While this blog is normally about startups and venture capital, I wanted to share a personal experience. If you don’t care about nutrition, you can stop reading now…
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Game Changers on Netflix. Produced by James Cameron and narrated by James Wilks, a former UFC fighter and martial arts trainer, the movie includes an all-star team of co-producers (Arnie, Hamilton Lewis, Serena Williams, etc). The documentary features several top athletes (runners, weight lifters, cyclists) who have switched to plant-based diets and improved their performance as a result. The narrative is that using meat as a source of protein is a mis-conception and a very “expensive” wrapper to deliver protein, most of which can be ingested from plants/vegetables.
The movie strongly advocates a plant-based diet, but came under heavy criticism for using ‘pseudo-science’. Nevertheless, it gives some compelling reasons (health, environment) to reduce animal products consumption (meat, dairy, etc).
I was born in Argentina, which can normally be found in the dictionary as the antonym to vegetarian (fellow Argentineans – don’t be offended, I’m half kidding). Since I recently returned from a trip there where I ate non-stop meat, my wife and I decided to set ourselves a challenge – let’s go plant-based for a week… long story short, that turned into a month-long experiment.
Below is my experience so far….
- How can you tell if someone is vegan? don’t worry, they will tell you about it! joking aside, switching to a plant-based diet is a great conversation starter, but I’m sure it can also alienate people ;-)
- I’ve paid more attention to what I put in my mouth, in general. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m eating much healthier (think carbs!) but that I’m more aware of what I’m eating which is a nice change. I have NOT been 100% plant-based – I had salmon/ sushi and the occasional dairy chocolate. But I can say it’s a significant change.
- We re-discovered cooking – having to switch diets meant buying new ingredients that didn’t normally enter our fridge, and to make them taste nice we had to cook new things – curries, casseroles, mainly.
- There’s a vegan option for almost everything – from vegan spreads (alternative to cream cheese) to vegan ‘cheese’, Seitan, impossible foods/ beyond meat etc. If you’re in the UK and you shop on Ocado, you’re spoiled for choice.
- Turns out that at least in the beginning you fart a lot :-) an increase in gas and bloating has been well documented and apparently has to do with the type of fibre we ingest. After all, think about how much Methane gas cows release after eating all that grass.
- It might be plant-based, but It’s not all super healthy – I’ve been to some of the newer vegan restaurants in London, where you can eat a vegan cheeseburger for example, and it felt like the nutrition value was zero. To keep it healthy, it’s best to eat more raw foods…
- We’ve bought some supplements – not sure it’s needed, but for the first time we started taking B12, Iron and Calcium. Initially I felt like a senior citizen taking pills in the morning.
- The tough part was breakfast – I’m normally a fan of eggs, so cutting that out in the morning was an adjustment. So far we went with steel cut oats, bagel with peanut butter and honey (not plant-based) or avocado toast (not all at once, of course).
- It made me think about the startup opportunities in this space. I was already aware of all the meat/poultry/fish/shrimp replacements and direct to consumer supplement companies, but I started paying more attention to it.
- This is part of a bigger trend – The Economist recently published a chart of Google searches for “Veganism” by country – it’s mostly “up and to the right”
I should say that we didn’t inflict this on the kids. I know Veganism is almost a religion for some… for me it’s not going to be. I’m probably going to reduce my meat/fat intake in the future and overall it’s been a good experience so far. More than anything, it made me want to take more health ‘challenges’ in 2020.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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I did the same as you. Watched the movie and gave myself a 30 day challenge to cut out meat and other processed foods. Although, mine was being a vegetarian and not vegan (not sure if I could commit to that). My outtake was that I don’t need to eat meat for every meal, almost every day. It also opened up the world of food. I think I’ll go on a pseudo-vegetarian diet moving forward.