Show Notes

Unlock the secrets of macronutrients with us and the superb protein-deficient vegan on this latest VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition Podcast! We’re getting down to the nitty-gritty of your diet’s building blocks – protein, carbs, and fats – and how they fuel everything from your morning jog to your weightlifting session. Say goodbye to cookie-cutter nutrition advice as we tailor protein intake recommendations to fit your lifestyle, whether you’re a gym warrior or a desk jockey.

Referenced in episode:
Peaceful Rebel Cheese

Full Podcast Transcription

VeGAINS: Quick note from the editor here, there are some minor audio issues with this episode. You might just hear some words get cut off early. Nothing too bad. I do have some audio equipment on the way, so hopefully from now on the audio quality be a lot better in general. Anyway, enjoy.

VeGAINS: Welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition podcast, episode seven. I am VeGAINS here with the awesome Protein Deficient Vegan. You want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi.

VeGAINS: Hi. So this week we’re going to talk about macronutrients. Okay, so the three macronutrients in nutrition are protein, carbohydrates and fat. Those are the three macronutrients that make up our calories. So we’re going to talk a little bit about each one of them. So first of all, we have protein. Protein is four calories per gram of protein. So what protein does for us is protein provides our body with amino acids. Amino acids are also known as the building blocks of muscle. You don’t need to know too much about these right now, but basically they are used to build and maintain your muscle mass.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Did you say a mean old acids?

VeGAINS: Amino acids.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, okay

VeGAINS: So with amino acids there are nine essential amino acids. I’m not going to list them out. They’re very chemically names. You’re a chemical engineer. Do you know all of them?

Protein Deficient Vegan: No. More on the engineer than the chemical side. Yeah.

VeGAINS: So basically your body doesn’t do this literally, but you can think of it as a pool of amino acids that it pulls from throughout the day to feed your muscles. So the non essential amino acids you have to get from food, your body can’t make them on their own. So you’ll hear people sometimes refer to, especially Vegan proteins as either a complete protein or not a complete protein. All that means is to be a complete protein, each of the essential amino acids have to meet a certain percentage threshold in the protein source. But as long as you’re getting a diverse variety of protein sources throughout your day, this is probably not something you need to worry about, especially if you’re eating calories at maintenance or at a surplus. If you’re in a caloric deficit, you might want to think about it a little more and you can usually just buffer it with like an EAA supplement. Okay, the next macronutrient is carbohydrates. There are also four calories per gram of carbohydrate, just like protein. Carbohydrates are interesting. They’re not technically essential for your body. You can live without them because your body can make all the sugar and things that it needs to live.

Protein Deficient Vegan: If you want to be a sad human.

VeGAINS: Right

VeGAINS: So they are very helpful, even if they aren’t necessary. They provide you with a lot of energy

Protein Deficient Vegan: And Joy

VeGAINS: And joy. They add to the muscle glycogen stores, which essentially just means that your muscles store glucose and that helps you with exercise capacity. So if you have a regular workout routine, you’re going to make sure that you are eating carbohydrates on a regular basis to make sure your muscles do have enough glycogen stored up. Also, you’ll know, maybe you’ve heard for endurance athletes like marathon runners, things along lines, they actually do carb loading and even eat carbs kind of in the middle of their race to restore some of that capacity. So that would be why.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What do they eat while they run?

VeGAINS: They actually have little gels of carbohydrate. So they just kind of chew the gel as they run and they get them off the sidelines. I think also during exercise, like weightlifting session or something, if it goes over 45 minutes or so, and it’s really intense. I think it’s kind of borderline as to whether you can take some carbohydrate in the middle of that session to help finish it off a little stronger. I think it’s really not required, though, unless you’re doing some endurance sport. All right, the last macronutrient is fat. Fat is nine calories per gram. So it’s more than twice as calorically dense as protein and carbs. And it is essential. It provides your body with fatty acids, kind of like protein provides your body with amino acids. Fatty acids do a couple of interesting things. They protect your organs. They’re required for some fat soluble vitamins, like vitamin A-D-E and K.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And they taste good.

VeGAINS: They do taste good. It’s probably the best tasting macronutrient.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, for sure.

VeGAINS: I don’t know, sugar and carbs. If you add fat and sugar together, you get all the good food.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You get awesome. That’s right.

VeGAINS: Fat also promotes healthy joints. So it’s definitely good to keep some fat in your diet. And for that reason that we’ve talked about all these, you don’t really want to, if you can help it, eliminate or really extremely limit any of the three macronutrients unless you have some kind of actual medical reason. There are some cases where a doctor will basically instruct you to limit some of these for various reasons. So obviously you want to do that if your doctor tells you to. But if you’re an otherwise healthy person, I wouldn’t recommend any low fat or low carb or low protein diets or anything like that. They’re just not really necessary. So let’s talk a little bit about what you can do to understand how to use these macronutrients in your nutrition plan. So, for protein, the recommended daily allowance to just be a healthy person is about 0.4 grams of protein per pound of body weight, or 0.8 grams/kg now that is just to basically survive. Get enough protein that a human needs to do daily things and not get sick.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And so your hair won’t fall out.

VeGAINS: Is that a thing?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. You don’t have a lot of protein. I think your hair can fall out, your nails can get brittle.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I’ve heard the nails, yeah. Interesting. So that’s just to be a healthy human. But if we’re doing resistance training, we want maybe to try to optimize our protein intake to help either not lose muscle mass if we’re in a deficit or make sure we’re maintaining or gaining muscle mass if we’re on maintenance or a surplus. So basically, to optimize muscle with protein, you want to try to target 0.8 to 1.2 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass, or 1.6 to 2.2 grams/kg lean body mass is just basically the muscle on your body. So it’s not including your body fat percentage. You probably don’t know your body fat percentage unless you’ve had like a Dexa scan or done some body fat calipers or something like that. Even those aren’t super accurate. It’s kind of hard to judge, but you can get a pretty decent estimate.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So how do you get it if you have your fat percentage?

VeGAINS: If you have your body fat percentage, let’s say you are 200 pounds of body weight and you think you’re about 20% body fat. That means you’re about 160 pounds of lean body mass. You just subtract the body fat percentage from your total body weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Is that true though? Because what about your bones and your organs? Like, those count towards your muscle? That doesn’t make sense.

VeGAINS: Yeah…

Protein Deficient Vegan: Bones aren’t muscle.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I mean, it’s just an estimate. I don’t know how much bones weigh.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know. They’re not hollow like bird bones, so I feel like they probably weigh.

VeGAINS: How much do bones weigh? I feel like, okay, google, how much do human bones weigh? On the website homework study, they say it only accounts for about 15% of a person’s weight, as many of the bones out there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Whoa, we have hollow bones. Okay, so update. Apparently bones don’t weigh that much. That’s very disturbing.

VeGAINS: Yeah, but they do weigh something. Is it like 20 pounds of bones?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So you should take out the bones, too.

VeGAINS: I’ve never actually seen anything recommending to take out the bones. Anyway. I think that maybe this is derailed a little bit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: But how much does hair weigh? I think these things can’t count towards lean body mass. It’s a scam, folks. It’s a farce. We will not stand for this.

VeGAINS: So another update. Your bones and your hair and your organs all count as part of your lean body mass. It is everything except for your body fat.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And I disagree with this

VeGAINS: But that is the way it is. So if you’re at 160 pounds of lean body mass, you probably target. To optimize muscle, you target about 130 grams to 190 grams of protein per day. And if you target the low end of that, you’re going to get about 95% of the benefit. There are some diminishing returns. So I think you should be perfectly comfortable just shooting for 130 grams there. And if you just want to hit the RDA, maybe you’re just starting on protein and you’re like, okay, how much do I need to just stay healthy? You would probably target for 160 pounds of lean body mass. You’d probably target 60 to 80 grams of protein a day. One caveat here is that those numbers come from studies that do not target plant based people. So it’s just for omnivores due to things like bioavailability and vegan protein sources generally having less amino acids and things along those lines, you may want to include a buffer of 10 to 15% additional protein over the numbers we talked about before. There are new studies are coming out and maybe this isn’t necessary, but they do have a weaker amino acid profile, so it may be a good idea. So that means that if you would have normally targeted 130 grams of protein per day, 160 pounds, maybe as a vegan, you target 150 grams of protein a day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Better stock up on your tofu, kids.

VeGAINS: Yeah, and seitan

Protein Deficient Vegan: And seitan, and TVP

VeGAINS: Protein is also the most satiating macro. So it makes you feel the most full out of protein, fats and carbohydrates. So the more protein you can eat, the less you’ll be hungry throughout the day. Technically, food with high fiber and high volume is more satiating even than protein, but that’s not a macronutrient. So high protein foods, high fiber foods, high volume foods, especially if you’re trying to cut weight. Those will help you keep from being hungry throughout the day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: More protein, less hanger.

VeGAINS: Yes, you want to try to get some protein with every meal. That one makes it easier to hit your targets. Two, again, helps you from being hungry. Also, just kind of a timing thing. Protein timing is not super important if you’re going to be getting protein throughout the day anyway, that you can maybe get an extra couple of percentage points of optimization if you try to get about 20 grams of protein every three to 4 hours, basically that triggers muscle protein synthesis. So just a couple of times a day, you can trigger your muscles to recover and build up a little more from the damage from the last workout.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Science.

VeGAINS: Okay, next up is fat. For fat, we want to try to target 0.3 to 0.6 grams per pound of body weight. So in that 200 pound body weight example, you want to try to get 60 grams to 120 grams of fat just to be in the optimal range. So for saturated fat, we do want to try to limit saturated fat. There are two different guidelines. The American Diabetes Association recommends limiting it to 7% of your calories. USDA recommends limiting it to 10% of your calories. So somewhere in that range, if you take an example, 2000 calorie diet, 10% of that would be 23 grams of saturated fat, so you wouldn’t want to get any more of that. The problem, especially with saturated fat, is when you have a lot in a poor ratio to unsaturated fat. So saturated fat, on its own, I think, is still a gray area how bad it is. But when you have a lot more saturated fat than you do unsaturated fat, it seems to be a lot more clear that it’s problematic for your health. So our ratio is supposed to be pretty close to one to one with saturated to unsaturated. But a typical american diet right now is about one to 16. So you have about 16 times as much saturated fat as you do unsaturated fat. And that’s where we start to run to issues.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Wow.

VeGAINS: Last up is carbohydrates. So first of all, with carbohydrates, fiber does fall under carbs. So for fiber, you want to just try to get 25 to 35 grams a day to make sure your bodily functions are all working properly, and you can go to the bathroom regularly, and you’re healthy in that way. One interesting thing about fiber is even though it is a carbohydrate, your body doesn’t necessarily digest most of it, so it does not count for calories. Also, it does not count for the glycogen stores we were talking about earlier. So fiber doesn’t really give you energy because it’s not digested. It really just kind of goes through your system and helps to kind of move things along in various ways.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And that’s how they will sneak in fiber into, like, for instance, like low carb wraps. It actually has carbs, but they’re fiber, so they don’t count towards calories or the carbs.

VeGAINS: Right? Yeah, but it will still make you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Feel full and it will sometimes make you shit your brains out.

VeGAINS: That’s true. But also, did you know if you eat too much fiber, you go back to being constipated?

Protein Deficient Vegan: What?

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: A double negative?

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Whoa.

VeGAINS: So you want to really try to be in the right range, and that range is probably going to be different per person. So you’re going to have to experiment with this one a little bit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: What is too much?

VeGAINS: I don’t really know. I think it’s per person. And it depends also on how much soluble fiber versus insoluble fiber you have. So a lot of different things play into that. You have to figure out your own tolerance.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So do you want to experiment?

VeGAINS: Oh, I figured mine out

Protein Deficient Vegan: He’s going to be the guinea pig!

VeGAINS: For fiber and carbohydrates. When you’re trying to count calories, you can do, especially in your calorie tracker like myfitnesspal, you can switch that over to net carbs mode, and those will just show you your carb goals for the carbs that actually contribute to calories. So net carbs is just carbohydrates minus fiber grams. So those are your net carbs. So as far as how many of those you should eat, basically, once you figure out your protein target and your fat target, carbohydrates should just make up the remainder of your calories and your total calorie goal for the day. Okay, so I think that’s all we have about macronutrients. We’ll be digging more in the future into all of these amino acids and fatty acids and things along those lines, but that’s enough to get you started. Okay, so next up, we are going to go through our recipe roundup. We’ve had quite a few recipes since the last podcast. Some of these are for the holiday, and then some of these are to take you into Veganuary, which is again the month of January. A lot of people try to switch over to a plant based diet and experiment with vegan lifestyle. So we’re trying to get everybody set up for that with some easy recipes for Veganuary.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: Cool. So our first one we made for the holidays was a biscoff cheesecake. Can you tell me what a biscoff is?

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s a cookie.

VeGAINS: Yeah. It’s those cookies you get on airplanes that are, like, cinnamon flavored.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Pretty good.

VeGAINS: They are really good. I think maybe I’ve had one on a plane, but I’ve never eaten them intentionally until we went to make the cheesecake. And I feel like I’ve been missing out for a long time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. They are not just airplane cookies, folks.

VeGAINS: You can put them in your house.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yummy cookies. You can buy them for your house. You don’t have to be in the air.

VeGAINS: Yeah. The cheesecake is 29% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’s pretty good.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it is really good. Tastes like a big biscoff cookie that’s really soft and creamy with chocolate. With chocolate, yeah. Next up, we made a seven layer taco dip that was 30% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You can eat it with tortilla chips or tortillas.

VeGAINS: I actually just made some, like, burritos out of it that was even really good

Protein Deficient Vegan: That was good.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know. Did your family make taco dip a lot?

VeGAINS: Yeah, we had taco dip a lot for various holidays. I don’t know if it was for Christmas, but I remember taco dip being around at a lot of family gatherings.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, I feel like I always had that because I was a vegetarian for a long time and that was just, like, one of the things I ate. It felt like all the time at holiday stuff.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I always really liked it. Next up, we had a shepherd’s pie that was 31% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That was really good.

VeGAINS: Yeah. A big pile of potatoes and TVP. It’s hard to go wrong.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And mushrooms.

VeGAINS: Well, yeah, the mushrooms are really good

Protein Deficient Vegan: Apparently people don’t like when you call it Shepherd’s pie.

VeGAINS: Yeah, well, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay, here’s my thing. It doesn’t have sheep in the name. It has shepherd.

VeGAINS: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So it’s like metal. Like, is there a shepherd in this pie? Maybe. Did I kill him and free all of his sheep? Also, maybe.

VeGAINS: Is cannibalism vegan?

Protein Deficient Vegan: If they consent, yes.

VeGAINS: So you found a really generous shepherd.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, for sure.

VeGAINS: Next, we had a really awesome triple chocolate cheesecake that’s 28% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: We ate that for breakfast. Multiple days.

VeGAINS: Yeah. This one. We’re going to have to figure out how to make this our flagship recipe somehow, because it’s definitely the best thing we’ve ever made.

Protein Deficient Vegan: We need to learn how to freeze it and ship it, because it’s really freaking good.

VeGAINS: Yeah. I don’t know. This one doesn’t taste like anything protein or tofu related. It just tastes, like, fudgy, chocolatey.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Tastes kind of like brownies, even.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t know, if you’re going to make any of the recipes. You should probably make this one.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I agree with that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I stand by this one.

VeGAINS: And then the last one we had on the holiday list was a cold veggie pizza, which I had never heard of before.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: But it’s kind of like one of those veggie dip plates, but on a crescent roll. On a crescent roll crust. Like a pizza. Yeah, it was actually super good, and I ended up eating quite a bit of it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s kind of classy. It’s like a veggie tray. Classy.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like, I tried but not too hard because I don’t like you guys that much.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Now, that one’s not high protein. It’s only about 18%, but it is. You get all your veggies in and it’s delicious.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It was good.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Not everything’s high protein. Right. What are you going to do?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, what are you going to do?

VeGAINS: All right, next up, we’ve got some of the recipes we set aside specifically for Veganuary. First up, we got a pasta primavera. It’s 31% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I loved that it had so many veggies.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it was really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we made it, like, six servings. So we had it for three days for meal prepping.

VeGAINS: What did you use for the sauce on that?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Extra firm silk and tofu and nutritional yeast.

VeGAINS: Kind of the go to, I think.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, and we tried this new brand of cheese for the first time called Peaceful Rebel cheese.

VeGAINS: Oh, yeah, that was really good cheese.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we grated their parmesan on top, and it really good. And it’s made with tofu and it melts really nicely. I am a big fan. Hopefully it’ll hit grocery stores at some point.

VeGAINS: Yeah, that was some of the best cheese. I remember having, like, the blocks of cheese. I don’t normally like them too much, but that was really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they had a couple of really good flavors. Big fan.

VeGAINS: Okay, next up, we had an Oreo cheesecake that was 29% protein, had just a bunch of oreos crunched up in it, and for some reason turned almost black when we cooked it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. I don’t know this. Okay. This might be a little niche, but if you’ve seen supernatural, there are these creatures called a leviathan, and I feel like the goo that they have when they die looked a lot like the oreo cheesecake.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Because it started out kind of grayish.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it started out gray and then it turned black.

VeGAINS: I don’t know, but it was really good, actually. Just had some more for breakfast this morning. Yeah, it was delicious.

Protein Deficient Vegan: The leviathan cheesecake.

VeGAINS: Next up, we had a big portobello mushroom. Was it stuffed?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes, stuffed with TVP and sauteed onion and spinach, obviously. Vegan cheese.

VeGAINS: Yeah. All these stuffed mushroom things are really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I’m obsessed with the stuffed mushrooms because they take literally zero effort. You just like, mix some crap together, shove it in a mushroom and put it in the oven.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then you eat it.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Cool. The next one we made was a coconut cashew cheesecake. This one was actually way more protein than the other ovens at 35% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And it has chocolate in it, too, because. Duh. Yeah, I really liked it.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I really liked it, too. The coconut flavor came out really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: Little coconut flakes and stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You do like coconut.

VeGAINS: And then last up, we had a vegan philly cheesesteak.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I love this.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So you’re going to take extra firm tofu or like super firm tofu. And you’re going to take a wide vegetable peeler and just peel it into the thinnest slices possible. Then you marinate that, and then you cook it in a pan and it texturally is fantastic.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it’s just kind of like shaved.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’s really good.

VeGAINS: It’s super good. It marinates. Getting it so thin and stuff. Putting it in a marinade helps it marinate really well because, you know, tofu cubes don’t marinate worth a damn.

Protein Deficient Vegan: No, they do not.

VeGAINS: But these shaved slices seem to marinate pretty well.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. And then you don’t end up with, like, big, blobby blobs of moisture, too, like you do with tofu cubes.

VeGAINS: Yeah, nobody wants to eat tofu cubes. If you’re making tofu and you’re still eating it in cubes, you probably hate it for one. And for two, try some of our recipes, because tofu, I don’t think, was meant to be eaten in cubes, but it happens a lot.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. Expand your mind.

VeGAINS: All right, well, that’s all the recipes coming up next week, we’re going to be talking about some of your micronutrients and vitamins, especially some vitamins that you might want to focus on as a vegan and stuff. Right. And stuff. It does say there vitamins and stuff. So we will figure out what the stuff is, but it will probably be vitamin related stuff. As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions. We can be reached at or you can use the contact page on our website, or just comment or direct message in any of our social media profiles that you can find in the show notes. All right. Thanks, everybody. Have a good week. And we should talk to you at least one more time before the new year and before we get into January.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, unless we suck.

VeGAINS: So good luck with figuring out your macronutrient goals, and hopefully you can tie that into what you’ve already been doing with your calorie tracking and your calorie targets. And hopefully this will really set you up, hit the new year pretty strong. All right. You want to say bye?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Bye?

VeGAINS: 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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