Metabolites

Lou

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Does anyone here know about metabolites? and maybe willing and able to explain it to us.

I ran across it in my morning reading and looked it up but I couldn't make much sense of the definition. Having not having heard of them before it registered on my BS detector. But when you google it - it shows up in a lot of scholarly like articles.

I think it might be an alternate means of assessing a healthy food or a healthy diet.
 

What was it you were reading? This is interesting!
Thank you. that is a big help. the metabolites that the article was referencing was more general. Maybe more about food, or nutrition.

anyway this is what I was reading:

and since the author concluded that "...including both plant and animal meats in your diet could yield more nutritional advantages,..." I immediately wanted to call it BS.

I think the researcher was saying that if you are a meat eater you would benefit from some P-B meats in you diet. I'm not so sure he is implying that if you are vegan you would benefit from including some real meat in your diet.
 
Here is the paper the article was based on. which doesn't help much.
But I find metabolites interesting. they could be a better way to analyze or compare nutritional values.
They also may find their way into the research to produce better alternative plant-based products.
 
I haven't gone through the paper in great detail, but at the very bottom, under "Competing Interests", you can see that the main author of the article "reports a grant from the North Dakota Beef Association to study the impact of diet quality on the relationship between red meat and human health", as well as other links to the agricultural industry.

The study looked only at one specific plant-based "meat" and compared it to the ground-up flesh of dead cows. I wonder why they didn't look at more plant products. Their conclusion seems to be that plant products are not exactly the same as the animal products they imitate; there are metabolites that are in the animal product but not in the plant product, and metabolites that are in the plant product but not in the animal product. Of course, since people who eat animals also eat plants, the metabolites that are missing from the plant product could pose a bigger problem for vegans than the metabolites that are missing from the animal product would for people who eat animals.

On p. 6, they say that "creatinine", "hydroxyproline", "anserine", "glucosamine", and "cysteamine" were in the animal product but not in the plant product. (Creatinine is, according to my Google search, "a waste product produced by muscles from the breakdown of a compound called creatine" and is removed by the kidneys. I think they meant to say "creatine". )

According to the following article (which seems to have a strongly pro-animal-flesh bias):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7088015/
plants do not contain the metabolites "taurine, carnosine, anserine, and creatine". When I look up these metabolites, I find many medical web sites that mention the good things they do in the body and list the animal body parts that contain them, but I can't find anything that states whether they are necessary. In other words, they may have been found to have benefits, but does a deficiency actually cause problems? (If so, I'm not sure how the researchers would explain the health of people who have been vegan for decades, such as David3 on this forum.)

Upon further thought, it is possible that our bodies, like the bodies of other animals, make these metabolites, and that we don't need to obtain them from the foods we eat. I tried looking up the four metabolites I mentioned above, and it looks like carnosine, at least, is metabolised by the bodies of cows but not humans. The question is whether it, and the other missing metabolites, are essential. I suspect they are not.

I am not a biologist (I was trained in a different science). You might want to contact nutritionfacts.org or pcrm.org to request that Drs. Greger and/or Barnard answer this question.
 
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On p. 6, they say that "creatinine", "hydroxyproline", "anserine", "glucosamine", and "cysteamine" were in the animal product but not in the plant product.

plants do not contain the metabolites "taurine, carnosine, anserine, and creatine".

Those are all non-essential amino acids.
 
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Those are all non-essential amino acids.
Thank you for figuring this out. However, by quoting two carefully selected bits of my post, you have created the impression that I suggested that they were essential, when I said explicitly that I believed they were not necessary.

It's really getting too tiring to post here.
 
Thank you for figuring this out. However, by quoting two carefully selected bits of my post, you have created the impression that I suggested that they were essential, when I said explicitly that I believed they were not necessary.

It's really getting too tiring to post here.
Sorry. I did not mean to imply that.

You said, "When I look up these metabolites, I find many medical web sites that mention the good things they do in the body and list the animal body parts that contain them, but I can't find anything that states whether they are necessary. In other words, they may have been found to have benefits, but does a deficiency actually cause problems? (If so, I'm not sure how the researchers would explain the health of people who have been vegan for decades, such as David3 on this forum.)"

It was clear to me that you Didn't think they were necessary. I was just trying for more clarification.
 
Thank you for figuring this out. However, by quoting two carefully selected bits of my post, you have created the impression that I suggested that they were essential, when I said explicitly that I believed they were not necessary.

It's really getting too tiring to post here.
I read it with a different inflection and I understood you meant it with a bit of , sarcasm? Eye roll?