Dr. Luc (Luke) van Loon

Those are the two issues when you have plant-based foods.

Now, nowadays, much of the research has looked at the proteins that are actually in plant-based foods, extracted those proteins, and then assessed their capacity to stimulate muscle protein synthesis.

It has been done for some proteins like wheat protein, soy protein a lot, pea protein, about five different proteins that we and others have actually assessed.

And then some of them actually, some of these studies show a lesser capacity to stimulate muscle protein synthesis when compared to an equivalent amount of mostly dairy protein.

That might be attributed to the fact that there's less leucine, less essential amino acids, and sometimes most of the plant-based proteins are deficient in one of more specific amino acids.

That's often methionine and lysine.

The last five years, we have been trying the protein extracts from pea and gluten and corn.

And actually, if we give in healthy subjects, we give 30 grams, which is quite a lot of protein.

We don't see a difference with dairy protein.

So if you give sufficient of the protein, of the protein extract where digestibility is high, there's not that much difference in muscle protein synthesis.

However, if you would take it from a plant-based food, then on an equivalent amount of protein, less of that protein becomes available.

And that is, of course, then you have to compensate for.

I think so.

So they don't necessarily have to have supplements.

Supplements is probably easier.

They can also compensate for lesser quality by greater quantity.

But then you have to consume a huge amount of foods.

And, of course, you improve the quality of your protein sources by having a very diverse palette of plant-based foods.

So if you really know what you're doing from a nutrition perspective, dietetics perspective, then I think you're quite capable doing that on a vegan diet.

But it's more difficult.