Question
Janine Malapanis
My husband has a few friends doing that crazy high protein / no carb diets. I know as a vegan how crazy this is! Please help me with explanation of how this is more dangerous than good. If that is how you feel?
Answer
It is a good question and I'm concerned about high protein. So there's interesting because there's now these high fat kind of ketogenic diets too, which has some interesting kind of perspectives, especially if you consider plant-based version of that, but that's a different story so protein, you know, here's what we know about protein. All of the health span and Longevity research shows that it may be excessive amino acid consumption that promotes aging there's all these different kind of ways and mechanisms by which this is this happens, but we've only elongated and and prolonged decreased the rest of chronic disease and age-related chronic diseases and increase the longevity by limiting diet with dietary restriction without malnutrition and usually this looks like it's Associated specifically with the amino acids specific even more specifically the essential amino acids. So leucine isoleucine methionine. These things are found in animal products mostly and they even there's a lot of that stuff we could find in soy Foods too. So you don't want to have too much of those high protein foods in general because that's what's gonna promote aging the aging process. So that's one element of it. The other thing is when you're consuming a lot of protein, you know, your kidneys are working a lot and you're having to dispose of that and it's just there's like some long-term consequences of that the other Part of that is if you're doing a high protein diet with animal products, we know the risk of animal products because it all comes packaged together with saturated fat and heme iron and it's got you know, it enhances igf-1 formation in the body which promotes growth. So there's all these other things packaged along with the meat which is why we see, you know, an abundance of research now showing increased mortality increased risk of cardiovascular disease increased risk of certain cancers type 2 diabetes obesity the list goes on and on with the implications of consuming a lot of animal products. So if you're doing it with animal products consumption, there's that's the number one reason I would suggest not doing it and why it's adverse to our health. You can lose weight. You can lose weight. you know doing heroin or cocaine you could lose weight doing just a certain amount of calories worth of you know, let's say ding dongs like you could do you could lose weight in a whole plethora of ways, but you want to also consider your long-term Health when you're on a weight loss diet and that's where eating a whole food plant-based diet comes in because you're naturally getting fewer calories and you're getting all of those nutrients and you're avoiding. You're also avoiding all those things that animal products have as well. So that's that's my take on a high protein diet.
