"The Health Effects of Mycoprotein (Quorn) Products vs. BCAAs in Meat"
You may have heard about meat made out of wheat protein,
meat made out of soybean protein, and meats made out of pea protein,
but mycoprotein is a relatively new addition—meat made from
the mushroom kingdom—popular in Europe, commercialized as Quorn,
which makes not just meat-free beef, but chicken-free chicken,
fishless fish and pig-free pork, just in case someone would like
to eat plant-based but can’t give up their cocktail weenies.
Environmental impact-wise, Quorn beef has at least
a 10 times smaller carbon footprint than beef;
Quorn chicken at least four times better than chicken-chicken.
And health-wise, it’s high in protein and ﬁber, and low in fat,
cholesterol, sodium, and sugar as one would expect.
But, most importantly, there have been clinical trials
showing it may help people control cholesterol, blood sugar,
and insulin levels, and improve satiety.
No surprise given that not only the fiber
but the mycoprotein itself is fermentable by our good gut bugs,
so can also act as a prebiotic for our friendly flora.
There have been rare authenticated reports of people
with mycoprotein allergies, and even more with unvalidated
complaints, but given how many billions of packages have been sold,
the rate of allergic reactions may be
on the order of like 1 in 9 million.
Here’s the cholesterol data, converted into US numbers.
So significant drops in total and LDL cholesterol—
more than 30 points within 8 weeks.
In terms of satiety, as I noted in my Evidence-Based
Weight Loss presentation, both tofu and Quorn have been found
to have satiating qualities that are stronger than chicken;
for Quorn, among both lean subjects and overweight
and obese individuals, cutting down on subsequent
meal intake hours later.
You know, it’s funny when the meat industry funds obesity studies
on chicken, they choose for their head-to-head comparison foods
like cookies and “sugar-coated chocolates.”
This is a classic drug industry trick where you make
your product look better by comparing it against something worse.
(Apparently, just regular chocolate,
was not enough to make chicken look better.)
But what happens when chicken is pitted against a real control,
like chicken without the actual chicken?
Chicken chickens out.
For example, feed people a chicken and rice lunch,
and four and a half hours later they eat 18% more of a dinner buffet
than those who instead who got a Quorn and rice lunch,
cutting about 200 calories on average.
Part of the reason plant-based meats may be less fattening
is that they cause less of an insulin spike.
A meat-free chicken like Quorn causes up to 41% less
of an immediate insulin reaction.
It turns out animal protein causes almost exactly
as much insulin release as pure sugar.
Just adding some egg whites to your diet can increase insulin output
60% within four days. And fish may be even worse.
Why would adding tuna to mashed potatoes spike up insulin levels,
but adding broccoli instead drop the insulin response
by about 40%? It’s not the fiber, since giving the same amount
of broccoli fiber alone provided no significant benefit.
So, why does animal protein make things worse,
but plant protein make things better?
Plant proteins tend to be lower in the branched-chain amino acids,
which are associated with insulin resistance—
the cause of type 2 diabetes. You can show this experimentally.
Give some vegans branched-chain amino acids,
and you can make them as insulin resistant as omnivores.
Or, take omnivores and put them through even a 48-hour
vegan diet challenge, and within two days you can see
the opposite—significant improvements in metabolic signatures. Why?
Because “decreased consumption of branched-chain amino acids
improves metabolic health.”
Check this out. Those randomized to restrict their protein intake
were averaging literally hundreds more calories per day;
so, they should have become fatter, right?
But no, they actually lost more body fat.
Restricting their protein enabled them to eat more calories,
while at the same time they lost more weight.
More calories, yet a loss of body fat!
And this magic “protein restriction”?
They were just having people eat the recommended amount of protein.
So, maybe they should have called this
the normal protein group, or the recommended protein group,
and the group that was eating the more typical American
protein levels, and suffering because of it,
the excess protein group.
Given the “restoration of metabolic health by decreased consumption
of branched-chain amino acids,” leaders in the field
have suggested the invention of drugs to block their absorption,
to “promote metabolic health and treat diabetes and obesity
without reducing caloric intake.”
Or, we can just try not to eat so many
branched-chain amino acids in the first place.
They are found mostly in meat, including chicken and fish,
dairy products, and eggs, perhaps explaining why animal protein
has been associated with higher diabetes risk,
whereas plant protein appears protective.
So, defining the “appropriate upper limits” of animal protein intake
“may offer a great chance for the prevention
of type 2 diabetes and obesity.”