Plant Based Diets

Few nutrition topics create more emotional debate than plant-based eating.

One side treats it like the healthiest path for everyone. The other side acts like it is automatically deficient, weak, or unsustainable.

The truth is that both sides often argue ideology while ignoring the thing that matters most: individual physiology.

In this episode, I break down the real conversation around plant-based eating without the tribalism.

A well-structured plant-based diet can absolutely support health, body composition, performance, and longevity. But it requires intention. Protein quality, amino acid completeness, calorie sufficiency, and key micronutrients need more attention than many people realize.

At the same time, critics often oversimplify the issue. Some people genuinely digest better, feel lighter, and improve certain health markers when animal products are reduced or removed.

This is where nuance matters.

High-fiber diets can help one person and wreck another. Some people thrive on legumes and grains. Others deal with bloating, digestive distress, or appetite issues. Some lose body fat and gain energy. Others under-eat, lose muscle, and blame the philosophy instead of the execution.

We also discuss how ethical and environmental motivations can be completely valid, while still being separate from whether a specific diet is the best fit for your body.

Your beliefs around food matter. But they should not override your biology.

The goal is not to win a nutrition debate.

The goal is to eat in a way that supports your body, your goals, and your real life.

What We Cover

• Why plant-based eating can work extremely well when structured properly
• Common mistakes that lead to low protein and muscle loss
• Why digestion response to fiber is highly individual
• Predictable nutrient gaps and how to manage them
• Separating ethical beliefs from physiological outcomes

Key Takeaways

• What you believe about food affects how you eat it
• Protein is non-negotiable regardless of source
• Alignment matters. Dogma doesn’t

If you’ve ever felt confused by the noise around plant-based eating, this episode will help you think clearly.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okie dokie, good to see you guys. I hope you're having an awesome day. We're back here at the rebuild today. This one's gonna be a little bit more controversial, and that's okay. So sit down for it, maybe. I want to talk about the vegan diet today or plant-based diet. And so just talk about some of the arguments behind both um, you know, both its positives, negatives. And I just want to talk to you a little bit today about the physiology and you can come to your own conclusion, okay? But I am going to give you some personal takes that I know aren't necessarily positive. And so, uh, especially in the vegan community. However, and so first off, I do want to state there's a disclaimer, I really don't like the vegan diet. I don't see any utility for it at all. And I also don't even see a moral argument for it, because most of the moral argument is grounded in statements that sound really good, but they don't actually equate to anything, right? And so, as an example, like, well, you know, I'm saving X animals from getting killed, and it's like, yeah, but how cute does an animal have to be before you care if it gets killed? Because as someone who grew up in agriculture and understands agriculture processes, especially mass-produced farming, all of the stuff that is made to produce a vegan diet uh probably kills more land and creatures and bugs and birds and disrupts more ecosystems than farming, specifically regenerative farming. And in Canada, farming is actually awesome. You know, like even when when you see things online about like grass-fed meat versus uh grain-fed meat, all of the cattle that are produced, any cattle you're eating in Canada, most of it is grass-finished. We have lots of pasture land. And again, these are just people on TikTok that have like never stepped foot on a farm, they've never, you know, um dressed and slaughtered an animal, they've never hunted. And I have a heart for this, by the way. I don't think everyone needs to think like me. I just think the moral argument is almost like a moral superiority placement of like, look at me, I'm doing this this thing, and it makes me superior. And whenever I dig into those people's lives, I'm like, to be honest, you could just impact your own life and the planet and everything else way better by just not doing these three stupid things instead of focusing on only eating plants. But the beauty of the place we live is that everyone can do whatever they want. I'm just here to tell you, uh, you know, if we get into like kind of the diet itself, not so much my opinion on it, kind of going from here. There pretty much is no long-term vegans. This is one of those diets where I've watched it for a long time because it was kind of this weird phenomena that came up when I first got into fitness, didn't really exist much before that. Pretty much everyone who was like a big proponent of it, they only last three to five years before they start looking like they're gonna die. And that's because it's exactly where it's gonna lead you. And there's some arguments like, well, if you supplement properly, you do all this, and it's like, so you're we're gonna take a diet. I have to take 47 pills to feel okay on, and still I guarantee you that your lab work is not gonna be as good as someone who's eating really good ruminant products from animals and eggs and things that are just filled with all the nutrients for your brain and for your your your physiology. Like, why would we do that? It does like I can I can ride a bike to work too, but I would just prefer to drive, and so it just doesn't make sense. It's usually more expensive, it's very restrictive, and uh becomes usually very high fiber, which causes gut health issues for a lot of folks, and you know, um plant-based athletes, like there's been some studies now. All of the athletes, NFL fighters, we did kind of a big meta-analysis on this. They all switched out and or got so injured that they could never do their what they loved again. Do you know how many foot NFL players tried to go vegan? Remember when that Game Changers documentary came out? It was like uh Netflix documentary on vegan, and there was like a bunch of NFL guys, those guys are mostly all retired now or had to go back to a different diet because their bones were snapping like little sticks because they had become so brittle. Injury rates go through the roofs, fighters get knocked out easier, which just makes so much sense. You're not getting any iron, you're not getting any heme iron specific specifically, you're not getting uh a lot of the B vitamins, you're not getting a lot of the choline, the carnosine, the creatine, the coq10, like literally everything, all the highest uh like cost supplements, right? You go buy a high CoQ10, you go for an injectable L-carnitine shot at these fancy um, you know, like um hormone places or or vitamin drip places, you know, you go get glutathione, you go get all these things, uh that NAD, that's all found in meat, specifically red meat. And so, you know, we've already been gifted with the um solution right here on earth uh to to solve those problems. And so, you know, again, if if you're doing it for ethical reasons, that's totally fine. I I would definitely debate someone in that position and have done so many times to to very good success, to be honest, and that's why they don't like it, because it makes them kind of feel less then, and that's not what I'm trying to do. It's just I don't like people acting out nonsense that doesn't actually do anything. I think it's very bad for their life, and I'm brave enough to tell the truth, and so you know, um I think that it it it can be good if if you're having triggers. Sometimes people do get autoimmune triggers to meat and and dairies and things like that. So, you know, and and I'm all for vegetables. Like I think they're great actually, and I, you know, I I as I get older I try to eat more of them. Uh so uh don't hear me when I'm don't hear what I'm not saying, which is that they're not important because I think the fiber from them is very important. They could they provide a bunch of phytonutrients that are very important. But I just think that again, just like I don't think the carnivore diet is all it, I think that a good mix of all of it is is the right way to go, right? And so just watch that. And so I think your food the way that I think about it is is the food philosophy you have should best serve your physiology, not some moral talking or point or something that we heard on TikTok or a podcast, right? I think I think that it should best suit us to repopulate, create really strong offspring, and uh create great, great stability, energy, libido, uh resilience, health, all of that, right? And I think that that matters a lot. And I think that the vegan diets also you're gonna struggle to get a lot of high quality protein, which is why you're uh folks are having the issues that we see in in the in kind of following people long term. Okay, and so again, now I want to finish with if you're doing it and you just love it and you feel good, I actually encourage you to keep doing it. It's just that I trust my 15 years of coaching people, athletes, fighters, you know, obesity, functional health, bodybuilders. You just don't if if that's you, you need to understand you're an outlier and you shouldn't tell other people to do what you're doing because most people don't succeed on it for a variety of reasons. Never mind the difficulty of sticking to it, but even if you could just turn people into robots who uh would just follow and whatever you told them blindly, uh our health as a society would drop to shit if everyone became vegan. I'm telling you that right now because most people do not do well on it after about four or five months. All the nutrient deficiencies start to um you know really show themselves in in and you can see this as like people look like they're on crystal meth and then they get back to eating meat, and it's like, oh, never mind. It's the same thing that comes with any elimination diet. We can't eliminate forever, there's things that we need, right? And so try not to maybe think about it as a forever solution. But I hope that helps. And I'm always willing to chat about these type of things too, because I know people can get pretty dogmatic when they're on a team, you know, like it's like that's my that's my team you're talking about, but I'm always just coming at it from a logical perspective. So thank you so much for being here. Uh uh if you have certain topics that you would like me to cover, please let me know. And I I would love to do it. I'm basically an encyclopedia on human physiology and and neurology at this point when it comes to thriving in your health. And I'm I'm trying to, most of the time I'm doing these podcasts just to kind of download my brain for my current clients, help them navigate a sea of m misinformation or just crap on you know, all these all this short form content that doesn't actually get anyone healthier. Having said that, if you'd like some help with your one to one coaching and you haven't felt your best and you would really like to see what the rebuild could do for you, shoot me a message. I'd love to help. So thank you so much for being here. I'll I'll see you guys very soon.