9 ms·

>a pretty good source of protein. Unlike many things that are referred to as a "good source of protein," mushrooms have a really great macronutrient profile:

• JeremyNT 3y ago
  I think the challenges with mushrooms as "whole foods" are similar to that of greens (also "good source of protein"). Challenge one: you need a truly huge volume of the uncooked stuff to get a meaningful amount of protein out. Lentils are way more compact. Challenge two: when one cooks greens or shrooms, they tend to add a lot of oils and other stuff that destroys that ratio. The proposal on offer here solves this for shrooms by preparing a packaged patty based on them (like today's extant Quorn product). This is cool and I'd love to see it, but it's not like they're trying to replace soy/lentils (which certainly have "good enough" protein content) as agricultural staples that you can harvest and eat with minimal preparation.
• slily 3y ago
  Poor amino-acid composition is a major problem with non-animal protein sources. Every time we think we can "cheat" nutrition by reducing nutritional value to a small set of cherry-picked nutrients, we find that it leads to deficiencies elsewhere. It's like fad diets for technocrats.
  • rdedev 3y ago
    We have enough data on how to supplement enough of those macro and micro nutrients. And there's plenty of studies showing no risk of going on a full plant based diet. Like here's a video discussing plant based protein for body building. The key take away is that you need some diversity in the stuff but it's fairly easy to get there https://youtu.be/MB7rIAArV2Q https://youtu.be/MB7rIAArV2Q
  • Klonoar 3y ago
    This has been debunked repeatedly - that's not a big issue if you're actually eating a balanced diet, which you should be doing. (Plus tofu is fine here)
    • hombre_fatal 3y ago
      Yeah, you can debunk this trivially with cronometer.com which kinda reveals how many people repeat things without looking. It’s like when people regurgitate that “add rice to beans for a complete protein” meme without realizing that rice is less dense in every amino acid, and beans have every amino acid in similar qualities, and you can simply eat more protein dense plant sources if you need more protein. I eat 550g extra firm cooked tofu and 230g tempeh daily. Plug that into cronometer and show me the plant based amino acid hole.
• BobaFloutist 3y ago
  100g of Lentils is a lot more food than 100g of mushrooms though. Also, you do need some fat and carbs in your diet to, you know, live.
  • coldtea 3y ago
    Carbs you don't really need to eat to live! What of them you need, you can make it, gluconeogenesis and such. Proteins on the other hand...
    • ch4s3 3y ago
      Sure it’ll work but ketone bodies are acids c and the ver time you’ll end up with metabolic acidosis[1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341377/#:~:text=The%20ketone%20bodies%20formed%20from,leading%20to%20ketoacidosis%20%5B11%5D https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341377/#:~:tex....
      • loopdoend 3y ago
        *in rats
        • ch4s3 3y ago
          Diabetic Ketoacidosis is well documented in diabetic people[1], alcoholics, and in conditions of starvation[2] and the mechanism is the same. Ketone tests were developed for this purpose. Note starvation there, where the body starts using its own fats for energy. Here's a case report of it happening to someone on a ketogenic diet[3]. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/diabetic-ketoacidosis.html https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/basics/diabetic-ketoacidosis.ht... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK534848/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK534848/ [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7220017/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7220017/
          • kelipso 3y ago
            The body is designed to use its own fats for energy. All logic says you are talking about extreme conditions.
• barbazoo 3y ago
  How about insects like crickets (1). Claims to have 13g of protein per 20g powder. (1) https://ca.entomofarms.com/products/organic-cricket-powder https://ca.entomofarms.com/products/organic-cricket-powder
  • loopdoend 3y ago
    I will not eat the bugs
    • histories 3y ago
      No one's forcing you
      • z3ncyberpunk 3y ago
        There is a literal global organization trying to do just this.
        • fnordian_slip 3y ago
          There is a literal global organization trying to force us to eat bugs? Could we please not discuss ridiculous conspiracy theories on hn? Reddit is already infected with qanon an the like, we don't need that rubbish here. Thank you.
    • londons_explore 3y ago
      Ya know, red food dye for most of the 20th century was ground up bugs... The only reason we don't do it now was that it's kinda expensive compared to lab made dyes.
      • mythrwy 3y ago
        Also some people are quiet allergic to cochineal, like life threatening anaphylactic shock allergic.
      • konfusinomicon 3y ago
• hombre_fatal 3y ago
  You shouldn’t be looking at whole mushrooms. You should be looking at mycoprotein which is a dense protein source found in fungi based meat alts like Quorn products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoprotein
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • adrian_b 3y ago
    While the protein extracts from fungi or from plants solve the problem of the non-animal sources of protein having an undesirable ratio between protein content and energy content, they are much more expensive than meat or eggs and they have an unknown environmental impact, due to high consumption of energy and of chemicals. The fact that these protein extracts are more expensive than meat, per protein content, should be a strong clue that their real environmental impact is also worse, even if their producers avoid to document it. I am aware of only a single method of protein extraction that can provide separated protein that is cheaper than chicken meat and which requires no chemicals that could leave residues in the protein and which uses little energy (but it requires an additional non-negligible water consumption). This is the extraction of gluten from wheat flour, by making a dough and washing it. For the (relatively few) people who have gluten intolerance, this unique method is not applicable, but in many parts of the world (i.e. where soy is expensive) it is the only way that I know of that can be used for achieving a vegan diet that is less expensive than eating meat. Without gluten, a lower protein cost than for meat could be achieved only by combining vegetable protein sources like lentils with chicken eggs.
    • hombre_fatal 3y ago
      It's worse than animal agriculture based on what evidence? Once you look at production at scale, these products dominate animal ag environmentally: > a study published in Nature 2022 found that replacing 20 percent of per-capita ruminant meat, such as beef, with fermentation derived microbial protein, such as mycoprotein, could cut global deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions by 50% in addition to lowering methane emissions. Also, > it is the only way that I know of that can be used for achieving a vegan diet that is less expensive than eating meat. I don't understand this. Even ChatGPT can come up with a solution to your question if you care to figure out how to eat a sufficient vegan diet without soy/gluten. e.g. Legumes are cheaper than meat. For the sake of looking at real numbers, 1000 calories of cooked lentils has 80g protein (all of the EAAs) and 67% of the day's nutrients. Also, you'd have to substantiate why optimizing for protein is the only thing you seem to care about given that (1) you can reach the high end 1.6g/kg protein with this food and (2) there are dozens of other nutrients that matter. But searching for these hypothetical cases where someone can't eat neither soy nor gluten just so you can finally launder in a chicken egg and go "A-ha!" seems to be a red herring that doesn't track anything in this conversation. Okay, now let's pretend they are allergic to chicken eggs, too. Ho hum.
• adrian_b 3y ago
  The value you give for lentils might be for some kind of boiled lentils, including a lot of added water. Raw lentils, as you buy them, have about 22% to 25% of protein, i.e. about the same as lean meat. However, while the rest of the meat is mostly water, the rest of the lentils is mostly starch. Therefore, if you have a sedentary life style, lentils cannot provide a too big fraction of your daily protein intake, i.e. above 40% to 50%, otherwise they would provide too many calories. Raw mushrooms have a high content of water and chitin, so their nutritional content is very low per mass, like also for most parts of vegetables, except seeds. Among non-animal sources, only the seeds (e.g. of cereals or legumes or nuts) or the oily fruits like olives or avocado, have high nutritional content per mass in their raw, unprocessed state. For instance eating 167 g per day of lentils would provide a significant part of the daily protein intake and it will cover the daily necessities for all amino-acids except methionine. For a similar nutritional intake you would have to buy and eat more than 1.5 kg of mushrooms, which would be quite a challenge and it would also be much more expensive than eating meat. Nevertheless, while for now mushrooms could not be a staple food, I agree that the future of food is in capturing solar energy and using it to synthesize some simple organic molecules, like glycine, by capturing carbon dioxide and dinitrogen, and then using those to feed bioengineered fungi or parasitic (i.e. non-photosynthesizing, like mistletoe) plants, which could produce the equivalents of any kind of animal or vegetable food that is eaten today.
  • hombre_fatal 3y ago
    > Therefore, if you have a sedentary life style, lentils cannot provide a too big fraction of your daily protein intake, i.e. above 40% to 50%, otherwise they would provide too many calories. If you're going to respond with six paragraphs to every post, at least indulge us with some numbers when you make claims about food which you seldom seem to do even though you appear in every nutrition thread on the forum. 2000 calories of cooked lentils provides 156g protein which is over even the 1.6g/kg protein high-mark for a 200lb guy who still has more calories to spare. 930 calories of cooked lentils provides 72g protein which is the 0.8g/kg minimum threshold in less than half of the day's calorie budget. A quick google search says a 200lb sedentary male needs 2150 to 2550 calories per day to maintain.