Comment on Cannot tell you how many times I have asked this question

• yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’m actually literally talking about the nutritional protein available to you, a human.

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  • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Even though your broader point is correct that our ancestral lines and closest relatives (chimps, gorillas, other great apes) primarily eat plants, I think broccoli is a bad example of what our ancestors are. Broccoli is the result of specialized human-driven artificial breeding after the rise of human agriculture, and has a higher protein ratio than even other brassicas, like the cabbage breeds that broccoli descends from.

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    • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You know, I was going to mention that, but I deleted it because I thought the word “like” was doing sufficient work. The stuff we ate was “like” broccoli, just less sweet.

      However, the high protein-per-calorie content of vegetables is notable. Even cabbage is 0.05g/calorie (roughly half of mince meat).

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• Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Skill issue

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• exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For broccoli? No, that’s actually a fairly bioavailable protein source, especially when cooked. Even compared to high protein plant sources like beans or lentils, broccoli’s protein is more bioavailable. It’s just there’s not that much of it, and the “protein per calorie” stat is kinda cherry picked from the fact that broccoli is low carb and low fat, rather than being really high in protein.

  Either way, though, the gut microbiomes of herbivores are mainly adapted to draw out more useful carbohydrate, not more useful protein. Cellulose is so plentiful in nature that making use of all those glucose molecules is biologically rewarding.

  Plant protein bioavailability is affected by a lot of factors, including whether the food has been chopped up, peeled, cooked, etc. Human chewing and guts (especially in modern humans) are pretty inefficient for extracting nutrients from food in the natural state because we have been cooking and processing food for millions of years.

  So yeah. Cows have complicated guts for digesting cellulose and extracting amino acids from chloroplasts, and innate chewing behaviors that mechanically process grass into mush, but we have knives and fire to do more of that stuff outside of our bodies. And cattle pick and choose grasses (including high protein leafy legumes like clover or alfalfa) depending on their own needs, as well.

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