Julie's bindetta against protein

I hope you will forgive my extreme deviation from the usual subject matter. It’s not as much a deviation as it might appear to be. People who know me from elsewhere are aware that I talk a lot about nutrition and health. I just haven’t done it here yet, really.

Anyway. Here’s what set me off. I won’t link to it, but it’s in The Spectator and it’s Julie Bindel writing a screed about the “prioritizing protein” fad. I can find a lot to agree upon with Julie when it comes to gender identity, but this is one of those times I have to agree to disagree with a gender-critical person about some other subject.

I informed the Facebook friend who posted it that Julie was falling back on the standard vegan arguments and that the standard vegan arguments are bullshit — a sort of dietary trans, if you will. She may have been offended. I noped out of the conversation, so I probably won’t see it if she is, but I stand by my characterization because opposition to meat-eating arises from that same biology-denying, nature-hating, anti-human mindset, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. You can even find evidence of this in vegan literature if you know what you’re looking at. The Venn diagram of vegans versus the human-hating animal nuts who constantly post animal-abuse porn to social media is not a perfect circle, but it’s pretty damn close.

(I’m not actually okay with animal abuse. It’s hard to explain but there’s a certain vibe to how these people share animal-abuse information in public fora that is just… disturbing. I am also not against wanting to protect animals. If I told you what I’m doing lately to benefit animals, you’d understand me better. But it’s the frank denial of what life is and the denial of what eating is and the unrealistic expectations laid on the human animal that sit wrong with me.)

I didn’t read Julie’s entire piece but I caught enough that I wanted to respond to some of it in my own space. I get impatient when I see someone’s spouting basic bullshit and I stop wanting to follow what they’re saying. But I feel there are not enough of us of a certain mindset and political bent explaining why we don’t fall in with all that vegan bullshit. So here are my two cents.

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes a year ago. The first thing my nurse practitioner said to me was to prioritize protein. It’s been a long time since I assumed that doctors or NPs are always right, but I have a long history of learning about the effects of diet on health; the only reason I went diabetic is I didn’t follow my own advice. Type 2 diabetes — again, the kind I have — is a caused chronic disease. In people who don’t do the things that cause it, it almost never turns up. It’s not “inherited” either, except possibly on an epigenetic level, and that still points back to behavior being the primary cause; you’ve just shifted your gene expression and then reproduced and passed your unhealthy changes on to your kids, making it ten times as difficult for them to avoid damaging themselves. Given that my father is an alcoholic and both he and my mother struggled with diet and weight their entire lives (he’s still struggling; my mother’s struggle is three months over now), that was probably a factor in my situation too. Particularly given there are a lot of type 2s in my mom’s family.

But anyway. So, given my ongoing bent on this subject matter, I already knew that protein’s literally the least problematic macronutrient of the three when it comes to chronic disease. Fat is the near runner-up, but with fat you have to be mindful of which kinds of fat you eat, and there is a lot of bad advice there too. Protein will raise your insulin level, but it also triggers the release of another hormone which knocks down your insulin not long after it elevates. Contrast this with the effect of digestible carbohydrate, even from “safe starches,” when you’re already blood-sugar dysregulated — prediabetic or actually diabetic. Your insulin will go up and stay up for hours. This is not conducive to either preventing fat gain or making fat loss easier.

And you need protein, both for structures and for hormones. This is not in question. I don’t know why nutrition influencers (I won’t call them experts) ignore this. Possibly they don’t know. One more reason you should ignore them.

Here are some things I saw Julie claiming which were straight out of that bullshit vegan playbook.

First up, that protein will make you fat. I suppose it might be possible. You would have to eat a hell of a lot of protein to make that happen, and you’d throw up long before you crossed that threshold. Protein is naturally satiating. To the point your body is going to go “no, fuck you, I’m done” before you go too far with it.

The reason we see people overeating so-called “protein meals” is that they are usually accompanied by a hell of a lot of carbohydrate. Think about your stereotypical McDonald’s meal. Yes, there are two beef patties and two slices of cheese in that Big Mac. But there’s also that sugary Big Mac sauce. There’s that starchy bun — three pieces of bread! There’s that starchy large fry. There’s that huge cup of fizzy liquid sugar. Explain to me why none of those are the problem and why vegans get a hard-on about the two patties and two pieces of cheese. I bet you haven’t ever thought about it before.

I will bet you money I do not even have that the add-on carbs are the reason why meat-eaters seem to be less healthy in food-frequency questionnaire studies. No one ever accounts for them, because we’re supposed to believe carbs are healthy.

I have gone to McDonald’s in the past year and ordered a bunless double bacon Quarter Pounder, just that, plus a diet soda and felt perfectly fine afterwards. I know what it feels like to have high blood sugar, and that just does not happen. I was losing weight through this entire process, too.

Our bodies do have the ability to turn protein into glucose. Possibly this is why some people think protein is fattening. If you can produce, in a type 2 diabetic, a 200 mg/dl blood sugar from a pound of seasoned, cooked, and drained ground beef — all by itself, no carbs added — I’m all fucking ears. You won’t be able to do it. The elevation of blood sugar is related to the increase in bodyfat from your food choices. If you’re not launching your blood sugar into the stratosphere, then suddenly the situation is a lot more favorable.

Julie also claimed that protein causes kidney damage. Categorically untrue. It is true that people with chronic kidney disease are advised to reduce protein intake. This is not because protein damages kidneys but because the kidneys are already damaged and their ability to convert nitrogen to ammonia has been disrupted. Since most people with CKD are type 2 diabetic, I am not clear at this point on whether eliminating carbs from the diet would improve the CKD diabetic’s ability to process nitrogen. I hear pro and con arguments. I feel the possibility is worth exploring. If I had CKD, I would definitely experiment with this to find out for myself.

But generally, arguing that letting the kidneys do what kidneys are supposed to do with nitrogen is damaging to the kidneys is like arguing that breathing air causes asthma. Course it fucking doesn’t. What the fuck already.

Related to this is Julie’s argument that protein causes osteoporosis. Hey, did you ever notice that in general, in the West, women eat a lot less protein than men but, FUCKING WEIRDLY, women also get more osteoporosis than men do? IT’S ALMOST LIKE PROTEIN IS NOT THE FUCKING PROBLEM.

The reason vegans claim this bullshit about protein is that they think we can only buffer nitrogen from protein using the minerals in our bones. That is one way we can do it, and under certain biological circumstances we will, but actually we are more likely to use the amino acid glutamine for buffering. And while we can make our own glutamine, guess where we get the rest of it. Protein. Especially animal protein, as it turns out — the protein vegans claim is worse for our bones.

Men drove much of the early vegetarian and vegan movements and I’m half-convinced they made this bullshit up about osteoporosis as another way to hog up all the protein and starve women into submission. It sounds insane but if you look at the overall history of civilization, most of it has involved men hogging up most of the meat and leaving women and children to go begging. This is just another iteration of that and it’s despicable. Ladies, eat a fucking steak and lift some heavy things. Your bones will thank you.

I will give Julie this much credit: her vendetta appears to be against protein generally, rather than pretending that plant protein is somehow superior to animal protein. She’s still wrong, but she’s consistently wrong. Vegans have never been able to explain to me, in a way that would actually be factual, why animal protein does all these horrible things but plant protein, which they claim is every bit as good, does none of them. I’ve quit wondering. It’s nonsense. Like the claim that human beings can change sex. And there’s quite a bit of overlap between the two groups making those two claims.

And finally: I have never tasted battery acid, but I am fairly certain kefir does not taste like it. It’s good stuff. You should try it sometime. Meanwhile, people who want gender identity to go away should probably stop trying to bundle their gender-critical analysis with pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s not helping.