Yes, but you have to eat more plants and the amino acid spectrum is not always complete. An equivalent amount of red meat has 40% more protein than chickpeas, 400% more than green peas and 300% more than lentils.
And the equivalent calories of red meat has 50% the protein of seitan.
At equivalent mass, red meat has 30% the protein of seitan.
If you're going to pick one nutrient of comparison (which doesn't even make sense since we need more than protein), why wouldn't you compare foods that are dense in that nutrient? Would you accept someone comparing tofu to pig skin to conclude that plants massively dominate animal flesh in protein?
Chickpeas were the most nutrient dense plant protein I could think of. I hadn't heard of seitan before this comment and looking into the amino acids it provides shows that it’s not nutritionally complete.
Can you give me the definition of nutritionally complete that applies to seitan but not red meat considering that seitan, at the same amount of calories, is more amino acid dense than a steak according to Cronometer?
Let's pretend you can only eat 500 calories per day (which is usually part of the weird implication in these claims). Seitan gives you 100%+ of all EAAs except one (70%). A steak gives you 100%+ of the EAAs except for three (85%, 80%, 77%). Seitan also contains double the total protein of the steak.
Wouldn't you have the bite the bullet on steak being nutritionally deficient if seitan is?
If that's not good enough for you, we could look at another protein dense plant-based food: TVP aka soy chunks. 500 calories of soy chunks have 100%+ of the EAAs, 25g more protein than steak, in 50g less food than steak.
Protein isolate powder has more protein than red meat, so you should be eating that, not meat, by this measure.
* The density of protein is not important at all. What is important is that you get the sufficient daily amount of protein, which is easily achievable by eating plant-based foods only.
* It is a myth that the "amino acid spectrum" is not always complete. Plants contain all essential amino acids, and as long as you aren't on a strict white-rice diet, you'll get everything you need from a modest variety of foods.
