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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Agree. I don’t get it. Plants fill the protein need without the need for bugs. Bug protein seems like a solution in search of a problem.

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Aren't plants not very protein-dense?

Is that really a problem? People tend to vastly overestimate our protein needs.

Whether that matters depends on whether people are eating enough protein. A cursory search shows that most people in the west vastly overeat protein beyond their needs. Yet aggressive marketing has Americans thinking they need more protein.

20g of protein in a cup of cooked lentils sounds pretty adequate to me. At 180lbs, it's only recommended that I get 63g of protein. It's not a challenge. I get almost half that in a single lentil salad including any other plant matter I toss in there with its own amino acid profile.

Maybe so, but Americans are also some of the tallest people (especially compared to those who eat much less). I'm not saying this is necessarily for the better or for the worse, but it's not easy to just say "you should eat this". Recommendations for diet change - remember when it was "don't eat fat", then "don't eat sugar", then "don't eat either"? Who knows.

After all the diet recommendations and panics about obesity, I still think most of us know what healthy eating is.

I heard somewhere that anybody 6’ tall or above has back problems. Anecdotally, this seems plausible enough to me.

Meanwhile there’s been a decades long marketing campaign to sell people on eating all the animal fat and protein they want with the dubious promise of weight loss and that always being healthy. Also decades long increases in cardiovascular diseases and death.

I'm over 6' tall, upper 30s age, and have never had a back problem. I also squat and deadlift frequently, which a lot of people don't do.

USA, just cherry-picking the non-hispanic whites, isn't even in the top 25 of average height, height is hereditary, meanwhile USA is known for catastrophic eating habits that I find hard to spin in a positive way.

Are you sure that was the evidence you wanted?

You can make plant based foods arbitrarily protein dense with things like gluten/seitan and nutritional yeast.

Many beans and lentils are protein dense. For example, Soybeans have more protein than chicken.

Dried beans have more protein than chicken, not cooked beans though. I could say that dried chicken jerky has more protein than dried soybeans if you are disregarding water content as it contributes to weight.

oh, interesting. Thanks for the heads up.

Take a look at the nutritional information for tempeh though.

Protein isn't monolithic: there are 20 amino acids which are found in different proportions.

Plants, specifically, often have less leucine than animals, which is an important signalling molecule that feeds into mTOR as well as protein synthesis regulation.

https://www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpendo.00153.20... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322509/

This doesn't make plant protein 'bad', but it is something to consider, especially if using a plant-based diet.

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