What it Takes to be a Vegan Athlete w/Chris Kresser | Joe Rogan

The J ere Ogan experience. I listened to your interview with Matt Tybee and the point I was thinking about it because you were talking about it politically, how we're just living in echo chambers now. So you go on social media, you're a Republican, you're only going to see stuff that caters to your view and the algorithms are even optimized for that because they know that you'll click on that more and that will lead to more ad dollars. But it's similar with nutrition. So if you're a vegan, you go on YouTube, you're going to see a ton of vegan videos and vegan perspectives, same with your Facebook feed, et cetera. And to be fair, it's the same for people who are into keto or low carb or carnivore or whatever they're into, it's the same thing. So you're just getting this reinforcing confirmation bias, supporting access to information. That is a weird thing about social media algorithms, whether it's YouTube algorithms or Facebook or any of these things is that they're giving you what you want to see, which you would say, oh great, well that's what I want to see. But the problem is there's so many counter arguments, especially when you're talking about nutrition science, there's so many discussions on both sides of the fence and it seems like both sides are preaching to the choir. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're biased, as you said. My story, as a lot of people know, is I was vegan. Somebody said on one of the videos, you are the most vegan sounding non-vegan ever. Well, I mean, yeah, I was a vegan, I was vegetarian, I was raw food vegan, I was a macrobiotic vegan, I have a lot of friends who are vegan, I have patients that are vegan, I have nothing against vegans and I totally get the reasons that people become vegan. But I, like many others and my patients in my community, my health was harmed by that. And now, I mean- How was your health harmed? Can you explain to people? Yeah, I mean, I lost weight and as you can see, I don't have a lot to lose to begin with. My digestion got really screwed up. I got depressed. I'd never been depressed, like I've never been a person who gets depressed. I felt anxious. It just was clearly not working for me. And again, that's not to say it can't work for some people. Do you think the cause of depression had something to do with the diet because of the lack of cholesterol? It's- B12. Hormones. Iron, yeah, for sure. But now, I mean, it's funny too, I don't actually, I make a point of not reading comments usually. Yeah. But occasionally, I come across them on Twitter or something- No, this is something a comedian told me. So that's why I thought it was hilarious. So people are just like, oh, he's going to get on there and just low carb, low carb. That's total, I'm not a low carb guy. I never have been. In fact, I'm in trouble with the low carb community because I push back. I don't think it's right for everybody. I don't think it's right for performance. I don't see any evidence that for elite athletic performers, that it's the way to go. And I don't know anyone that's an elite athletic performer that follows those diets. Maybe endurance runners. I was going to say Zach. Zach Bitter. Yeah, I was going to say Zach. And Zach flies in the face of all this stuff. And if you want to include someone like that guy that ran the Appalachian Trail in 48 days or whatever he did, which is no small feat for sure. But I mean, Zach Bitter ran a 100 mile race in 11 hours and 40 minutes, which is 40 something minutes, which is fucking bananas. And then he kept running. I think after that. He's a savage. All he eats ribeyes. Yeah. That's what that guy eats. I mean, he talked about the main food in his diet is ribeye steaks. He's mostly keto. So yeah, I mean, anyways, my point was just like, I'm not super dogmatic. I'm just like, I'm interested in what works for the most people, essentially. And you mentioned Scott Juric. A Belgian dentist shattered his record by five days a couple of years ago. And that guy was eating like Snickers and tons of crap. So I'm not saying that he shattered his record by five days. Yeah. Oh Jesus. I'm not saying that I'm not saying that's what you should do, but I'm saying there's more to athletic performance than food. I guess that's not really deceptive because he did break the record when he broke it. He did break it. Yeah, he broke it. He's a phenomenal athlete. We don't want to take that away from him again. And then like Michael Phelps, you know, guy eats pizza. This guy eats 12,000 calories of like sugar Swiss French toast pizza. Usain Bolt in the Beijing link with the Olympics when he shattered those records, he ate over a thousand chicken nuggets. I think somebody calculated it. So I know there's more, there's more to it than that. When you're at that level of performance, you are burning off such an insane amount of calories. It wasn't so hard. You can kind of almost eat anything when you're, when you're in that mode. Yeah. This is obviously not comparable, but when we did sober October last year, we had this fitness challenge. I was doing cardio. No joke. Minimum five hours a day, sometimes six and seven. It was insane. And I was eating everything. Boxes of cookies, bottles of soda. Probably lost weight too. Yeah, I did. Well, not really. Because I lifted a lot of weights too. I kind of maintained. Maybe I lost a couple of pounds, but I was drinking like giant, like coke. Like I was drinking like a cream soda. I never drink that shit. But it's like, my body wanted sugar. It's like, give me some sugar. You just did seven hours on a fucking elliptical machine. Right. And it was so ridiculous. But those guys are working out even harder than that. So imagine like what felt. If you need 12,000 calories, you're not getting it with paleo and you're not getting it with vegan diet. That's important. No, that's important. So let's go. Let's rewind a little bit to the protein, the RDA. Yes. RDA protein. That's super important. Yeah. So 0.8 kilograms per grams per kilogram of protein per day is the RDA. And again, that's just the basic minimum. That's not the amount that's needed for optimal health and performance. That's just the absolute basics for avoiding malnutrition. However, even that number now, that's based on outdated nitrogen balance studies for determining the RDA. And there's a newer method called the indicator amino acid oxidation technique or IAAO. And this suggests that the RDA should be 1.2 grams per kilogram. And again, just the basic minimum, bare minimum, not optimal. So it's now gone up from 0.8 to 1.2. And if you use that number, if you pull up slide eight, Jamie, that's only enough for an adult that weighs less than 130 pounds. Really? So the, sorry. You know how he said, and James said in the study, the average vegetarian gets 71 grams a day, which is not only the RDA, but 70% more. That's using the 0.8 number. But if you use 1.2 grams per kilogram per day, then a lot of people are going to be protein deficient on a vegetarian diet. And we're not, again, not talking about optimal amount for athletes. We're just talking about the RDA basic bare minimum. And when you say vegetarian, you should say vegan, correct? Because you're not talking about egg protein. You can get... No, this study was vegetarian. They weren't referring to vegans. So you actually could get egg protein. Yeah. And dairy. And dairy protein. Right. But eggs are far superior in terms of their amino acid profile than vegetables. Yeah. So for vegans, it would be different. I brought up eggs to a friend of mine. I was saying this really recently, why don't you try eggs? And they looked at me like I was talking to them about poison. Yeah. Like there's plenty of people that are vegan or vegetarian and you bring up eggs to them and they look at you like, why would I eat an egg? Yeah. So that's, you know, 1.2 is the RDA with if you use this newer method. But for athletes, James, to his credit, does acknowledge in the film that athletes need more protein than regular non-athlete people. But he doesn't say how much more. So again, if you use these IAAO method, they've done... Use this newer technique to look at athletes and they've found that the range is somewhere between 1.4 to 2.7 grams per kilogram. So we're now way higher than that 0.8 number. And just for people who aren't familiar with kilograms, let's say we take the median number there, 2.1 grams per kilogram per day. Well anyone who's ever been in the bodybuilding weightlifting community will recognize this. That's one pound of protein per pound of body weight a day. Which has been the common recommendation in that community for one... You need one gram of protein. Sorry, one gram of protein. Not one pound. Holy shit. I'd have to... Can you imagine? One gram and in fact even Arnold in the movie says, I weighed 250 pounds. I used to eat 250 grams of protein. That's the recommendation. That's the standard in the bodybuilding community. And it turns out that's actually based on science. So a 200 pound athlete would need 200 grams of protein a day. And Jamie, if you pull up slide 10, this is what you'd have to eat on a vegan diet to get that amount of protein. And again, we're just talking about quantity. We're not talking about quality. So 200 pound athlete, that's me. I weigh 200 pounds. So you would need to eat three cups of cooked lentils, three cups of chickpeas, two cups of quinoa, three ounces of almonds, three slices of silken tofu, and 10 tablespoons of peanut butter. That's the whole day? That's the day. I could fuck that up in a day. Yeah, you could. But the problem is the DIA score for all of those, like the bioavailability and amino acid profile would be horrible compared to meat, eggs, dairy. So what would I have to do? Because I know they've done this study. There was a study that I'd read or had heard about, I should say, where they compared rice protein to whey protein. And they found that at a certain level of grams, like whatever it was, they had an equal effect. Is it lutein? Lucene. Lucene. They had an equal effect. I should give credit to the video that I was watching. This gentleman, I was watching this video today, Dr. Ryan Lowry. And they were saying that what that means is that, correct me if I'm wrong, what it is is once you hit a certain level of leucine, it's a point of diminishing returns. And there's no added benefit to having more leucine in your diet. So if you hit whatever it is, I think it was 48 grams or something like that. When you have 48 grams of this and 48 grams of that, you put the two of them together, it's essentially the same effect. Well, I'm not sure about that. But I mean, leucine is very important for anabolic signaling and muscle protein synthesis. It's one of the essential, it's the essential amino acid that's thought to be the most important for that. And it's low in plant proteins. And the other issue with plant proteins that you have is that they have limiting amino acids. So these are amino acids that actually interfere with muscle protein synthesis. So because the levels are so low in that food. So lysine is a limiting amino acid in grains like wheat and rice. Maybe that's, there was leucine and lysine discussion maybe there. And then methionine and cysteine are limiting in legumes like soy. So Jamie on slide six, I made a chart comparing the amino acid profile in beef to several different plant proteins like white beans, soybeans, peas, and rice. What you can see there is beef is higher in every single amino acid other than every plant protein that's compared there with the exception of soybeans are slightly higher in tryptophan than beef. Look at leucine. So beef it's 2.23 versus 0.58 for white beans, 1.3 for soy. Soy is higher in leucine than any other plant protein, which is why it's often used. And then like 0.3 for peas and 0.01 for rice. If you get to a certain number or a certain level of all these, so if you ate enough food that you would pass a certain marker, would it be possible to have the same effect by eating cooked peas or soybeans? It is possible. It is possible. So I agree with that. You have to eat an enormous amount of that as you can see because of the levels. And this is why a lot of vegan bodybuilders and athletes end up using protein powders because you can get to those amounts easier by using the powders. And you can also blend like 70% pea with 30% rice to get the right amino acid ratio easier with powders. So like Patrick Baboumian is a good example of that. Did you see the video that Bobby Geist made? No. So there's actually a video. Oh, is that the one that you sent me? Yes, I did see that. There's video that Patrick made himself of his own diet on what he eats on a daily basis. And it turns out to be a boatload of protein powder and just shakes with all kinds of powders and supplements and things like that. So yeah, we can go through it. So he starts with a bunch of different supplements in the morning, multivitamin, nutritional yeast, zinc, glucosamine, magnesium, calcium, B12, and iron. Then he has a protein shake with soy protein powder, creatine, and beta-alanine, which probably is because he's aware of the research showing lower levels of muscle creatine and carnosine in vegans. Beta-alanine and creatine would address that. Then he has a post-workout smoothie with soy or pea protein powder, glutamine, beta-alanine, creatine, and dried greens. And then his first solid meal of the day is fried falafel, french fries, soy sausage, fried peppers, and tomatoes. And then he has some more protein shakes and smoothies throughout the day. So I don't know. That doesn't strike me as a super healthy way to eat. What problem do you have with that? Well first of all, I think we should primarily get nutrients from food whenever we can. I'm not against supplementation. I think there's a role for it, of course, especially with things like vitamin D that you might not be able to get enough of from food or therapeutic supplementation if you're dealing with a health problem. But eating a diet that is not sufficient in the amount of nutrients that you need and then using supplements to make up, you know, to address that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Well, in his situation, he's got a very unique situation that he's a strength athlete. That's all he's doing is trying to lift really, really heavy things. So he needs to maintain a certain amount of bulk. He needs to have an enormous amount of protein. Yeah, an enormous amount of protein. He's very heavy, you know, and that sport is also, that's a steroid sport. It's just one of those sports where it's like bodybuilding. Pretty much everybody. It's a steroid sport. So you're eating massive amounts of quantities. You're taking chemicals. Yeah, it might not be the healthiest thing. But it's also like just the sport itself might not be the healthiest thing. I mean, you've seen them carry people on the, he was doing that in the film. Like that's not good for your back. That's fucking crazy. But it works for what he's trying to do. Obviously it's working for what he's trying to do. There's no dispute in that. See what he's doing is almost like the intelligent way if you want to be vegan and do what he's trying to do. I don't know if he could eat just vegetables and pull that off. He couldn't, but that's kind of the point. There are a lot of other strong men that do just- Like Robert Oberst, who we did on the show. Yeah, he just eats meat and rice. That guy eats pounds and pounds of beef and rice. Simple, you know, accessible form of carbohydrate and a lot of protein. And it's an unfair comparison and Oberst talked about him on the podcast before. They're much larger. He's much larger. A lot of the strong men are huge. Like the guy who played Gregor in Game of Thrones, right? Yes. Yes, he's one of them. He's like six, eight or nine. Yeah, he's a normal. And Patrick is not. He's not nearly that size. Five, six or five, seven or something. So the comparison between him and a guy like Oberst in those legit top of the food chain, strongest man in the world competitions. It's not comparable. Totally different weight class. He's a more- Robert is enormous. He's so much bigger. But the problem is in the film, they don't make that distinction. And they try to pretend that this guy is one of the strongest men in the world. He's not. He's very strong, no doubt. And he definitely has broken some records and some competitions. And you know, and you have different weight classes and different- But you're not talking about a guy who wins those, you know, Magnus von Magnuson and the fucking competitions where they're carrying trucks and shit. Well, I mean, I guess my point too was like, is it the best example of how an athlete can thrive on a plant-based whole foods diet? Well, I think it is though, because for him, for his size, you know, to be a guy who's five foot seven and is carrying that fucking enormous amount of weight, he's obviously doing something that's very impressive and he's doing it while he's on this vegan diet. And again, I mean, just the discounting all the illegal supplementation, because I don't think it is illegal in that sport. It's kind of, you kind of have to do it. You want to get that big. But if you want to do it and do it as a vegan, he is showing you that it's possible. So in that sense, I defend what he's doing. Because I think that he, like, that's the only way in that. But this is a very sport specific area of performance. He's just talking about lifting insanely heavy shit. And he's doing that and thriving on a vegan diet. Yeah. No doubt, you know, enormously strong and he's succeeding. I would argue that he might do even better if he was eating, you know, more nutrient dense food and he might need to take fewer supplements and drink less powder. Yeah, but I think from his perspective, it's an ethical thing. That's my bias. I'm more like a whole foods person and, you know, that's where I'm coming from.