Joseph Everett is the creator and host of the YouTube channel “What I’ve Learned” where he makes videos about productivity and healthy habits. He’s made quite a few videos on the topic of animal sourced foods in an attempt to promote their health benefits and assuage the negative impacts of these food on personal health and our planet. As far as I’ve seen he’s ignored the ethical concerns around animal derived foods.
What you are reading now is a loose transcript (with citations) for the response video I made to one of Joseph’s videos which compares animal protein to plant protein. This is not a word for word transcript as parts in the video were filmed extemporaneously but I will be covering all the points and elaborating on a few. Here is my response video:
In Joseph’s video; “Protein is not protein. Here’s why”, he starts by pitching a peanut butter sandwich against beef while the narration insinuates that the latter is superior. He introduces the viewer to the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score system or ‘DIAAS’. I don’t talk about the use of the DIAAS to score plant protein in my video but the YouTube channel ‘Lifting Vegan Logic’ (LVL) focuses on this in his own response to Joseph. It’s amazing that in a combined runtime of over half an hour; LVL and myself debunk separate points throughout.
Joseph then explains that proteins are made up of amino acids. Of the 20 amino acids; for an adult human there are 9 so called indispensable amino acids that must be obtained from dietary sources and the body can use those to create the rest. The table onscreen in my video at 0:50 is from this paper.
Joseph then references a study and claims that 103 countries are not getting their minimum requirement of 50grams of protein a day. This paper is unfortunately behind a pay wall so I haven’t thoroughly checked this source. However from the section of the paper visible in Joseph’s video you can see that it’s 103 “countries and territories”, not 103 countries; a significant distinction and presumably these countries are all third world. In this section Joseph claims that when factoring in ‘Utilizable protein’ then “none of these 103 countries are hitting the 50gram protein requirement”. This clam requires two further points to mean anything; 1) how does ‘intake’ differ from ‘utilization’ and 2) what are the negative repercussions of this failure to meet the recommendation? If there are no bad effects then maybe the recommendation is higher than it needs to be or the measurement in this study is flawed.
Joseph Gish Gallops for the next minute or two so I’m going to skip to the points I focused on in my response video.
In an attempt to demonstrate the inferiority of plant protein, Joseph expands on an example taken from the Game Changers. It’s worth mentioning that James Wilks, who is the host in the Game Changers documentary, has defended the film from criticism from Chris Kresser the Joe Rogen podcast in far more detail than I will go into here. They go into details on the DIAAS system and its validity, protein intake recommendations and more. Links to those debates are below:
At the start of this section, Joseph quickly mentions “Of course plant foods have various benefits other than just protein” then continues to explain why he thinks it’s harder to ingest protein than the Game changers suggests. Again, I’ll refer to the Joe Rogen episode here and I give an example of how easy it is to get enough protein later.
Here’s where things get complicated; Joseph compares the amino acid profiles of his two meals and my response was to reveal some other figures. A good source of protein might bring other unwanted problems, does that mean it’s still a good source of protein? This is a valid question that needs answering. I point out there’s a lack of fiber in animal-sourced foods and high levels of cholesterol. The links I show on screen are below.
Joseph plots the amino acid profiles of these two meals onto a graph and labels the x-axis as ‘indispensable amino acids’ and the y-axis as ‘mg of protein’. He claims that “you get a better balance of the amino acids from the animal proteins”. However, the bar height doesn’t accurately correlate with the mgs so I called this out in my response and made my graphs to show the balance is about the same.
Joseph says "balance of the amino acids" so my graph is just showing that the ratios of mgs are about the same. For that point, it's not relevant that the average quantity is different and so the y-axis scales vary between the graphs.
It seems Joseph’s graphs are actually representing the recommended daily intake (RDI) as opposed to mg which would make it much less pernicious. However, it still doesn't sit well with me that he challenges the overall protein quantity recommendations and doesn't talk at all about how the varying requirements per amino acid are discovered yet still uses that RDI.
While researching this video I came across a really simple plant-based set of foods that contain almost the RDI for every indispensable amino acid in just 3 ingredients; one cup of Tofu, broccoli and rice. And here’s what that meal looks like:
As you can see, it’s not an inconveniently large quantity of food as Joseph implies and as Biolayne explicitly states. This meal isn’t enough to satiate me so in my video I added a few extra ingredients which also pull the last two amino acids over the line.
Again Joseph tries to insinuate the protein difficulty of a plant-based diet so I give another example in the form of a salad that gets well over 100% of each amino acid.
Joseph presents research that doubles the protein RDI. This paper has a serious conflict of interest in that the researchers have incentives to recommend higher protein intakes but in any case, I’ve shown that double the 50mg RDI is still easily doable in just two plant-based meals.
The next claim to debunk is the concept of limiting amino acids. Joseph brings up a few times that if one amino acid is too low it will bring all the higher quality ones down to its level. As far as I can find not all amino acids are limiting in this way but Lysine is one of the examples used. Joseph misrepresents a book source here by cherry-picking statements. On the same page, the book also says “The richest vegan sources are soya products”, which most vegans consume a lot of anyway and “vegetarian and vegan diets provide the same protein quality as meat-based diets.” It's funny how Joseph left that out of his video, he would do well to properly read his sources.
40% of Americans are protein deficient? It bewilders me how Joseph can make this claim without showing examples of the negative effects this is having. I suspect it’s because the claim is untrue. LVL explained how Joseph (and Dr Peter Ballerstedt) misread or misrepresented the paper they site this fact from and I played a clip from Dr Michael Gregor from nutritionfacts.org.
It might simply be impossible for Joseph to interview more relevant scientists but I’ve always found his guests to be questionable choices, Dr Peter Ballerstedt is no exception; he’s not a medical doctor or nutritionist. I presented the opinions of two medical doctors to show the other side.
In response to Dr Ballerstedt’s points on ‘The best sources of protein’ we need to define “good” or “the best” in this context. If our goal is only to get a high quantity of protein then sure, meat could be ‘the best’ way to do that, but if our goal is to eat healthily while getting the right amount of protein and other nutrients, which is what the goal should be, then no; meat sources of protein are not the best.
Isn’t it strange to quote a footnote as a source of proof that meat protein is “the best”? Here’s something the WHO didn’t leave only a footnote to mention. In 2015 the WHO stated “Processed meat was classified as carcinogenic to humans” and “classified the consumption of red meat as probably carcinogenic to humans”.
When I first watched Joseph’s video I thought, nigh, hoped that Joseph doesn’t know about the cancer risk associated with red meat because then he’d simply be unaware that he’s promoting an unhealthy nutrient source. Sadly when watching more of his videos I realized that he has seen this statement from the WHO. Mic the Vegan has responded to that video.
Just because Joseph has attempted to debunk points I’m bringing up in response doesn’t get him off the hook. I hope that demonstrating how misrepresentative he can be, inspires general skepticism in his channel as a whole. It’s clear to me that Joseph is deep down a rabbit hole of wishful thinking and confirmation bias.
Now to pre-emptively clear up one potential rebuttal to my criticisms which is that Joseph doesn’t explicitly recommend eating red meat, perhaps his interests are purely academic. Why should I go after someone who’s just talking about food science? Well, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he is simply taking a dispassionate look at protein and then I watched one of his older videos where he says “we were right to like meat, it was the fun way to get our proteins” so it’s clear that Joseph personally is pro-eating meat.
My final and main criticism of Joseph that applies to his channel more broadly is that he seems to have a complete disregard for the ethical consequences of his actions; by encouraging the consumption of meat he’s tacitly encouraging the unnecessary mass brutal slaughter of innocent animals. Even if you don’t have any sympathy for the plight of animals he’s still misrepresenting the current consensus on dietary health; which is misleading people into damaging their personal health.
I find this behaviour indefensible and abhorrent. At the time of writing the ‘What I’ve learned’ channel has almost 2 million subscribers, so Joseph has a very real ability to influence and he owes it to his viewers to be responsible with that influence.
I think I’d like to see Joseph make a video on how he reconciles his morality with his actions. It would be interesting to know if he actually has a complete disregard for others, including animals, or if he deceives himself on this matter as well. Perhaps he’s a hedonist; only seeking out the next pleasure.
In conclusion; obtaining more than enough of all indispensable amino acids is easily doable on a strict vegan diet.
Meat consumption comes with higher levels of risk from cancer and all-cause mortality.
Joseph Everett from the YouTube channel What I’ve learned has a propensity to misrepresent data to promote a false conception of animal-derived foods.
He has a disregard for the consequences of his actions that he promotes and sometimes tenuously defends.
I consider this to be disgraceful behaviour that justifies civil criticism, hence why I made the response video.
I don’t know why Joseph is doing this other than a suspicion that he doesn’t like hearing bad news about his bad habits so is making up good news about his bad habits. Unfortunately for him, it doesn’t matter how much he lies to himself, those lies won’t turn into truths.
People love to hear good news about their bad habits and Joseph is giving this to many meat-eaters.
Please seriously consider going vegan. Whatever reason you find compelling; it’s a good one.
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