I don't find lab grown 'synthetic' animal products palatable. And I don't have any interest in consuming textured soy either. Akhas.
I honest to god never cut down on plant foods because I had some obsession with meat, dairy, eggs and seafood. It just intuitively happened. I had gotten out of shape in the middle of my Uni years but decided to get my shit together during my final year and lost like 80% of the weight I'd gained just from cutting out processed foods. I was still even eating rice and pasta with lunch and had plenty of vegetables with my lunches and dinners but I'd removed breads and anything out of a box. Whole foods all the way.
But then I just kept noticing things as my health improved. I kept wanting to tweak and tweak and see if I couldn't lean out more or feel better. I gave up rice and pasta because I noticed I'd experience annoying afternoon lulls in energy which I read was due to the large amount carbs (rice and pasta) I was eating with my meat, chicken or seafood during lunch and the general up and down nature of your blood sugar levels when you eat carby meals all day. So I tried a day of just having veggies and meat or chicken or fish for lunch and lo and behold; stable energy all day long and it was the same the next day and the day after that so bye bye rice and pasta. As a side bonus I leaned out a little more over time as well.
After this came the vegetables. To be fair, I overdid it with them. I really bought into the crap the mainstream dietary guidelines and media push on people about vegetables being great for you and knew nothing about the dangers of excess fiber, of antinutrients and phytoxins and so on. Every night I'd bloat like a pregnant women which is actually fairly common among Vegans:
It was excruciating and uncomfortable as heck. I tried whatever I could from Betaine HCL to apple cider vinegar to chewing my food into utter mush before swallowing it. Only gave me some relief. Eventually I stumbled upon studies, books and lectures on the dangers I spoke of and I was skeptical but I gave it a shot and tried one day of just eating meat, cheese, eggs and some chicken. No bloat. Nothing. Flat stomach all day. Once again, I never looked back.
I only gave up fruits out of curiosity. Personally, I think they're some of the only plant foods that are semi okay. In reality the only part of a plant a plant actually even wants you to eat. No plant wants you to eat its body (vegetables) or its offspring (grains & seeds) so they pack these parts with as many toxins as possible to discourage their consumption. Humans have found ways around this through the millennia. Cooking, fermenting, powdering and so forth and these methods are useful if you have a healthy gut microbiome which most people do not and do not make these foods the basis of your diet but instead treat them as supplementary to things like meat but that's become less and less the case for many poor fools nowadays.
Nevertheless, I noticed some minor leaning out when I removed fruits from my diet alongside more stable energy levels and, for whatever reason, reintegrating them always makes me feel weird after. Minor sore throat, watery stools (sorry!) and so forth. Though I am curious to see how I'll react to wild varieties of fruits like berries and unsprayed organic stuff once I can get my hands on it. Kinda hard to come across here in the UAE. Not to mention that
most modern fruits are highly unnatural and basically man-made. Much sweeter than their ancient, wild counterparts our ancestors would have scavenged for
when they were in season.
All of this coupled with how I built
this physique rather easily on mainly meat and dairy pretty much sold me on all the literature I was reading on the importance of animal foods over plants. And that one, if they so desire, can most certainly get every single nutrient they need off of things like meat, organs and so forth. That and following the Vegan movement closely for years and noticing how many of them eventually drop out due to the same health issues I was experiencing ramped up to 11 + other issues due to deficiencies:
A lot of people don't realize that even for the nutrients that are found in both plants and animals you will generally struggle to absorb them from plants due to antinutrients and fiber. For example, there is iron in spinach indeed but the oxalates in it greatly hinder the absorption of that iron and any other minerals and the methods that exist to lower the oxalate content also denatures the nutrients. Even "Vegan doctors" will advise vegans to take it easy on things like Spinach and Kale due to the risks that come with oxalates like kidney stones.
Along this vein I also shake my head whenever I see someone blabbering about "plant protein". Unless it's a protein powder isolate, most plant protein is pretty hard to get to and wrapped in indigestible fiber. This is why it's hilariously sad when you see fools on the web comparing something like protein in broccoli to protein in steak. Steak protein is pretty much 99% bioavailable. You will take in pretty much all of that protein with ease. Broccoli? Almost none of it or less than half and whatever protein you do get is usually low quality whereas the steak will have all the essential aminos + non-essential but very useful ones to top up your own natural supply with like creatine
where they've shown that vegetarians who take creatine supplements notice improvements, even cognitively.
It truly is a crime how much people have been lied to with this plant-based nonsense. None of it is even sustainable without a global supply-chain and monoculture fields where animals have to die anyway and biodiversity had to be cleared for a monoculture:
Where in nature would you even encounter this kind of absurd variety of plants like what we have now in the modern world? Top that off with something like the vegan diet absolutely requiring supplementation of various nutrients with the supplements usually being synthetic as things like vitamin D3 cannot be found outside of animal foods and thus they have to make approximations of them with these synthetic supplements not absorbing as well as the real thing and even being downright poisonous in some cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO--6mFLcTg&ab_channel=VeganPhobic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7zV0l4Ii2s&t=593s&ab_channel=sv3rige
Just eat the meat, kids. Seriously.