m weird about cakes. I don’t like crumbly cakes.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah. One thing I noticed. A lot of vegan baking can get pretty dry, it seems like. And especially when you see ones that are really thick on the inside. You just know they’re going to be dry. But it seems like the silken tofu, to me, helps keep it moist, even when there’s, like, a lot of, you know, substance on the inside.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, and I don’t know why that is.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But it turned out really well, and it was kind of, like, springy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know. I really liked the texture of it a lot.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they were really good.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Cool. So, I think that’s all we got for this week. Make sure if you have any questions about any of these recipes, or you have any questions about protein or maybe even specifically vegan protein, anything like that, feel free to reach out to us.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: You can find us on our social medias linked in the show notes, or on the website, you can comment on the articles, leave something in the contact forms. Or even you can leave a comment now, I think on Spotify on the podcast. So any of these ways we see all that stuff and feel free to reach out.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Or if you just have ideas, or like, have ideas of recipes you want to see, or things you would want us to talk about.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: Alright, well, I hope everybody has a good week, and you can put some of this information to use, and we’ll see you next week.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 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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