PCOS and a Vegetarian Diet: Are Plant Proteins Enough?

Protein is a big concept. Kind of like ‘love’ or ‘stress’, protein is a word that covers a lot of related but not equivalent items.

The way you love your mother is not the way you love your girlfriend -- or, if it is, you are in for some trouble on down the line. The stress of getting packed for a month in Thailand is different from the stress of divorce- and they are both big.

There is chemistry in plants that is called protein, and indeed it is a kind of protein. But you only have to look at a chicken, and look at a soybean and you know the basic stuff they are made of is fundamentally different.

The proteins in plants do not and will never do the same job for you that animal protein does. This is an important issue for women with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome). A PCOS diet should consist of some animal protein.

Francis Moore-Lappe did a great job raising awareness of the fragility of our ecosystems, in her book Diet for a Small Planet, published some thirty years ago. Vegetarianism got a big boost thanks to her hypothesis about the amino acid array available in plant foods.

With the science of the time, she described her idea of how the human digestive system breaks down and then recombines these amino acids into 'whole' proteins. She famously pointed out something like 50 people can live for a year from the grain it takes to feed one cow, and reasonably asked wouldn’t it be better if we just all ate lotsa pasta.

It seems like a great idea, but there are a couple problems with Moore-Lappe’s hypothesis.

The main problem is simply that the science of the time as she understood it was inadequate. There is more to what we get from meat than a jumble of simple, re-assignable amino acids. Plants simply do not hold, cannot provide, all of the necessary nutritional elements, including enzymes and fatty acids, in the combinations and proportions that animal food does.

We'll discuss the other problem with Moore-Lappe’s hypothesis next time.

Return to Article Directory Page

Top