HI I'm Dr. Jason Barker with the Natural Athlete's Clinic and today I want to make
a video about the differences between plant
and animal proteins - so hold on before your eyes roll back in your head "oh no
here's another video somebody telling me how I should eat".
That's not what this one is about I just want to provide you some biochemical
information about how these different proteins are
assimilated in your body so that you can make a decision on what your diet should
be because after all it comes down to biochemical
individuality - not really which diet you follow because
after all, there is no perfect diet, there never will be a perfect diet.
If you follow nutrition science, you know that one day a study comes out that says
this is the diet that's going to save your life and by the way this is the
diet that's going to kill you and then a month later there's another
couple of studies that come out to say the complete opposite so it'll make your
head spin. Really i think we should be eating small
amounts of a wide variety of foods and really the
more importantly than what diet you follow is what kind of foods do you not
eat - are you not eating processed stuff? or you're not eating a bunch of sugar?
fried food? all that other garbage because that stuff will kill you faster
than any type of diet that you follow okay as long as that's a healthy diet.
All right so what are proteins? Well, proteins are one of our main
macronutrients - we also need fat and we also need carbohydrates to be
healthy. Now carbohydrates tend to come packaged all
by themselves so if you look at a piece of broccoli that's a carbohydrate,
an apple is a carbohydrate, wheat is a carbohydrate, when we grind that wheat up
into flour and those foods that we make from that flour those are carbohydrates,
and then when you look at a nut for instance, there are some protein and fat
in that nut. Same thing with a piece of steak, there's
protein and fat wrapped up in there so in mother nature,
the way she makes food is that protein and fats tend to come wrapped together
and carbs are kind of by themselves. So backing up though, what are proteins
made out of? They're made out of amino acids. So the best analogy I can give you
is that amino acids are like letters and proteins are like words. So if I give
you lots of amino acids or letters, you can make lots of words so
humans only need 20 amino acids to be healthy okay - there are many, there are
probably hundreds of different amino acids in mother nature and there's
probably thousands of proteins but humans only need those 20 amino acids.
Now 11 of those amino acids are
non-essential - meaning we can make them in our body. We can make them from
another other amino acids or we can make them from other compounds
whereas nine of those amino acids are termed
essential meaning that we need to get those from our diet.
Now when you take a look at some different protein type foods sometimes
you'll see them labeled as a complete protein or an incomplete protein. So most
often animal proteins are complete because they contain all 20 of those
amino acids that we need whereas plant proteins are often
incomplete because they don't contain all those essential amino acids so
that's an important point I'm going to make in a little bit here is because
if you're eating lots and lots of plant foods for example and you're not getting
enough of those essential amino acids, you're not going to be able to
synthesize enough of the protein that you want. So think about if I give you a
bunch of construction material to build a house
and I give you enough of everything except for wood
then you're not going to be able to build that whole house right? You're only
going to be able to build half of it or however much
of that essential ingredient that I gave you. So
that is the big difference here between plant and animal proteins. Now when
nutrition scientists look at this they look at how bioavailable
are different proteins - they've got a number of different ways of measuring
this in a couple of different scales out there
but in general you'll see these bioavailability scales going from 100
down to zero and you'll find that most animal
proteins are near the top at 100. Whey protein is very high, it is an extract
kind of a cheese production which comes from cow milk right or other types of
milk, eggs, steak, beef, those are all very high
and then when you start to get down to around 75 or 50 that's when you'll start
seeing these plant proteins show up on that
bioavailability scale which tells us that plant proteins are
about 25 to 50 percent less bioavailable. Now what does that mean?
So just because you put something in your body
doesn't mean that you're going to use it and assimilate it so when we think about
protein and how we're going to assimilate it, you need to think about
how well is it digested, how well is it absorbed and how well has
it assimilated. okay so there's a lot that goes into
this science and figuring out how bioavailable these different proteins
are. Now the problem is is that as I told you animal proteins
are very easily absorbed and utilized in our body
to make protein and by the way our protein is our muscles, it's our skin,
it's our hair, our nails, so we need plenty of protein to do all those things
or to make all those things. Plant proteins have a couple of
different limitations with them that keep us from
absorbing it as well. Now does that mean that
plant protein is not as good as animal protein? No. Absolutely not - they're made
out of the same amino acids, they're just in different combinations
right and in different amounts. But going back to why we can't absorb
plant proteins is because a couple different reasons: one of them
is a structural issue. So plant proteins just the way they're kind
of folded up in their structure actually kind of protects part of that
protein molecule from our digestive enzymes so we can't really get to it as
well so remember when i said when you look at a
piece of steak you're essentially looking at a big hunk of muscle which is
primarily protein, so it's easy for our digestive enzymes
to get to all of that and break it down whereas if you look at that
broccoli, there's a little bit of protein and broccoli, very small amount but
when you look at that plant food that's not all protein that you're looking at -
you're looking at fiber and lots of other nutrients and things like that so
our digestive system has to work a lot harder
to extrapolate and digest and break down and absorb that protein from that
plant. So you have a structural issue as I mentioned there are other
nutrients in the plants that need to be kind of pushed past so there's things
like polysaccharides which are just long chain sugars
and there's fiber of course that your digestive enzymes have got to work to
get that protein away from and then there's also
other anti-nutrients in there so there's things like
phytic acid there's hemoglobin ace there's tannins, there's all kinds of
chemicals in plants that actually impede how our digestive
enzymes work. So there's a few ways of getting around
this and that is by cooking your plant protein. So
heat helps inhibit those compounds you know like with
nuts and seeds and certain beans you can soak them to get rid of the phytic acid
so you can germinate or you can sprout grains that also cuts down on the phytic
acid so there's a number of ways that we can cook plant proteins to make that
protein more bioavailable and there's lots of
different studies on different proteins but
in general you're going to get an increase of about 18 to 20 percent of
that protein availability if you kind of cook those
plant proteins. So that's the big difference, animal protein
is a lot more easily digested and assimilated in your body
whereas plant proteins it's harder for you to do that.
And by the way remember because those plant proteins are
often incomplete, you need to eat a wide variety of different plants in order to
get enough of those different amino acids so
that you wind up with plenty of those essential amino acids so that you can
synthesize your own protein production. These people
that I see in the clinic who come in and they're vegetarian and they say oh yeah
I have cereal for breakfast and you know i'll
do like mac and cheese at lunch and I'll have a
cheese pizza for dinner or something like that,
they're not getting a wide variety of proteins in their diet, they're not
getting a wide variety of amino acids and they're protein deficient and that
probably works for a sedentary person who sits at work all day
and then comes home and sits around again but if you're an active or
athletic person, that isn't going to fly. You're
definitely going to be protein deficient eating like that so
vegans vegetarians need a wide variety of plants in their diet.
Omnivores you need the plants as well in your diet because there's other health
reasons. Okay I hope that helps you guys
understand the difference of how you assimilate plant protein versus animal
proteins. Of course share the video, don't forget
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