The Truth about needing proteins and what are amino acids?
Image courtesy of Freestocks
“We need to eat protein to survive”.
But what are these? Proteins are used within the human body to form enzymes, hormones, tissue, to transport and for the immune system, among others. Of course they’re vital to us.
Amazing pic by Enrico Mantegazza
What are proteins?
Proteins are chains of amino acids, so a very useful concept to understand how a vegan diet works is protein’s quality. This depends on the amount of amino acids it has.
From this point of view, animal products have a high protein quality, because most of them have all the essential amino acids. The same as if someone would eat us, they would get all our proteins for them. Because all the amino acids would be in us. Yes, you’re starting to guess how it works.
So, do we need to EAT all the proteins in the same way as we need them? The answer is no.
What we actually need is to have amino acids. It’s our body who synthesizes the proteins we require. Even if we consume the very same protein we have in our bodies, our digestive process will break them into smaller molecules of amino acids and form the proteins we need.
Amazing pic by Tom Hermans
What We really need
There are 9 essential amino acids, called this way because our bodies are incapable of producing them, therefore we need to take these from our food. If you want to know which they are, here’s the list:
Histidine
Isoleucine
Leucine
Lysine
Methionine
Phenylalanine
Threonine
Tryptophan
Valine
There are two main considerations then when formulating a good vegan diet: to ensure you have all the foods that will provide the essential amino acids you need, and to provide them at the same time. Yes, they have to be together or at least within less than 3 hours so the digestive system will have them in time to synthesize the required protein with all the ingredients it needs, and this is what a nutritionist needs to take in consideration to recommend a diet.
Let's see some examples
Green peas contain Histidine, Isoleucine, Leucine, Phenylalanine, Threonine and Valine. They are missing: Lysine, Methionine & Tryptophan.
And here’s the reason vegan love so much our their brown rice: it contains Histidine, Isoleucine, Leucine, Lysine, Methionine Threonine, Tryptophan and Valine. Yeap, 8 out of 9. It’s missing Phenylalanine, but, as you can see, green peas do have it, so it will need to be accompanied by the green friends if you want to call it a complete source of amino acids. Or protein.
Another example:
Chickpeas contain Isoleucine, Leucine, Lysine, Methionine, Phenylalanine, Threonine, Tryptophan and Valine – very impressive score as well, but missing: Histidine. But you can combine this friend with pasta to get a full source of amino acids, as this one contains:
Pasta: Histidine, Isoleucine, Leucine, Lysine, Methionine, Phenylalanine, Threonine and Valine. Yes, it’s missing Tryptophan, but as we said before, combination is the trick.
This explains how a horse can have muscles formed with high quality protein, even though they eat grass and fruits; how a cow can produce such a high-protein content product as milk.
There’s more to it, of course. It’s not that simple. But this may explain how a vegan athlete can be so healthy, so powerful and have so high marks, even when he or she doesn’t eat this so called great thing “animal protein”.
There’s one more thing to say about consuming animal protein, but I’ll save that for the article “Proteins and toxins”. Hang in there. See you around, and take care :)