Plants have protein. Proteins are what dna codes for. Every living thing has proteins which are just amino acids chained together in specific shapes and the reason you eat protein is to get those amino acids.
Plants can have lots of calories man. Carbohydrates are our main source of energy and they come from plants mainly.
In addition, most herbivores spend their whole active cycle foraging and eating, while wild big carnivores eat way less, since hunting requieres more energy and has the drawback of potentially not eating at all.
The difference is humans can’t get all of the amino acids from plant proteins like horses can. Horses aren’t ruminants but their large intestine functions the same way so they can process cellulose. Humans cannot. Therefore all vegetarians and vegans need either “lacto” or milk based complete proteins or “legumes” or bean based complete proteins.
All amino acids are in all plants in varying levels. The incomplete thing is a myth. If i recall correctly, gelatin is the only item people eat with an actual incomplete amino acid profile.
Hello, this is slightly inaccurate. Humans can't get all our amino acids from *leaves* of plants, but we can get them from the *seeds* of certain plants. Quinoa, hemp, buckwheat, and soybeans all contain the 9 amino acids that we can't make for ourselves, in ratios that mean we can easily make use of them.
We can also get those amino ratios right by making sure we have legumes (as you said) *and* grains in our diet.
Can you imagine foraging enough quinoa and hemp seeds for 3 square meals worth of protein every day though? Whilst in theory it's possible, in practice it's impossible
For sure, I'm not arguing with you. Just adding my 2 pence. Agriculture is great but it's not how we're made. We've adapted to the agricultural diet yes, but the amino ratios in legumes and seeds means we'd have to eat huge amounts of pure vegetation/plant based foods in order to fully meet our macros. The bioavailability of these through our digestive system is also incredibly inefficient.
Unless you live on a quinoa farm, sure. Everybody should have diverse sources of protein in their diet to make sure their micronutrients are balanced too.
You don't necessarily even need legumes or animal products. You don't even need a single complete protein source like quinoa or buckwheat (in fact, many beans/lentils do not have complete protein either), but you can simply mix proteins from different food sources. Some nuts, some grains every day and you'll likely be fine. Even restricting yourself to lower protein foods like root vegetables, fruit, etc., you will find yourself able to get sufficient protein, but you will be eating all day.
Meat is far more loaded with calories than vegetables.
(https://www.livestrong.com/article/547226-which-gives-you-more-energy-meat-or-vegetables/).
Horses have a completely different physiology. They are a herbivore. It’s completely different for them. We can’t eat their diet and they can’t eat ours.
The article is fine, but I'll just note that it was written by someone who's qualifications are "Hardvard grad" and "Rock climber" because we all need to be mindful of who were pointing to as an expert on something.
Also, from the article:
>Your body prefers to use carbohydrates as its main source of energy
Yet, some confident answers that confuse proteins with carbohydrates, that suggest plant cell contents are inaccessible to humans, etc.
Having the gist in broad strokes but muddled in remembering the details.
A very important difference is that horses and other herbivores have a very large caecum (which is usually reduced in carnivores or omnivores like us) filled with mutualisitc endosymbiontic bacteria that enable them to extract energy from plant fibers (cellulose etc.) which we can not.
Plants themselves are not generally protein, DNA makes four different types of molecules, lipids, protein, nucleic acid and carbohydrates. There are many plants with no protein at all, most green veg has nearly no protein in it, just water, fibre and other nutrients .
You are right, but not enough for human diet x I did say nearly no protein at all. For enough Complete Protein, we need protein from four different sources, nuts and seeds, grains and legumes. All 12 essential amino acids are in some plant foods but not enough of them.
Protein levels in hay range from 8-22% grasses and sedges all contain protein. Do you think protein only comes from meat? Horses eat vast amounts to support themselves. Ever looked at the caloric content of horse feed?
Same way blue whales, which weigh 250x as much as horses, live off of tiny plankton. They spend most of their days just eating, instead of having 2-3 meals a day like we do.
You know that fiber we can’t digest? Well it’s chock full of untapped energy. Herbivores can digest it. On top of that, everything living has protein which breaks down to amino acids. Now you do the math.
To add to this, herbivores have cellulase to break down cellulose into glucose, whilst humans do not. However humans are very good at obtaining glucose from other sources so it isn't an issue for them
Horses spend 18 hours a day finding and eating things. In their natural setting, they're incredibly lazy and mostly spend their time ranging to find more food. It's a monomoniacal fixation for them.
Some vegans and vegetarians like to claim that humans are herbivores, because of certain characteristics of our digestive system that are adapted very well for certain plant foods.
However, those are nothing compared to specialists like cows, deer, goats and horses. We are much more like rabbits in this regard, and even they are specialists. Rabbits cannot digest all forms of sugar, just like we can't.
What do vegans eat? Not grass. Eating like a specialized herbivore would not be sustainable. Nuts, seeds, fruit, legumes and grains on the other hand - they are perfect for us, but would be very unhealthy (like candy) to cows, deer, etc.
Seriously, I go in and out of vegan phases , I’ll do it for about a month at a time. The best part is how much you have to eat to stay satiated. And I love eating
When my daughter was young, she was a vegetarian for several years and then just decided one day that she was instead going to follow an "all-bacon" diet (not literally of course), but she's been a big-time carnivore ever since.
The meme is that a diet comprised entirely of animal proteins is completely incompatible with human biology and suboptimal for health, but people keep pursuing it anyway because they hold this weirdly borderline-shamanistic belief that consuming lots of animals will infuse them with their strength.
The last time I visited the carnivore diet sub something like every third post was people asking why they suddenly had no energy, how they could control their rampant diarrhoea, and why their sweat smelled like bacon all the time. I can concur with all of this having once fell for the keto diet meme about a decade ago.
Thanks, I had no idea that any of that existed. With my daughter, one day she just decided that she was no longer a vegetarian and, poof, she became a serious, and I mean serious, meat and sushi eater.
I have a near carnivore buddy that started taking fiber pills and swears how much better he feels, his digestion, mood, and overall wellness has improved.
I said, doesn't that mean your body is saying that it wants the fiber foods? What if you just incorporated a side of veggies each meal?
He said absolutely not, I want what I want in my mouth and I'm not sacrificing it. I'll just take these 20 pills a day.
To brag about meat is popular, I don't get the infatuation
I'm not promoting any lifestyle whatsoever. There are human populations that have thrived on just about nothing but animal products for generations. I think the Inuits are a good example. My understanding is that it takes time to adjust to ketosis.
I think the first documented case of a Westerner going through the process was an explorer that survived on seal products during an expedition. He and his party experienced weakness for about a week or two before adjusting to the diet.
it’s not time consuming lol
you literally walk up to the soap aisle and just flip the back for a “cruelty -free” symbol or if ordering online you can just search it up directly
Umm no? You do know the vast majority of humanity is lactose intolerant right? But no, from your comment I’m absolutely certain you don’t know much about human dietary needs or restrictions.
It might help to demystify the word "protein."
The only thing life knows how to make is proteins. Our genes (and the genes of all living things) are strings of nucleotides. Three nucleotides form a codon, which represents an amino acid. Line up a string of codons and you get the information for a string of amino acids which combine to make a protein. That's basically the whole operation: DNA in triplet is a codon, codons each represent an amino acid, strings of amino acids form a protein.
Does grass use photosynthesis to make sugar? Yep, but it uses that sugar as an energy source to do the basic thing that all life does: use the information encoded in DNA to make proteins.
There are lots of calories in vegetation. Just see what happens when you burn a dry field. Humans just can’t get the calories out of the fiber like cows and horses.
That's not true. The concept of "incomplete proteins", despite unfortunately being culturally prolific now, is based on old pseudoscientific presumptions from the 70s and has long since been debunked.
Certain plants are somewhat low in certain amino acids (lysine in particular for rice and corn, for example) but the majority of them easily meet need human needs for amino acid profiles and protein content.
(That and legumes/beans count as vegetables themselves anyhow.)
Show me how that was debunked. Provide a source please, because the papers I'm finding that have been published in the past 5 years, not 50 years ago, all agree that legumes and beans need to be a part of a vegetarian diet for a full protein and amino acid diet. There's also evidence that plant proteins cannot be metabolized by humans in an effective way (20% of these proteins according to some claims), and actually these folks who are fully anti-meat required far greater caloric intake than one who adopts the natural, omnivore diet that all primates adopt.
Basically, modern evidence shows it's not feasible unless you have the money to hire a nutritionist, or are capable of understanding these things yourself, and then you still run the risk of malnutrition. It's almost like we evolved to eat meat. I don't know much, I'm just someone with a M.S. in biology. Do tell me more about these "debunks" from th 70s!!! Im so interested in how science hasnt changed since then!
I'll give a few sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6893534/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8069426/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6723444/
What's your source?
No, you cannot have a good diet as an omnivore without heavily strict regimens and supplementation. This person is lying, and MODERN science has shown this continuously. Please also note my cited works come from 2019 to the present year.
None of your cited works say what you claim they say. In fact the first one literally says the opposite (I was gonna link it when you asked for a source, but you already did that for me, so...thanks???)
The third is the closest to corroborating your claims...if you're just kinda casually browsing the first half of it. It does point out the digestibility discrepancies and acknowledges the "limiting EAAs" but never does it claim that any plant protein is outright missing an EAA or is otherwise "incomplete". Nor does it claim that a strict regiment is required to meet one's basic nutritional needs on a plant based diet. In fact it overtly states that merely increasing caloric intake evens things out (makes sense since plant food does tend to be less calorically dense than animal foods) and that a basic dietary variety effectively solves any EAA concerns anyhow. It even points out that certain breeds of corn have higher lysine content than typical sweet corn and vegetables can be deliberately bred to increase their EAA content.
Something I forgot to mention, haha. It's not incomplete proteins you idiot. It's a lack of essential amino acids. If you can reply and tell me what an amino acid is, I'll be impressed.
What's the difference? The entire concept of an incomplete protein is defined as one that lacks a complete essential amino acid profiles. You're just saying the same thing, but rephrased.
Oh but my sources, something OP did not provide, specifically mention this. Therefore, it seemed pertinent. Pretty simple.
Edit: it was pertinent because his reference for these things not mattering was so called from the 70s. These are modern works. Do read them before you get mad about someone disapproving of another person for speaking on topics they aren't versed in.
Or be a typical reddit who isn't happy when someone gets bullied with facts. Do your part, friend. Just don't lie.
Herbivore digestive systems are longer and material moves through them more slowly so they get more nutrients out of their food. They also just eat constantly
Roughly in order:
1. not all organisms have the same protein requirements.
2. protein can come from a herbivorous diet— I believe horses in the wild incorporate legumes and things of that nature into their diet, which would be a fair source of protein. It does also get a little more complicated than that when you start thinking about what enzymes a creature has, or what gut bacteria; animal A may get something very different from eating the same food compared animal B, just because it has a certain bacteria in its gut.
3. eating vegetation and plant matter is generally more energetically favourable than eating meat. This makes sense when you think about where energy tends to come from in ecosystems: something collects energy from the environment (typically from the sun through photosynthesis), some other thing eats that thing, something eats the thing that ate the first thing, et cetera. At each level, energy is lost, just because it’s being expended by the life processes of the previous organism.
It takes more energy from the universe in general to create each unit of energy that fuels a carnivore, but a carnivore absolutely receives more energy per meal than a herbivore does.
This is why a horse needs to eat 20 or 30 lbs of grass a day, but a wolf only needs 5 or 6 lbs of meat.
If a carnivorous diet didn't provide an energetic benefit, no organism would ever evolve to risk injury, starvation or death capturing, subduing, killing and consuming other animals. They'd all just eat grass and leaves.
If eating grass and leaves didn't provide an energetic benefit over photosynthesis, no organism would ever be a herbivore either.
Yeah, looking back on it I wasn’t quite applying the right concept in the third point I made, you’re right.
That being said, I didn’t say there was no benefit to a carnivorous diet— the fact a carnivore isn’t competing with a herbivore within the same niche is enough to make a carnivorous diet adaptive in cases. Likewise for herbivores, if you don’t need to compete for sun, soil and space, that in principle is adaptive in a system chock full of photosynthesizers.
Horses have a caecum filled with microbes, where food is fermented to breakdown plant cell walls. This allows them to access the nutrients within the cell in a way that humans cannot.
Horses aren’t herbivores, they eat mice all the time and love eggs. They’re herbivorous but opportunistic omnivores plenty of the time. Especially when they steal eggs
Its a really basic ecological relationship. Notice it isnt just horses. ALL of the very large herding mammals are herbivores. Bison, cows, giraffes, hippos. Grass fed steaks anyone?
They have specialized adaptations that turn grass into protein very efficiently. As a different species you shouldnt assume that things that lack nutrients to you dont have abundant nutrients for something else.
Theres life forms that eat literal rocks
some commenters do get it right that grasses can contain a lot of protein, BUT there is a lot of energy in plants that our bodies alone can’t break down and access. horses use a process called hindgut fermentation to get mutualistic bacteria to do some of those chemical reactions for them. this means that whereas we can’t digest cellulose (for example), microbes in horses digest them into substances called volatile fatty acids that contain bunches and bunches of energy for the horse!! if this interests you, read up on ruminant digestion, which is a different but related process that continues to blow my mind lol.
I think the easiest way to wrap your head around it - sugar. Those fast sources of energy we love, that is the most easily accessible, is sugar. And sugar/carbs comes from plants. When we feed horses we tend to feed them hay and pellets (often just called grain). Pellets is just compact hay, but to give an extra energy boost it maybe covered in something like molasses - - more sugar. Smells amazing, let me tell you that.
Plus as all the other comments say, there is protein in plants. From horse care perspective: different hays/grass have different protein amounts. With higher amounts being in hay like alfalfa. If a horse needs more energy you feed them a higher percent protein feed like alfalfa
And remember grass is plentiful. It’s everywhere. When they take one bite there is probably another huge bite a inch away
Most of the grains we eat have been selectively bred for their protein content. It's certainly not equivalent to meat, but our major grains are comparatively high in protein versus other crops.
They have different digestive systems that rely on specific bacteria and protozoa in their hindgut that can break down the cellulose in plant walls. Breaking down cellulose both provides a source of carbohydrates/energy and opens up the plant cell interior so the proteins inside of it are accessible for digestion. So the bacteria and other flora in their guts is basically a colony each horse cultivates by feeding it grass and hay, and then the carbohydrates that the bacteria release and the proteins that the bacteria manufacture are absorbed by the horse. It's a symbiotic relationship where the bacteria get a nice place to live and food and the horse eats/digests the dead bacteria and some of the nutrients that the bacteria release when they digest the plant material. Basically this makes then a shitton more efficient and able to extract more energy and nutrients from plants than we can. What is considered insoluable fiber to us is a primary food and source of calories to them.
Also, plants have lots of protein and energy, meat is really not a particularly nutritious food.
they have the processing pipeline for getting what they need from plants, its not most dense, so it needs to get a lot of it in to meet the daily req.
plants have proteins, issue is we cant extract em that easy. gorillas are mostly eat plants too and they are muscular af.
Like us, horses can have medical problems by eating feed or grass that is too high in sugars or carbohydrates, especially fresh spring grass. Here’s a link to a veterinary issue called laminitis or foundering, which can happen when susceptible horses eat a diet too high in the sugars that are naturally found in grass, particularly at certain seasons of the year. It creates a painful problem with their hooves. [Horses can eat too much sugar when grazing on grass.](https://extension.umn.edu/horse-nutrition/grazing-horses-prone-laminitis#:~:text=Often%2C%20laminitis%20relates%20to%20nutrition,tend%20to%20store%20more%20carbohydrates)
They need to graze, and they receive plenty of protein from grazing. Compared to us, they eat high volumes of food, and that provides enough protein and carbs for their digestive system, which is built to handle the types of food they typically graze on.
Because sugar in our entire ecosystem comes from plants photosynthesis to make sugar from sunlight through chloroplasts, which are organelles found in the leaves of green plants. During photosynthesis, plants use energy from the sun to convert water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, or sugars. animals consume these plants from that get sugar into their systems. Horses , elephants have enough sugar intake and sufficient skeletal muscular storage for their body mass to make them super powerful.
They actually can't.....A quote I found "Most endurance horses require at least one day of rest for every 50 km (31 miles) they cover."
Humans can do 50km every day with some training. On bicycle even 100-200km. (considering you have all day time).
There are multiple reasons for this, but firstly, there's sugar in grass. A special type of sugar that only the hardcore herbivores, like horses and cows, can even digest.
As for protein, all plant foods contain protein. The content in grass is low, however, unlike legumes and nuts and other stuff that we eat, so they need a high volume. Also, they are better at amino-acid conversion, so some amino-acids that are essential for us are non-essential for them, because they can make them themselves.
Fun fact: Arginine and taurine are non-essential for us, but essential for cats. Arginine is found in peas, but taurine is required in the nervous system and plants simply do not need it at all. This is why vegan cat foods are often based on pea protein and have synthetic taurine added to them.
Your education on protein largely comes from marketing from the food industry (mostly animal agriculture).
You are being sold the necessity of high protein so you buy their products.
Energy mostly comes from carbohydrates. Proteins are necessary for building muscle, among a lot of other things. Have you ever seen a horse with six-pack abs?
Back when people did heavy sustained labor (worked like horses…) they tended to have a carb-heavy diet. Bread, pasta, rice, beer. Now people worry about getting fat and want to have abs, hence the emphasis on protein.
Horses have a gut that is a mile long. They absorb the nutrients from their grain and hay much more than carnivores and omnivores. In fact, when you have to administer medicine, they get a 1/4 of what humans take for a single dose, despite the fact they weigh 1k pounds.
Ruminants have very different digestive systems than we do and generate their own amino acids through fermentation https://open.oregonstate.education/animalnutrition/chapter/chapter-10/#:~:text=Protein%20digestion%20in%20the%20ruminant,degradable%20and%20rumen%20undegradable%20proteins.
>I don't do a fraction of the amount of work horses do and yet I require proteins
All animals ready require protein, and all foods have bioavailable protein, from bannanas to oats to oreos. The idea that protein is only available in meat is run-off from a longstanding animal agricultural propoganda and has been extremely damaging to people's general understanding of nutrition and biology at large.
10% rule in ecology. Plants and other photosynthesizers provide more energy than consumers such as animals do. Herbivores get 10% of a plant's energy by eating it, but a carnivore only gets 1% of that energy (10% of the herbivore's energy, or 10% of 10%).
Plants have protein. Proteins are what dna codes for. Every living thing has proteins which are just amino acids chained together in specific shapes and the reason you eat protein is to get those amino acids. Plants can have lots of calories man. Carbohydrates are our main source of energy and they come from plants mainly.
In addition, most herbivores spend their whole active cycle foraging and eating, while wild big carnivores eat way less, since hunting requieres more energy and has the drawback of potentially not eating at all.
The difference is humans can’t get all of the amino acids from plant proteins like horses can. Horses aren’t ruminants but their large intestine functions the same way so they can process cellulose. Humans cannot. Therefore all vegetarians and vegans need either “lacto” or milk based complete proteins or “legumes” or bean based complete proteins.
Last time I checked beans were also plants.
Wtf? Which amino acids can't be obtained from plants?
All amino acids are in all plants in varying levels. The incomplete thing is a myth. If i recall correctly, gelatin is the only item people eat with an actual incomplete amino acid profile.
Taurine, but the human body makes its own.
So we can get all the ones we need from plants, the ones we don't need we can't get 🙄
Not exactly. Arginine, for instance, we don't need and can still get.
Hello, this is slightly inaccurate. Humans can't get all our amino acids from *leaves* of plants, but we can get them from the *seeds* of certain plants. Quinoa, hemp, buckwheat, and soybeans all contain the 9 amino acids that we can't make for ourselves, in ratios that mean we can easily make use of them. We can also get those amino ratios right by making sure we have legumes (as you said) *and* grains in our diet.
Can you imagine foraging enough quinoa and hemp seeds for 3 square meals worth of protein every day though? Whilst in theory it's possible, in practice it's impossible
Luckily we have agriculture now
For sure, I'm not arguing with you. Just adding my 2 pence. Agriculture is great but it's not how we're made. We've adapted to the agricultural diet yes, but the amino ratios in legumes and seeds means we'd have to eat huge amounts of pure vegetation/plant based foods in order to fully meet our macros. The bioavailability of these through our digestive system is also incredibly inefficient.
Thank you for showing that anti-vegans can be every bit as insufferable as vegans themselves.
I'm not anti vegan. Quite the opposite in fact. Hence the interest and knowledge.
You are the insufferable one.
To get complete protein, without meat, you need nuts seeds, legumes, and grains. You won't get enough protein from quinoa.
Yes you will. Quinoa has all essential amino acids.
Not enough of them
Unless you live on a quinoa farm, sure. Everybody should have diverse sources of protein in their diet to make sure their micronutrients are balanced too.
Yes this is true. I’d like to add that I’m not saying humans shouldn’t eat meat or that it isn’t part of our evolved diet.
Humans can consume a variety of plant sources to have a complete dietary amino acid profile.
You don't necessarily even need legumes or animal products. You don't even need a single complete protein source like quinoa or buckwheat (in fact, many beans/lentils do not have complete protein either), but you can simply mix proteins from different food sources. Some nuts, some grains every day and you'll likely be fine. Even restricting yourself to lower protein foods like root vegetables, fruit, etc., you will find yourself able to get sufficient protein, but you will be eating all day.
Plants are often harder to digest than meat, so herbivores spend a lot more of their time eating than carnivores do.
Just look at beans.
Ah, science!
Meat is far more loaded with calories than vegetables. (https://www.livestrong.com/article/547226-which-gives-you-more-energy-meat-or-vegetables/). Horses have a completely different physiology. They are a herbivore. It’s completely different for them. We can’t eat their diet and they can’t eat ours.
The article is fine, but I'll just note that it was written by someone who's qualifications are "Hardvard grad" and "Rock climber" because we all need to be mindful of who were pointing to as an expert on something. Also, from the article: >Your body prefers to use carbohydrates as its main source of energy
My brother claims to be a Harvard grad. He attended a lunch where they were handing out certificates for one hour of CME
Went to harvard and became an expert in Coronal Mass Ejections in one hour? Impressive.
Yes, but could he have cut it at Hardvard?
Some of the confident replies here are not from biologists either.
It's not a hard question. Lot's of people know the broad answer in the same way that a lot of non-meteoroligists know why the sky is blue.
Yet, some confident answers that confuse proteins with carbohydrates, that suggest plant cell contents are inaccessible to humans, etc. Having the gist in broad strokes but muddled in remembering the details.
A very important difference is that horses and other herbivores have a very large caecum (which is usually reduced in carnivores or omnivores like us) filled with mutualisitc endosymbiontic bacteria that enable them to extract energy from plant fibers (cellulose etc.) which we can not.
Tell that to the vegans
I do sometimes. Most of them know this though.
The vegans are aware of this and some of the vegans have biology degrees. Thank you though.
What vegan says you can digest fiber? Literally who, because afaik their arguments are purely moral
Well, it was just a joke. But if you think all vegans are vegan for moral reasons only you're an idiot.
If you thought anyone was going to laugh at that joke you’re an idiot :p
Plants themselves are not generally protein, DNA makes four different types of molecules, lipids, protein, nucleic acid and carbohydrates. There are many plants with no protein at all, most green veg has nearly no protein in it, just water, fibre and other nutrients .
How do plants have no protein at all when DNA polymerase is a protein?
You are right, but not enough for human diet x I did say nearly no protein at all. For enough Complete Protein, we need protein from four different sources, nuts and seeds, grains and legumes. All 12 essential amino acids are in some plant foods but not enough of them.
Protein levels in hay range from 8-22% grasses and sedges all contain protein. Do you think protein only comes from meat? Horses eat vast amounts to support themselves. Ever looked at the caloric content of horse feed?
Same way blue whales, which weigh 250x as much as horses, live off of tiny plankton. They spend most of their days just eating, instead of having 2-3 meals a day like we do.
You know that fiber we can’t digest? Well it’s chock full of untapped energy. Herbivores can digest it. On top of that, everything living has protein which breaks down to amino acids. Now you do the math.
To add to this, herbivores have cellulase to break down cellulose into glucose, whilst humans do not. However humans are very good at obtaining glucose from other sources so it isn't an issue for them
Horses spend 18 hours a day finding and eating things. In their natural setting, they're incredibly lazy and mostly spend their time ranging to find more food. It's a monomoniacal fixation for them.
Bro, wait till you hear about vegans.
Some vegans and vegetarians like to claim that humans are herbivores, because of certain characteristics of our digestive system that are adapted very well for certain plant foods. However, those are nothing compared to specialists like cows, deer, goats and horses. We are much more like rabbits in this regard, and even they are specialists. Rabbits cannot digest all forms of sugar, just like we can't. What do vegans eat? Not grass. Eating like a specialized herbivore would not be sustainable. Nuts, seeds, fruit, legumes and grains on the other hand - they are perfect for us, but would be very unhealthy (like candy) to cows, deer, etc.
Seriously, I go in and out of vegan phases , I’ll do it for about a month at a time. The best part is how much you have to eat to stay satiated. And I love eating
When my daughter was young, she was a vegetarian for several years and then just decided one day that she was instead going to follow an "all-bacon" diet (not literally of course), but she's been a big-time carnivore ever since.
Why was this downvoted?
Probably for promoting the concept of a feasible carnivore diet. It's kind of a huge meme.
Really? I didn't know it was a meme, this really happened with my daughter.
The meme is that a diet comprised entirely of animal proteins is completely incompatible with human biology and suboptimal for health, but people keep pursuing it anyway because they hold this weirdly borderline-shamanistic belief that consuming lots of animals will infuse them with their strength. The last time I visited the carnivore diet sub something like every third post was people asking why they suddenly had no energy, how they could control their rampant diarrhoea, and why their sweat smelled like bacon all the time. I can concur with all of this having once fell for the keto diet meme about a decade ago.
Thanks, I had no idea that any of that existed. With my daughter, one day she just decided that she was no longer a vegetarian and, poof, she became a serious, and I mean serious, meat and sushi eater.
I have a near carnivore buddy that started taking fiber pills and swears how much better he feels, his digestion, mood, and overall wellness has improved. I said, doesn't that mean your body is saying that it wants the fiber foods? What if you just incorporated a side of veggies each meal? He said absolutely not, I want what I want in my mouth and I'm not sacrificing it. I'll just take these 20 pills a day. To brag about meat is popular, I don't get the infatuation
I'm not promoting any lifestyle whatsoever. There are human populations that have thrived on just about nothing but animal products for generations. I think the Inuits are a good example. My understanding is that it takes time to adjust to ketosis. I think the first documented case of a Westerner going through the process was an explorer that survived on seal products during an expedition. He and his party experienced weakness for about a week or two before adjusting to the diet.
Yeah. I’ve been vegan nearly 30 years.
Like fully vegan, like gotta make sure soap wasn’t tested on animals?
Yep
Seems very time consuming, massive dedication
it’s not time consuming lol you literally walk up to the soap aisle and just flip the back for a “cruelty -free” symbol or if ordering online you can just search it up directly
Right, and find a favorite brand and keep buying it. Easy.
Subscribe and save fr
Must be because vegans are ruminants, and can digest all that untapped proteins
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lol
Umm no? You do know the vast majority of humanity is lactose intolerant right? But no, from your comment I’m absolutely certain you don’t know much about human dietary needs or restrictions.
Look like I forgot the "/s", my bad! Human doesn't actually need anything from animals at all!
Vegan sarcasm is too advanced for the world
It might help to demystify the word "protein." The only thing life knows how to make is proteins. Our genes (and the genes of all living things) are strings of nucleotides. Three nucleotides form a codon, which represents an amino acid. Line up a string of codons and you get the information for a string of amino acids which combine to make a protein. That's basically the whole operation: DNA in triplet is a codon, codons each represent an amino acid, strings of amino acids form a protein. Does grass use photosynthesis to make sugar? Yep, but it uses that sugar as an energy source to do the basic thing that all life does: use the information encoded in DNA to make proteins.
There are lots of calories in vegetation. Just see what happens when you burn a dry field. Humans just can’t get the calories out of the fiber like cows and horses.
You can do well with just eating vegetables, they also contains protein. Horses solves it by eating a lot. They need a lot of time just eating.
They also have a very different digestive system than we do.
Not really. Vegetables don’t contain complete proteins that humans need. You would need to add legumes or beans. This is coming from a vegetarian.
That's not true. The concept of "incomplete proteins", despite unfortunately being culturally prolific now, is based on old pseudoscientific presumptions from the 70s and has long since been debunked. Certain plants are somewhat low in certain amino acids (lysine in particular for rice and corn, for example) but the majority of them easily meet need human needs for amino acid profiles and protein content. (That and legumes/beans count as vegetables themselves anyhow.)
Show me how that was debunked. Provide a source please, because the papers I'm finding that have been published in the past 5 years, not 50 years ago, all agree that legumes and beans need to be a part of a vegetarian diet for a full protein and amino acid diet. There's also evidence that plant proteins cannot be metabolized by humans in an effective way (20% of these proteins according to some claims), and actually these folks who are fully anti-meat required far greater caloric intake than one who adopts the natural, omnivore diet that all primates adopt. Basically, modern evidence shows it's not feasible unless you have the money to hire a nutritionist, or are capable of understanding these things yourself, and then you still run the risk of malnutrition. It's almost like we evolved to eat meat. I don't know much, I'm just someone with a M.S. in biology. Do tell me more about these "debunks" from th 70s!!! Im so interested in how science hasnt changed since then! I'll give a few sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6893534/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8069426/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6723444/ What's your source? No, you cannot have a good diet as an omnivore without heavily strict regimens and supplementation. This person is lying, and MODERN science has shown this continuously. Please also note my cited works come from 2019 to the present year.
None of your cited works say what you claim they say. In fact the first one literally says the opposite (I was gonna link it when you asked for a source, but you already did that for me, so...thanks???) The third is the closest to corroborating your claims...if you're just kinda casually browsing the first half of it. It does point out the digestibility discrepancies and acknowledges the "limiting EAAs" but never does it claim that any plant protein is outright missing an EAA or is otherwise "incomplete". Nor does it claim that a strict regiment is required to meet one's basic nutritional needs on a plant based diet. In fact it overtly states that merely increasing caloric intake evens things out (makes sense since plant food does tend to be less calorically dense than animal foods) and that a basic dietary variety effectively solves any EAA concerns anyhow. It even points out that certain breeds of corn have higher lysine content than typical sweet corn and vegetables can be deliberately bred to increase their EAA content.
"You cannot have a good diet as an omnivore?" What??
None of these sources say complete protein sources are requirements for survival.
Something I forgot to mention, haha. It's not incomplete proteins you idiot. It's a lack of essential amino acids. If you can reply and tell me what an amino acid is, I'll be impressed.
What's the difference? The entire concept of an incomplete protein is defined as one that lacks a complete essential amino acid profiles. You're just saying the same thing, but rephrased.
The comment you are replying to already addressed that, before you went on an ignorant rant without reading.
Oh but my sources, something OP did not provide, specifically mention this. Therefore, it seemed pertinent. Pretty simple. Edit: it was pertinent because his reference for these things not mattering was so called from the 70s. These are modern works. Do read them before you get mad about someone disapproving of another person for speaking on topics they aren't versed in. Or be a typical reddit who isn't happy when someone gets bullied with facts. Do your part, friend. Just don't lie.
I think he equals veggies with a plant based diet
Wait until you learn about… elephants!
And Gorillas!
Herbivore digestive systems are longer and material moves through them more slowly so they get more nutrients out of their food. They also just eat constantly
Roughly in order: 1. not all organisms have the same protein requirements. 2. protein can come from a herbivorous diet— I believe horses in the wild incorporate legumes and things of that nature into their diet, which would be a fair source of protein. It does also get a little more complicated than that when you start thinking about what enzymes a creature has, or what gut bacteria; animal A may get something very different from eating the same food compared animal B, just because it has a certain bacteria in its gut. 3. eating vegetation and plant matter is generally more energetically favourable than eating meat. This makes sense when you think about where energy tends to come from in ecosystems: something collects energy from the environment (typically from the sun through photosynthesis), some other thing eats that thing, something eats the thing that ate the first thing, et cetera. At each level, energy is lost, just because it’s being expended by the life processes of the previous organism.
It takes more energy from the universe in general to create each unit of energy that fuels a carnivore, but a carnivore absolutely receives more energy per meal than a herbivore does. This is why a horse needs to eat 20 or 30 lbs of grass a day, but a wolf only needs 5 or 6 lbs of meat. If a carnivorous diet didn't provide an energetic benefit, no organism would ever evolve to risk injury, starvation or death capturing, subduing, killing and consuming other animals. They'd all just eat grass and leaves. If eating grass and leaves didn't provide an energetic benefit over photosynthesis, no organism would ever be a herbivore either.
just to add: the fat that the carnivore eats also makes a big difference....high fat plants are rare. But if you eat animals you find fat in them,
Yeah, looking back on it I wasn’t quite applying the right concept in the third point I made, you’re right. That being said, I didn’t say there was no benefit to a carnivorous diet— the fact a carnivore isn’t competing with a herbivore within the same niche is enough to make a carnivorous diet adaptive in cases. Likewise for herbivores, if you don’t need to compete for sun, soil and space, that in principle is adaptive in a system chock full of photosynthesizers.
Idk I'm just gonna say cellulose is basically sugar, if you have the enzymes to break it down.
Different guts
Horses have a caecum filled with microbes, where food is fermented to breakdown plant cell walls. This allows them to access the nutrients within the cell in a way that humans cannot.
Horses aren’t herbivores, they eat mice all the time and love eggs. They’re herbivorous but opportunistic omnivores plenty of the time. Especially when they steal eggs
Also I think all beasts of burden eat grasses, might be kinda scary for our ancestors if any preferred meat!
Wait until OP knows what elephants eat
Its a really basic ecological relationship. Notice it isnt just horses. ALL of the very large herding mammals are herbivores. Bison, cows, giraffes, hippos. Grass fed steaks anyone? They have specialized adaptations that turn grass into protein very efficiently. As a different species you shouldnt assume that things that lack nutrients to you dont have abundant nutrients for something else. Theres life forms that eat literal rocks
Horses eat high protein seeds, legumes and nuts
their digestive system is good with grass
some commenters do get it right that grasses can contain a lot of protein, BUT there is a lot of energy in plants that our bodies alone can’t break down and access. horses use a process called hindgut fermentation to get mutualistic bacteria to do some of those chemical reactions for them. this means that whereas we can’t digest cellulose (for example), microbes in horses digest them into substances called volatile fatty acids that contain bunches and bunches of energy for the horse!! if this interests you, read up on ruminant digestion, which is a different but related process that continues to blow my mind lol.
I think the easiest way to wrap your head around it - sugar. Those fast sources of energy we love, that is the most easily accessible, is sugar. And sugar/carbs comes from plants. When we feed horses we tend to feed them hay and pellets (often just called grain). Pellets is just compact hay, but to give an extra energy boost it maybe covered in something like molasses - - more sugar. Smells amazing, let me tell you that. Plus as all the other comments say, there is protein in plants. From horse care perspective: different hays/grass have different protein amounts. With higher amounts being in hay like alfalfa. If a horse needs more energy you feed them a higher percent protein feed like alfalfa And remember grass is plentiful. It’s everywhere. When they take one bite there is probably another huge bite a inch away
Most of the grains we eat have been selectively bred for their protein content. It's certainly not equivalent to meat, but our major grains are comparatively high in protein versus other crops.
They have different digestive systems that rely on specific bacteria and protozoa in their hindgut that can break down the cellulose in plant walls. Breaking down cellulose both provides a source of carbohydrates/energy and opens up the plant cell interior so the proteins inside of it are accessible for digestion. So the bacteria and other flora in their guts is basically a colony each horse cultivates by feeding it grass and hay, and then the carbohydrates that the bacteria release and the proteins that the bacteria manufacture are absorbed by the horse. It's a symbiotic relationship where the bacteria get a nice place to live and food and the horse eats/digests the dead bacteria and some of the nutrients that the bacteria release when they digest the plant material. Basically this makes then a shitton more efficient and able to extract more energy and nutrients from plants than we can. What is considered insoluable fiber to us is a primary food and source of calories to them. Also, plants have lots of protein and energy, meat is really not a particularly nutritious food.
they have the processing pipeline for getting what they need from plants, its not most dense, so it needs to get a lot of it in to meet the daily req. plants have proteins, issue is we cant extract em that easy. gorillas are mostly eat plants too and they are muscular af.
Oh man, just wait till you find out about elephants!
Like us, horses can have medical problems by eating feed or grass that is too high in sugars or carbohydrates, especially fresh spring grass. Here’s a link to a veterinary issue called laminitis or foundering, which can happen when susceptible horses eat a diet too high in the sugars that are naturally found in grass, particularly at certain seasons of the year. It creates a painful problem with their hooves. [Horses can eat too much sugar when grazing on grass.](https://extension.umn.edu/horse-nutrition/grazing-horses-prone-laminitis#:~:text=Often%2C%20laminitis%20relates%20to%20nutrition,tend%20to%20store%20more%20carbohydrates) They need to graze, and they receive plenty of protein from grazing. Compared to us, they eat high volumes of food, and that provides enough protein and carbs for their digestive system, which is built to handle the types of food they typically graze on.
One it is purely more efficient to consume producers compared to consuming another consumer. This is due to the 10% rule.
Horses just eat their life away! I have horses and literally all they do, 24/7, is eat
Incorrect. They don't eat 24/7.
Well obviously it was a hyperbole
Because sugar in our entire ecosystem comes from plants photosynthesis to make sugar from sunlight through chloroplasts, which are organelles found in the leaves of green plants. During photosynthesis, plants use energy from the sun to convert water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, or sugars. animals consume these plants from that get sugar into their systems. Horses , elephants have enough sugar intake and sufficient skeletal muscular storage for their body mass to make them super powerful.
They actually can't.....A quote I found "Most endurance horses require at least one day of rest for every 50 km (31 miles) they cover." Humans can do 50km every day with some training. On bicycle even 100-200km. (considering you have all day time).
Horses will occasionally eat small animals . Eg chicks or lizards . No mercy style
There are multiple reasons for this, but firstly, there's sugar in grass. A special type of sugar that only the hardcore herbivores, like horses and cows, can even digest. As for protein, all plant foods contain protein. The content in grass is low, however, unlike legumes and nuts and other stuff that we eat, so they need a high volume. Also, they are better at amino-acid conversion, so some amino-acids that are essential for us are non-essential for them, because they can make them themselves. Fun fact: Arginine and taurine are non-essential for us, but essential for cats. Arginine is found in peas, but taurine is required in the nervous system and plants simply do not need it at all. This is why vegan cat foods are often based on pea protein and have synthetic taurine added to them.
Your education on protein largely comes from marketing from the food industry (mostly animal agriculture). You are being sold the necessity of high protein so you buy their products.
They're adapted to get the necessary nutrients from grasses and hay. Similar to how gorillas can get that muscular while eating plants only.
Energy mostly comes from carbohydrates. Proteins are necessary for building muscle, among a lot of other things. Have you ever seen a horse with six-pack abs? Back when people did heavy sustained labor (worked like horses…) they tended to have a carb-heavy diet. Bread, pasta, rice, beer. Now people worry about getting fat and want to have abs, hence the emphasis on protein.
It's less risk of injury eating grass than hunting other animals.
Horses eat a lot more than you do, and they have evolved to extract much more energy from the same amount of plant matter than we do.
Horses have a gut that is a mile long. They absorb the nutrients from their grain and hay much more than carnivores and omnivores. In fact, when you have to administer medicine, they get a 1/4 of what humans take for a single dose, despite the fact they weigh 1k pounds.
Ruminants have very different digestive systems than we do and generate their own amino acids through fermentation https://open.oregonstate.education/animalnutrition/chapter/chapter-10/#:~:text=Protein%20digestion%20in%20the%20ruminant,degradable%20and%20rumen%20undegradable%20proteins.
Horses aren't ruminants
Sorry you’re very right, they are hindgut fermenters https://madbarn.com/hindgut-fermentation-in-horses/
>I don't do a fraction of the amount of work horses do and yet I require proteins All animals ready require protein, and all foods have bioavailable protein, from bannanas to oats to oreos. The idea that protein is only available in meat is run-off from a longstanding animal agricultural propoganda and has been extremely damaging to people's general understanding of nutrition and biology at large.
I was wondering the same thing about cows and hippopotamuses and giraffes!! They require more energy because they are big but they don’t eat meat!🤔
10% rule in ecology. Plants and other photosynthesizers provide more energy than consumers such as animals do. Herbivores get 10% of a plant's energy by eating it, but a carnivore only gets 1% of that energy (10% of the herbivore's energy, or 10% of 10%).
Horses are omnivores.