Visualizing whole food nutritionally complete diets
::: spoiler Whole-Food Plant-Based Daily Menu
Breakfast
- Boiled potatoes: 350 g
- UV-exposed mushrooms: 200 g (raw weight)
- Orange: 200 g (edible portion)
- Ground flaxseed: 20 g
Lunch
- Calcium-set firm tofu: 400 g
- Cooked lentils: 180 g
- Cooked kale: 80 g
- Red bell pepper: 150 g
Dinner
- Tempeh: 120 g
- Cooked shelled edamame: 120 g
- Cooked broccoli: 250 g
- Cooked cauliflower: 400 g
- Carrots: 150 g
Snacks and Supplements
- Unsalted sunflower seeds: 85 g
- Iodized salt: 3.8 g
- Vitamin B12 (cyanocobalamin): 100 µg
- Vitamin D: From verified UV-exposed mushrooms, or 20 µg supplement if needed
Daily Nutritional Totals
| Metric | Amount |
|---|---|
| Calories | 2,233 |
| Total protein | 147 g |
| DIAAS-style adjusted protein | ~110 g |
| Carbohydrates | 248 g |
| Fat | 94 g |
| Fiber | ≥77 g |
| Food weight | 2.71 kg |
| Daily cost | $13–20 |
:::
::: spoiler 70/30 Ground Beef Daily Menu
Daily Food
- Ground beef: 70% lean / 30% fat
- Quantity: Approximately 0.50 kg
- No additional foods or supplements
Daily Nutritional Totals
| Metric | Amount |
|---|---|
| Calories | ~2,300 |
| Protein | ~100 g |
| Food weight | ~0.50 kg |
| Daily cost | ~$3–5 |
:::
the menus are taking into account bioavailabilty, diaas - and are nutritionally complete.
Yes its a best effort generated visualization
I have written on food menu weights before - https://discuss.online/post/39914520
18 replies
Imports required for this menu from different countries
My food for today is around 300g. It's dried. Were it fresh meat and fat instead of pemmican it would be 500g lean beef and 150g fat
200g of pemmican pictures below on a 20cm plate for scale. I'd have this and another half of a piece that size
That's certainly a choice. Not one I thought anyone would make.
the volume and mass differences do explain the bathroom efficiency of zero carb - in and out once every day or two - not even enough time to pull out the phone.
::: spoiler Whole-Food Plant-Based Menu — Daily Time
Total: 3 hours 54 minutes/day
:::
::: spoiler 70/30 Ground Beef Menu — Daily Time
Total: 46 minutes/day
:::
not to mention food waste - i eat 100% of the food i buy, none of it spoils. Freezers keep meat indefinitely
Yeah sorry, at the very least, the waste perspective is insane. The amount of waste thrown away as bones, inedible animal parts, sick animals, animal feed (almost all of which is factory farmed itself, matching the single layer of factory farming of non-meat), layered transport of equipment and food and human effort for the factory farm, and all those gone through the fundamental inefficiency of getting the calories through another animal's metabolism first...
The only reason you "eat 100% of the food you buy", is because it has been meticulously processed for you, by an entire industry, that has produced insane amounts of waste, away from your house.
This is not an inefficiency. It is indeed fundamentally more efficient for us to consume animals that have evolved to process the plant matter because we have not ourselves evolved to do that, and cannot do so to any meaningful degree.
Look up the bio availability of any nutrient in its animal vs plant forms.
As an aside, calories don't matter very much, and it's the nutrients (and other matter) we consume that do. I wouldn't worry too much about a unit of energy going through our metabolism since it's just an abstraction. We literally cannot consume calories, since they have no rest mass.
The inefficiency is not about what happens in your body, it's about how much energy and environment you need to destroy, to eat enough. If everyone did, the earth wouldn't be able to sustain even one fifth of the people alive today.
And humans obviously can, and need to eat plant matter too, as we have been doing for literal millennia.
Some plant matter is digested for energy (e.g. starch), which meat can also do, but some isn't, indeed passing untouched (fiber), and helps you not get diarrhea and constipation every week.
There's a reason that articles by dentists literally advocating for the carnivore diet, have 5-lines-long lists of carnivore diet symptoms, and recommend supplements both before meals, and "for bowel movements".
You are, and it's not entirely your fault, confidently incorrect. Those of us here practicing zero carb were once like you.
We cannot sustain ourselves efficiently with plants. I understand this sounds highly unintuitive to you and even unhinged, but I really do encourage you to read about the bio availability of nutrition and what nutrition human beings require.
We can eat plant matter and tolerate many toxins. It doesn't mean we should. There is no carbohydrate, fiber, or fructose deficiency in human pathology.
fiber bulks up stools, it is linked to constipation - removing fibre resolves constipation in a RCT.
Westin Price would disagree with you, there is no need for supplements , and quite frankly if someone is selling fibre supplements and advocating for a zero carb diet they need to go back to biochemistry for their inherit contradiction.
Of course not fibre supplements, duh, that wouldn't even be carnivore diet.
It's lipase before meals, for the barrage of fat you can't process, and Magnesium Citrate which is a laxative.
Humans run on fat, you will notice humans store excess energy as fat... famously the gallbladder caches biles to process fats quickly in the stomach. We are lipovores - we absolutely can eat fat in our diet without supplements.
none of that changes the money spent is not thrown away in my kitchen.
fundamental inefficiency of animal nutrition is curious - most of the land in the world is not arable, yet can support animals, that land does not produce human nutrition no matter how much industrial fossil fuel fertilizer you throw at it. Ruminants eat grass growing on land not fit for farming and convert it into human usable protein. Go ahead and grow crops on arable land, use the non-arable land for animals.... oh, but even the crops grown on arable land are mostly not consumable by humans, we can't ferment cellulose after all, so what do we do with this "waste", we either throw it away... or feed it to something that can process cellulose (a animal).
Well that's just not true. It's a long time, but it's not indefinite.
At -18C or lower, it's true. Admittedly most people don't freeze meat that low