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Why you should go animal-free: 18 arguments for eating meat debunked

Unpalatable as it may be for those wedded to producing and eating meat, the environmental and health evidence for a plant-based diet is clear writes Damian Carrington in The Guardian

Whether you are concerned about your health, the environment or animal welfare, scientific evidence is piling up that meat-free diets are best. Millions of people in wealthy nations are already cutting back on animal products.

Of course livestock farmers and meat lovers are unsurprisingly fighting back and it can get confusing. Are avocados really worse than beef? What about bee-massacring almond production?

The coronavirus pandemic has added another ingredient to that mix. The rampant destruction of the natural world is seen as the root cause of diseases leaping into humans and is largely driven by farming expansion. The world’s top biodiversity scientists say even more deadly pandemics will follow unless the ecological devastation is rapidly halted.

Food is also a vital part of our culture, while the affordability of food is an issue of social justice. So there isn’t a single perfect diet. But the evidence is clear: whichever healthy and sustainable diet you choose, it is going to have much less red meat and dairy than today’s standard western diets, and quite possibly none. That’s for two basic reasons.

First, the over-consumption of meat is causing an epidemic of disease, with about $285bn spent every year around the world treating illness caused by eating red meat alone. Second, eating plants is simply a far more efficient use of the planet’s stretched resources than feeding the plants to animals and then eating them. The global livestock herd and the grain it consumes takes up 83% of global farmland, but produces just 18% of food calories.

So what about all those arguments in favour of meat-eating and against vegan diets? Let’s start with the big beef about red meat.

Meaty matters

Claim: Grass-fed beef is low carbon

This is true only when compared to intensively-reared beef linked to forest destruction. The UK’s National Farmers Union says UK beef has only half the emissions compared to the world average. But a lot of research shows grass-fed beef uses more land and produces more – or at best similar – emissions because grain is easier for cows to digest and intensively reared cows live shorter lives. Both factors mean less methane. Either way, the emissions from even the best beef are still many times that from beans and pulses.

There’s more. If all the world’s pasture lands were returned to natural vegetation, it would remove greenhouse gases equivalent to about 8 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere, according to Joseph Poore at Oxford University. That’s about 15% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Only a small fraction of that pasture land would be needed to grow food crops to replace the lost beef. So overall, if tackling the climate crisis is your thing, then beef is not.

Claim: Cattle are actually neutral for climate, because methane is relatively short-lived greenhouse gas

FacebookTwitterPinterest Cattle graze in a pasture against a backdrop of wind turbines which are part of the 155 turbine Smoky Hill Wind Farm near Vesper, Kan. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP

Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and ruminants produce a lot of it. But it only remains in the atmosphere for a relatively short time: half is broken down in nine years. This leads some to argue that maintaining the global cattle herd at current levels – about 1 billion animals – is not heating the planet. The burping cows are just replacing the methane that breaks down as time goes by.

But this is simply “creative accounting”, according to Pete Smith at the University of Aberdeen and Andrew Balmford at the University of Cambridge. We shouldn’t argue that cattle farmers can continue to pollute just because they have done so in the past, they say: “We need to do more than just stand still.” In fact, the short-lived nature of methane actually makes reducing livestock numbers a “particularly attractive target”, given that we desperately need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

In any case, just focusing on methane doesn’t make the rampant deforestation by cattle ranchers in South America go away. Even if you ignore methane completely, says Poore, animal products still produce more CO2 than plants. Even one proponent of the methane claim says: “I agree that intensive livestock farming is unsustainable.”

Claim: In many places the only thing you can grow is grass for cattle and sheep

NFU president, Minette Batters, says: “Sixty-five percent of British land is only suitable for grazing livestock and we have the right climate to produce high-quality red meat and dairy.”

“But if everybody were to make the argument that ‘our pastures are the best and should be used for grazing’, then there would be no way to limit global warming,” says Marco Springmann at the University of Oxford. His work shows that a transition to a predominantly plant-based flexitarian diet would free up both pasture and cropland.

The pasture could instead be used to grow trees and lock up carbon, provide land for rewilding and the restoration of nature, and growing bio-energy crops to displace fossil fuels. The crops no longer being fed to animals could instead become food for people, increasing a nation’s self-sufficiency in grains.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The Wild Ken Hill project on the Norfolk coast, which is turning around 1,000 acres of marginal farmland and woodland back over to nature. Photograph: Graeme Lyons/Wild Ken Hill/PA

Claim: Grazing cattle help store carbon from the atmosphere in the soil

This is true. The problem is that even in the very best cases, this carbon storage offsets only 20%-60% of the total emissions from grazing cattle. “In other words, grazing livestock – even in a best-case scenario – are net contributors to the climate problem, as are all livestock,” says Tara Garnett, also at the University of Oxford.

Furthermore, research shows this carbon storage reaches its limit in a few decades, while the problem of methane emissions continue. The stored carbon is also vulnerable - a change in land use or even a drought can see it released again. Proponents of “holistic grazing” to trap carbon are also criticised for unrealistic extrapolation of local results to global levels.

Claim: There is much more wildlife in pasture than in monoculture cropland

That is probably true but misses the real point. A huge driver of the global wildlife crisis is the past and continuing destruction of natural habitat to create pasture for livestock. Herbivores do have an important role in ecosystems, but the high density of farmed herds means pasture is worse for wildlife than natural land. Eating less meat means less destruction of wild places and cutting meat significantly would also free up pasture and cropland that could be returned to nature. Furthermore, a third of all cropland is used to grow animal feed.

Claim: We need animals to convert feed into protein humans can eat

There is no lack of protein, despite the claims. In rich nations, people commonly eat 30-50% more protein than they need. All protein needs can easily be met from plant-based sources, such as beans, lentils, nuts and whole grains.

But animals can play a role in some parts of Africa and Asia where, in India for example, waste from grain production can feed cattle that produce milk. In the rest of the world, where much of cropland that could be used to feed people is actually used to feed animals, a cut in meat eating is still needed for agriculture to be sustainable.
“What about … ?”

Claim: What about soya milk and tofu that is destroying the Amazon?

It’s not. Well over 96% of soy from the Amazon region is fed to cows, pigs and chickens eaten around the world, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, says Poore. Furthermore, 97% of Brazilian soy is genetically modified, which is banned for human consumption in many countries and is rarely used to make tofu and soya milk in any case.

Soya milk also has much smaller emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. If you are worried about the Amazon, not eating meat remains your best bet.

Claim: Almond milk production is massacring bees and turning land into desert

Some almond production may well cause environmental problems. But that is because rising demand has driven rapid intensification in specific places, like California, which could be addressed with proper regulation. It is nothing to do with what almonds need to grow. Traditional almond production in Southern Europe uses no irrigation at all. It is also perhaps worth noting that the bees that die in California are not wild, but raised by farmers like six-legged livestock.

Like soya milk, almond milk still has lower carbon emissions and land and water use than cow’s milk. But if you are still worried, there are plenty of alternatives, with oat milk usually coming out with the lowest environmental footprint.

Claim: Avocados are causing droughts in places 

Again, the problem here is the rapid growth of production in specific regions that lack prudent controls on water use, like Peru and Chile. Avocados generate three times less emissions than chicken, four times less than pork, and 20 times less than beef.

If you are still worried about avocados, you can of course choose not to eat them. But it’s not a reason to eat meat instead, which has a much bigger water and deforestation footprint.

The market is likely to solve the problem, as the high demand from consumers for avocados and almonds incentivises farmers elsewhere to grow the crops, thereby alleviating the pressure on current production hotspots.

Claim: Quinoa boom is harming poor farmers in Peru and Bolivia

Quinoa is an amazing food and has seen a boom. But the idea that this took food from the mouths of poor farmers is wrong. “The claim that rising quinoa prices were hurting those who had traditionally produced and consumed it is patently false,” said researchers who studied the issue.

Quinoa was never a staple food, representing just a few percent of the food budget for these people. The quinoa boom has had no effect on their nutrition. The boom also significantly boosted the farmers’ income.

There is an issue with falling soil quality, as the land is worked harder. But quinoa is now planted in China, India and Nepal, as well as in the US and Canada, easing the burden. The researchers are more worried now about the loss of income for South American farmers as the quinoa supply rises and the price falls.

Claim: What about palm oil destroying rainforests and orangutans?

Palm oil plantations have indeed led to terrible deforestation. But that is an issue for everybody, not only vegans: it’s in about half of all products on supermarket shelves, both food and toiletries. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature argues that choosing sustainably produced palm oil is actually positive, because other oil crops take up more land.

But Poore says: “We are abandoning millions of acres a year of oilseed land around the world, including rapeseed and sunflower fields in the former Soviet regions, and traditional olive plantations.” Making better use of this land would be preferable to using palm oil, he says.
Healthy questions

Claim: Vegans don’t get enough B12, making them stupid
A vegan diet is generally very healthy, but doctors have warned about the potential lack of B12, an important vitamin for brain function that is found in meat, eggs and cows’ milk. This is easily remedied by taking a supplement.

However, a closer look reveals some surprises. B12 is made by bacteria in soil and the guts of animals, and free-range livestock ingest the B12 as they graze and peck the ground. But most livestock are not free-range, and pesticides and antibiotics widely used on farms kill the B12-producing bugs. The result is that most B12 supplements - 90% according to one source – are fed to livestock, not people.

So there’s a choice here between taking a B12 supplement yourself, or eating an animal that has been given the supplement. Algae are a plant-based source of B12, although the degree of bio-availability is not settled yet. It is also worth noting that a significant number of non-vegans are B12 deficient, especially older people. Among vegans the figure is only about 10%.

Claim: Plant-based alternatives to meat are really unhealthy 

The rapid rise of the plant-based burger has prompted some to criticise them as ultra-processed junk food. A plant-based burger could be unhealthier if the salt levels are very high, says Springmann, but it is most likely to still be healthier than a meat burger when all nutritional factors are considered, particularly fibre. Furthermore, replacing a beef burger with a plant-based alternative is certain to be less damaging to the environment.

There is certainly a strong argument to be made that overall we eat far too much processed food, but that applies just as much to meat eaters as to vegetarians and vegans. And given that most people are unlikely to give up their burgers and sausages any time, the plant-based options are a useful alternative.
‘Catching out’ vegans

Claim: Fruit and vegetables aren’t vegan because they rely on animal manure as fertiliser

Most vegans would say it’s just silly to say fruit and veg are animal products and plenty are produced without animal dung. In any case there is no reason for horticulture to rely on manure at all. Synthetic fertiliser is easily made from the nitrogen in the air and there is plenty of organic fertiliser available if we chose to use it more widely in the form of human faeces. Over application of fertiliser does cause water pollution problems in many parts of the world. But that applies to both synthetic fertiliser and manure and results from bad management.

Claim: Vegan diets kill millions of insects

Piers Morgan is among those railing against “hypocrite” vegans because commercially kept bees die while pollinating almonds and avocados and combine harvesters “create mass murder of bugs” and small mammals while bringing in the grain harvest. But almost everyone eats these foods, not just vegans.

It is true that insects are in a terrible decline across the planet. But the biggest drivers of this are the destruction of wild habitat, largely for meat production, and widespread pesticide use. If it is insects that you are really worried about, then eating a plant-based organic diet is the option to choose.

Claim: Telling people to eat less meat and dairy is denying vital nutrition to the world’s poorest

A “planetary health diet” published by scientists to meet both global health and environmental needs was criticised by journalist Joanna Blythman: “When ideologues living in affluent countries pressurise poor countries to eschew animal foods and go plant-based, they are displaying crass insensitivity, and a colonial White Saviour mindset.”

In fact, says Springmann, who was part of the team behind the planetary health diet, it would improve nutritional intake in all regions, including poorer regions where starchy foods currently dominate diets. The big cuts in meat and dairy are needed in rich nations. In other parts of the world, many healthy, traditional diets are already low in animal products.
On the road

Claim: Transport emissions mean that eating plants from all over the world is much worse than local meat and dairy

“‘Eating local’ is a recommendation you hear often [but] is one of the most misguided pieces of advice,” says Hannah Ritchie, at the University of Oxford. “Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.”

Beef and lamb have many times the carbon footprint of most other foods, she says. So whether the meat is produced locally or shipped from the other side of the world, plants will still have much lower carbon footprints. Transport emissions for beef are about 0.5% of the total and for lamb it’s 2%.

The reason for this is that almost all food transported long distances is carried by ships, which can accommodate huge loads and are therefore fairly efficient. For example, the shipping emissions for avocados crossing the Atlantic are about 8% of their total footprint. Air freight does of course result in high emissions, but very little food is transported this way; it accounts for just 0.16% of food miles.

Claim: All the farmers who raise livestock would be unemployed if the world went meat-free

Livestock farming is massively subsidised with taxpayers money around the world – unlike vegetables and fruit. That money could be used to support more sustainable foods such as beans and nuts instead, and to pay for other valuable services, such as capturing carbon in woodlands and wetlands, restoring wildlife, cleaning water and reducing flood risks. Shouldn’t your taxes be used to provide public goods rather than harms?

So, food is complicated. But however much we might wish to continue farming and eating as we do today, the evidence is crystal clear that consuming less meat and more plants is very good for both our health and the planet. The fact that some plant crops have problems is not a reason to eat meat instead.

In the end, you will choose what you eat. If you want to eat healthily and sustainably, you don’t have to stop eating meat and dairy altogether. The planetary health diet allows for a beef burger, some fish and an egg each week, and a glass of milk or some cheese each day.

Food writer Michael Pollan foreshadowed the planetary health diet in 2008 with a simple seven-word rule: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” But if you want to have the maximum impact on fighting the climate and wildlife crisis, then it is going to be all plants.

Why do people hate vegans?

It has left the beige-tinted margins and become social media’s most glamorous look. But why does veganism still provoke so much anger asks George Reynolds in The Guardian

From the hunger strike to the edible projectile, history offers abundant examples of food being used for political ends. Even so, the crowd of vegans who gathered in central London earlier this year are unlikely to forget the moment when Gatis Lagzdins skinned and ate a raw squirrel.

Along with his co-conspirator Deonisy Khlebnikov, Lagzdins performed his stunt at the weekly Soho Vegan Market on Rupert Street. He would subsequently demonstrate at VegFest in Brighton (although this time his snack of choice was a raw pig’s head) as part of a self-proclaimed “carnivore tour” intended to highlight the evils of a plant-based diet. At the London event, he wore a black vest emblazoned with the slogan: “Veganism = Malnutrition.”

The war on vegans started small. There were flashpoints, some outrageous enough to receive press coverage. There was the episode in which William Sitwell, then editor of Waitrose magazine, resigned after a freelance writer leaked an email exchange in which he joked about “killing vegans one by one”. (Sitwell has since apologised.) There was the PR nightmare faced by Natwest bank when a customer calling to apply for a loan was told by an employee that “all vegans should be punched in the face”. When animal rights protesters stormed into a Brighton Pizza Express in September this year, one diner did exactly that.

A charge commonly laid against vegans is that they relish their status as victims, but research suggests they have earned it. In 2015, a study conducted by Cara C MacInnis and Gordon Hodson for the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations observed that vegetarians and vegans in western society – and vegans in particular – experience discrimination and bias on a par with ethnic and religious minorities.

 

Illustration: Lee Martin/Guardian Design

Once a niche interest group parodied in TV shows such as The Simpsons (in which a character describes himself as a “level five vegan” who refuses to eat anything that casts a shadow), in the past two years, vegans have been thrust into the limelight. A philosophy rooted in non-aggression has found itself at the heart of some of the most virulent arguments on social media. In November 2018, Good Morning Britain hosted a debate titled “Do people hate vegans?”; the political website Vox tackled the question in even more direct fashion a week later, asking: “Why do people hate vegans so much?”

These recent displays of enmity towards vegans represent a puzzling escalation in hostilities, just as a consensus is starting to form that eating less meat would almost certainly be better for everyone – and the Earth. Of course, eating less meat does not mean eating no meat whatsoever, and the extreme prohibitions associated with going vegan (no animal products, no eggs, no leather, no wool) suggest it could have been just another Atkins diet or clean-eating fad – a flash in the pan that blows up and then dissipates, leaving behind nothing more than a dose of mild regret. Instead, just when the growth might have been expected to plateau, it kept on growing. A 2016 Ipsos Mori survey suggested the total number of vegans in the UK had increased more than 360% in the preceding decade, to more than 500,000.

Big business has been quick to cash in. The Los Angeles-based company Beyond Meat, producer of plant-based burgers whose taste and texture are as much like minced beef as possible, recently went public and soon afterwards hit a valuation of $3.4bn; huge conglomerates such as Nestlé and Kellogg’s are moving into the fake-meat market; supermarkets and restaurant chains have introduced vegan ranges. Yet perhaps the definitive proof of veganism’s mainstreaming – and the backlash against it – came in January this year, when the beloved high-street bakery chain Greggs announced it was launching a Quorn-based vegan sausage roll. It was pilloried by Piers Morgan, who tweeted: “Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns.” It turns out Morgan was mistaken: the vegan sausage roll was such a hit that the company’s share value leapt by 13%.

Of course, what we grow, harvest, fatten and kill is political. A Tesco advert showcasing vegan produce met protests from the National Farmers Union who claimed it “demonised” meat, while Shropshire deputy council leader Steve Charmley unleashed a tweet-storm when confronted with pro-vegan advertising in a county he claimed was “built on agriculture”. This moment, and this conflict, were a long time coming. The rise of veganism is a question less of personal taste than of generational upheaval; less about meat and fish and dairy than the systems that put them on our tables in such excessive quantities. Ultimately, the vegan wars are not really about veganism at all, but about how individual freedom is coming into conflict with a personal and environmental health crisis.

In many cultures, the practice of abstaining entirely from animal produce has an established history: with their belief systems rooted in nonviolence, many Rastafarians, followers of Jainism and certain sects of Buddhism have been swearing off meat, fish, eggs and dairy for centuries. In large swathes of the west, though, public awareness of what veganism actually entails has been sketchy. There wasn’t even a commonly accepted English-language name until 1944, when a British woodworker called Donald Watson called a meeting with a handful of other non-dairy vegetarians (including his wife, Dorothy) to discuss a less cumbersome label for their lifestyle. They considered alternatives such as dairyban, vitan and benevore before settling on the term we use today, a simple contraction of vegetarian on the grounds that “veganism starts with vegetarianism and carries it through to its logical conclusions”.

But those logical conclusions did not stop at abstaining from certain foods. The original vegans were not pursuing a diet so much as a belief system, a wholesale ideology – one that rejected not just animal protein but also the way animals had become part of an industrial supply chain. In the 1970s, Carol J Adams started work on the book that would appear, two decades later, as The Sexual Politics of Meat: a seminal feminist text that positioned veganism as the only logical solution to a social system that reduced both women and animals to desirable, but disposable, flesh.

In the early 70s, other activists were considering how veganism might provide a viable alternative to existing food systems. In 1971, Diet for a Small Planet by the social policy activist Frances Moore Lappé introduced an environmental justification for going vegetarian or vegan to a global audience (it eventually sold more than 3m copies). In the same year, counter-culture hero Stephen Gaskin founded a vegan intentional community, The Farm, in Lewis County, Tennessee, bringing together some 300 like-minded individuals. Four years later, The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook by Louise Hagler announced: “We are vegetarians because one-third of the world is starving and at least half goes to bed hungry every night,” and introduced western audiences to techniques for making their own soy-based products such as tofu and tempeh.

The Farm Vegetarian Cookbook fixed a certain vegan aesthetic in the minds of mainstream meat-eating culture for decades to come. Veganism became synonymous with soybeans and brown rice, with ageing hippies spooning beige bowlfuls of worthy grains and pulses – not the glamorous, vibrant, youthful practitioners that now radiate positivity from their Instagram feeds.

 

BBQ pulled jack fruit tacos with avocado and lime: a long way from the beige vegan food much parodied in the 70s. Photograph: LauriPatterson/Getty Images/iStockphoto

It is hard to overstate the role social media has played in transforming veganism’s image, with its facility for fostering an instant sense of community. Witness any number of viral internet phenomena – from Woman Laughing Alone with Salad to acai bowls and this generation’s staple, avocado toast – that have helped free it from its musty old associations. Instagram in particular gave vegan food mainstream exposure, repackaging it (good for you and photogenic!) for the low-attention-span internet age. Not everyone sees this as a positive development: the vegan writer and podcast host Alicia Kennedy considers it troubling that the internet has transformed something with such a rich political history into “a wellness thing” that allows would-be consumers to label themselves vegans without having to engage with the “excess baggage” of ideology. Another American writer, Khushbu Shah, has argued that the popularisation of veganism via social media has erased non-white faces and narratives from the dominant discourse, as white bloggers and influencers fashion a lifestyle in their image.

At the same time, a similar transformation was happening to the food vegans were eating. A blossoming street food scene in major cities influenced a dirtier, trashier vegan aesthetic that gave the diet a further boost. Recipe channels on YouTube and Facebook such as BOSH! – a glossy young male duo – used video to make stunt dishes (apple pie tacos; a plant-based take on a McDonald’s McMuffin; a watermelon “Jaegerbomb”) that injected some much-needed fun into the diet. (Tellingly, the BOSH! dudes, Henry Firth and Ian Theasby, refer to themselves not as chefs but “food remixers”.)

The language began to reflect a new, more approachable veganism. Descriptors such as “plant-based” gained in popularity, effectively rebranding the worthy brown stodge of popular imagination into something green and vital. Other neologisms such as “flexitarian” (a term denoting someone who is predominantly vegan or vegetarian but who occasionally eats meat or fish, added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2014) recast daunting vegan ideology as a fun, healthy, casual thing to try.

Cultish initiatives like Veganuary (an annual campaign encouraging people to go meat-free for the first month of the year, launched in 2014) and Meat Free Mondays tapped into this spirit – moving away from wholesale dietary transformation and towards something more manageably sporadic, with the added gloss of being able to share (that is, brag about) the experience online. Beyoncé declared an interest in veganism – at least, for breakfast – while athletes such as Venus Williams (who took up a raw vegan diet to combat a health condition) and Lewis Hamilton played a vital role in raising awareness and turning something once seen as weird and a little annoying into a desirable lifestyle.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning

Helping the cause was the growing body of scientific literature suggesting that some of the processes that produce the modern western diet were catastrophically bad for us. Bee Wilson wrote in these pages about the health effects of processed pork in a piece titled “Yes, bacon really is killing us.” Food in the Anthropocene, a report commissioned by the Lancet in conjunction with the global nonprofit Eat (a startup dedicated to transforming the global food system) concluded that “unhealthy diets are the largest global burden of disease”, and that meat-heavy food production is “the largest source of environmental degradation”. A major study led by a team from Oxford University, published in the journal Nature in October 2018, showed that huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to slow the rate of climate change. Livestock production has been shown to lead to dangerous levels of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Factor in pop-science phenomena like the documentaries Cowspiracy! and What the Health – available on Netflix – and your diet suddenly seemed like a way you could save the world.

Big Meat continues to lobby aggressively in favour of our God-given right to eat animal flesh, resulting in a series of legal prohibitions surrounding what can and cannot be called “meat”’ or even – in one US state – a “veggie burger”. But veganism’s virality has proved irresistible. From about 2015, vegan and plant-based cookery manuals started to proliferate at a dazzling rate, with the BOSH! boys selling upward of 80,000 copies and spending four weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list (today, Amazon lists more than 20,000 results for the search term “vegan cookbook”). Sales of plant milks skyrocketed; financial results at the manufacturer of plant-based protein Quorn soared as what one analyst referred to as the “battle for the centre of the plate” began to draw (fake) blood. By 2018, Byron, M&S and Pret had invested heavily in vegan ranges. It was, this paper proclaimed, “the year that veganism moved out of the realms of counter-culture and into the mainstream”. In 2014, Veganuary’s inaugural campaign had attracted just 3,300 participants; by 2019 the number was greater than 250,000, with 53% of them under the age of 35.

But veganism’s explosive growth alone does not explain why it attracted such controversy. There is something inherent to veganism and vegans that arouses deeper feelings. What is it about the vegan lifestyle that stirs such strong emotion in those who don’t happen to share it? Why do people hate vegans so much?

Early attempts to establish a vegan utopia did not go well. In the 1840s, the transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (father of the author of Little Women, Louisa May) founded Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts – a vegan community intended to be nothing less than a second Eden. But Alcott’s insistence that crops had to be planted and fields tilled by hand meant that not enough food could be grown for all of the members (even though the population peaked at just 13); a diet of fruit and grains, typically consumed raw, left participants severely malnourished. Just seven months after opening, Fruitlands closed – derided, in the words of one biographer, as “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias”.

The timing was unfortunate for American vegetarians, who were already engaged in a pitched battle with public opinion. Vegetarians and vegans in the 19th century – known as Grahamites after the Presbyterian minister and diet reformer Sylvester Graham, who campaigned against meat-eating on the grounds that it was both unhealthy and morally repugnant – were the subject of frequent vitriolic editorials in the popular and medical press of the day, which described them as “cadaverous”, “feeble”, “half-crazed”, “sour-visaged” and “food cranks”.

In the 21st century the terminology may have changed but the sentiment remains much the same. The 2015 study conducted by MacInnis and Hodson found that only drug addicts were viewed more negatively among respondents. It concluded: “Unlike other forms of bias (eg, racism, sexism), negativity toward vegetarians and vegans is not widely considered a societal problem; rather, [it] is commonplace and largely accepted.”

In 2011, sociologists Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan observed a phenomenon they called “vegaphobia”, demonstrating that the British media consistently portrayed vegans in a negative light. In the days after her story broke, Selene Nelson, the freelancer at the centre of the Waitrose magazine row, was called “humourless”, “combative” and “militant”. In 2017, residents of the Swiss town of Aargau reportedly called for a vegan foreign resident to be denied citizenship because she was “annoying”, and the glee with which the global media retold the story revealed a widespread and casual prejudice.

  Beyond Meat’s Beyond Spring burger.

Veganism’s opponents outline a host of objections to the lifestyle to justify their hostility. Per a now-familiar joke (Q: How do you know if someone’s vegan? A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you), vegans are portrayed as preachy and sanctimonious, a characteristic that rankled among MacInnis and Hodson’s respondents in particular, who viewed “vegetarians/vegans more negatively when their motivations concern social justice rather than personal health”.

There are rational motives to oppose vegan diets on health grounds. They can be deficient in crucial nutrients such as vitamin B-12. This is especially notable in the case of extreme diets (such as fruitarianism) advocated by some vegan bloggers or Instagram influencers with unorthodox approaches to nutritional science. Various supermarket chains have also attempted to meet the burgeoning demand for vegan products with highly processed vegan ready meals – from the Impossible Burger to plant-based meatballs, goujons and hot dogs. As Bee Wilson argued in these pages, the high proportion of processed ingredients in these products means the so-called health halo they enjoy may well be illusory.

Perhaps all we are doing, as veganism truly goes mainstream and companies such as Beyond Meat reap windfalls, is replacing one kind of industrialised system with another. Evidence suggests that intensive livestock farming is a poor solution to world hunger, given its impact on personal health and the environment, but intensive industrialised farming of soya, maize and grains comes at a significant carbon cost, too – as does flying in the ingredients to keep berries and nut butters on acai bowls or avocado on toast.

Veganism, of course, is rooted in social justice – a detail that has faded from view as it has gone mainstream. But even in its dilute 21st-century form, veganism remains confrontational: it casts people’s dietary choices in harsh relief, and people are by nature defensive. In countries where meat is prohibitively expensive for many, people are sometimes vegetarian or vegan by necessity; in the affluent west, not eating meat is an active choice. This makes it a rejection of a lifestyle and a rebuke to the majority’s values – especially in a country (such as the UK) still struggling to escape the long shadow of rationing. We are conditioned to like animals and decry animal cruelty, and yet we are also brought up in a culture that revels in the bacon sandwich, the Sunday roast, fish and chips. One simple explanation for why people don’t like vegans is because they show how confused humankind is about food choices and how illogical its decision-making can be.

And yet none of this really gets to the heart of what it is about vegans that makes people so upset. Calling them humourless or militant, sanctimonious or annoying or hypocrites – all of these terms are just smokescreens for what it is that people really feel, which is fear. Vegans are unsettling and uncanny: they live among us, speak like us, behave like us – but for one significant exception. Meat may be murder, but to some people, the prospect of life without it is even worse.

There is no justification for the amount of meat we eat in western society. The resources that go into humanely rearing and butchering an animal should make its flesh a borderline-unattainable luxury – and, indeed, in the past, it was. Meat always used to be the preserve of the wealthy, a symbol of prosperity: “A chicken in every pot” remained an aspirational but impractical promise across the best part of a millennium, from the days of Henry IV of France (when the term was invented) all the way through to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign.

It was only through the technological advances of modern agriculture that meat became attainable and available at supermarket prices. From the mid-1800s onwards, farmers could raise animals bigger, better and faster than in the past; kill them quicker; treat their flesh to prevent it from spoiling; transport it further and store it longer. A commonly cited psychological turning point was the second world war, which engendered what Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times, later described as a kind of “beef madness”. GIs were sent to the front with rations of tinned meat; once peace had been declared, there was no better symbol of the brave new world than a sizzling celebratory steak. In the course of just over a century, meat went from unattainable luxury to dietary cornerstone; these days, we feel entitled to eat meat every day.

In March this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was discussing the Green New Deal on Showtime’s Desus & Mero US TV talk show when she observed: “Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like, let’s keep it real.” An apparently innocuous comment, rooted in the same common-sense good science that informed the Lancet report on meat and environmental degradation published around the same time? Not if you asked the Republicans, it wasn’t.

Representative Rob Bishop of Utah seized on Ocasio-Cortez’s comment, claiming that under the Green New Deal the eating of burgers would be “outlawed”. Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka went one better, using a speech at the Conservative Political Action conference to proclaim: “They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved!”

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing the Green New Deal, part of which would aim to reduce meat consumption. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

Stalin was, in fact, full of admiration for the American burger, going so far as to send his minister of foreign trade to the US on a fact-finding mission (the result, the so-called Mikoyan cutlet, would remain an affordable Soviet staple for decades). But “they’re taking our meat” is as evocative a rallying cry as “they’re taking our jobs” or “they’re taking our guns” – it conveys the same sense of individual freedoms being menaced by external forces, a birthright under attack. Ted Cruz (wrongly) alleged that his Democrat rival Beto O’Rourke planned to ban Texas barbecue if elected senator in his place: like the personal firearm, animal flesh has become an emblem of resistance against the encroachments of progressivism, something to be prised from your cold, dead hand. Men’s rights advocate Jordan Peterson is famed for following a beef and salt diet; Donald Trump is renowned for his love of fast food and well-done steak with ketchup; there is even a subset of libertarian cryptocurrency enthusiasts who call themselves Bitcoin carnivores.

In the internet age, the consumption of meat is visibly aligned with a certain kind of conservative alpha-masculinity. Before he found infamy eating raw flesh, Gatis Lagzdins was best known for hosting a YouTube channel peddling racist ideology and rightwing conspiracies about the Illuminati. Among the alt-right and affiliated circles online, the derogatory term “soy boy” has been adopted along with other terms such as “cuck” and “beta” as a way of mocking so-called social justice warriors for their perceived lack of vigour. This echoes a finding in the MacInnis/Hodson study, in which respondents from a rightwing background, who seek to uphold traditional gender values, see something alarmingly subversive and worthy of derision in any man who prefers tofu to turkey.

This loaded use of food-derived epithets cuts both ways. In the UK, the term “gammon” gained currency in the early 2010s as a pejorative apparently inspired by the puce skin tone of enraged, middle-aged middle Englanders. Food has always been bound up in personal identity, and thus inextricable from politics. In their etymology, common terms such as “diet” (Greek for way of life) and “regime” (Latin: rule) are metaphors for a struggle over what it means to lead one’s life correctly. The very concept of orthorexia (whose sufferers obsessively exclude foods from their diet that they consider harmful) has at its root a corrupted idea of “correct” eating. It is impossible to talk about diets without also talking about the implied inadequacies of those who do not follow them; to paraphrase Brillat-Savarin, tell someone what to eat and you tell them who to be.

The vegan conversation, then, is a stand-in for much bigger things. When we talk about veganism we are talking about environmental and social change; we are also contemplating the erasure of tradition (Texas barbecue! The Sunday roast! The sausage roll!). We are also tabling a long-overdue referendum on how our food choices affect us and the world around us. And as much as its popularity has been pumped up by concepts like flexitarianism, ultimately veganism’s goal is a world in which the annual per-capita consumption of animal products is precisely zero. No wonder things have got so heated.

Food can be a powerful conduit for our anxieties, too. Half a century ago, a letter published in The New England Journal of Medicine described a terrifying new condition whose symptoms – headache, sweating, heart palpitations – were associated with a common ingredient of dishes served in Chinese restaurants: monosodium glutamate, or MSG. The flavour-enhancing additive was so demonised that it was banned in some US cities. Despite multiple studies conclusively proving otherwise, the belief in so-called “Chinese restaurant syndrome” remains widespread today: Asian-American chefs still find themselves having to justify the use of MSG despite its widespread use in non-Asian foods too. It is a neat example of the persistence of food-related urban legends. There was no doubt a racist element to the way the MSG myth spread; those involved in its dissemination were also motivated by a gnawing fear of obsolescence as a new threat to their existence began to gain popularity.

Those opposing meat-eating have a struggle ahead of them. It is clear that what is at stake here is not steak, but identity. A movement that preaches such wholesale change is bound to stir up anxieties, chief among them the sense that vegan dishes such as the Greggs Quorn sausage roll are being positioned not as alternatives but as replacements.

With a few notable exceptions – most of them religious – meat has retained its primacy in cultures across the world. It originally became a status symbol because it was harder to obtain than plant matter – even a small animal could run away, and if caught, was capable of inflicting wounds that could prove fatal in a world before antibiotics. As society became hierarchical, there was no greater token of status than the ability to eat meat on a whim. In her 2016 book Meathooked, Marta Zaraska records the discovery of Egyptian tombs in which the pharaohs had been buried alongside “meat mummies”, baskets of beef and poultry that had been embalmed in preparation for the afterlife. Our fetishisation of meat has not lessened – on the contrary, forecasters predict rapid increase in meat consumption in developing countries over the next decade. As a ready source of protein, meat remains the great aspiration, the surest proof of prosperity.

As Carol J Adams wrote, the words we use shield us from the moral consequences of carnivory: we eat beef, not cows, pork, not pigs, while a cabbage remains just a cabbage wherever it is in its life cycle. Our language ennobles meat at the expense of veg: strong, muscular types are “beefy”, lazy people are “couch potatoes”, unresponsive ones “vegetables”. Turning our back on meat-eating is not as simple as changing from pork to Quorn: it requires us to reject some entrenched values.

Already, there are signs that a great migration is underway. The UK university caterer Tuco recently reported that record numbers of canteens are going meat-free, describing the adoption of vegan or vegetarian diets among students and staff as a “mega-trend”. On the high street, too, there is a growing recognition that vegan ranges are not just opportunistic cash-grabs but potential best-sellers. After the success of Greggs’ vegan sausage roll, Tesco announced it would be increasing its range of dedicated plant-based products by nearly 50% to keep pace with demand.

Sales may be growing fast, but they are barely making a dent in the $1.7tr global market for animal-derived protein. Certainly, a change of culture will not happen without the involvement of government, industry and science; as the past few years have shown, widespread change is also unlikely to happen without a fight. This makes the current field of conflict an unfortunate one – in the real world, we can practise moderation, emotional flexitarianism. Online – where many of the vegan wars’ most intense skirmishes are currently being fought – we do not find compromise or even look for it. The internet has made communication highly charged and polarised; the only way to be heard in such a screaming vortex is to shout louder.

But the body of evidence suggesting that we eat too much meat is approaching the point where it becomes undeniable. This summer, a UN report identified destruction of forests and emissions from cattle and other intensive farming practices as major factors driving the climate crisis towards a point of no return.

Some are proposing urgent action, such as the QC Michael Mansfield, who recently suggested (in a speech given at the launch of the Vegan Now campaign) that meat-eating could become illegal. He drew a parallel with the smoking ban, and it is indeed eminently possible that in time meat (especially red meat) becomes the new tobacco – a vice enjoyed by a small number of people in full awareness of its negative health consequences.

But in coining the term “ecocide” – and classing it as a crime against humanity – Mansfield framed the debate in different terms. We might portray the current moment as a precipice, and the growing interest in plant-based diets as the surest way back to safety. In this interpretation, the war on vegans is the act of a doomed majority fighting to defend its harmful way of life. Vegans might well be vociferous and annoying, holier-than-thou, self-satisfied and evangelical. But as their numbers grow beyond the margins, perhaps the worst thing they could be is right.

Protein mania: the rich world’s new diet obsession

Why we can’t get enough when we already eat too much. By Bee Wilson in The Guardian


Are you getting enough protein? The question provides its own answer: if you are worrying about the amount of protein in your diet, then you are almost certainly eating more than enough. This is the paradox of our new protein obsession. For many people, protein has become a kind of secular unction: it instantly anoints any food with an aura of health and goodness. On the menu at the gym where I go, a salad niçoise is now repackaged as “high-protein tuna”. It comes without the usual capers or olives – those are items that merely add flavour, and who needs that?

On Pinterest, the lifestyle-sharing site, you can now choose “protein” as one of your interests in life, along with “cute animals” and “inspirational quotes”. In 2017, there were 64m Google searches for “protein”. Anxiety about protein is one of the things that drives a person to drink a flask of vitamin-padded beige slurry and call it lunch.

You merely need to visit a western supermarket today to see that many people regard protein as some kind of universal elixir – one food companies are profitably adding to anything they can. “When the Box Says ‘Protein’, Shoppers Say ‘I’ll take it’” was the headline of a 2013 article in the Wall Street Journal. In addition to the ubiquitous protein balls, protein bars and protein shakes, you can now buy protein noodles, protein bagels, protein cookies and – wait for it – protein coffee. Even foods that are naturally high in protein such as cheese and yoghurt are sold in protein-boosted versions. Strangest of all might be “protein water” – clear, fruit-flavoured drinks laced with whey protein, as if ordinary water was insufficiently healthy.

Around half of all UK consumers are apparently seeking to add “extra protein” to their diets, according to market research from the cereal brand Weetabix – which has also cashed in on our hunger for protein. The protein version of Weetabix – a 24-pack of which costs 50p more than the same-sized pack of original Weetabix – is worth £7m in sales per year.

In a way, there’s nothing strange in the fact that we see protein as valuable, because it is. Along with fat and carbohydrate, it is one of the three basic macronutrients, and arguably the most important. We could survive without carbohydrates, but fat and protein are essential. Protein is the only macronutrient to contain nitrogen, without which we cannot grow or reproduce. There are nine amino-acid proteins – the building blocks of human tissue – that we can only get from food. Without them, we could grow neither healthy hair and nails nor strong bones and muscle, and our immune system would be impaired. A child who lacks vital protein in the first five years of life will suffer from stunting and sometimes wasting, too, as the dreadful persistence of malnutrition in the developing world reminds us.

So the puzzle is not that we should crave protein, but that our protein anxiety has become so acute at a time when the average person in developed countries has a surfeit of protein in their diet – at least according to official guidelines, which recommend a minimum of 0.8g of protein a day per kilogram of body weight. According to 2015 data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the average person in the US and Canada gets a full 90g a day, nearly twice the recommended amount. The average European is not far behind with 85g of protein a day, and the average Chinese person consumes 75g.

When we seek out extra protein to sprinkle over our diets, most of us in rich countries are fixating on “a problem that doesn’t exist”, said David L Katz, an American doctor and public health scholar who is the director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center. In his latest book, The Truth About Food, Katz notes that while the “mythology of protein tends to propagate the notion that more is better”, there are serious concerns that a very high protein intake over a lifetime can result in harm to the liver, kidneys and skeleton.

The current protein mania has partly come about because so many people now regard carbohydrates or fats (and sometimes both) with suspicion. In the current nutrition wars, protein has emerged as the last macronutrient left standing. But the whole “macronutrient fixation” is a “boondoggle” that has been calamitous for public health, Katz told me. “First they told us to cut fat. But instead of wholegrains and lentils, we ate low-fat junk food.” Then food marketers heard the message about cutting carbs and sold us protein-enriched junk foods instead. “When we talk about protein,” said Katz, “we are dissociating the nutrient from its food source.”

And yet still we try to get more protein. In this world of abundance, humans seem to be on an eternal quest for the one safe substance that we can consume in limitless quantities without gaining weight. Such is the appeal of Diet Coke.

Our protein anxiety drives us to take diets already high in meats, soya, sugars and ultra-processed foods and dose them with yet more meats, soya, sugary bars and ultra-processed foods because they are marketed to us as “protein” – even though many of these products are not even particularly high in protein.

There is something paradoxical about our collective protein worship. When we pay good money for protein-enhanced food, we hope it will lead us to better health (however that is defined). Yet our single-minded pursuit of protein – as a disembodied nutrient whose presence trumps all other considerations – can lead us to behave as if we have forgotten everything we knew about food.

The intensity of our protein obsession can only be understood as part of a wider series of diet battles that go back half a century. If we now thirst for protein as if it were water, it may be because the other two macronutrients – fats and carbohydrates – have each in turn been made to seem toxic in the public mind.

Official dietary guidelines in the US and UK still insist that a healthy diet is one founded on plenty of carbohydrates with limited quantities of fat, especially saturated fat. The rationale for this low-fat advice goes back to the landmark Seven Countries Study, conducted in the 1950s by the American physiologist Ancel Keys. Based on his observation of healthy, olive oil-eating Mediterranean populations, Keys argued that affluent westerners would suffer fewer cases of heart disease if they could limit consumption of saturated fats such as those found in butter, lard and meat.

But as interpreted in the modern supermarket, the low-fat diet often ended up being a high-sugar and high-refined-carbohydrate diet, which was not quite what nutritionists had originally envisaged. In recent years, the low-fat, high-carb orthodoxy has come under fierce attack. In 2015, a meta-analysis conducted by a team of Canadian researchers concluded that intake of saturated fat was not associated with raised risk of stroke, type 2 diabetes or death from heart disease. Vocal anti-sugar campaigners such as Gary Taubes – author of The Case Against Sugar – have argued that the true cause of our current epidemic of diet-related ill health is not in fact saturated fat, but refined carbohydrate.

While the low-fattists and the low-carbists continue to slug it out, protein comes out the winner as the one safe thing that most of the population feel they can still put their faith in, whether for weight loss or general health. We have to eat something, after all.

The current protein fetish is merely the latest manifestation of a far larger phenomenon that Michael Pollan memorably referred to as “nutritionism” around 10 years ago. For decades now, there has been a tendency to think about what we eat and drink in terms of nutrients, rather than real whole ingredients in all their complexity. A combination of diet fads and clever marketing has got us here. It doesn’t matter whether we fixate on “low fat” or “low carbs” or “high protein” – we are making the same old mistakes about nutrition in a new form.

For a while, on my kitchen counter, next to the jars of rice and flour, there was another canister made of black plastic, much larger than the others. Its label said “SOURCE OF HIGH QUALITY PROTEINS” in huge letters. In much smaller lettering it said “READY TO MIX PROTEIN POWDER WITH SWEETENERS” and listed three kinds of whey protein: whey protein isolate, whey protein concentrate and hydrolysed whey protein. When you opened it, a fake vanilla smell wafted into the air and you saw a whitish powder and a black plastic scoop.

This soulless canister of ultra-processed whey protein was something that I, as a food writer, never thought I would see in my kitchen. The macho aesthetic of the packaging made my heart sink. I am also no fan of artificial sweeteners, which I believe do no favours either to the palate or to gut bacteria. What’s more, I believe most people should be able to get the nutrients we need from a balanced diet, rather than through supplements.

But nothing forces you to bend your own principles like parenthood. I turned to whey protein in a state of mild desperation for my very tall youngest son, who plays competitive sport five or six days a week. Three square meals plus multiple snacks only scratched the surface of his appetite, and he was sometimes almost crying with hunger by dinnertime. My conversations with other sport parents suggest that it’s not uncommon to be at least a little bit obsessed with their child’s protein intake. We grumble that protein bars are a pointless rip-off – and then we buy another pack of them.

 

Vanilla protein powder. Photograph: Arisha Singh/Alamy

Protein means different things to different people. To some, it symbolises “weight loss”, while to others it means “muscles”. To me it appeared as a magical filling substance that just might help my son to be less ravenous.

I had read studies suggesting protein was the most filling – or satiating – of the three macronutrients, and wondered if more protein at breakfast could be the answer. I tried him on homemade waffles enriched with almonds and hidden eggs (at that point he wouldn’t countenance whole eggs) and the improvement in his energy levels was dramatic. It was a short step to making him occasional smoothies from half a scoop of whey protein with milk and bananas or frozen berries. Despite my unease at the powder, I could genuinely see the difference in his levels of fullness. When the canister was empty I didn’t replace it, but I still monitor my son’s protein intake.

Having “enough” protein in your diet to meet your basic needs is not necessarily the same as having the right amount for optimum health. When I asked David Katz how much protein a person should consume, he said certain people may indeed require more than the minimum recommendation of 0.8g per kilo of bodyweight – including athletes like my son. The problem is that once we start thinking more protein is automatically better, it can be hard to know when to stop. The idea that protein is synonymous with healthy eating leads many people to eat in disordered ways that are far from healthy, either for body or mind.

A couple of years ago, Sarah Shephard, a thirtysomething British sports journalist, realised she was obsessed with protein. On a typical day, she was eating three or four protein bars, hard-boiled eggs, meat, fish and non-starchy vegetables and a couple of protein shakes. Virtually the only carbs in her diet came from the protein bars and shakes. It reached the point where she had so little energy in the evenings because of the lack of calories in her body that she stopped going out.

Shephard’s protein obsession started when injury forced her to give up running. After she started doing boxing and circuits with a new trainer, he told her she should be eating more protein to help prevent future injuries. To start with, Shephard’s new low-carb, high-protein regime felt wonderful. She lost weight, gained muscle and became one of the many people at the gym clutching their sleek flask of protein shake like an amulet.

However, she noticed her thoughts about protein were becoming obsessive. Given the choice between an apple and a protein bar, she always chose the protein bar, even though at a rational level she knew that a piece of fresh fruit with its fibre and vitamins had a lot to recommend it over a processed snack. By the time she finally sought help from a sports nutritionist, he said he had never seen anyone with such an intensive fitness regime who ate so little carbohydrate. She was consuming 150g of protein a day, around 2.5g per kilo of bodyweight – far in excess of the upper limit recommended for bodybuilders by the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Shephard slowly weaned herself back on to a more balanced diet that included a range of complex carbohydrates such as oats and brown rice. Despite her apprehension, she did not gain weight. When I spoke to her, Shephard had been eating a balanced diet for more than two years without any ill effects, and was a bit mystified as to how she had drifted into her protein fixation.

Encouraged by the marketers of high-protein foods, many people talk about whether we we have reached our daily target for “macros”, but we do not talk so much about how much is too much. Adding extra protein beyond our needs can be harmful for people with underlying kidney or liver problems, as the body can struggle to process the excess.

In 2017 there were sensationalist headlines around the world when Meegan Hefford, a 25-year-old Australian bodybuilder, died after consuming high amounts of protein shakes and supplements. Hefford hadn’t realised she was suffering from a condition called urea cycle disorder, which meant that her body couldn’t metabolise protein normally. Defenders of high-protein diets immediately attacked the coverage of the story, pointing out that Hefford’s condition was rare and that her death was not caused by protein per se. This was true, but it is also true that there is a significant minority of the population for whom a high-protein diet is not advisable. For the 13% or so of people who have chronic kidney disease, a large amount of protein from red meat can damage renal function.

Above and beyond its long-term effects on the body, a fixation with protein can become a form of eating disorder. Three years ago, the American psychologist Richard Achiro decided to study men in Los Angeles engaging in excessive use of protein powders as well as other supplements such as caffeine. Achiro conducted a survey of nearly 200 active men who were using workout supplements and found that, for many of them, protein use had become a “variant of disordered eating” that threatened their health.

These men felt under intense pressure to achieve bodies that were not just thin, but that exhibited a supposedly ideal ratio of fat to muscle. Three per cent of the sample group had been hospitalised as a result of excessive supplement use, yet they still viewed supplements as healthy. Eating disorders have complex causes: Achiro told me the men who were overusing protein supplements also tended to be suffering from body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem and a sense of insecurity about their own masculinity.

But they were not helped by the fact that the culture they lived in told them that when they replaced most of their meals with protein shakes, what they were doing was normal. Achiro found that it was hard for these men to recognise that their relationship with protein might have become a problem, “because those of us living in western society have been groomed to view a protein-rich diet as the apex of healthful eating”.

By 2001, Arla Foods, a vast European dairy cooperative with Danish headquarters, had used up all of the whey in Denmark. The company realised it would have to look further afield to meet the insatiable demand for whey protein. Arla signed a contract with SanCor, an Argentinian dairy company, to build a giant whey protein plant in the town of Porteña, to the north of Buenos Aires. When you order “warm protein pancakes” with blueberries at the gym, the odds are the protein will have come from a plant such as this.

It was David Jenkins, a Scottish track and field athlete and silver medallist at the Munich Olympics, who first had the idea of marketing whey protein as a “recovery optimiser” for athletes called ProOptibol. It was launched in health food stores in Southern California and Hawaii in early 1988. At first it was a niche product that found popularity among cyclists and triathletes. The formula for this original whey protein was called WPC 75. It was a byproduct from the Golden Cheese company, based in Corona, California – a giant factory that produced Monterey Jack and other American cheeses.

In just a few decades, whey protein has gone from waste product to aspirational lifestyle enhancer. Whey is the watery stuff left over during cheese-making after the curds are separated off. On traditional dairy farms, it was put to good use in anything from bread-making to pickles, but in the vast American cheese factories of the postwar years it came to be seen as an unwanted nuisance. In US dairy states such as Wisconsin, cheese factories dumped thousands of litres of whey in nearby rivers. It was only in the 1970s, after local authorities placed limits on the dumping of dairy waste, that cheese manufacturers realised they had to find a way to use up this annoying whey. The quality of whey powders – known as “popcorn whey” – was poor, and it was mostly used to feed pigs. The key technology that made whey protein possible was the development of ultrafiltration techniques to pre-concentrate the whey before it was dried. This was when whey protein started to be made on an industrial scale.

There is nothing on the average tub of whey protein to suggest it ever came from cheese, let alone from a cow. Whey manufacturers work on the assumption that consumers want it to be as close as possible to flavourless, to preserve the illusion that it is some kind of magic potion for humans. In its unadorned form, however, whey varies considerably in flavour. There are two kinds of whey: sweet whey made from rennet cheeses such as cheddar and mozzarella, and acid whey made from the likes of cottage cheese. Cheddar whey has a tendency to taste cardboardy, mozzarella whey is milky and whey from cottage cheese can be sour or reminiscent of cabbage broth. But in the finished product, all these flavours are evened out and disguised by the cloying scent of chocolate, artificial vanillin or salted caramel.

 

A selection of energy bars in a supermarket in New York, US. Photograph: Richard Levine/Alamy

Dairy whey protein has become a commodity that travels the world in 100kg sacks, generating vast profits, coordinated by GVCs (global value chains). Thanks to the shifting patterns of supply and demand, the protein shake a gymgoer in Tokyo drinks after lifting weights may have originated on a farm in Norway. The lowest-quality whey powder is called “permeate” and is mostly shipped to Asia, where it is made into infant formula. The higher-quality whey, called WPC 80 because it has an 80% protein content, travels the world to fuel our protein obsession. The global whey protein market is now a complex and hugely competitive global trade, forecast to reach $14.5bn by the year 2023: more than half as much as the global market in breakfast cereal.

Strolling through London at lunchtime a few weeks ago, I found myself walking down Bread Street, near St Paul’s Cathedral, which in medieval times was the site of the city’s bread market. Turning off Bread Street, I came upon a branch of Protein Haus, which claims to sell the “most amazing protein shakes you will ever taste”. The shakes have names such as Strawberry Warrior and Vegan Coffee Pump and Berry-Yatric, which must be a competitor for the most offensive food name ever. Protein Haus also sells protein foods such as “bliss balls” and indiscriminate steaming portions of various meats.

From Bread Street to Protein Haus – this sums up how our eating habits have changed in modern times. When I was in Protein Haus staring at the heaps of overcooked chicken, slabs of salmon and rows of whey protein shakes and vegan protein shakes, it suddenly occurred to me how crazy it is that we should treat all of these varied “protein” substances as if they were in some way identical. A scoop of ultra-processed whey is not, in fact, the same as a grilled salmon fillet, either in nutrition or in the experience of eating it. Salmon – even the farmed kind – will be high in omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin B12, whereas whey protein is low in vitamins and minerals (except for calcium) and fat-free. The only thing these foods have in common is that they tend to be fuel first and pleasure later (if at all).

At the same time, our reverence for protein as the one perfect nutrient tends to completely ignore how the protein we eat is produced, or what the environmental consequences of that production might be. Of the 90g of protein eaten each day by the average American, two-thirds is composed of animal products.

One irony of Britain’s obsession with protein is that we don’t actually produce very much of it. In fact, only 3% of arable land in Europe is given over to protein crops such as pulses, and Europe imports more than two-thirds of its animal feed. Much of the protein consumed in Europe is meat raised on materials that actually originate in South America or the US as soybean oil or other oilseeds and have to be shipped across the world. So long as we largely consume protein from animal sources, our obsession with protein is also likely to be bad for the planet.

At the end of September, at the Aldeburgh food festival in Suffolk, I had a lunch with Nick Saltmarsh, who runs Hodmedod, a company that works with British farmers to produce locally grown pulses. Saltmarsh told me he feels our mania for protein foods has gone so far that we sometimes can’t recognise real protein when it is right in front of us.

Vegetable proteins such as lentils and peas tend to be regarded as “low-quality” compared with meat, eggs and dairy. But Christopher Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has argued that this “quality” argument is misleading. His great discovery was that all plant sources of protein – from peanuts to edamame beans – contain all essential amino acids. Admittedly they contain smaller concentrations of the amino acids than meat or eggs, but in the context of a plentiful and varied diet, this doesn’t matter.

The problem is partly that beans and lentils do not fit our tunnel-visioned conception of what protein is. Pulses such as lentils contain around 25% protein but also 25% carbohydrate – which makes them hard to categorise within the dogmatic categories of modern nutrition. Is the lentil a protein (good) or a carb (bad)?

When Saltmarsh takes his product range to food fairs, he finds that bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts will sometimes pick up a packet of pea flour and say “ooh! Peas!” – because pea protein has become fashionable as a vegan alternative to whey. “But when they see that it also contains carbohydrate, they put it down again,” he said.

Some now shun any meal or snack that can’t be categorised as a “protein” fix. But they aren’t among the millions of people for whom a lack of protein is indeed a real and pressing problem – and who don’t tend to be the ones browsing pea protein at fitness fairs.

The word protein derives from the ancient Greek protos, meaning first. When a Dutch scientist called GJ Mulder first brought the term into use, in 1838, he proposed – rightly, as it turns out – that protein was a crucial substance in all animal bodies. But new research suggests protein is required not just in an absolute sense, but in a particular ratio to the other nutrients in our diets.

Going by official guidelines, as we’ve seen, the average person has access to more than enough protein for general health. It turns out our perplexing protein obsession may actually be a symptom of a larger problem in our sugar-heavy modern diets: if it feels like we are not eating enough protein, it’s because we’re eating too much of everything else.

In 2005, two biologists called David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson put forward the “protein leverage hypothesis”, in which they argued that protein could be the missing link in the obesity crisis. Since the 1960s, the absolute level of protein consumed by the average westerner has not changed. What has changed is the ratio of protein in our diets.

Because our overall calorie consumption has risen by 14%, the ratio of protein to carbohydrate and fat has significantly dropped. In 1961, the average American got around 14-15% of calories in the form of protein, whereas today it is 12.5%. This doesn’t sound like a big drop, but Raubenheimer and Simpson’s research suggests that even a small drop in the percentage of protein can have a big impact on eating behaviour – driving us to overeat.

 

Salmon steaks at a Carrefour supermarket in Calais, France. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Observer

Like many other animals, humans have what biologists call a “dominant appetite” for protein. The biological drive for protein is so strong that a cricket who feels short of protein will resort to cannibalism. When a locust is short of protein, it will explore different food sources to redress the balance. Humans are neither as ruthless as crickets nor as prudent as locusts. When given access to a diet that is low on protein and heavy in carbs and fats, humans will binge, in an attempt to extract the protein they need.

If many of us overeat, it could be partly because our bodies are desperately seeking out protein in a food environment flooded with refined wheat and oils and many kinds of sugar. As Raubenheimer and Simpson wrote in their startlingly original 2012 book The Nature of Nutrition: “Dilution of protein in the diet by fat and carbohydrate drives excess consumption, perhaps more so in some individuals, life stages and populations than others.” In other words, obesity may often really be hunger hiding in plain view.

The urgent question raised by this research is how we can get our protein ratios back to a healthy level. Our current protein mania – encouraged by the food business and the whey protein industry – suggests that the answer is to supercharge our diets with a flood of added protein. But eating protein to excess comes with its own costs, the main one being that it tends to shorten the lifespan.

A more effective way to concentrate protein in our diets, Raubenheimer and Simpson say, would be to keep our protein levels constant (assuming we have enough) but cut down on “fat, sugar and other readily digested carbohydrates”, which would allow us to reach the protein our bodies need at a lower level of calories. But given that sugar is poured into everything from bread to stir-fry sauces, this solution would require a radical restructuring of our food environment.

Our protein needs do not remain constant over the human lifespan: 0.8g per kilogram of bodyweight may be enough for a twentysomething, but not for an octogenarian. If anyone needs extra protein, it is not fit young gymgoers, but old people – particularly those on low incomes who may struggle to buy or cook meals for themselves. Instead of protein bars for the young and rich, we need omelettes and chickpea soup for the old and poor. From the age of 50 onwards we progressively lose muscle and our protein requirements become higher, just as appetite tends to decline. Rates of protein malnutrition are alarmingly high among elderly people admitted to hospital.

Most of those who can afford to buy a “high-protein” tuna plate are already well nourished in amino acids. By contrast, in these austere times, many hard-pressed eaters are forced into a kind of protein hunger by the economic circumstances of their lives. Think of the families who go to the chip shop and buy chips with no fish, or the person on universal credit living on plain pasta until the next cheque comes in. This is one reason there is a huge market for savoury snacks that taste like a ghostly echo of the hearty, protein-based meals of the past while consisting of little but refined carbs and oil: roast chicken flavour crisps, barbecue tortilla chips. Raubenheimer and Simpson’s research suggests that the colossal market for these cheap snacks could be another symptom of a world in which – despite all those bars and shakes on the shelves – many are still hungry for protein.

Behind the current protein hype, there is a kernel of truth. A deficit of protein is indeed part of the hugely complex puzzle of what’s wrong with modern diets. The problem is that the right question – am I getting enough protein? – is being asked by the wrong people.

How the science of sport can boost exam revision

Training your brain to revise well can be a bit like football training Picture: Alamy 

By Simon Briggs in The Telegraph

6:29PM GMT 27 Mar 2015

  

Jon Finn recently won the Education Initiative of the Year award for his programme Tougher Minds, which takes the insights of sports psychology and applies them to the classroom. Here he boils down the latest scientific research into a 12-point guide.

Tougher Minds from Pre-Shot on Vimeo.

The holy trinity

1. Before you even start planning your revision, you need to be aware of three key factors in the performance of your brain: sleep, diet and exercise. And the greatest of these three is sleep. Britain’s cycling trailblazers Team Sky value it so highly that they employ a sleep scientist during the Tour de France. So for the next few nights, rank your sleep quality out of ten each morning, as well as recording what time you went to bed and woke up. If you’re getting less than nine hours a night, try staying away from electronic screens for an hour before bedtime.

Mapping out your sessions

^{Setting small achievable goals will help you map out your revision and keep an eye on your progress}

2. The next stage is to set some goals. Use the four-column principle: write down each subject, the grade you got in your mocks, how much effort you are currently putting in (out of 100), and finally the grade you’re aiming for. Don’t make it easy: stretch yourself. Put the grid somewhere you can see it: on the fridge or in front of your desk.

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3. Now write a brief revision plan for the next three days. Most people want to work on the subjects they like, but this can mean you’ll get polarised results: As and Ds, for instance. The better you are at a subject, the harder it is to improve, so spend more time on the weaker ones.

4. Follow the 20:20 rule. Research shows us that a golfer who stands on the range and hits shots with a varied sequence of clubs every day does better than a golfer who hits her driver on Monday, her five-iron on Tuesday and so on. The same applies when you’re revising: you’ll improve quicker if you spend 20 minutes on one subject, and then move on to the next. Aim to fit around 20x20-minute sessions into a day; that’s about the equivalent of being at school.

But do put some “Break” sessions in, because most people fare better when they don’t abandon their work-life balance completely. Some might want to reward themselves with an occasional 20 minutes on the Xbox, others will prefer to make time for netball practice or meeting friends. Also include a few “Flexible” entries, because some subjects will probably require more attention than you expected. Use a kitchen timer if possible, not the dreaded iPhone, because it only does one thing and won’t distract you.

How each session should work

^{Your twenty minute sessions should be like interval training, in that your confidence grows with time}

5. Our next piece of sports science is called functional equivalence. When revising, try to simulate the conditions you’ll be tested in, in the same way that Jonny Wilkinson repeatedly practised the drop-goal that won the 2003 rugby World Cup in training. So don’t revise with loud music banging away, or with your parent helping you, or by reading all day and not writing at all. Yes, in your 20-minute slot, you’ll need to look at your notes – especially in essay subjects – but then close your book or your folder and write out some answers, as if giving yourself a 10-minute mini-exam. You could even go so far as to wear the same clothes you will wear in the exam; every little helps!

6. Repeat to remember; remember to repeat. It’s estimated that you need to go over facts four or five times, at spaced-out intervals, to achieve long-term recall. When Jon trains his students, he talks about “turning cobwebs to cables”, which is a reference to the way neurons form strong pathways through repetition. But as with weight training, you don’t do it all at once; you build up your muscles over a sequence of days and weeks. One practical option here is to use the Leitner System: a card-index approach in which you rank topics according to how confident you are with them, and then organise them so that the trickier ones come up more often.

7. Don’t expect revision to be fun! It’s important to remember that we are not well evolved for schoolwork. We still have the same basic cognitive framework as our prehistoric ancestors, who generally lived for 20 to 35 years, and so were designed to seek short-term rewards rather than building skills that might help them over the long term. Your inner caveman is probably going to get frustrated and cranky at the lack of instant satisfaction in this process. He is going to look for distractions, so lock that mobile phone in another room, and turn off your internet connection if you’re using a computer. It’s better to work with pen and paper anyway, because of point No. 6 above.

8. Build your house of confidence. At the end of each 20-minute session, identify three things you have learned or done well in that time. Because your caveman is designed for survival, he is always on the look-out for threats and negative thoughts – the voice in the back of your head that says “You will never be able to do this; it’s boring and you’re wasting your time.” A little upbeat checklist should help you gain a small sense of short-term satisfaction and so keep negativity at bay. Once you have done that, select one thing you can improve on when you return to that topic next time.

Self-reflection

^{While regularly checking your progress helps, putting your phone away will alllow you to really focus}

9. Assess yourself at the end of the day in a closing ceremony, an expanded version of what you did at the end of each session. How well did you follow the plan? Which sessions were most effective? Was there a pattern to times of the day when you achieved more? It probably feels like the last thing you want to do after a hard day at your desk, but this is actually where the greatest benefits are to be found. Athletes make good role models here because they track every detail of their lives, and use the data to optimise their performance levels.

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10. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Your basic unit of study doesn’t have to be exactly 20 minutes – it could be 15 or 30 if that suits you better. Likewise, if your textbook is not helping you understand a certain topic, try searching on YouTube for a video that might present it from a different angle. Or if you suddenly hit a mental block, leave your desk and go for a walk before coming back to it later. Whatever changes you make, they need to be assessed during your closing ceremony. If they’re working for you, you might want to incorporate them into your routine (see 12).

11. One key variable that we haven’t talked about is “activation” – otherwise described as your energy levels. Most people find that their basic activation levels are too low, and therefore benefit from pumping themselves up when they come to study. They might want to do some jogging on the spot or push-ups before they sit down at their desk, but there are others who are happier to be calm. To optimise your productivity, you need to work out where you stand on that spectrum. Here's how to check.

Sample Activation Check

What is activation? It is a concept created to replace the term anxiety. Anxiety is not always bad for learning and performance; you just need to understand how to control it. The symbol below is the activation scale. Low numbers on the scale represent feeling clam and relaxed. If you are at a low number on the scale your breathing and heart rate will be slow. Zero on the scale indicates that you are dead! High numbers on the scale denote being pumped up, nervous or anxious - depending on how you interpret these feelings. If you are at a high number on the scale your breathing and heart rate will be high. You are always somewhere on the scale. Sitting at your desk and writing, aim for a 50 on the activation scale.

^{The activation scale}

You must check and actively manage your activation at the beginning of each 20-minute period to maximise your learning. As the day goes on, achieving the correct activation level can become challenging. You may find it difficult to achieve an optimal activation level during every session. Without good levels of sleep, diet and exercise it will be difficult to manage your activation.

Source: Tougher Minds

Try giving yourself an activation score out of 100 before each 20-minute session, and then at the end of the day look back and see how effective your revision was; a pattern should soon emerge that reveals your optimum score:

12. Once you have found a formula that works, make it a routine. Every professional golfer follows a precise sequence of steps before hitting the ball – both physically and mentally. What makes these people successful, even more than hand-eye coordination, is the ability to control their thoughts when the going gets tough.

• Click here for a free performance planner

Try to master the same single-mindedness in your revision: there is no more valuable skill, at school or in the rest of your life, than self-discipline.