Protein Is Parts

[Guest guest]

Protein Is Parts

JoAnn Guest

Nov 14, 2003 17:50 PST

 

Protein Is Parts

 

 

Thoroughout these pages, I will tell you a bit about how I came to

be a total vegetarian over the course of twenty years. The rest of

the What is Worth Doing? section will tell you why we don't have

that long for everyone else to convert. I am a research fanatic, so

please contact me if you can add to my body of knowledge. I am

always looking for good research results.

 

ur bodies are not cars. But an analogy to cars is extremely useful.

They both need a constant supply of fuel to burn, a reasonable

amount of water to keep the engine cool (imagine how much water your

car engine would need if it couldn't recycle the stuff) a little

oil, and a few new parts now and then. The need for fuel and water

dwarfs the need for new oil and new parts. For humans, the fuel is

carbohydrates. The oil is fat. The parts are amino acids. This is

the fundamental message: protein is parts, and you don't need as

much as you think.

Amino acids are the building-blocks of protein. Different

combinations of amino acids form the basis of blood cells, brain

cells, hair cells, skin cells, and so on. Many amino acids we can

make ourselves, some we need to get from food. The 9 or 10 amino

acids we need from our diet are found abundantly in mother's milk,

starches, vegetables, and leaves. But shhh!, there are people who

don't want us to know this. They want us to think amino acids have

to be combined to imitate the proportions of amino acids found in

meat and eggs. They want us to think this is a terribly complicated

business. They don't want us to know how efficient our bodies are at

replacing parts.

The protein myth tells us that protein is fuel. I run ten

kilometers under forty minutes, yet I haven't had meat for seven

years. I know several vegetarian weight lifters. In fact, Stan

Price, who holds the world record for the bench press, is

vegetarian, as are a lot of other Olympic athletes. Big people and

small people are vegetarians. Without exception, the other people in

my running club have seen their times go down since becoming

vegetarians. My coach says in ten years most athletes going to the

Olympics will be complete vegetarians. It's just a matter of getting

the information out to people. The need for lots of protein is not

an individual need so much as a fear-driven belief reinforced by

society.

 

Take the Protein Challenge

 

Remember how your mom told you you need to get your protein every

day? Where did your mom get her training in nutrition? Same place my

mom did: from TV. If it's on TV, it must be real. But if something

doesn't add up, check your assumptions. There isn't a documented

case of protein deficiency in this country that isn't associated

with a calorie deficiency. In other words, if you're absorbing

enough calories, you are getting enough protein. This isn't strictly

true. If you got all your calories from white sugar, you'd be

missing some amino acids. If you got all your calories from Crisco,

you'd be missing some amino acids. But if you got all your calories

from pretzels, you'd come up with scurvy before you showed any signs

of protein deficiency.

To prove this, I will pay you $20 for every documented case of

protein-only deficiency (in the presence of 1400 calories or more

absorbed daily) you can find in this country. This is your chance to

get rich. Get out there and scour the medical literature so you can

fill my mailbox with documented cases. I have my checkbook ready.

 

 

The Grim History

 

The funny thing about the protein myth is that the doctors are the

last to get it. Every single doctor in this country agrees that

babies grow healthy and strong with a diet that consists of only 6%

protein. In fact, every doctor in this country agrees that 6% is too

much, because babies need to be protected against malabsorption and

different needs, so 6% actually exceeds any particular child's

requirements. There is absolutely no argument on this issue. Why?

Because that's how much protein is in mother's milk. Always has

been. Always will be.

Then, for reasons only the USDA can understand, many doctors in this

country get the idea that when a baby turns two years old, he or she

must immediately start to consume a diet with about 30% of calories

as protein.

You may be wondering how this came to be. The answer is that the

Dairy Council lucked out a long time ago, when a pair of scientists,

T.B Osborne and L.B. Mendel, published a paper on the subject in

1914. At the time, it was the accepted procedure to do experiments

on rats and infer from these studies the results for the human

population. As it turns out, baby rats double their birthweight in

four days. Rat mother's milk is 49% protein. Osborne and Mendel

showed that rats cannot mature on protein exclusively derived from

plant sources. They then deduced that humans cannot mature on

protein exclusively derived from plant sources.

That was all the dairy farmers and cattle ranchers needed to know.

They soon came up with their famous " Four Food Groups, " and realized

that PR was the best way to keep people addicted to their products.

The protein myth is fueled by our friends at the Beef Council, the

Poultry Board, the Egg Council, and the Dairy Council. The same

people who hire the huge ad firms to tell us about nutrition and ask

us if we " got milk? " . They are the same people who tell the USDA how

to educate the country on nutrition issues, and in fact they pay for

much of the teaching materials used in our schools, because they are

the same people who give (rancid, out of date) surplus dairy

products to our schools for free, so that our kids can have strong

bones. If the schools didn't take these cut-rate donations, our kids

would all suffer from osteoporosis and protein deficiency, so the

USDA lets the various councils tell us what to eat. Actually, that's

not the real reason the USDA is so compliant. The real reason is

that they have been bought, sold, and paid for since the USDA was

invented. This is documented, but not well known, as you can imagine.

If humans were huge rats, we would need the amount of protein we eat

every day in this country. Baby rats cannot survive on human

mother's milk, yet we can. Gorillas grow to be big and strong on

leaves, roots, and fruits. Our digestive tracts are

indistinguishable from gorillas' digestive tracts, and I mean this

in very scientific terms. Our dentition is also closer to gorillas'

than to any of our other cousins (see my The Three Enchiladas

Illicit Powwow for more on one of our near cousins, the bonobos).

 

The Bottom Line

 

Because I was still clinging to protein sources that were going to

save me when Jane Brody at The New York Times (one of the most

gullible, or should I say lazy, journalists on the face of the

planet) told me the low-protein diets were wrong. I found out how

many grams of protein I was supposed to get per day and made sure I

had plenty of beans, peanut butter, and tofu. I balanced my amino

acids by combining proteins. Frankly, I had hummus coming out my

ears.

That is when I learned how bad the situation is in this country. The

average American gets almost twice as much protein as even our

government recommends! If you follow the guidelines of the people we

lovingly refer to as nutrition experts at the National Research

Council (sounds pretty scientific, doesn't it?), we find that we are

supposed to get 1g protein per kg of body weight. That means I am

supposed to get 60 grams of protein a day. The average American gets

about 100 grams per day, and that leads to all kinds of health

problems. I'll go into this subject in another paper, but you should

know that for five years I've been trying hard to stay under 30

grams of protein per day, and if you ask anyone who knows me she'll

say I'm in great shape. The World Health Organization's recommended

protein levels are half of the U.S. levels, and that includes

a " safety factor " margin of 30%. I recommend every man, woman, and

child in this country go out of his or her way to stay under 40

grams of protein per day.

But don't take my word for it. The New York Times already reported

on it and then forgot about it. As usual, Jane Brody is confused,

but on Oct 27, 1993, her " Eating Well " column included many of the

things I've just told you. Then, in a New York minute, she went back

to reporting on fish oil and how many eggs a week were okay. Why?

Because her readers don't want to know about the health benefits of

total vegetarianism. It's not " main stream. " Noam Chomsky is dead

right.

 

Out of Gas, or Out of Parts?

It's possible to feel tired, fatigued, and run down, but not from a

lack of protein. Lack of protein would be something like hair

falling out, nails not growing, loose teeth-things like that. After

six months on a low-protein diet, I had more energy, not less. It

took that long to get over my psychological dependence on protein.

Once I stopped substituting one protein for another, I started

seeing and feeling the results. I have absolutely no taste for

animal products, and that has nothing to do with environmental or

humane concerns. Here's a tip: When you hear or see the words " high

quality protein, " stay away. Don't consume whatever it is, even if

it looks like a vegetable (unless, of course, you know it's a

vegetable).

Do you have to combine foods to get " complete' protein? " If protein

were fuel, you might. But protein isn't fuel, it's parts. Combining

proteins is like saying that because your car has four brakes, two

headlights, and one transmission, you have to replace them all at

the same time in those proportions, every time you get gas. The

woman who invented food combining, Frances Moore Lappe, has finally

denounced it, saying " It's almost impossible to have an amino-acid

imbalance or shortage. "

But what about people who work out in the gym every day? Don't they

need more protein than the rest of us? If you read Muscle magazine,

you can find a hundred studies showing that " quality protein " builds

muscles fast. If you thought that eating powdered gorillas' feet

built strong bodies, they'd sell you powdered gorillas' feet, and

they'd back it all up with studies. Don't laugh. This same basic

thing happens with sharks' fins and tigers' testicles every day.

Unfortunately, your body is not mostly protein. It's mostly water,

about 10 percent protein, 3 percent calcium, and about 15 percent

fat. (More or less. I am about 10 percent fat.)

A diet with five percent of its calories as protein is enough to add

muscle mass as fast as you can put it on in the gym, provided you

don't go hungry. Why? Because when it comes to protein, your body is

extremely efficient. Muscles respond to physical stress by

increasing in bulk--most of which is water. When your weight goes up

and down as shown on your bathroom scale, you are manipulating

stores of water and fat, while your protein mass stays about the

same. When you work out in the gym, your body responds by being

hungrier and asking for more calories (it wants to build up its

stores of glycogen against future demands you might make on it).

You can't use more than five percent of your calories as protein

because amino acids are recycled by our bodies. When a cell dies,

its amino acids become available as building blocks for another

cell. Studies on mice show that females are able to abort a

pregnancy if conditions warrant it. They reabsorb the fetus and

reuse the protein. Our bodies are constantly recycling amino acids

and getting rid of the excess protein we eat. How? By binding

calcium to the extra proteins and sending the globs through your

kidneys, where they turn into kidney stones. Anything more than

eight percent protein in your diet and your whole system must work

overtime to get rid of it. You need protein every day, but you don't

need much. More protein means fewer carbos. A balanced diet includes

very little protein. Soy products are full of protein. Too much

protein. Tofu, I'm afraid, is garbage food, no matter what it says

in Vegetarian Times. They have their advertisers too, you know.

Protein really is like parts: you only need it when things wear out,

which happens quite slowly. Eating a high- or medium-content protein

diet is like putting nuts and bolts in your gas tank. It clogs the

valves and starves the engine. It is very hard to turn parts into

fuel, yet your body will do it if need be. And guess what? Starches

have all the protein men and women need. In fact, a potato has 11

percent of its calories as protein-all you need. Vegetables have

even more. If you ate two cups of rice at breakfast, another two

cups at lunch, and another two cups at dinner, your amino acid needs

would be more than met. I go out of my way *not* to combine beans

and rice, just so people can see that I'm still here.

 

Starch and Salad

 

Only a high-carbohydrate, low-protein, high-water, low-sodium, low-

fat diet can provide you with the fuel your brain and body need to

function at its peak. I call it the starch and salad diet. If you're

underweight, exercise more and eat more fat. If you're overweight,

exercise more and eat no fat. Starch and salad. Simple. Nothing to

count.

Those of us who took nutrition classes in the '70s and early '80s

are going on useless information. Dieticians and nutritionists with

long-standing reputations to uphold write the best-selling books and

appear on television shows. They don't change their views when new

research comes out. A proper, healthy diet isn't an interesting talk-

show topic.

 

Besides, the medical community makes more money fixing problems

than preventing them.

The best, safest guidelines I can give you are to eat a diet whose

caloric content consists of about 8-10% protein, 5-10% fat, and the

rest complex carbohydrates from fresh grains, roots, seeds, and

greens. Don't worry about protein. Just go for the starch and salad

and forget the rest.

 

I'll get a Venn diagram up here as soon as I can. Sorry. -Dave

 

http://www.dsiegel.com/wiwd/diet/protein.html

 

JoAnn Guest

mrsjo-

DietaryTi-

http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Melanoma.html