WHAT ARE PROTEINS?
When people talk about
food having protein do they know what they are talking about? Do
you know what protein is? Most people know in a general sort of way, that meat like steak,
hamburger and chicken and fish have protein. That's because they are made of muscles and other tissue that is constructed out of biological material generically know as protein. Protein is a vital building block of all biological organisms. But there are many thousands, in fact
hundreds of thousands of proteins throughout nature. What do they have in common? Proteins are made of chemicals called amino acids. So by eating
protein, your body can deconstruct the proteins and get a source of amino acids to use for building..
WHY DO VEGETARIANS HAVE TO WORK HARDER TO GET PROTEIN?
Because many non meat proteins may not have all the amino acids the body needs. Therefore,
vegetarians need to insure that they are getting a variety of protein sources that have the adequate amino acids. See the famous book Diet for A Small Planet by Francis Moore Lappe.
WHAT DO PROTEINS DO IN THE BODY?
What don't proteins do in the body? Besides being structural parts, proteins are involved as enzymes that make chemical reactions possible. Insulin, for example, is a protein made in the pancreas and released into the blood stream to push the glucose in the blood into the cells of the body. Prescription insulin is made by bacteria that have been programmed with the genes to manufacture insulin. Although the
human body has hundreds of thousands of proteins and proteins are made by following the instructions of genes, the body is estimated to have 25,000 or 30,000 genes. So the manufacture of a protein is not just a one to one correspondence with a gene. In fact,
it's turning out that the old idea of genes as long strands of dna is just a part of the whole genetic story. Besides the fact that
dna strands are broken apart and recombined in new arrangements there are other factors added to the dna that impact the genetic behavior, a field called epigenetics, but I digress.
