People will hear that fibre supports gut health, lowers disease risk, helps regulate blood sugar, and may even help preserve muscle strength as we age, then still reach for the same old line about plant-based foods being “processed” or “missing something”. Meanwhile, the foods doing the most obvious damage keep getting waved through as normal.

Animal flesh contains no fibre. None. Eggs contain no fibre. Dairy contains no fibre. Processed meat comes with salt, saturated fat, preservatives, and well-established links to disease. Yet somehow the panic is aimed at the bean burger.

Your gut microbiome is a living ecosystem that shapes digestion, metabolism, immune function, inflammation, and, increasingly, aspects of health we were only just beginning to understand. One of those is muscle strength.

A recent study found that higher levels of a gut bacterium called Roseburia inulinivorans were linked to better muscle strength in humans. In mice, introducing that bacterium increased grip strength and altered muscle fibres in ways associated with more powerful movement. Older adults in the study had lower levels of it than younger adults, which matters because muscle decline is one of the biggest reasons ageing becomes disabling rather than merely inconvenient.

That does not mean one bacterium is magic. It means yet again the story points in the same direction: feed the microbiome properly and the body works better. And what feeds it properly? Not bacon. Not cheese. Not eggs. Plants.

Roseburia inulinivorans appears to thrive on inulin, a type of fibre found in foods like onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus, and chicory root. In other words, the answer is not buried in some futuristic supplement. It is sitting in the produce aisle. It is in ordinary foods that humans have been eating for generations, and that industrial food culture has spent years sidelining in favour of convenience, habit, and animal-centred meals.

That matters because the microbiome does not just respond to what you remove. It responds to what you actually put in.

This is where people get lazy. They hear that a diet lower in animal products can benefit the gut, then reduce the whole conversation to meat versus no meat, as if that is the main event. It is not. The important question is what replaces it. A microbiome built on chips, white bread, and sugary snacks is not suddenly thriving. A microbiome thrives when it is fed fibre, resistant starch, polyphenols, and a wide range of plant foods.

That is why research comparing vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores keeps finding meaningful differences in gut bacteria. Diets centred on whole plant foods tend to cultivate microbes associated with better cardiometabolic health and beneficial fatty acid production, while omnivorous patterns more often support bacteria linked to inflammation and disease. But the more important lesson is not “vegan” as a label. It is that whole plant foods feed the microbial systems that protect us.

Fibre is the headline because it is what most people are missing and the one animal products fail to provide entirely. Prebiotic fibres from beans, onions, garlic, legumes, and other plant foods feed beneficial gut bacteria, which in turn produce short-chain fatty acids. These compounds help regulate inflammation, support the gut barrier, and shift the internal environment away from the kind of protein-heavy fermentation linked to worse health outcomes.

One of the most useful recent diet trials on this point did not even rely on some purist fantasy diet. Researchers tested a “non-industrialised-type” eating pattern in healthy adults. It was largely plant-based, high in fibre, low in highly processed foods, and designed to reflect some key features of non-industrialised diets. In just three weeks, fibre intake doubled. The participants’ gut microbiomes shifted rapidly. Total short-chain fatty acids rose. Markers associated with plant-carbohydrate use increased. Mucus-degrading features fell. And clinically, things improved: cholesterol dropped, LDL dropped, fasting glucose dropped, inflammatory markers dropped, and participants even lost a little weight despite being fed to meet their calorie needs.

That should have been the end of a lot of bad arguments.

Instead, one detail from that study will probably confuse people who have been taught to think in slogans. Microbiome diversity actually went down, even as the health markers improved. “More diversity” is not the whole story. A more diverse microbiome is not automatically a healthier one if the microbes being fed are the wrong ones. What matters is not diversity for its own sake but what the diet is selecting for. A microbiome full of bacteria adapted to a fibre-poor, animal-heavy, industrial diet is not impressive. It is just responsive to the inputs it keeps getting. This is where the usual ultra-processed food panic also starts to fall apart.

The conversation around plant-based meat has been poisoned by blunt categories and lazy thinking. If a food is labelled “ultra-processed”, many people treat that as the end of the discussion, as if all processed foods are nutritionally interchangeable. They are not. That classification tells you something about how a product was made. It does not tell you everything that matters about what the food actually does in the body, what it replaces, or what its overall nutrient profile looks like.

That is not a defence of every plant-based product on the shelf. Some are rubbish. Some are too salty. Some are low in useful micronutrients. Some are poorly formulated. But the same is true of animal-based foods, and nobody pretends a sausage, a salmon fillet, and a sugary yoghurt are nutritionally identical simply because they all came from an animal.

Recent papers looking specifically at plant-based meat and dairy analogues make this point clearly. These products vary a lot by brand, ingredient, and fortification, but when compared properly, many plant-based alternatives offer more fibre and less saturated fat than the animal products they are designed to replace, especially processed meat. They also generally come with lower greenhouse gas emissions and lower land use. The best ones can function as a practical bridge for people who are not suddenly going to start living on lentil stew and chickpeas seven days a week.

The world is full of people who know they should reduce processed meat, know they should eat more fibre, know they are not going to spend every evening soaking beans from scratch, and still want familiar meals. Telling them the only acceptable future is one made entirely of wholefoods and culinary perfection is not strategy. It is fantasy.

Whole plant foods should absolutely be the priority. That is where the deepest benefits are. Beans, lentils, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, potatoes, oats, and whole grains deserve the spotlight. But pretending plant-based alternatives have no useful role is just another way of keeping animal products in place.

And the data does not support that cynicism anyway.

Researchers modelling realistic UK food baskets found that targeted swaps to plant and fungi-based alternatives reduced greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and water use while keeping diets nutritionally adequate overall. The strongest gains came from replacing processed meat. Fibre went up. Energy intake went down. Environmental impacts fell.

One of the recurring findings in this research is that some plant-based options, particularly meat analogues, still cost more than the products they replace. That is not a failure of the concept. It is a political and economic choice. Governments subsidise animal agriculture, institutions normalise animal products, and food systems are built around their dominance. Then critics point at the price gap as if it emerged from nowhere.

Make healthier plant-based options cheaper. Improve procurement standards in schools and hospitals. Stop treating meat as the default centre of the plate. Support crop production instead of funnelling money into systems that turn plants into animal flesh with enormous waste along the way.

And while we are here, stop treating fibre as some side note.

People are under-consuming it on a staggering scale. In the UK, the vast majority do not get enough. That has consequences far beyond constipation jokes. Fibre affects blood sugar, cholesterol, inflammation, bowel health, microbial metabolism, and likely much more than that. When people swap processed meat for a well-formulated plant-based alternative, fibre intake rises. When they move further toward whole plant foods, it rises again. That is not trivial. It is one of the clearest nutritional upgrades most people could make.

Which brings us back to strength.

Ageing is often discussed as if decline just happens in a vacuum. Muscles weaken. Falls increase. Independence shrinks. But part of that story is dietary. Strength training matters, obviously. People should lift things, challenge their muscles, and stop being sold the lie that ageing means passive surrender. But food matters too. The body is not built from exercise alone. If the microbiome helps regulate muscle function, and if the microbiome thrives on fibre-rich plant foods, then a low-fibre, animal-heavy diet is not neutral. It is part of the problem.

So no, the future of healthy ageing is probably not more processed meat, more dairy, and another scare story about a soy burger. It looks much more like what the evidence already keeps showing us: more fibre, more legumes, more vegetables, more variety, more plants.

And for people who are not ready to build every meal from scratch, carefully selected plant-based alternatives can help move things in the right direction.

That is the part reactionaries hate. The evidence is not asking us to choose between a perfect wholefood utopia and a butcher’s counter. It is showing that there is a spectrum of better choices, and that nearly all of them move away from animal products and toward plants.

Feed your microbiome and it feeds you back.

Ignore it, and your gut, your cholesterol, your blood sugar, and eventually your strength pay the price.

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A fresh study made headlines by suggesting that higher ultra-processed food intake around conception may be linked to reduced fertility in men and slightly smaller embryonic growth and yolk sac volume in women. Predictably, the media did what the media does. It turned a nuanced piece of research into a broad cultural warning about “processed food”, as if the category itself explains everything and as if the public hasn’t already been trained to hear “processed” and think “poison”.

But that is not what the evidence says. The study itself was more limited than the coverage made it sound. It found that higher maternal ultra-processed food intake was associated with smaller measurements at 7 weeks, but the associations weakened later in the first trimester. It also found that higher paternal UPF intake was linked with reduced fertility. That is worth discussing. It is not nothing. But nor is it a licence to flatten every food made in a factory into the same moral and nutritional category.

That flattening is one of the most irritating habits in modern nutrition discourse. It gives people the illusion of clarity while making them less informed. A hot dog, a fortified soy milk, a sugary energy drink, a high-fibre plant-based burger, margarine, baby formula, supermarket bread, and a can of beans can all end up caught in the same rhetorical dragnet. Then people wonder why the public is confused.

Of course they are confused. They are being told to fear a category instead of understand foods.

And that confusion matters, because when people hear “avoid ultra-processed food”, they do not all picture the same things. Some imagine fizzy drinks and processed meat. Others start side-eyeing tofu, soya milk, breakfast cereal, plant-based meat, wholegrain bread, or anything with more than three ingredients. The result is not better public understanding. The result is nutritional superstition.

This is where the conversation goes badly wrong.

Not all processing is harmful. Humans have been processing food for an astonishingly long time. Archaeological research has shown that our ancestors were grinding seeds, pounding tubers, cooking starches, and detoxifying bitter plant foods thousands of years before agriculture. Processing food is not some modern corruption of a pure ancestral diet. It is one of the reasons our species spread, adapted, and survived. We are not a species that fell from nutritional grace the moment somebody invented a machine. We are a species that has always transformed food to make it digestible, safe, nourishing, portable, and useful.

So the problem is not processing in itself. The problem is what is being processed, into what, for whom, and with what health consequences.

That distinction should be obvious, but the current UPF discourse often treats it as a nuisance. The category becomes the story. The ingredients, nutrient profile, and replacement effect get pushed aside.

Replacement effect matters enormously. A food does not exist in isolation. People do not eat categories. They swap one thing for another. And when researchers actually examine those swaps, the tidy morality tale around “ultra-processed” starts to wobble.

A review published in Current Nutrition Reports made this point clearly. Ultra-processed plant foods are not the same as ultra-processed animal foods, and in many cases they compare favourably not just with processed meat, but with supposedly “unprocessed” animal products too. Plant-based milks, plant-based meat analogues, and modern margarine are often lower in saturated fat, contain no cholesterol, provide fibre absent from animal foods, and lack heme iron, which has been repeatedly linked with higher chronic disease risk. Replacing cow’s milk with soya milk has been associated with lower total and LDL cholesterol, lower C-reactive protein, and lower breast cancer risk in substitution analyses. Replacing meat with plant-based analogues has been associated with reductions in cholesterol, body weight, TMAO, and ammonia. Replacing butter with margarine lowers cholesterol and is associated with lower cardiovascular risk.

That is the part many people do not want to hear.

The food advertised as “natural” is not automatically the healthier one. The food marketed as simple, traditional, and recognisable is not morally or biologically absolved by its familiarity. Red meat does not become a health food because it can be described as “unprocessed”. Dairy does not become benign because it came from a cow rather than a factory vat. Butter does not become cardioprotective because your grandmother used it.

This is one of the deepest flaws in the way UPF is discussed. It quietly smuggles in the idea that “natural” is virtuous and industrial is suspect. That may be emotionally satisfying, but it is not serious nutrition analysis.

Even some researchers and public health bodies that are otherwise concerned about UPFs have had to admit this. The UK government’s rapid update on processed foods reported that vegetarian alternatives were not associated with adverse health outcomes, while ultra-processed meat, animal products, and sweetened drinks tended to be associated with increased risk. That should have been a much bigger story than it was. Instead, the broader public conversation continues to be dominated by hand-wringing over whether an oat milk or veggie burger is too “processed”, while processed meat keeps slipping through under the comforting glow of familiarity.

This would be laughable if it were not so backwards.

Processed meat has been consistently linked with disease risk. Yet a lot of people who would never touch a vegan sausage because it has methylcellulose will happily eat carcinogenic pig flesh wrapped in plastic because at least it feels traditional. That is not a rational nutritional framework.

And yes, there are serious concerns around many ultra-processed foods. No sensible person needs to pretend otherwise. Diets dominated by industrially manufactured products high in salt, sugar, saturated fat, and low in fibre are not a great idea. A global review in The Lancet argued that UPFs pose a major health threat and called for strong public health action. Fine. But even that wider debate has critics pointing out that the category is too broad to tell us which foods are driving which risks. Correlation is not causation. Lumping unlike with unlike does not become rigorous because it is fashionable.

Some of the strongest signals in UPF research appear to be driven by products like sugary drinks and processed meat. Remove those, and the neat story starts to look much messier. That does not make the issue trivial. It makes it more important to get right. Because when public health messaging gets sloppy, people do not become wiser. They become easier to manipulate.

That is exactly what we are seeing now with plant-based foods. Plant-based meats and milks are being folded into the same threatening category as products with completely different nutritional profiles and effects. Research from Finland has even shown that current classification systems can miss meaningful differences in the biochemical composition of plant-based foods. Some forms of processing reduce useful compounds. Others preserve them. Some, as in fermentation, can improve bioavailability. Yet the public is encouraged to think in crude binaries: processed equals bad, unprocessed equals good. No wonder survey data found that so many people either believe all processed foods are unhealthy or do not know what to think at all.

This is the cost of dumbing down nutrition until it fits a headline.

It also has consequences beyond personal confusion. The more the public is taught to fear “ultra-processed plant foods” in the abstract, the easier it becomes to steer them back toward meat and dairy under the guise of common sense. Suddenly, the cholesterol-free burger with fibre is cast as suspicious, while the corpse of an animal gets framed as wholesome because it is less technologically novel. Suddenly, soy milk is interrogated for ingredients while cow’s milk escapes scrutiny despite its saturated fat, hormones, and links to adverse outcomes. Suddenly, “processed” becomes less a scientific descriptor than a cultural weapon used selectively against plant-based change.

That is why this latest fertility story needs to be handled carefully.

If people take from it that diets high in many ultra-processed products may be associated with poorer reproductive outcomes, fair enough. That is a reasonable point for further research and cautious reflection. If they take from it that men and women trying to conceive may benefit from a diet centred more on whole and minimally processed plant foods, also fair enough. That is hardly controversial.

But if they take from it that the answer is to recoil from plant-based milks, meat alternatives, or other processed plant foods while continuing to treat meat, dairy, and butter as sensible staples, then the message has been mangled beyond recognition.

Whole plant foods should absolutely be the foundation. Beans, lentils, grains, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, potatoes, herbs, spices. That is where the strongest evidence keeps pointing. But transitional foods matter too. Real life matters. Accessibility matters. Convenience matters. The person swapping cow’s milk for soy milk or a beef burger for a plant-based one is not making some catastrophic health trade-off because a factory was involved. In many cases, they are making an improvement.

Public health messaging should be mature enough to say that plainly.

Not all UPFs are equally useful. Not all are equally risky. Not all are equally nutritious. Not all should be defended. Not all should be condemned. And the idea that “processing” itself is the main event is increasingly looking like a blunt instrument masquerading as insight.

The real questions are simpler and harder.

What is this food made of?

What does it replace?

What happens when people eat more of it?

Who profits from the confusion?

And why are animal products so often treated as the default safe option even when the evidence says otherwise?

The media loves a villain, and “ultra-processed food” is a convenient one. It sounds modern, sinister, and broad enough to carry any anxiety people already have about industrial life. But science is not supposed to exist to flatter our intuitions. It is supposed to sharpen them.

So let’s say it clearly: a category that places processed meat and fortified soy milk under the same ominous umbrella is not precise enough to carry public health messaging on its own. A label that encourages people to fear plant-based alternatives more than animal products is not helping. And a culture that hears “processed” and stops thinking is not becoming healthier. It is becoming easier to mislead.

The fertility study is worth attention. It is not worth turning into another anti-plant panic.

Because the real danger here is not just bad food. It is bad framing. And bad framing has a habit of protecting the very foods doing the most damage while demonising the ones that could help replace them.

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Unlike most other animals, we have to get it from food.

What Is Vitamin C? 🧬

Also known as ascorbic acid, vitamin C is a water-soluble molecule with a long to-do list:

🍊 It builds collagen, the structura…

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Its chemical formula is C₆H₁₄N₄O₂, and it's part of the 20 amino acids used in protein synthesis.

What Do…

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For decades, we’ve been told that to protect our hearts, fuel our brains, and live long healthy lives, we need to eat fish, oily bodies laced with cholesterol, mercury, and microplastics. All because of one thing: omega-3 fatty acids.

But here’s the truth they’d rather you didn’t hear: you don’t need fish. You ne…

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Yet somehow, people still toss around the word “protein” as if it’s exclusive to body parts. As if your liver, kidneys, and muscles didn’t evolve to handle basic biochemistry without a cow’s permission.

Alanine is a non-essential amino acid. That means your body builds it from scratch. Not rare. Not magical. Just biology.

What Is Alanine?

Alanine is a non-essential, glucogenic amino acid with the chemical formula C₃H₇NO₂. It’s one of the 20 amino acids that build proteins in the body, and it’s especially easy to come by, for humans and other animals.

There are two types:

L-alanine – The form your body uses for protein synthesis.

D-alanine – A component of bacterial cell walls. Not relevant unless you're a microbe.

How You Make Alanine — Naturally

Alanine is produced through transamination - a reaction where your body takes pyruvate (from carbohydrate metabolism) and glutamate (from protein turnover or diet), and converts them into alanine using an enzyme called alanine transaminase (ALT).

The reaction:

Pyruvate + Glutamate ⇌ Alanine + α-Ketoglutarate

No meat, no dairy, no excuses.

What Alanine Does

1. Glucose-Alanine Cycle

Muscles use alanine to ferry excess nitrogen to the liver. Once there, the liver turns alanine into glucose (fuel) and disposes of the nitrogen as urea. This cycle keeps blood sugar stable, especially during fasting or intense physical activity. It’s efficient. It’s elegant. It’s entirely independent of a steak.

2. Fuel Supply

Because alanine is glucogenic, it can be turned into glucose - particularly useful when food is scarce or energy demands are high. Still not a reason to kill someone for a sandwich.

3. Protein Construction

Like all amino acids, alanine helps form proteins. It’s found in structural proteins, enzymes, and countless tissues throughout the body. Whether you’re building muscle or healing wounds, you’re using alanine, and you’re already making it.

4. Immune Support

Immune cells can use alanine as an energy source, especially during periods of stress. And no, you don’t need to put another species through stress to get it.

Plant-Based Sources of Alanine

Even though you don’t need to eat alanine, plenty of foods contain it, especially plant foods:

🥡 Soy products (tofu, tempeh, edamame)

🫘 Legumes (lentils, chickpeas, beans)

🍚 Whole grains (corn, rice, oats, wheat)

🥜 Nuts and seeds

Yes, alanine is found in animal products too. But so what? It's like pointing out that water exists in cola. That doesn’t make it a better source or justify the rest of the ingredients.

Clinical Relevance

🧪 Alanine Transaminase (ALT)

ALT is the enzyme that produces alanine and it’s measured in liver function tests. Elevated levels of ALT in the blood can indicate liver damage, hepatitis, or other issues. That’s not about diet, it’s about physiology. Don’t confuse having alanine with abusing it.

🧬 D-Alanine in Research

D-alanine has been studied in some neurological contexts, particularly for schizophrenia. That’s a separate compound with a separate pathway. It’s not the form your body’s making from lentils and pyruvate.

💊 Supplementation

Some athletes take β-alanine to boost carnosine levels in muscles for endurance. That’s not the same as L-alanine. And unless you’re training for something extreme, it’s not remotely necessary. Your body and your diet are doing just fine.

So Why Mention Alanine at All?

Because alanine is a good example of how unnecessary animal use really is. It’s a biochemical reality that exposes the lie behind “you need meat for protein.” No. You don’t even need it for amino acids.

Your body is already doing the work. Your diet, if it’s made of plants, gives you more than enough support. And your ethics don’t have to be sacrificed for molecules your own cells produce on autopilot.

Alanine is made by humans, for humans, inside humans.

You don’t need to steal it from anyone else.

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Another new study has confirmed that people eating plant-based and animal-based diets build muscle equally well.

No, you didn’t misread that. No, there’s no asterisk saying “but only if you eat chicken.” No, it doesn’t matter if you get your pr…

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When asked whether consu…

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This is a question every vegan, or just a person adhering to a plantbased diet, will hear at least once, if not so much their superior oblique muscles will get a thorough workout from all the eye-rolling 🙄

To answer this question, we first need to have an understanding of what protein is.

What is protein?

Protein is found throughout the body, in virtually…

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