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EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 4 PERFECT PROTEIN

Protein is the basis of life for every living being—plant, animal, or microbe. You may already understand how critical protein is, but everything else you’ve heard about this substance is probably incomplete or downright incorrect. Protein is a common nutrient you can find abundantly in any Perfect Food. Here is the real story of protein, how it helps you, and how it can harm and fatten you. Be prepared for some surprises!

The public went crazy over the 1838 discovery of protein. Recent diet gurus have largely ignored more than 170 years of protein-related research. You can benefit from the Perfect Formula Diet’s 21st century knowledge for weight loss and health.

Your Protein Is Unique

Except for identical twins, no two people have identical proteins in all their cells. More radical differences in proteins make each species of animal and plant different from the others.

Scientists are still researching how many kinds of proteins you make, but estimates range up to a million. Each fulfills a specific job to keep you functioning. The most abundant protein in your body is collagen, which forms your bone, skin, tendons, and cartilage.

Since unique proteins build each of us, and there are wide differences in proteins among different species of plants and animals, how are you able to put together exactly the proteins you need? The simple answer you are about to read is key to understanding weight, disease, and health.

All proteins are linked assemblies of smaller units called “amino acids.” Just 20 kinds of aminos acids (also called “aminos”) form the proteins of all living things. You can use the proteins from parsley and cilantro, potatoes and rice, beans and bananas, to create your own body cells because you disassemble these plant proteins into their aminos during digestion and put those amino acids together again the way you uniquely require.

The same thing happens if you eat animal foods—you disassemble the protein from that cow or chicken or cheese into its component aminos, and then reassemble the aminos according to your own unique genetic blueprint. However, you will learn the many advantages of using aminos from plants instead of animals to satisfy your nutritional needs.

Building Blocks Of Your Life

So what are amino acids made from? Four basic elements—oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen—are building blocks of all aminos. These four critical elements make up about 96% of the human body. Some aminos contain small amounts of other substances, such as sulfur.

Carbohydrates and fats are comprised only of oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. Nitrogen, then, is the distinguishing element of protein. In addition to containing nitrogen, protein molecules are generally hundreds or thousands of times bigger than carbohydrate and fat molecules.

You may have heard that farmed animals convert carbohydrates in plants into proteins. Such a transformation would be physically impossible. Because carbs do not have any nitrogen atoms and proteins do, carbs cannot be “transformed” into protein any more than gold can morph into lead.

Earth’s Protein Factories

Although there are 20 aminos that together build all plant and animal life, you can simplify this into two important kinds of aminos: the essential and the nonessential. Scientists disagree somewhat on where to draw the line, which can differ by life stage.

A common consensus is that, for people, there are eight kinds of essential aminos and twelve kinds of nonessential aminos. You don’t have to eat the nonessential aminos because your body assembles them as needed. The essential aminos must come from your food.

Plants and micro-organisms (such as bacteria and yeast) are the only natural factories on earth for essential aminos, because so much energy is required to put together all the necessary atoms. The sun supplies enough energy, and plants can directly harvest the sunlight through a process called photosynthesis, which happens primarily in leaves.

All plants, from trees to weeds, must turn non-life into life. To accomplish this routine miracle, plants weave oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and some trace minerals together into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and all living things—plant and animal.

Sun’s Energy Captured

Plants use energy directly captured from the sun to assemble amino acids from molecules in the air and soil. Biologists do not totally understand how plants accomplish this astonishing task, which is the basis for all life on earth.

Why does nitrogen-based fertilizer fuel plant growth? Because nitrogen is the distinguishing element in amino acids, and lots of nitrogen allows plants to manufacture the aminos needed to flourish. On the other hand, a shortage of nitrogen will stunt plant growth.

Proteins make up about 30% of the total dry weight of typical plant cells. Most common food plants assemble the bulk of amino acids in their leaves, and then distribute these essential building blocks throughout the plant for use and storage. Each plant actively regulates the aminos it manufactures, based on its needs and the resources available to it.

Once a plant makes all the amino acids required, it assembles these building blocks into the proteins necessary for its millions of cells to function. There are as many as 20,000 different kinds of proteins in one plant, each actively controlled to optimize the plant’s ability to survive and reproduce.

Animals Are Efficient

Animals get 100% of their essential amino acids from plants or bacteria, either directly by eating plants, by eating other animals who consumed plant foods, or from bacteria that live in their gut and make aminos the animal can absorb. Think about that for a minute.

Animals lack the ability to make essential amino acids because they don’t have to. These basics of life are readily available through plants. For animals, there is a survival advantage in relying on the environment for abundant resources, rather than having to make them from scratch. Calorie for calorie, green veggies—such as romaine lettuce, broccoli, and kale—have twice as much protein as steak.

You can target plant sources to get your essential aminos and skip the animal middleman. When you eat string beans, apples, rice, peas, oatmeal, or any Perfect Food, your body will use the essential amino acids you digest to build its own cells and tissues.

No matter how much meat you eat, you manufacture your cells 100% from plant-formed or bacteria-formed amino acids. Animal protein is recycled plant protein.

You Link Aminos Into Proteins

Did you ever make a paper chain when you were a child? Think of heavy construction paper cut with blunt children’s scissors into thin ribbons of color, ready to be glued into a circle. Remember how you linked each strip to its neighbor before pasting the ends together so you ended up with a long chain for imaginative play?

Your paper chain is an excellent model for understanding how your body makes proteins from aminos. Imagine that the essential aminos are green strips of paper and the nonessential are blue strips. The shades of color are important. There are eight shades of green strips and twelve shades of blue strips. Millions of times each day, your body picks up precisely the strip it needs and joins it to the next strip in the chain. Hundreds or even thousands of amino acid strips form one protein molecule.

To work properly, the amino strips must follow a specific color-coded order, and after the long chain is done, it must be folded or shaped in a precise form to be able to do its job in your body. If even one link in a chain of thousands of aminos is wrong, the entire protein can’t do its job right, and you may get sick or even die.

If the chain is a perfect assembly but the folding is faulty, the results can be similarly dire. Mad cow disease and other dangerous disorders are the results of proteins folded incorrectly.

Every cell in your body, guided by your genetics, has the amazing ability to assemble exactly the proteins it needs from amino acids.

Your Body’s Closet Space Is Limited

Your body stores extra calories as fat because your ancestors may have survived famine with this back-up. But since amino acids are so abundant in just about any diet, including 100% plant-based eating, your body has limited the amount of aminos you can tuck away for later use. After all, why waste energy and space storing something that won’t be needed?

Your body is anticipating a potential calorie shortage, but not a potential amino acid shortage. Your ancestors who stored more amino acids didn’t survive any longer than those who did not; otherwise, any flab around your middle would hold protein instead of fat. The amount of protein your body stores is largely dependent on your height and cannot be increased by reasonable food choices.

To better understand your body’s design, think of how limited your ability to store oxygen is; only a few minutes without air, and you may die. Why is this? Because oxygen is so abundant in the atmosphere, your body anticipates you will be somewhere you’re able to breathe and storing oxygen isn’t necessary.

Seals, as an instructive contrast, must spend long stretches underwater to find their fishy foods. Seals are mammals who get their oxygen from the air, the same as humans. Yet the deepest diving seals can stay underwater for one to two hours, which certainly gives them a survival advantage in securing enough to eat. Seals can store oxygen, far more than land-dwelling humans, in their enormous blood volume, muscles, special abdominal spaces, and spleen.

The takeaway lesson from the seals is that your body will not waste its resources storing even the most essential basics of life, as long as those necessities are readily obtained in the normal environment. For humans, protein is as abundant in whole plant foods as oxygen is in the air.

The Original Recycling

Your Perfect Body has another compelling reason to avoid storing certain amino acids. Some of these building blocks are a toxic threat. Your body specifically targets maintaining these at low levels in its amino acid pools. These deadly aminos must be quickly converted to carbs or fat when you eat too much protein.

While your body’s closet space for amino acids is limited, it’s not nonexistent. Your body stores some amino acids in higher amounts than others, so the need for specific aminos in your diet is not directly proportional to the composition of protein in your body.

You do lose a tiny bit of aminos every day when skin and intestinal cells die and are not retained by your body. These lost aminos are replaced when you eat; plant proteins fill this role admirably. How about when other cells die?

Luckily, your Perfect Body is an amazingly efficient recycler. If you’re an adult, you’re probably not growing (larger fat cells don’t count here). If you are to form vigorous new cells, old, worn out, or damaged cells need to die. On average, your cells divide 25 million times each second to renew your body.

What happens to the old cells? Your body disassembles them and reuses their constituent parts (including amino acids) again and again and again. Small storage pools of aminos are sufficient to accommodate this recycling. Your body craves energy, not more amino acids, to build new cells.

Remember, an amino acid is a building block. Your body can use it again and again, since it retains its integrity. The amount of aminos lost in this process is tiny. Your body, no matter what your age, is especially skilled at conserving and reusing the essential aminos that are more likely to be in relatively limited supply in your diet.

In 2004, three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for clarifying how cells break down proteins that are damaged or no longer needed. Each cell has an intricate inventory control system that speedily removes and recycles the targeted proteins. In fact, if this process doesn’t happen as it should, then diseases may result. The breakdown of old proteins into their amino acid building blocks is just the other side of the formation of new proteins from the now available components.

Interesting fact: birds generally have higher maintenance amino acid requirements than mammals. Birds use the aminos to grow new feathers as the old ones fall off and must be replaced (the bird cannot recycle the aminos in a feather that has drifted to the ground). Many birds are plant eaters and comfortably meet their high amino acid requirements without animal foods.