re: Are plant-based protein powders as effective as animal-based ones?

There is not a lot of scientific literature supporting pomegranate juice for atherosclerosis. Most of the data I’ve seen comes from one guy in Israel that rules a lipid research center, which should give you pause. The study you cited had 19 patients, was single center and was unblinded which allows for tons of bias, not a high quality study. The same author seemed to understand that so was involved in a much bigger, multicenter, double blinded, randomized, higher quality followup study that showed no difference. They scoured the data retrospectively looking for something and found a subset of the group where they saw a difference but that is just another form of bias. To be trusted that subgroup would have to be tested in a randomized prospective blinded trial.

I’m not talking about you, but there are people on this site that form conclusions and tell other people what to do based on poor quality evidence that is likely to be untrue because they don’t understand how to interpret scientific literature. It is an absolutely critical skill if you want to understand these studies and how they fit into the broader scope. I think Peter Attia did a couple hour podcast on it that is probably a good place to start