Ben Greenfield

You have lower levels of vitamin B. You have lower levels in many cases of the fats that I was talking about, like the DHA and oleic acid.

You have lower amounts of protein.

And it's not as though you can't eat a good plant-based diet and get a lot of that stuff.

It's just harder than if you were eating meat.

Just protein in general.

I mean, I'd even say just digestive enzymes, not just for protein, but in general as you age, as pancreatic enzyme production just decreases with age, it's a good idea to take digestive enzymes.

A lot of people who get more gas and bloating from foods that didn't used to cause them issues-

will be able to get rid of that if they take digestive enzymes with their meal.

And protein is one of the biggest.

I take digestive enzymes now, I'm 43.

I take them with pretty much every meal except, and this is not like deeply rooted in scientific principles, it's just my own theory, when I have a smoothie, because it's kind of like easy to digest, it's blended and everything, and I might be totally off base, like

There actually was one research study that showed that, back to the plant-based thing, if you have a plant-based protein like pea, hemp, rice, and you have whey protein, usually the whey protein would have more amino acid bioavailability than the plant-based protein.

But if you take digestive enzymes with a plant-based protein, and in this study, they were actually using like smoothie, like protein powder.

the availability, the bioavailability of the amino acids in the plant-based protein becomes just as good as the animal-based protein.

So technically, I probably could get even more benefit if I just threw a handful of digestive enzymes into my smoothie, but there's just so many things to do and so little time when I'm making my morning smoothie.

Right.

Right before I got to get on a phone call.

It's just like one extra step to take.

So I don't use digestive enzymes when I'm having a smoothie.

But pretty much every meal, like if I go out to a restaurant, like I actually take one of those little pill capsules and I put digestive enzymes in there.