OMG WHERE do you get you protein?

Why is everyone obsessed with protein? Are we, as a country, so nutritionally dumb-ed down that we believe anything a diet book (with absolutely no real medical research backing it) or a doctor (that died of heart related issues!) says about protein?

This is problem the number one "concern" I receive when I tell people that not only I am following a plant based diet, but my 13 month old son is as well.

Here are some interesting things from http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2007nl/apr/dairy.htm

Please visit the link above for more info and some really interesting charts as well!

Plants--the Original Sources of Protein and Amino Acids

Proteins are made from chains of 20 different amino acids that connect together in varying sequences—similar to how all the words in a dictionary are made from the same 26 letters. Plants (and microorganisms) can synthesize all of the individual amino acids that are used to build proteins, but animals cannot. There are 8 amino acids that people cannot make and thus, these must be obtained from our diets—they are referred to as “essential.”

After we eat our foods, stomach acids and intestinal enzymes digest the proteins into individual amino acids. These components are then absorbed through the intestinal walls into the bloodstream. After entering the body’s cells, these amino acids are reassembled into proteins. Proteins function as structural materials which build the scaffoldings that maintain cell shapes, enzymes which catalyze biochemical reactions, and hormones which signal messages between cells—to name only a few of their vital roles.

Since plants are made up of structurally sound cells with enzymes and hormones, they are by nature rich sources of proteins. In fact, so rich are plants that they can meet the protein needs of the earth’s largest animals: elephants, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and cows. You would be correct to deduce that the protein needs of relatively small humans can easily be met by plants.

People Require Very Little Protein

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that men and women obtain 5% of their calories as protein. This would mean 38 grams of protein for a man burning 3000 calories a day and 29 grams for a woman using 2300 calories a day. This quantity of protein is impossible to avoid when daily calorie needs are met by unrefined starches and vegetables. For example, rice alone would provide 71 grams of highly useable protein and white potatoes would provide 64 grams of protein.⁸

Our greatest time of growth—thus, the time of our greatest need for protein—is during our first 2 years of life—we double in size. At this vigorous developmental stage our ideal food is human milk, which is 5% protein. Compare this need to food choices that should be made as adults—when we are not growing. Rice is 8% protein, corn 11%, oatmeal 15%, and beans 27%.⁸ Thus protein deficiency is impossible when calorie needs are met by eating unprocessed starches and vegetables.

The healthy active lives of hundreds of millions of people laboring in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America on diets with less than half the amount of protein eaten by Americans and Europeans prove that the popular understanding of our protein needs is seriously flawed.

You Don’t Need Beans or to “Combine” Your Foods

Many investigators have measured the capacity of plant foods to satisfy protein needs. Their findings show that children and adults thrive on diets based on single or combined starches, and grow healthy and strong.¹⁰ Furthermore, no improvement has been found from mixing plant foods or supplementing them with amino acid mixtures to make the combined amino acid pattern look more like that of flesh, milk, or eggs. In fact, supplementing a food with an amino acid in order to conform to a contrived reference standard can create amino acid imbalances. For example, young children fed diets based on wheat or corn and supplemented with the amino acids tryptophan and methionine in order to conform to the standard requirements set by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) developed negative responses in terms of nitrogen balance (the body's utilization of protein).¹⁰

People who are worried about getting sufficient protein will sometimes ask me if they can still follow the McDougall Diet if they do not like beans. From the chart above, you will notice that any single starch or vegetable will provide in excess of our needs for total protein and essential amino acids—thus there is no reason to rely on beans or make any efforts to food combine different plant foods to improve on Nature’s own marvelous creations.

Potatoes Alone Suffice

Many populations, for example people in rural Poland and Russia at the turn of the 19^th century, have lived in very good health doing extremely hard work with the white potato serving as their primary source of nutrition. One landmark experiment carried out in 1925 on two healthy adults, a man 25 years old and a woman 28 years old had them live on a diet primarily of white potatoes for 6 months. (A few additional items of little nutritional value except for empty calories—pure fats, a few fruits, coffee, and tea—were added to their diet.)¹¹ The report stated, “They did not tire of the uniform potato diet and there was no craving for change.” Even though they were both physically active (especially the man) they were described as, “…in good health on a diet in which the nitrogen (protein) was practically solely derived from the potato.”

The potato is such a great source of nutrition that it can supply all of the essential protein and amino acids for young children in times of food shortage. Eleven Peruvian children, ages 8 months to 35 months, recovering from malnutrition, were fed diets where all of the protein and 75% of the calories came from potatoes. (Soybean-cottonseed oils and pure simple sugars, neither of which contains protein, vitamins, or minerals, provided some of the extra calories.)¹² Researchers found that this simple potato diet provided all the protein and essential amino acids to meet the needs of growing and small children.

Excess Protein Causes Diseases of Over-nutrition

Unlike fat, protein cannot be stored. When it is consumed in excess of our needs, protein is broken down mostly by the liver, and partly by the kidneys and muscles. Consumption in excess of our needs overworks the liver and kidneys, and can cause accumulation of toxic protein byproducts.

Proteins are made of amino acids, and are, therefore, acidic by nature. Animal proteins are abundant in sulfur-containing amino acids which break down into very powerful sulfuric acid. These kinds of amino acids are abundant in hard cheese, red meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs, and their acids must be neutralized by buffers found in the bones. The bones dissolve to release the buffering materials; eventually resulting in a condition of weakened bones, known as osteoporosis. Released bone materials often settle and coalesce in the kidney system, causing kidney stones. Fruits and vegetables are largely alkaline, preserving bone health and preventing kidney stones.¹³ (A more detailed discussion of the health consequences from excess protein is found in my January 2004 newsletter article: Protein Overload.)

Diseases of over-nutrition are directly connected to planet health, too. Recommendations to eat animal foods for protein have resulted in an environmental catastrophe. Livestock produces 18% of the greenhouse gases; these food-animals occupy 26 percent of the ice-free surface of the Earth and 33 percent of the total arable land is used to produce their food. One telling tragedy is they account for the deforestation of 70 percent of Amazon rainforests, which act as the “lungs of the Earth.”¹⁴ (A more detailed discussion of the environmental damage from livestock is found in my December 2006 newsletter article: An Inconvenient Truth: We Are Eating Our Planet To Death.)