Why Protein Is Good For You
No one would ever confuse you with being the most observant person but by now you’ve probably noticed that the packaging of everything you want to eat has something in big, bold print about it having protein.
Shit, there are even diets like Atkins and Paleo that are built around the stuff. And let’s not forget the puny sales clerk who starts spouting off about protein before your entire body is through the entrance of your local supplement store.
So what makes protein so important?
You mean, other than the fact that people who have no vested interest in selling you shit telling you that it’s important?
Well, there are a number of reasons why protein is good for you…
Protein is composed of amino acids, which are long chains of nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. There are 20 amino acids and depending on how the elements are sequenced in a chain, their specific function varies. Some make enzymes and hormones, act as precursors, serve as buffers, and help transport nutrients, among other things. The most widely known function of protein is structural, as it’s the building block of bone, blood, muscle, skin, and hair. But that’s not all. To save time from listing everything in the body that’s made of protein, basically every structure from the tiniest cells to the largest organs is composed of the stuff.
Protein clearly plays a role in a bunch of exciting body processes that you’ve done a remarkably good job of pretending to care about.1Hooray for you! I won’t hold you to pretending any further and will now proceed to inform you of four functions that are vital to your appearance, something we all know is the most important thing in the whole wide world!
REDUCES APPETITE
A study of 311 overweight and obese women split subjects into four groups. Each group followed the Zone, Atkins, LEARN, or Ornish diet.2The Zone diet is a balanced intake of protein, carbs, and fat. Atkins is high protein and low carbs. The LEARN and Ornish diets are both low fat with varying degrees of carb intake. Compared to the 3 to 6 lbs lost by those in the Zone, LEARN, and Ornish groups, the women on the Atkins diet lost 10 lbs at the end of the study. They reported feeling fuller after eating, which indirectly helped them lower their calorie intake.
That there is one of the benefits of protein.
Protein is not only the most filling of the three macronutrients but it also regulates several hormones that influence hunger so you don’t go full Kirby mode and eat everything in sight.3It’s adorable when Kirby, the cute, pink, round Nintendo character, eats everything. But you? Not so much! Yeah, it’s a double standard but hey, that’s life for ya!!!
Anyway, one of the hormones that protein affects is ghrelin. During times of reduced calorie intake, like during a diet or extended period between feedings, more ghrelin than usual gets secreted in the stomach, signaling to the brain that you’re hungry. Protein has the effect of suppressing this hormone’s effect so you don’t overeat during the meal, as well as helping you go without food for some time after.
Other hormones influenced by protein include polypeptide YY (PYY) and cholecystokinin (CCK). These hormones counteract ghrelin, so as levels of that hormone fall with the consumption of protein, their levels rise so your appetite decreases and you feel full.
BOOSTS METABOLISM
As part of a study, 21 overweight adults were put on the same diet for seven months and all lost the same percentage of their body weight. To maintain their new weight, they were then split into three groups with different diets. Low-fat foods comprised one diet, another followed Atkins, and the third consisted of low glycæmic foods like oatmeal, brown rice, and other complex carbs. Those on the high-protein Atkins diet burned 350 more calories per day than the low fat group. The Atkins group also burned 200 more calories than those eating foods with a low glycæmic index.
What can explain the disparity is the thermic effect of food (TEF), or the amount of energy needed by the body to digest and process what’s consumed. Of the three macronutrients, protein has the highest TEF. That means that just by eating protein, you’ll burn a shitload of calories even when you’re doing all that nothing that you seem to spend a lot of time doing.
PROMOTES MUSCLE GROWTH
Cardiac, smooth, and skeletal are the three kinds of muscle tissue in the body. The last one, skeletal tissue, is what you’re talking about when you say “muscle”. One of its functions is movement of the bones, which muscles are attached to via ligaments and tendons.
When a bone has to overcome a force to move itself, like when lifting weights, you create micro-tears in the muscles, which amino acids from protein surround and fill to make the muscle bigger and stronger so it can overcome that force in the future with more ease and less damage.4I know, you go to the gym and do everything other than lift weights. For example, you spend a lot of time camping out on a machine and playing on your phone. But this is what would happen if you were to stop scrolling social media long enough to do a fucking set.
MAINTAINS MUSCLE MASS
All physical activity creates stress on our muscles, no matter how low intensity the movement is. As such, the muscles are in a constant state of turnover, as there’s ongoing repair and maintenance of damaged tissue that’s broken down from everyday living. The process by which the body repairs itself is known as muscle protein synthesis and the amino acids from protein are what drive it.
Muscle protein synthesis is an energy-intensive process. When restricting calories, you’re restricting energy. As a result of fewer carbs and the body’s hesitance to burn the fat it’s stored for future emergencies, the body resists the normal growth and rebuild signals for muscle protein synthesis and instead uses amino acids for energy production. If this goes on long enough, then a loss of lean body mass will occur, most of which will come from muscle that the body breaks down to provide its needs.
Studies have found that lifting weights combined with increased protein intake preserves muscle mass for two reasons. One, strength training creates an immediate demand for the building and growth of muscle, a demand that can last for as much as 24 hours after a workout. The other reason, obviously, has to do with a higher protein intake helping to increase the pool of available amino acids, which frees some up for muscle protein synthesis rather than most going towards energy production.
Now, returning to the idea of the body ignoring the signals for muscle protein synthesis, this also occurs as we age, resulting in muscle loss. Care to take a guess at what helps mitigate the loss of muscle that comes with the loss of years as you age and look back at your life with regret at all the bridges you should’ve burned earlier instead of losing time staying in casual and intimate relationships with losers?
Yup, the combination of strength training and adequate protein consumption!!!5Good guess! *fist bump*
Protein sounds pretty good for you, huh?
So where do you find the stuff and how much of it do you need?, you ask.
Well, as stated above, protein is composed of amino acids, of which there are twenty. And of the 20 amino acids, the human body only synthesizes 11 of them by itself. These proteins that the body makes are known as nonessential amino acids.6These include alanine, arginine, asparagine, aspartic acid, cysteine, glutamic acid, glutamine, glycine, proline, serine, and tyrosine. The 9 that it doesn’t make are called essential amino acids and have to be obtained from food.7These include histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine. All animal products contain essential amino acids, making them complete protein sources. Conversely, incomplete proteins are missing essential amino acids, or have a low amount if present. Plant-based products fall under this category.
That means that animal-hating meat eaters can satisfy their protein requirements rather easily by, for example, only eating one particular protein source, though they’d be missing out on vitamins and minerals from others. Those on a plant-based diet don’t have the same luxury. Rather than eating one protein source, a variety of incomplete sources are needed to compensate for the essential proteins lacking from the others. As for specific sources, some of the best complete proteins are eggs, salmon, tuna, and poultry, beef, milk, Greek yogurt, and cottage cheese, as well as soy. Among the best incomplete options are lentils, chickpeas, and almonds, quinoa, chia seeds, and leafy greens.
That’s one question down and another to go!
You now know what protein sources to choose.
But how much protein you need is still up in the air.
Regarding that, the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.4 grams per pound of body weight.8The RDA is actually 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, but it’s given in Imperial units here to save you the trouble of conversion and, of course, because Americans don’t use no stinkin’ Metric system!!! Anything more than that and you’ve probably heard that you’ll have to scour the black market for a harvested kidney when yours shuts down.
Here’s the thing that virtually everyone gets wrong about the RDA: it’s not the maximum amount of protein you should eat. Nope! The RDA is actually the minimum amount of protein you should eat to avoid complications from protein deficiency.9Signs and symptoms of protein deficiency include, but aren’t limited to, thinning hair, brittle nails, muscle loss, and increased risk of bone fractures.
Instead, to reap the benefits of protein, intake should be 0.8 to 1.2 grams times your body weight.10That’s your body weight in pounds! And yeah, that’s how much protein someone with an active lifestyle should eat. But as the modern person you are living here in 20XX who relies heavily on the latest research from the 1960s for all their nutritional decisions, I don’t blame you for NOT wanting to add more protein to your diet to enjoy any of its benefits!
Whew, that’s another question down!
NOTE: Protein intake may be above or below the given recommended range depending on your age, sex, activity level, metabolic health, and other factors. Anyway, everything presented here is for entertainment, not as medical advice.11That’s a legal disclaimer, which now means that you can’t sue me if something fucked up happens to you because you did something stupid. Na-nana-naa-nah!!!
What to eat and how much are questions now answered for you. While they were both good questions, there’s one you didn’t ask that I’m going to answer anyway.
And that question is…?
…when you should eat protein!
In answer to the question I was bright enough to ask myself, eating a high-protein breakfast is something you ought to consider. One reason why is that the body doesn’t store protein like it does carbs and fat. And like I mentioned before, the body is in a constant state of turnover. So depending on how well you prepare yourself before bed by eating enough nutrients to last the night, there’s a good chance that your body will undergo catabolism as you sleep.12Catabolism, as well as autophagy, is when protein from muscle gets broken down into amino acids for the energy necessary for the body to perform vital functions. Eating protein upon waking snaps the body out of a catabolic state into an anabolic, or muscle building, one. Protein for breakfast is also linked to eating behavior, with its satiating effects helping people to eat less later in the day. How much less? As much as 400 fewer calories!13Can you say, weight loss?!
Apart from eating protein for breakfast, there’s no best time to eat protein. Fuck, not eating protein for breakfast isn’t going to kill you. All that really matters is that you meet your total daily protein requirements. How you should go about doing so is by including protein in every meal and spreading out the intake over the course of the day.14In addition to overeating protein fucking up your kidneys, which isn’t true unless you have underlying health conditions, you’ve probably also heard that the body can only handle but so much protein in one sitting. That’s also not true. There is no set amount of protein that your body can handle at a time.
When you eat protein, it gets absorbed in the intestines and is slowly released into the body for absorption, with the rate of release depending on immediate need. So if your body only needs 20g of protein at the time of your feeding but you eat 50g, for example, 20g will be immediately absorbed for muscle protein synthesis. The remaining 30g or so will be slowly released over the course of hours. About 5 percent gets converted into waste after going unabsorbed. So there’s no need to worry about unused protein from a meal getting stored as fat.
With that said, if you exceed your DAILY CALORIE TOTAL, then there’s a possibility that the body will store some, if not all, of the unused protein from previous meals as adipose if protein rather than carbs or fat is what’s responsible for you exceeding your total calorie needs for the day. In turn, you’ll stay full, burn calories, and provide your body with a ready supply of materials for muscle protein synthesis.
If you can’t tell, I can go on and on about protein all day!
But this is where we’re going to have to end things because I have shit to do.
I would hope you do, too.15I know you don’t, but take the hint!
I’M BRUSHING YOU OFF!!!
Glossary: active lifestyle, adipose, calories, diet, gym, hormones, muscle, workout