Everything You Thought You Knew About Protein Is Wrong | Stanford's Professor Christopher Gardner

this is disgusting are you ready yeah we're ready we got human subjects that were conscientious objectives to the Vietnam War and every single day they would remove the blue Zoo suit and they would vacuum it all the poop all the pee anything that left the human body was collected welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where world-leading scientists explained how their research can improve your health [Music] thank you for joining me today and it's such a treat we've known each other I think for more than five years now um and for our listeners Christner refer is one of the top nutritional scientists in the world carrying out you know a whole series of big Interventional studies in humans which are randomized controlled trials which is very rare he's been a long time member of the Zoe scientific Advisory Board and he's also been one of the authors of a major review of protein requirements for nutrition review so sort of no one better to talk about protein which is one of the topics we've had the most questions from our listeners and members of anything that we touched on on this podcast so I think it's gonna be a lot of fun uh thank you for for being here with us absolutely this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart many myths to be busted well on the topic of mythbusting uh why don't we start with our usual quick fire round of questions from our listeners and just to remind you Christopher you know the rules are are quite simple you can say yes you can say no or if you have to you're allowed a one sentence answer but no more than that and we know that this is the hardest thing for any Professor to do but are you willing to give it a go yes all right you've got the hang of it already yes okay Christopher will I die if I don't get any protein in my food yes do animals contain special proteins that you can't get from Plants now should we all be worrying about getting enough protein no are protein shakes and protein bars healthy for most people compared to a tablespoon of sugar healthier but I always think compared to what compared to food no I told you it was hard for a professor to answer these questions and the last question can eating more protein help with weight loss no okay I think a lot of people are already going to be surprised and I hope we're now going to unpack this uh in the rest of the podcast maybe we can just start at the very beginning so I think most of our listeners will feel they know what a fat is right they're thinking of like an oil they cook with or butter or you know maybe the fat in a piece of meat and I think almost everybody feels sort of confident about a carb right it's like it's bread or potatoes or something like that I think however if a lot of people are like me they're actually quite unclear really what protein is except you know they're sure there's quite a lot of it and a piece of meat because you know their mum always said you know eat your meat and get your protein so could you just sort of start at the beginning what is protein and why do we need it sure so when it comes to fat and carb that's really most of our fuel when it comes to protein it's more of our structure so all of our cells and our organs and our hair and our fingernails all of that is structural protein all the enzymes that are in our body that catalyze reactions and make metabolism move forward those are all proteins many hormones our proteins there's actually a huge list of functional things that proteins do and to take it to one next level maybe this is helpful maybe this is not all proteins are made of 20 amino acids in the human body and I like to think of them like Scrabble letters in the Scrabble board game or the letter somebody would put on the Marquee of a movie theater and for perspective there's a couple of them that are only three amino acids tied together which would be called a tripeptide but that would be unusual the largest one I know of is something called maybe Tin Tin 35 000 amino acids strung together I was thinking about this like words and these amino acids like letters but you're saying these words can get really long and you need a lot of them but fundamentally you can make any word like any protein out of just this limited number of these uh these amino acids one could be a limerick you know and one could be a haiku it's just amazing how they differ in length and what's critical is not only that the specific amino acids one after another be perfect like if you were spell checking your your writing in a document and say nope that word doesn't work so it has to be perfect and then when the amino acids are arranged in a certain configuration these long strings of amino acids uh twirl and twist and conform they actually have to be side by side in just the right way and if you change that and unravel them which happens in your stomach with a low ph it happens with heat you inactivate the protein and if it was going to have some functional purpose like an enzyme or a hormone it no longer works and now it's kind of just like fuel now you can just break apart the single amino acids and use them but it can't function like it was going to and that's why protein's so tricky so many things that it does so many ways to activate and inactivate it and so Christopher to make sure that I've got this because that was a little scary what you just described you're basically saying you know we eat food with proteins in it we break it down there are like 20 of the potential like building blocks like letters which is what you're calling these amino acids and then our body makes almost everything we're made of out of those like 20 letters in unimaginably complex sort of combinations I like the way you said that and let me add one twist to this which is pretty interesting there's very few rare exceptions to this but when you say eat an animal protein or a plant protein and it goes into your digestive tract you can't absorb those amino acids into your body until you break them down to their single amino acid levels and then you absorb them travels through your body reassembles them can't remember where it came from oh did this come from a cow oh did this come from a pig oh does this come from broccoli no clue it's like ah it's just this amino acid I don't even care it came from a supplement can't even tell it's just the building block got it so this is like I uh I ate Shakespeare or I ate a comic book my body just breaks it down to letters that just makes the protein sound even more important um I guess follow-on natural question about this is I think one of the things that we've learned on this podcast is that our body has this amazing ability often to swap carbs into fat so it doesn't really matter what you eat always because your body will make what you need can't we just make these letters these amino acids when we need them yeah I bet you a lot of people listening have heard of essential and non-essential amino acids I think it's a pretty non-essential question for all of your listeners but I'm going to say it anyway the I the ideas um while carbohydrates and fats are circulating in your body those the basic structure of those is is built on carbons of different lengths and they have very complex metabolic pathways and at certain points in carbohydrate metabolism and fat metabolism you can borrow one of these molecules put a nitrogen on it in the form of an amino group which means a nitrogen with three hydrogens an amino Amino reflects this nitrogen portion you can actually make 11 of the amino acids by borrowing something from fat and carb and putting this ammonia amine group on it and likewise if you were breaking protein down because you had enough for the day which I hope we get to later because most people eat more than enough if you take the amine ammonia nitrogen group off you can put it right back into the carbohydrate or the fat metabolizing chain and that works for 11 amino acids for nine of them there isn't a specific place you can borrow it from in your body and so you since you need all 20 for just about every single protein that you synthesize you also have to get the nine essential ones and essential simply means you can't assemble the whole thing yourself you got to make sure I got that Christopher because it got a bit scary in chemistry again um you're saying there are these 20 actually we can make some of them ourselves but actually like I think you would say nine of them we can't make them so you've got to eat them you have to get those nine in order to do you know essential things inside yourself is that all right so protein is really important we need to get some um let's talk about how much we therefore need which was the number one question that we had as we were preparing for this show okay uh you're gonna just have to stop me all over the place and get me to explain it in English because this will be harder but uh basically you I'm going to take one big step back and say if you've eaten enough calories for the day you've got enough protein just so stop obsessing about protein proteins and everything all 20 amino acids are in all plant Foods big myth to bust here and all animal Foods so if you're simply getting enough calories with a reasonable Variety in your diet like if you only ate rice all day you wouldn't get enough if you only ate cassava all day you wouldn't get enough protein but you also wouldn't get a lot you also wouldn't get enough of other nutrients so let me tell you how people figured out how to get enough protein this is disgusting are you ready so I got yeah we're ready I got my PhD doctorate at UC Berkeley in California and they were one of the sites that did some of the initial trials in the 50s 60s to establish this and the fifth floor of my building Morgan Hall in Berkeley was called The Penthouse and we got human subjects that were conscientious objectives to the Vietnam War and they volunteered to live up there in blue zoot suits and the scientists would sequentially lower their proteins successfully successively down to zero and give them just carbs and fats and then they would raise the protein back up slowly in their diet and every single day they would remove the blue Zoo suit and they would vacuum it for all the hair and skin cells that sloughed off during the day they would collect all the poop all the pee all the nose blowings anything that left the human body was collected now we already talked about this nitrogen thing in protein and the initial studies were interestingly called nitrogen balance studies and instead of like analyzing amino acids in poop analyzing amino acids in P analyzing amino acids in hair you just burn it all up and analyze the nitrogen that's how much protein you can calculate how much protein left your body and then because they were nutrition scientists they were calculating the amount of protein or nitrogen going into the body from food so they knew how much is going in and how much is going out they raised and lowered it for each individual until they were in Balance but Jonathan when they did this for a bunch of people as you might imagine what they found out is oh my God this person in the room needed more than that person in the room and when they combined their data with a bunch of other folks who had done the same disgusting thing they came up with in math get ready for this a normal distribution curve which means ah a couple people needed very little a couple people needed a lot there's a bell curve so there was an average in the middle they did arrive at what would be the average okay and it's called the ear it's very specific in this huge nutrition book the estimated average requirement now here's an important question for you to think about when you want to come up with protein recommendations for the country what would you suggest recommending would you recommend the estimated average requirement because if everyone in the country got exactly the estimated average requirement by definition how many people would be deficient half because it's the average amount if you only get the average amount that half of you that are above average not just intelligently but from protein requirement would be deficient and so this happens in protein and all the vitamins and minerals Jonathan so when the U.S comes up with recommended daily allowances for protein vitamins and minerals the standard approach is to take two standard deviations above the average and in mathematical terms that means you've picked a number that should be adequate for 97 and a half percent of the population and there might be a couple people in the tail that need even higher than that but it would be so few that you're pretty safe recommending that amount now not only is that mount adequate but another math thing to keep in mind here is if really everybody in the U.S or the UK wherever got exactly that 97 and a half percent two standard deviations higher how many would be exceeding their requirement oh actually like 97 percent so just just to make sure I'm with you here Christopher because you know this is uh you're moving at some some pace you're basically saying that when they came up with a recommended amount for protein they basically picked then the amount they make sure that almost nobody would have too little and as a result you know this recommended daily amount which I've definitely heard from vitamins right and supplements you hear that very often but I think anytime you look on the back of a food label again you know I've definitely seen that for almost everything it's actually the amount that means almost everybody needs less than that yes and so if you're getting the recommended daily amount you don't need to worry that you're not getting enough actually in a sense you might you're getting more than you need for almost everybody is so where does this take us okay and so what that takes us to is they came up with a number that said 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight should meet that and so I have a graph and a table that I can't show you because we have a podcast here but for a lot of people that RDA level would be maybe 40 maybe 50 maybe 60 grams of protein if if you're heavier uh so I have some U.S data that shows how much protein people eat in the U.S and it's pretty much double the ear or double the RDA just eating food not even trying and so to me it's sort of this American idea of god let's see that's what the RDA is but I know I'm above average so let me make sure I get some extra here it's like no you don't understand the concept it was built in to recognize that some people would need more and as a nutritionist when I teach students I have to say this is not an individual approach you should not look at the RDA to see if you are meeting your individual requirement this is a population health approach so that if everybody were to get that amount almost no one would be deficient and just as you were a bit surprised every time I tell that story the audience I explain it to is a little surprise and so Christopher you know I am surprised because I've had this experience and I suspect there's quite a lot of people who've had this experience so like the first time I ever went to uh a gym which is about 10 years ago and um I had a trainer say you know this is what you need to do in order to get healthier which is what I was interested in and fitter well the first thing you said is oh well you need to eat more protein and you need to eat at least a gram per kilogram of um of protein if you're going to get you know any benefits out of the work that you're going to do at the gym now that number because I think you just said it was 0.8 grams per kilogram was your recommended amount which is like the maximum that anyone in the world basically needs um how did this happen why is there there this controversy help me to understand why there's this pressure about feeling people need to eat more protein sure okay so let's think about that word so there is there are some flaws with this nitrogen balance study that I suggested and so what happens in at least the US from all the databases I have is this is this is very consistent in all research studies that I look at most people get about 16 17 18 of their calories from protein it's so consistent it's just amazing and then you look at how many calories you eat to maintain your weight and let's not go down this rabbit hole but most people underestimate how many calories they eat the data I have says women eat 2 500 calories a day and Men eat three thousand and I know a lot of your listeners are going to say not me I only eat 1500 calories a day we've done feeding studies where we gave people a certain amount of calories and it's really two thousand twenty five hundred or three thousand if you take 16 17 18 percent of those numbers people tend to get about 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram body weight without trying they're they're pretty much getting double the RDA so now here's what happens if you're in the gym getting that double the RDA right okay so it's probably the 0.8 grams per kilogram met your need for enzymes hormones fingernails and hair you went to the gym to lift weights and gain muscle so you probably want more than 0.8 grams per kilogram per day so you can put muscle on okay so let me tell you let me tell you how many extra grams of protein you need so Jonathan how ambitious would it be to put on 22 pounds or 10 kilos of pure muscle in one year would that be pretty good that that I have to say it sounds quite ambitious I think if anybody saw me they would say totally ridiculous and impossible but let's go with ambitious shall we okay ambitious so 10 kilos uh actually 70 of your muscle is water so if you were going to do that in a year all you'd actually have to accumulate is three kilos of extra amino acids or 3 000 grams of extra amino acids divide that into 365 days of the year and just roughly that means you would need an extra 10 grams of protein a day to keep retain in addition to meeting your maintenance needs to put this on now it's not quite a fair number because when you're in the gym lifting and working out if you're working out really hard you're actually breaking down some muscle using those amino acids and you have to replace them so put another 10 grams on that say you needed an extra 20 grams a day every day for a year to put this on in the U.S people are eating like 30 or 40. extra grams a day over that 0.8 gram per kilogram every day just eating food and one more tidbit I have here is when you're working out hard every day don't you eat more you do you don't eat just 2 000 calories I have a Stanford football player who's in one of the Rose Bowl games he was eating 5 000 calories a day because they work him so hard he was getting 260 grams of protein every day without trying he wasn't having shakes he was just having food so we we should go to like which foods have that protein but if we could go here I have one more place to go is well wait is that bad what if you actually got more protein then you need it what what would happen to all that extra will it kill you to have more protein what happens okay so but I want to go down a rabbit hole just for a minute for a fun exercise so think on an average day you probably eat more carbohydrates than you need and so once you've eaten some carbohydrate the first thing it says oh my God does my brain need it right now nope my brain's okay um do I does my do I my muscles need it now I'm doing a podcast with Jonathan I'm just sitting here I don't really need my muscles okay well I have a storage Depot for my carbohydrate and it's called glycogen and there's some in my muscles and there's some in my liver so I will try to fill up my storage capacity of glycogen stored carbohydrate so that I can have some later in the day and do you know how long it would take you to deplete all the storage carbohydrate in your body any idea do you are you a runner Jonathan actually I don't know this if you're a runner no I'm I'm very good at sitting in my chair doing podcasts but tell me how long does it last for so I bet you've heard that marathon runners at 20 miles Bonk if they don't have enough carbohydrate that basically means you've used up all the glycogen that you stored in your body it's only about a kilo okay let's switch for a minute to Fat so let's say you ate more fat calories for the day and you used it for various things and mostly you burned it for energy where would you store that and how much could you store and I'll save you the trouble here you can store an infinite capacity of fat oh my gosh you can store hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds of fat in your butt in your thighs in your jowls in the pads in your fingers endless capacity to store fat would take you an incredibly long time to use up all the storage of fat that you have in your body so unlimited capacity to store fat a very limited capacity to store carbohydrate where could the extra protein go so your your trainer told you to do this you ate all that extra protein a few major enzymes you made your hormones you lifted your weights and it was a little more than you needed or maybe a lot more and you're going to bed tonight so where do you think you put it in your body is it in your spleen in your liver in your big toe in your elbow where's your protein storage where is my protein storage none every bit of it at the end of the day has the nitrogen taken off and it gets turned into carbs and fat you can't store protein in your body so the muscle heads who are having a lot of meat and regular meals and a protein shake and a protein bar are turning all that into carbs and fats at the end of the day and I'm just going to turn it into basically fat that I lay down on my body is that what you're telling me and yeah the nitrogen will be taken off your liver will turn it into ammonia and your kidney will excrete it and get it out of your body and so you actually could suck out some calcium as it goes and so some people say don't eat too much protein it'll suck the calcium out of your bones let's not go down that rabbit hole it probably doesn't happen most people with a healthy kidney can eliminate this just fine you you might know that if someone has an impaired kidney one of the first things they do from a dietary perspective is they ask them to limit their protein because they don't want their their impaired kidney to face the challenge of clearing more of this excess ammonia from the excess protein that most people get in a day but to be honest most people's bodies are set up to handle this turn it into carbon fat and get rid of the ammonia for so for most people eating that protein isn't necessarily bad for you unless you consider what came with it so if this is what I was supposed to say isn't this like a I feel like this is a huge scam so basically there are all these products that are on sale that say you know no carbs 10 grams of protein or you know like no sugar 10 grams of protein and then you're telling me I eat it I haven't I'm already eating more protein than I need so my body is just going to turn that into carbs and fat and since I we know I already am eating as much food as I need like if I'm having that on top I'm just basically going to turn it into body fat is that have I got that right and so in the end it all comes down to calories so Jonathan we just finished a fun little study with a master's student we hope to expand on it we got 22 Stanford graduate student recreational athletes who have been for five or six years working out every day they're not competitors they just work out all the time they want to stay fit 12 of them were Runners 12 of them are weight lifters six in each group are men six in each group or women for four weeks each we had to meet an omnivorous diet a vegan diet or these plant-based alternative Meats and the outcomes instead of my usual cardiovascular thing with lipids or blood pressure whatever were push-ups pull-ups bench press lat pull Downs leg press and for the runners a timed 12-minute run to see how far you could run and it was four weeks each it's a preliminary study but they were all kind of shocked they ate much less protein on the vegan phase and their performance was not different than in the Omniverse space they didn't lose any performance and if you look they were getting all the protein as much protein as you needed by various Athletic Association type things they weren't taking any supplements no shakes no bars just eating a vegan diet and another paper came out just this last month that someone sent me saying the same thing and Stu Phillips who's a fantastic exercise guy from McMaster University he and I did a podcast together and said yes you know that 0.8 grams per kilogram number isn't right it should be higher than that it it may need to be as high as 1.6 and I said but isn't that what people eat anyway he said well yeah that's actually what they get anyway so if you weren't getting that much it's possible you could be impaired and you would benefit from this but if you were tracking your calories right and if you're eating a reasonable variety of diet you wouldn't have to do what the trainer said to you you wouldn't have to take any extra effort to get that amount of protein Christopher I think that's yeah it's very clear it's sort of amazing I do want however to spend a little bit of time talking through sort of the the different ages of people because we had so many questions on social from our listeners about concerns about protein requirements at different ages so I would love to start actually maybe with children um and I just have this sort of personal experience right now so I have a 15 year old and his friends have started drinking these new energy drinks that say they have added protein which is a new thing for me that wasn't what I you know I wasn't even aware that that was the that that was a a thing they've gone past caffeine is there any evidence that at this point when you're growing really fast that actually kids might not be getting enough protein and we need to really worry about that yep so for kids if you go back to all those old RDA calculations kids need not 0.8 grams but at different ages they need 0.9 1.0 1.1 because they're growing similarly for a pregnant woman that's growing a fetus inside of her she's not just maintaining she's growing and so those needs are higher than 0.8 grams per kilogram per day the question is can you get that just eating food or do you need to get these extra sources and as as I'm suggesting the food supply as long as you get a reasonable variety and we should get into plant food versus animal food but you would have to work really hard not to get that much protein Jonathan I attended the job talk of a nephrologist at Stanford who isn't a nutrition person said God you know I'm trying to work with these people with impaired kidneys and I've been trying to get them on this really severely restricted protein diet of 0.7 grams per kilogram body weight and I I can't get them there and I laughed and I said 0.7 grams per kilogram it's severely restricted protein that's practically the RDA he said yeah I can't get them that low I get them to try to eat this and that and then I can't get them that low it's hard not to get it and so does that mean you know as a parent you know you don't really need to worry about it um but isn't your refrigerator empty so I have four boys yes he does eat a lot of food there's no doubt bring their friends and it's like I skip dinner really aren't you eating oh no I had like two pizzas a half an hour ago but I'm skipping it oh my God and then I go out at midnight and he's having a sandwich it's like bottomless pit now if you go to the other end of the spectrum there's possibly some issues with elderly because digestive tract denture denture so you know they they're not chewing enough food they've sort of lost their appetite we have this issue of sarcopenia where they're losing muscle mass there have been some studies it's not really just the hormones it's loneliness it's depression it's not eating it could be that you have to make special effort to make sure in the small number of calories that they're getting that they are protein rich because they're just not eating very much so Christopher you'd be very patient about not talking about where the protein comes from so thank you let's um do that and we had lots of people asking us basically you know sort of versions of the same question is animal protein better than plant protein and um you know how are they different you know and why is it that one might be better than the other yeah so you're killing me this is a podcast because I can't tell you how many hours I spent making slides showing different amino acids at this point really have to get down to that amino acid level and so I'm gonna do my best to describe some of these slides I made Jonathan so if you look at the estimated average requirement of protein for a lot of people it could be close to 40 grams of protein which is pretty low and I I like to use that number just for fun to make this one point there are 20 amino acids if you need 40 grams of protein simplistically that sounds like it would be good to have two grams of each one 2 times 20 is 40. not even close so you need tons of glutamate glutamine aspartate asparaging you need hardly any tryptophan methionine cysteine and the best way I've found to describe this is the game of Scrabble so Scrabble which my wife beats me at regularly is a hundred tiles in a bag and I don't know if you know this from one country to the other the distribution of letters is a little bit different depending on how often those letters are used in the language of that I'm learning about Scrabble and protein now Christopher said it's great so think 26 letters in the alphabet there's a hundred tiles aren't there four of each letter in the Scrabble bag to make your words no there's only one Z there's one X One J and there are a whole lot of E's and A's and n's and ours amino acids are just like that so what I did is I sort of made a graph and I showed ah here's the distribution of 40 grams of protein in eggs in chicken in pork in fish in beef and they're stun the distribution is stunningly similar they say wow that's that's pretty interesting all the animals have a lot of the same ones and a few of the same ones and then I say okay so you've all heard plants are missing amino acids which ones do you think they're missing are different plants missing different amino acids and I put up some fake data and I say which one do you think is rice and beans and broccoli and I I don't let them think for long and then I put up the actual amino acid distribution and their jaws drop all of the plants have all 20 amino acids the distribution of the amino acids is almost identical in the plants as the animal and they say what have been people telling me Professor Gardner are you lying did you like make this up because this this is not the reality that I've been told and it's a very simple kind of trivial thing Jonathan so rice and other grains in general tend to be low in the proportion of Lysine that they have relative to the optimal proportion and likewise beans tend to be low in methionine and cysteine in proportion to what they need and so I like this Scrabble analogy so picture that you've had the Scrabble game for a really long time and you lost the L for lysine and the M for methionine are you missing all valves and all the M's no no actually you only lost a couple of the letters so if you were using your board and trying to make words you would run out of words you could make with l and m sooner what if you had a neighbor who also hadn't played Scrabble in a long time and they'd said oh I'm so sorry you're missing those letters you can have my Scrabble bag of letters oh I'm also missing an l and an M I'm sorry you could still fill up the L and the M that you were missing because your neighbor has extra L's and M's and I think Americans eat at least 80 grams of protein a day not 40 that they need and so I'm thinking what if you had two bags of Scrabble letters oh that's like what Americans eat in protein every day two bags of Scrabble letters and if they're eating plant proteins they are lower in lysine and methionine then would be optimal but that's only a concern if they only get 40 grams of protein and they need every amino acid to count but they get 80 grams of protein even the vegetarians and the vegans and Christopher just one clarifications I think that it sounds like a general saying don't worry about this are you saying because you're mentioning two particular amino acids that I can't pronounce um are you saying that in all plants the relative amount of that is lower than it is in animals um so even if you're having a variety of plants so it's not just that like one plant is low in the L and the other one is low and yeah I'm actually on average like all plants are lower in that relative to animals and therefore if you were eating a plant-only diet then if you were going to eat the 40 grams of protein you're going to have potentially a low level of those two particular amino acids I just want to make sure that I'm yeah if you needed 40. it's not really it's you need 40. you need 40 in the right distribution if you only ate rice all day that's how you got your 40 grams of protein you wouldn't have enough even if you ate 40 total grams of protein you run out of Lysine too soon if you only ate beans you'd run out of methionine before you got enough so you could supplement with just those individual amino acids or you could eat 80 grams of protein a day and you would end up getting the things that you're missing now here's what happens is you really only needed 40 and you 880 what do you do with the extra 40 you break 40 down and turn it into carbohydrate and fat but that's typically what's happening is that people eat more than the total amount they need and so given that plants don't have the ideal distribution of the amino acids they're almost always covered and you just break down the other ones so there is Jonathan an old concept that was written up in Francis Moore Lopez died for a small planet about complementing your proteins because the grains that are a little low in lysine are a little high in methionine and beans are a little low in methionine but they're a little high in lysine I'm gonna say ah this is sort of a no-brainer that's why some populations ate grains and beans together because they complemented the deficiencies with the excesses and it's still never quite as good as meat it's still not the optimal distribution but it's closer to Optimal so you can either try to complement them or you cannot worry about it because you're probably 880 or 90 grams and you didn't really have to think about it so you can absolutely meet all your needs on a completely plant-based diet stop obsessing about protein thank you brilliant answer so let's say that um someone's listening to all of this you haven't managed to completely convince them that they shouldn't have protein because you know it's hard to shake that so they're saying okay but like I'm worried or maybe I do fit into one of those categories that we're talking about where they are potentially concerned about it what's the healthiest and and tastier source of protein that you would recommend beans hummus all the three bean soup a three bean salad so David Katz and some other colleagues and I wrote a paper called modernizing the definition of protein quality and in it we said okay so there's this one issue of the distribution of amino acids perfect in animal Foods less than perfect in plant Foods there's actually an issue of digestion and availability bioavailability and it is a little higher for meat meat protein than plant protein but when people are eating Meats they're getting a lot of saturated fat and they're sometimes getting hormones and antibiotics were used to grow that meat and there's no fiber in there if you were eating beans and tofu and tempeh and plant Foods you'd be getting much less saturated fat you'd be getting phytochemicals antioxidants you'd be getting lots of fiber for your microbiome you guys at Zoe might have heard about the microbiome that's pretty cool thing and so this idea of should the the protein quality definition in the U.S is based on amino acid distribution and digestion and availability and we propose that it should also include the nutrients that come with those foods rich in protein which in your bar with sugar and that meat with saturated fat and no fiber versus those beans and Grains that had antioxidants and other things like that and if we're going to be Eco Warriors these days and not destroy the planet we live on the legumes and grains are much easier on the planetary boundaries of land use water use greenhouse gases eutrophication and biodiversity and I think you know just to add on top we we discussed this just a few weeks ago they're also incredibly cheap you can buy them in cans they last and so which means you capture like all of those nutrients sort of at the point of picking and then they sit there for months so I think beans have had the worst possible marketing probably because nobody can lock down the you know the copyright in the same way as uh for that uh protein enriched drink that my son was discussing with me a couple of weeks ago oh God I make a wheat berry salad um with some nuts and whole grains in there and I eat hummus all the time there's plenty of ways to incorporate really fun Mediterranean Middle Eastern Latin American uh South Asian dishes that really evolved around grains and beans so there's just a global fusion of flavors out there for you you do not have to look hard and your message is even if you're trying to you know be uh fast around the track or pumping your iron or all the rest of it you don't in fact need to be sort of eating a steak a day eat food yeah wonderful Christopher this has been an amazing tour uh I would love to try and do a little summary and then please keep me honest if I uh if I got anything wrong is that all right ready absolutely well um I think first you explained what is protein and what I took away from this is like fat and carbs are like the fuel that power us through the day but protein actually creates the structure so like everything we're made of basically comes from these these proteins and that they come from these 20 amino acids which I'd never understood what that was before but now I've got in mind they're sort of like the letters in the alphabet and then I'm like all these words that get created out of these these letters um in terms of how much protein we need the answer is far less than any of us realized or have been led to believe uh your colleagues at Stanford you know a long time ago did these crazy studies of of people sort of wrapped up in suits to understand exactly how much uh they needed and it turns out there's a lot of variation between people um and I'd love to figure out how we might be able to measure that at home somehow in the future but at the moment we can't Christopher's shaking his head there's always some new technology I feel but maybe that will make it happen but at the moment you can't measure that for yourself but what they did is they figured out sort of what's the maximum that almost anybody needs and that was actually only 0.8 grams per kilogram and on average in the US people are eating double that um uh already which means that they're eating you know far far more in fact than they need so they don't need to worry about it and then we talked about well what about if you're not eating lots and lots of animal protein you know is that a problem and the answer was really not that actually there are all the amino acids in Plants there are a couple of these amino acids which have lower amounts relatively but since we're all eating so much of it it's not really a problem and I think the final point was almost anything that says like extra high protein on it or you know a bar or a shake or any of these things are just really bad for you don't eat them and I think Christopher your messages eat beans instead yep perfect I don't know why it took me an hour to say all that when you just said it in three minutes which is pretty good well there one critical mistake so those those old studies in the blue suits were Berkeley my alma mater not Stanford my current place and you know there's a lot of competition between the two all right you masturbate that I I can see that I'll be in a lot of trouble you'll be in a lot of trouble there so I apologize Christopher thank you so much I think that was fascinating um and I think there's you know a few of these points that I'm sure we could go into in more detail in a in a future podcast but I certainly think you will have hopefully met a lot of people feel more relaxed which is great um and also probably look very differently at these foods that say no sugar and 10 grams of protein because they now realize if they eat that just before they go to bed they might as well just have had a chocolate bar it would have been more fun and he would have had the same result which I had not previously realized um so uh probably don't do that at home okay great it was very fun having this discussion and yeah I hope some people learned some things thanks Jonathan it's such a pleasure see you very soon Christopher thank you Christopher for joining me on Zoe's science and nutrition today if based on today's conversation you'd like to understand how to support your body with the best food for you including plenty of high quality sources of protein then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program your Zoe membership comes with meal and recipe recommendations access to our nutrition coaches and scientifically backed nutrition advice on how to eat for your best health so you can feel more energetic and reduce the risk of chronic health conditions your personalized nutrition program is based on our scientific research and the results of your personal at-home test if you're interested in learning more about Zoe you can head to join zoe.com podcast and get 10 off your purchase if you enjoyed today's episode please be sure to subscribe and leave us a review as we love reading your feedback if this episode left you with any questions please send them in on Instagram or Facebook and we'll try to answer them in a future episode as always I'm your host Jonathan Wolfe Zoe science and nutrition is produced by Fascinate Productions with support from Sharon feder yellow huens Martin and Alex Jones here at Zoe see you next time [Music]

Channel: ZOE

Views: 1,435,220

Keywords:

Id: DMwf_9wqWY0

Length: 47min 41sec (2861 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023