On the many different ways to emerge

or, “what can I eat on this diet?”

As I highlighted in my previous post, a number of very effective diets seem to include protein and/or branched chain amino acid (BCAA) restriction. They each provide under 65g of protein and 9g of BCAA per model 2000kcal diet. Arguably the least restrictive of them, and the shiny-newest, the “Emergence Diet”¹—a high-carb, low-fat diet—specifically targets BCAA restriction, rather than any limitation on particular foods. I’m currently experimenting with this way of eating.

It’s a lot less simple than “only eat potatoes” is, though. That complexity has its upsides and downsides. E.g.: you can eat things that aren’t potatoes, yay! You have to maybe do research and think about what to eat and maybe you’ll decide to make weird collagen pancakes and then you’ll probably have to buy exotic reagents and moonlight as an alchemist, boo.²

For that reason, many people following along with Brad’s first trial of his glass noodles-based Emergence Diet on the r/SaturatedFat subreddit have asked for a primer on what is or isn’t allowed, if they don’t want to do exactly what he’s doing. I have been plowing through spreadsheets and search terms to figure out how I’m going to do it, anyway, so I thought I’d write a post with some of my findings to help anyone interested in trying it out decide which foods to use. It is admittedly still pretty numbers-heavy, but a bit lighter and more directed than a spreadsheet with 600 entries.

So, as the old adage tells us “fat burns in the flame of carbohydrate”, let’s emerge.

Brad’s Outline

The clearest summary I could find of Brad’s intentions with the diet was this 12-minute video, so I’ll provide a text version: the diet is based around starch consumption, with fats kept below 10% of calories, BCAA below 8g, and 1oz of gelatin consumed to supplement glycine while keeping BCAA low. He recommends 6 oz of lean meat consumption to get the rest of the BCAAs, which entirely blows the rest of the budget after the gelatin. (1oz, or 28g, of gelatin contains 1.59g of BCAAs. 170g of lean pork, which Brad recommends, contains maybe 7.28g of BCAAs. Which is 8.87g, above the theoretical limit. Maybe he isn’t counting the gelatin, or has fattier pork.)³ That means he can’t get starch from rice, starchy vegetables, etc., because those all have additional BCAA. So the rest of his diet is non-starchy vegetables, fruit, and his staple starches: glass noodles and cassava flour pancakes (made with a “gelatin egg” instead of eggs).

A Word on Dieting, Tryptophan

Please don’t read this article and then just go off and do a diet based on it without researching whether it is safe for you. You should probably speak to your doctor before starting any particular diet, especially a restrictive one, and you should exhaustively research whether the food you plan to eat provides all essential nutrients.

For example, anyone following a diet that relies on gelatin for a significant portion of their protein intake should be careful to consume enough tryptophan. Tryptophan, the amino acid known to be found in high levels in turkey and often used to explain post-Thanksgiving-dinner naps, is entirely absent in gelatin. People who consumed gelatin as their sole protein source would die. (For those wondering, 3oz of turkey breast would provide enough tryptophan to meet the WHO’s daily recommendation for a 2,000kcal diet.)

Potato Diet, Kempner Rice Diet

I just want to note that the potato diet and Kempner rice diet fit the limitations Brad’s diet plan imposes. They’re super low fat and high starch. White rice comes in at 7.72g of BCAA or less for 2000kcal—pretty close to on par with that 6oz of pork. Potatoes are 7.18g⁴ or less per 2000kcal, with sweet potatoes considerably lower. That does mean that they leave very little room for other protein sources. (A diet consisting of 2000kcal rice or potatoes would provide enough tryptophan on its own, and sweet potato is particularly higher.) You could eat the 1oz of gelatin with these and be in pretty much the same BCAA boat as the pork and glass noodles folks, but you would need to not eat the pork, or really any other considerable protein sources, unless you were considerably averaging down the BCAAs in your diet with the allowed ~200kcal oil, and fruit, sugar, juice, and/or non-starchy vegetables.

BCAA Levels (g/2000kcal) for Other Foods of Interest

Obviously, to stay under these limits, you’d have to cap your classic lean protein sources at about 6oz or less, even if you go full starch-only staples for the rest of the diet. The lower in BCAAs you get your staple starches to be, the more you can eat e.g., meat (but it’ll never go above 6oz of lean meat). I’ll list plausible foods for this way of eating below, from least to most BCAAs per 2000kcal (how much you’d get if you basically ate nothing but that food). I’ll also note if a food is particularly low in BCAA/Protein or Isoleucine (maybe the “worst” BCAA?)/Protein ratio.

Almost None

Brad’s sources are glass noodles—which are made entirely of starch and therefore contain no BCAAs, and which you can get many varieties of at Asian grocery stores—and cassava flour, which being made from cassava (aka yuca) is lower in BCAAs than pretty much any other kind of flour. 2000kcal of cassava has only 1.26g of BCAAs, so air fryer yuca fries seem like a good option for averaging down the BCAA levels in your diet to allow for foods higher up the list.

Any “starch” (cornstarch, tapioca starch, etc.) should also be essentially 0g BCAAs, being the isolated starch component of the base grain or tuber. Predictably, though, those won’t just behave like flour, which makes it hard to imagine effectively using them as a staple.

Most fruit is very low in protein, and would average you down. Yellow plantains come in at 2.17g, green plantains 1.32g, and they are low in BCAAs per gram of protein. Some fruits to be wary of: guavas are surprisingly high in protein and BCAAs. A guava-only diet would put you over the limit at 10.32. Florida avocados are surprisingly high in protein and would net 6.23g, basically in non-russet potato range, but avocados should probably be avoided on this diet on account of their high fat content anyway. Apricot, kiwifruit and blackberries are all surprisingly high in protein and BCAAs and won’t likely average you down at all.

So cassava and plantain seem like helpful adjuncts to this diet, providing considerable starch calories with low levels of BCAA. They are low in both absolute BCAAs and BCAA/protein ratio. Most fruit will also help.

Non-starchy vegetables tend to be low in isoleucine/protein ratio (bok choy is surprisingly high), so onions, bell pepper, celery, cabbage, mushrooms, etc. are probably fine–but being so low in calories anyway, they are unlikely to affect protein intake much in either direction. (I suppose if they filled you up enough that they prevented you from eating other foods with protein calories entirely, they could decrease protein intake that way, but calorie restriction isn’t really the focus of this diet, or article.) Spaghetti and acorn squash are low in BCAAs but you’d need to eat 14 pounds of them to reach 2000kcal. Tomatoes also seem fine, but you’d need 24lbs of them for 2000kcal (maybe tomato sauce is easier... still 10lbs).

Staple Range (1g<BCAAs/2000kcal<8g)

Foods in this range provide some protein but, if you ate nothing but these, wouldn’t put you over the BCAA limit. In general, given 8g or so is the target, you can think of foods with BCAA/2000kcal below that level as averaging your total for the day down, and foods with above that amount as averaging it up.⁵ The left column is probably of most interest here for actually planning an emergence diet protocol, but being low on the other columns may also be desirable.⁶

Limiting Things Above Staple Range

As this diet primarily limits protein, you’ll want to limit foods with higher BCAA content than that, assuming a significant number of calories. Beans and peas, even green beans, come in at around double the staple food cutoff, so if you’re consuming any of those you’ll need to limit them pretty strictly and/or counteract them with glass noodles or cassava. As mentioned earlier, the max lean meat you could expect to eat on this diet is 6oz, if you were basically getting the rest of your calories from glass noodles, cassava, and/or fruit/starch/sugar.

As an example, say you wanted to get half of your calories from rice and potatoes. Knowing rice or potatoes would fill your protein budget in themselves, you know you have another half of your total protein budget remaining. You could eat 3oz of lean meat, or 500 calories of green beans (or maybe chickpeas, seemingly the lowest-BCAA bean), if you got the rest of your calories from very-low-protein sources, like glass noodles, cassava, or fruit. (Or uh, maple syrup and orange juice to balance some gelatin-y but still somehow good pancakes, in my case.)

Other than meat and beans, it seems to me that the foods most in need of limiting here are, unfortunately, eggs and dairy. They are high in absolute BCAAs, BCAAs by percentage of protein, and isoleucine to protein ratio. I’ve been adding honey and a splash of skim milk to my green tea in the morning (because the tannins in tea with nothing added can irritate the stomach), but if I thought I was getting more than 10 calories of skim milk in there I’d probably stop. For an example of how high these foods are: 200 calories of eggs has 3.63g of BCAA, so it’s 10x as much as yams. (Gaston was right.) 200 calories of whole milk mozzarella has 2.87g. And it’s 5% isoleucine by protein in each case.

If eggs or dairy are your Rosebud, then their BCAA equivalent for the “6oz lean meat” in the discussion above is 5 large eggs (but this would go just a bit over your recommended fat percentage, for 2000kcal), or about a liter of milk (but the fat content of this, for whole milk, would put you at more than double the recommended % limit for calories from fat). Or 5oz of e.g., part-skim mozzarella, which would also go a bit over your fat limit (whole mozzarella would go way over).

My Protocol

So far, I’ve been trying this diet as, essentially, a riff on the rice and potato diets. So I’ve often been doing the gelatin pancakes in the morning with a lot of syrup, orange juice and fruit to balance down their BCAAs, air fryer potato fries during the afternoon, and making soups with added gelatin (e.g. potato soup, chicken and rice soup but without the chicken, etc.) for dinner, when I’ll also have very very small portions of meat. (Usually I’ve probably been getting around 1oz of ground turkey, trying to keep the tryptophan levels sufficient.) I’ve been eating fruit and baked regular and sweet potatoes relatively at random throughout the day (a baked sweet potato followed by some grapes isn’t a bad dessert). I’ve also done glass noodles in soup a few times, having just gotten out to my Asian supermarket to get a bunch of varieties. I basically jam as many random vegetables into the soup as possible: onions, bell pepper, carrot, celery, cabbage, mushrooms. And I'm taking a multivitamin, which I think anyone on a particularly weird diet should probably do. But having just typed up this analysis, I think I’m going to try to incorporate yucca and plantains—which seem to have especially impressive profiles w/r/t BCAA and isoleucine limitation⁷—into my way of eating to make room for some more meat (or weirder choices, like gluten pasta with tomato sauce), and increase my use of glass noodles to do so as well. And I’ll see how it goes!

Begrudging TL;DR:

If you want to try the BCAA-restricting emergence diet: Eat 1oz of gelatin per day. If you otherwise only get calories from glass noodles, cassava, fruit, starch, sugar, etc., you can eat ONE of: 6oz of lean meat, or 5 large eggs, or about a liter of milk per day. Limit other sources of protein and fat: If you eat other foods (including grains, potatoes, etc., which contain a considerable amount of BCAAs), you’ll need to balance them out by reducing your lean meat/dairy/egg intake. Cassava and plantains seem like particularly interesting staples.

I’ll likely make another post soon about how my protocol is going, and maybe about helpful ways of quickly preparing these foods. If you’d like any help figuring out whether and how specific foods you love could be incorporated into this diet, please feel free to comment and I’ll try and help! I couldn’t really cover everything, so I aimed for foods that either seemed great to incorporate or obviously needed to be managed to limit BCAAs.

1.  It’s called the emergence diet because of its creator Brad’s belief that modern metabolic malaise is the result of humans eating in a way that roughly parallels how some ancestral mammals would prepare for hibernation. Emergence is the nice spring stage where these animals exit the cave and get going again. But I find the possible interpretation where a leaner, metabolically healthier, more energized version of myself emerges from within my current self pretty poetic, too.

2. I am the exact kind of Good Eats-, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt-loving food science junkie who finds doing this appealing anyway.

3. This assumes 6 oz of raw pork, which conservatively estimates the BCAA contribution down.

4. This high-end value for russets–my favorite by far, damn. White come in considerably lower.

5. Remember, though, that you do need protein, or you’ll die. The sum of the WHO’s daily recommendations for valine, leucine, and isoleucine (the three BCAAs) per 2000kcal is 5.27g, so a number that’s not considerably above that means you can’t solely eat these foods, and should supplement with e.g. meat. I’m listing low-BCAA options so you can use them as part of a mixed diet to, in essence, “make room” for high-BCAA foods. Always research your plan to ensure you get enough nutrients.

6. Re: the GF pasta value in this table: obviously there are a wide range of gluten free pastas—chickpea or bean-based ones wouldn’t apply here, being higher in protein. I’m using this entry because “corn and rice flour” seemed to match my experience with Barilla and Ronzoni’s pretty decent gluten free pasta (have eaten it for years, my girlfriend has celiac).

7. Which is presumably why Brad mentioned cassava flour and plantain each briefly in the video, but I had no real understanding of that until I stared enough at spreadsheets.