Dear Jack,

I recently got into a debate with a friend who insisted that quinoa, hemp, amaranth, buckwheat, and spirulina are all complete proteins. When I told him soy is the only complete vegetarian protein, he told me he avoids all soy due to its negative effect on men’s health. I wondered where this guy learned this and a quick google search on vegetarian complete proteins got me here. I checked out your page on protein. That chart listing the essential amino acids in so many plant foods made me realize that in fact many plant foods do contain all the essential amino acids but at such low levels it’s hard to list them as ‘complete proteins’ in the true meaning intended. So my take is that the only vegetarian protein that comes close to really being a complete protein (meaning it has essential amino acid levels similar to those of animal proteins) is soy. Would you agree?

Answer:

[As an aside, the research to date indicates that moderate amounts of soy do not harm men’s health.]

Because this question about complete proteins comes up on a regular basis, I decided to do some number crunching to get to the bottom of it. Mind you, there are many more numbers to crunch if someone wanted to take the time, but I think I’ve covered enough to draw some conclusions.

I see two ways of looking at the question of whether a food has complete protein:

If you look at Table 3 of Where Do You Get Your Protein?, you will see what it takes to meet the RDA for each EAA for a variety of foods.

I have taken some of the data from Table 3 and constructed the table below to look more closely at what foods might contain a “complete protein”. In the table below, the numbers in the right-hand column represent the following equation:

Where:

From the chart above, it appears that tuna is the most complete protein with a range of only .4 servings and only 1.7 servings required to meet the RDA for all the EAA. Chicken, beef, edamame (whole, cooked soybeans), lentils, and pinto beans all do quite well. I think it’s fair to consider all of them a “complete protein”. Tofu, milk, quinoa, soy milk, and eggs do significantly better than most grains and nuts which have a much wider range.

As for spirulina…not so much.

One thing to note about this is that all the numbers depend on the serving size. I tried to pick what I thought were reasonable (or common) serving sizes for each food (you can see what they are in Table 3).

The USDA database has a lot of specific entries for some of the food categories above (like ground beef). I chose what looked like a common version of the food, but I did not average the data across more than one version.

As for the remaining, supposed complete proteins mentioned in the original question above, here is what I found:

Amaranth
The USDA lists 9 g of protein per cup of cooked amaranth. That’s a good amount when compared to other grains, but I’m not sure if it’s as easy to eat a cup of amaranth as a cup of, say, rice or corn. The USDA had no amino acid info.

Hemp
There was no info in the USDA database. I found many sources saying that it is a complete protein but none that I know to be reliable.

Nutritional yeast
No info in the USDA database. According to this site, it has 9 g of protein per 3 tbsp serving. That’s a decent amount, but I’m not sure if we can trust that info.

In conclusion, edamame, lentils, and pinto beans fared pretty well with chicken and beef for being a complete protein. Tofu, soymilk, and quinoa were on par with eggs and milk.

Dear Jack,

While it was recommended to adjust the intake of oils to match an ideal omega-6:omega3 ratio, I have heard that this precaution didn’t apply to the consumption of seeds and nuts. In other words, you could have those in the amounts you deemed right and according to your taste, without worrying about their omega-6 and omega-3 composition.

Answer:

The main concern with omega-3s from plant foods (aka ALA) is whether it is being converted into DHA. There is evidence that a lot of people do not convert it efficiently, especially if their diets are high in omega-6s (as most vegan diets are).

Hempseeds, flaxseeds, and chia seeds are high in ALA, so these seeds would help correct an omega-6 to omega-3 imbalance. But other seeds and most nuts are primarily omega-6 and monounsaturated fats and could prevent the converstion of ALA to DHA. That said, nuts have so many beneficial effects that I would not want to recommend that people eat less than they want. Seeds have not been studied like nuts, so it’s hard for me to say if they are as healthy as nuts.

The easiest way to ensure you are getting enough DHA is just to take a DHA supplement, and then you do not need to worry if your omega-6s are preventing the conversion of ALA into DHA.

You can read more about omega-3s here.

I dug up an old paper that is relevant to the point Rhys Southan of Let Them Eat Meat brought up in a recent post which I quoted on June 9:

But I recognize that my consumer choices are almost totally insignificant in this regard; like veganism, this is a symbolic gesture.

The paper is Expected Utility, Contributory Causation, and Vegetarianism by Gaverick Matheny (Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2002. p.293-7.). In it, Matheny argues that act-utilitarians cannot know what the actual consequences of an action will be in many cases, and therefore they must base their actions on the probability of expected consequences. Matheny goes on to explain that by not eating meat for a year, you take a chance that you will be the person who causes a reduction of meat past a threshold which is felt to the farmers and causes them to raise less animals:

For example, take the case of The 200 Million Consumers. There are 200 million consumers, each of whom eats 50 farm animals each year. In this market there are only ten possible annual outputs of animals for farmers: one billion animals, two billion, and so on, up to ten billion. The difference between each of these annual outputs, one billion, is the smallest unit of demand perceivable to the farmer and is thus the threshold unit. Since there are 20 million customers per threshold unit, and only one of these customers will actually complete the unit of which his or her purchase is a part, the probability of my completing a unit is one in 20 million. That means by buying meat I have a one-in-20 million chance of affecting the production and slaughter of one billion animals. The expected disutility is then one-20-millionth times one billion, which equals 50 – that is, the disutility associated with raising and slaughtering 50 animals per year.

Matheny explains why this matters using the example of The 100 Bandits in which 100 bandits go into a village and each steals one bean from each of 100 villagers, each of whom has 100 beans. After this is done, the villagers have no beans left. However, the loss of only one bean cannot cause any perceptible difference to a villager. Since no bandit could have caused actual (perceptible) harm by stealing only one bean, none is responsible for the villagers going hungry, right?

No. One of the bandits stole the nth bean that reached the threshold of perceptible harm to a villager, and the probability of any given bandit being the one who steals the nth bean to reach that threshold is the same whether each bandit steals 100 beans from the same villager or 1 bean from 100 different villagers.

In other words, when divided into equal contribution units, any contribution of a unit towards reaching the threshold of a perceptible difference is as morally important as the unit that actually reaches that threshold.

Dear Jack

I’m interested in taking a DHA supplement and was reading your page on Omega-3s. I also read the linked pages at NuTru and Deva. According to NuTru:

Remember, the body needs vitamin E to process omega-3 DHA,…

Do you know if this is accurate? If so, do you recommend a particular amount of Vitamin E? (I seem to remember that E is one of the vitamins that could become toxic if taken in too large an amount…?)

Answer:

Vitamin E, an antioxidant, can protect DHA if packaged together, but I do not see any reason why vitamin E is needed to “process” DHA. I’ve never seen this mentioned in any scientific paper on DHA nor know of any mechanism that would indicate this to be true.

As for other benefits of vitamin E, click here for a thorough analysis of the literature by the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University (it does not mention DHA). They conclude:

Scientists at the Linus Pauling Institute feel there exists credible evidence that taking a supplement of 200 IU (134 mg) of natural source d-alpha-tocopherol (RRR-alpha-tocopherol) daily with a meal may help protect adults from chronic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, neurodegenerative diseases, and some types of cancer.

See the chart on that page for a list of good sources of vitamin E. Almonds turn out to be the best, providing 7.4 mg per ounce. The RDA is 15 mg for adults.

The vitamin D section of VeganHealth.org has been updated with this new information:

In June 2010, a vegan who had been diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency wrote me saying that his weekly 50,000 IU of Vitamin D2, prescribed by his doctor for 12 weeks, succeeded in raising his vitamin D levels from 13 ng/ml on Jan 27 to 72 ng/ml on May 4. For long-term maintenance, his doctor recommended 1200 IU per day.

A couple weeks ago, I was made aware of the website and blog, Let Them Eat Meat, written by Rhys Southan. He had mentioned me in a post and someone forwarded it to me. I spent a few minutes looking around the site and found it very interesting. Rhys is an ex-vegan and the site is basically a criticism of many aspects of the vegan movement, some of which I can’t say I disagree with. He was vegan for many years, didn’t feel healthy, mentally or physically, and went back to eating meat and felt a lot better.

In a post of June 7, Rhys says that some vegans are claiming that if you follow my nutrition recommendations, you will not fail as a vegan. He goes on to say:

There was a point when I was lazy about B12 pills and relied on supplemented nutritional yeast and soy milk (the vegan health argument at that time downplayed the need for B12, which convinced me this was adequate), but I got into taking B12 more regularly after enduring Restless Legs Syndrome for a few months.

Still, I didn’t follow Norris’ exact recommendations. For one thing, I didn’t know who the hell he was. And even if I had, Norris is constantly revising his recommendations in response to new research, and the B12 dosage Norris now stands behind was posted in March of this year, so that wouldn’t have helped anyway.

I would like to clarify some of this:

1. Though my recommendations have helped many people (who were not coming even close to following them), I do not think that following them insures that someone will have no trouble being vegan.

2. My recommendations do not need to be followed exactly to get most of the benefit. If you followed my pre-March vitamin B12 recommendations, you should not feel any different in the short term than following the new recommendations. Tweaking my B12 recommendations is for preventing long-term, chronic disease, not for daily feelings of well-being.

3. For the main nutrients I focus on (B12, omega-3s, vitamin D, calcium, iodine, vitamin A), I probably change my recommendations for any given nutrient no more than once every 5 years, and I rarely change them by much. My vitamin B12 recommendations change in March was the first I’ve made since about 2003.

4. If new evidence shows me that my recommendations need to be changed, I change them.

5. Restless leg syndrome could very well be from a vitamin B12 deficiency and my recommendations now or at the time might have helped this aspect of Rhys’ health; and it’s possible they could have even improved his mental issues as well. But, that said, see #1 above.

I am interested in reading more of Rhys’ site and possibly responding to things I find of interest, such as the below. Perhaps this is a good place for me to state for any new readers that I am a vegan to prevent animal suffering. There are some worthwhile health benefits, but those are side-benefits for me.

Rhys states in his post linked above:

In my case, when I grocery shop, I buy mostly organ meats. And when I go to a restaurant, I look for the organ option the way a vegan looks for the vegan option. I do this because I think fewer animals will need to be raised and killed if more of the animal parts are used. In that sense, I am accomplishing exactly what vegans are — fewer animals are being born. (But I recognize that my consumer choices are almost totally insignificant in this regard; like veganism, this is a symbolic gesture).

That’s probably true – just like in voting, your vote is unlikely to make a difference. But if enough vegans create a critical mass such that less animals are raised, it is probably in proportion to how many vegans there are and, at that point, one vegan could make a real difference to some animals.

 
Please note that I don’t allow comments through that are impolite or disrespectful.

William Harris, MD, a vegan of 40 years, recently told me about his experiences with taking omega-3s, both ALA and DHA. He said that after taking ALA by way of ground up flaxseeds, 1-2 tsp per day for about 5 years, he started to bruise very easily, and on one occasion in December 2000 the bursa over his left knee spontaneously filled with blood without any previous injury. Thinking this might be due to excess synthesis of EPA from the ALA in the flax, he searched the literature and was able to find one supporting reference from a plastic surgeon, who was advising his face lift patients to stop the flax seed prior to facial surgery.

Harris decided to stop taking flax seeds and the easy bruising went away after 4 weeks. Four years later, after reading about DHA shortage in vegans, he started taking DHA supplements. After taking them for only 4 weeks, the bruising returned. He stopped taking the DHA and the bruising, once again, ceased.

It might be that Dr. Harris is an anomaly, but if anyone finds that they are having easy bruising, it might be best to stop taking or drastically cut back on any omega-3 supplementation.

A talk Dr. Harris gave to the Hawaiian Vegetarian Society last year, in which he goes into more detail about his thoughts on omega-3s, can be found here. The omega-3 discussion starts at 32:00.

In the video, Dr. Harris says that I think vegans need to take DHA. I am not so sure that vegans need to take DHA – the research is far from conclusive. But I would say that it is prudent (assuming they have no reason to think they are getting too much omega-3, as Dr. Harris was). Also note that Dr. Harris eats a very unprocessed diet, low in omega-6’s compared to the average vegan, and that could explain why he converts ALA into EPA more efficiently than your average vegan.

You can read more on omega-3’s in the vegan diet in Omega-3 Fatty Acid Recommendations for Vegetarians.

A a cross-sectional study in Seventh Day Adventist adults showed vegetarians to have significantly “less negative emotions” than non-vegetarians. You can read the abstract here.

This could mean the vegetarians are making enough DHA.

On March 5, news reports started to surface about a meta-analysis showing that processed meat, but not red meat, was linked to heart disease and diabetes. It was the first systematic review or meta-analysis of its kind, and the paper was released this month.

The authors broke meat down into three categories:

• Red
• Processed – might have included some poultry
• Total – the above two categories combined

Averaged across studies, consumption levels in the lowest versus highest category of intake were (in servings per week):

The results were:

Coronary Heart Disease

Diabetes Mellitus

Stroke

In other words, more servings of red meat did not increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, or stroke, while more servings of processed meat increased the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Only more servings of total meat increased the risk of stroke, but there was not nearly as much data for stroke.

This raised the question, “Could it be that non-processed red meat – and, by proxy, saturated fat – is NOT linked to heart disease?”

Before I go and do something that really annoys me, I want to point out that it really annoys me when people nickel and dime a study to death because it disagrees with their pre-drawn conclusions. That said, I do not think you can rule out the possibility that if the researchers had included white meat in their analysis, unprocessed meat could have been linked to heart disease and diabetes. There is some evidence that people who eat no red meat or poultry have lower rates of heart disease.

Additionally, how the variables were adjusted is not clear. The authors’ state:

What this means is that if a study adjusted their results for body mass, caloric intake, or cholesterol levels, those results might have been included in the meta-analysis. This would possibly make red meat look better than it actually is because, for example, if red meat increases cholesterol levels, but you then adjust for cholesterol levels, you will lose the effect of red meat. That said, these adjustments would also have affected the processed meats category and it was not enough to ameliorate those results.

The authors note the differences between processed and unprocessed red meats:

The funding sources for the study were the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/World Health Organization Global Burden of Diseases, Risk Factors, and Injuries Study; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Foundation, National Institutes of Health; and the Searle Scholars Program. The authors listed no conflicts of interest.

In conclusion, processed meats increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Unprocessed red meat may not be harmful at the levels measured in this analysis, but there are still some unanswered questions before that should be considered definitive. Total red meat may increase the risk of diabetes and stroke.

Last November, rumors surfaced that there was a vegan vitamin D3. I’m still occasionally getting questions about it, so I decided to write up what I know.

It appears that these claims have originated with two different brands: MegaFoods and LifeGive.

MegaFoods

I could not find anywhere in which MegaFoods is currently claiming that their vitamin D3 is vegan, but it appears that at one time, someone was claiming that it was. Click here for a write-up about how it is not vegan:

Excerpt:

They say that their vitamin d3 is from S. cerevisiae, and technically it is- however, they actually take regular old vitamin d made from sheep lanolin that anyone can buy in stores, and they ‘feed’ this vitamin d3 to the yeast in order to ‘Biotransform’ the vitamin d3 into what they claim is an effective and bioavailable form of vitamin d3 that is easily ‘utilized’ by the human body.

If you go to their website, Mega Foods doesn’t claim that their vitamin D3 is vegan. A page at Amazon.com claims that MegaFoods’ vitamin D3 does not come from fish and that it is suitable for vegetarians, which I suppose is technically true if they mean lacto-ovo vegetarians who are willing to use sheep’s lanolin.

This site, Whole Foods Vitamins, sells MegaFood’s Vitamin D3 and explains a bit about it:

Vitamin D-3 DailyFoods is formulated with 100% Cold Fusion FoodState nutrients, developed by Durham Research, Inc.

I’m not sure if that’s important to know, but now we do. Moving on…

LifeGive Sun D

LifeGive Sun D is being advertised by two companies, UpayaNaturals and Alive Raw, as being vegan vitamin D3. They both say:

LifeGive Sun-D offers a superior, naturally occurring vegan source of vitamin D3 with vitamin D precursors from Shiitake mushrooms and rice germ ex-tracts. Sun-D offers supplies [sic] pure and powerful plant source of living and life- supporting vitamin D for preventing nutrient deficiencies, supporting good health and preventing the development of threatening health conditions.

On November 18, 2009, I wrote UpayaNaturals to inquire about their product and never got a response. However, a JackNorrisRD.com reader, who also wrote them last November, got a response from the company saying, “All the information comes directly from our supplier’s web page.”

I could not find any more information about LifeGive – the company or their Sun D product.

At this time, no one else knows of any way to create vegan D3 and I would say that this casts doubt on whether LifeGive’s Sun D is truly vegan.

In large, single doses, vitamin D3 may be more effective than D2; but in smaller, sustained doses, D2 appears to be as effective. It might take some time to build up your stores of vitamin D by taking D2. Here are my recommendations.

Nature’s Plus Source of Life Garden Vitamin D3

See below in the comments for a discussion of Nature’s Plus D3. A quick summary is that I was not able to verify whether the lab that tested their D3 distinguished between D2 and D3.