· By Ethan Whitfield
Animal Protein vs. Plant Protein
I built a company on beef, so you know where I come down. I still want to give you the honest version of this, because the loud version on both sides gets it wrong.
What "complete" means
Your body builds protein out of amino acids. Nine of them are essential, which means you have to eat them. A complete protein supplies all nine in useful amounts.
Meat, fish, and eggs are complete. Most single plant sources run low in one or two essential amino acids. That does not make them useless. It means a person eating only plants has to combine sources, like rice with beans, to cover the gaps.
How well you can use it
The other half is digestibility. Scientists score protein quality with a measure called PDCAAS, which combines amino acid content with how well the protein is digested. The top score is 1.0. These are commonly cited figures:
| Protein source | PDCAAS |
|---|---|
| Egg | 1.00 |
| Beef | 0.92 |
| Soy | 0.91 |
| Pea | 0.73 |
| Rice | 0.47 |
Two things stand out. Animal proteins sit at the top. And soy, to be fair, scores right up there with them.
What comes along with the protein
A food is more than its protein number. Beef carries iron in the form your body absorbs most easily, plus zinc, vitamin B12, and creatine. B12 does not occur naturally in plants at all.
Plants bring their own things: fiber, vitamin C, and compounds you will not get from a steak. I eat plants. I am not here to tell you to stop.
Where I land
My issue was never plants. It is what we do to them.
A lot of the plant protein people eat does not come as a bean or a lentil. It comes as an isolate: the protein pulled out of the plant, dried into a powder, and built back into a bar with binders and flavoring. The same is true of whey on the animal side. I used it for 30 years before I learned how it was made, and I have not touched it since.
So my line is simple. I want protein from an actual protein source, eaten as close to whole as I can get it. For a food that has to be dense, portable, and shelf-stable, nothing I have found beats dried beef and tallow.
That is why BIVI is a pemmican bar and not another protein bar. Grass-fed beef is the first ingredient. No protein isolates.