Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Most Plants Don’t Really Want You to Eat Them: A Short Lesson in Bioavailability

Have you ever wondered why certain foods have stood the test of time? Maybe it was your 93-year-old grandma’s lifelong love of butter or liverwurst that finally convinced you there was more than meets the eye to the discussion about the healthfulness of animal foods. Or perhaps it was the growing community of people who seem to be reversing chronic disease with diets centered around nutrient-dense foods like meat…

Whatever the reason, we wouldn’t be here on this earth with our brilliant minds capable of constructing skyscrapers and airplanes if it weren’t for consistent, bioavailable nutrition.

Bioavailability refers to how much of a particular nutrient is actually absorbed by your body during digestion, and is therefore able to be used. It matters, because despite the amount of a specific amino acid, vitamin, or mineral is in a food BEFORE you eat it, other components of that food can affect how much of a nutrient you absorb AFTER you eat it.

Plants can’t run away from you, so their only defense from you eating their “young” is to have defensive compounds. Their goal is to get through your digestive system as intact as possible so that their “babies” (seeds) can sprout someplace else and grow. This is generally why fruit has less anti-nutrients than vegetables. Fruit WANTS you to eat it and spread the seeds. Does this mean I’m “anti-plants”? No. I’m simply trying to point out that what you see on a label or nutrient detail is not exactly what you get when it comes to plant-sourced foods.

Many plants contain compounds like trypsin inhibitors, phytic acid, and lectins, which hamper your body’s ability to break down proteins and absorb key minerals like zinc, magnesium, and calcium. Some of these compounds can be reduced by soaking, boiling, and fermenting, but can still pose a threat if consumed in high amounts. Lectins, for example (found in high amounts in grains) have been causally implicated in gut dysfunction and autoimmunity. Lectins damage the gut barrier, causing it to become permeable or “leaky”, which can allow toxins that an intact gut barrier would normally ward off to enter your bloodstream, resulting in systemic inflammatory responses long-term. Cooking, fermenting and other forms of “processing” however, can reduce the amounts of antinutrients in plant foods.

 

Plant vs. Animal Proteins 

 

For amino acids in particular, we use the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score or “DIAAS” to assess protein quality. DIAAS samples come from the last part of the small intestine known as the ileum, and account for anti-nutritional factors when measuring protein absorption. High quality proteins are both complete proteins (i.e. they contain all 9 essential amino acids) and bioavailable proteins (meaning the amino acids inside of them are actually absorbed by YOU). For a deeper dive into the specifics of protein quality for optimal health, check out this blog post.


Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1009-y

Notice how even the plant protein ISOLATES rank lower than all of the animal foods… and that’s just for protein! When it comes to vitamins and minerals, most of them are much easier, more practical, and safer to acquire through animal foods than plant food sources. 

Vitamins and Minerals

 

Let’s take zinc, for example. The most potent chelator of zinc, phytic acid, is found in most grains and legumes. Zinc is required for enzymes to function, especially those involved in DNA repair, and stabilizes cell membranes by preventing lipid peroxidation and forming complexes that scavenge free radicals. When phytic acid binds zinc, it forms an unabsorbable complex that your body cannot use. This makes sense, because a plant that is stuck in the ground with no observable defenses does NOT want you to be getting bioavailable nutrients from it! But it doesn’t just stop at zinc or phytic acid. Both phytic acid and oxalic acid (which is found in high amounts in dark leafy greens and nuts) can bind to zinc, calcium, magnesium, copper, and iron, preventing their absorption. Still think that raw green smoothie is doing you any good?

Animal proteins and fats, on the other hand, have been shown to increase the bioavailability of important minerals like zinc, as well as the fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K. In fact, the only source of K2 from plants is from fermented vegetables like natto, whereas K2 is found ubiquitously in animal foods, and is highest in dairy and liver. 

I should also point out that the places where you can find fat-soluble vitamins in plants tend to be paired with highly-oxidizable fats like omega-6s, which are not ideal structural components for human cell membranes. In fact, the peroxidation of polyunsaturated fats found in plants is crucial to the development of countless chronic diseases. 

Prioritizing nutrient-dense foods doesn’t have to be stressful! If you take one item from each of the columns above, combine them, and consider that a meal, you have TEN THOUSAND meal options. If that was one meal a day, you would potentially not see the same meal for twenty-seven years. By focusing on what you can eat and not what you’re removing, the opportunities for meals are virtually endless!

And yes, you CAN reduce the amount of anti-nutritional factors in plants by soaking, boiling, and fermenting, but getting all of the recommended daily requirements on a vegan or plant-based diet might not be the most healthful OR ethical choice…

 

But What About the Planet?

 

Consider for a moment that a whole cow (which on average produces about 500lbs of edible meat) can feed a family of four for MONTHS, and provides safe, bioavailable nutrition with no shortage of every single nutrient a human being needs to live and thrive. Can the same be said for mono-cropped nuts, seeds, grains, and leaves? Aside from containing compounds that actively harm your health, especially when consumed raw and in the absence of nutrient dense animal foods, these vegetables were likely grown at a large scale, unless you’re buying everything locally and seasonally. In order to grow vegetables and grains at a large scale, farmers must till the soil, killing worms, mice, and any other animals that might have made a home in their field. When it comes time to harvest, tractors kill many small animals like rabbits that are in the way. And yes, even our beloved organic farms have to kill animals to grow their crops.

In some countries, agricultural practices have a human cost as well. Have you ever spent a day harvesting vegetables? It is incredibly labor intensive and at times dangerous. If these plant products are not well sourced, there is also a possibility that underpaid children or exploited immigrants were involved in their harvesting. If you want to read more on this subject, I’ve got a blog post about the harmful practices that are keeping some of your favorite fruits and vegetables cheap and accessible. 

So in terms of both least harm to animals and most benefit to humans, the one cow certainly seems like the better option to me. Just because that head of lettuce or package of tofu isn’t visibly covered in blood when you buy it doesn’t mean something didn’t die in a gruesome way to get it to your grocery store.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive to learn about nutrient-dense eating, how to optimize your health, and which foods are ideal from a sustainability and ethics perspective, check out my course, Sustainavore. And for a limited time, if you enter code: meat4health you’ll get $50 off!

 

My posts may contain affiliate links, which means you don’t pay any more, but I may make a small commission, which helps me continue to bring you great new posts. Read my full disclosure/disclaimer here.

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15 thoughts on “Most Plants Don’t Really Want You to Eat Them: A Short Lesson in Bioavailability”

  1. Laughing out load! I have never killed a rabbit in my life and I’ve been farming for 38 years. This article is parody, right?

  2. Your message is being heard. Truth will out! Unfortunately the ignorant are canon fodder against the mercenaries of disinformation and disease.

  3. Great article, couldn’t agree more. Too bad all the vegans are so blind to the fact that they kill way more animals then a Carnivore ever could.

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