Protein In Foods You’d Least Expect | Christopher Gardner, PhD. on Exam Room Podcast

welcome to the exam room podcast brought to you by the Physicians committee hello I am the weight loss Champion Chuck Carroll and protein protein protein my goodness we talk so much about plants and that means protein has to come into play and I can't think of a better person to talk protein protein protein with than Professor Christopher Gardner thanks for being here my friend hey I think this is going to be fun I think so too now listen before we get rolling on this interview you guys can't see this but it needs to be noted that this man's toenails each one is a different color which means that he's coming strong from a fashion game I mean these are not bringing it you are man you got the swags I don't have the color but the Green's pretty good no it's a good color on you man it brings out your eyes uh but so here's the deal we don't want to do a stuffy interview Christopher about protein where as you said earlier people's eyes just glaze over as you're giving facts but let's talk about it because it's still no matter how much we bring it up on the show no matter how much you read about on the internet when somebody first goes to a plant-based diet inevitable believe the question is where in the heck do you get your protein from how often do you answer that question uh several times a week hundreds of times a year yeah it's just so annoying let's get into a few fun protein facts though when somebody's looking at the quality of protein I was just talking about this with Dr David Katz recently on the show he was explaining that all plant foods have all essential amino acids on there and it's just a matter of eating a wide array of plant foods and then you're more than covered when it comes to your protein needs and then you don't need all of the stuff the unhealthy stuff that comes packaged with the meat the dairy the eggs the cholesterol the fat all of that stuff accurate Delia our talk is done thank you just summarize the whole thing thanks everybody thanks for being here [Laughter] that though I mean like in in all honesty like is it fair to say seriously though that the quality of protein found in say raspberries is on par with an egg no no Saxy raspberries are an outlier I do have a graph and a paper that I wrote shows how all foods all plant foods have all 20 amino acids almost always in the same proportion really raspberries are a little off I'll like do just about anything for raspberries okay except that's not how I get my protein okay I just like raspberries but for all other Foods so this is really fun for me I actually if I can go back to how I got started in this bring it back I've published 20 clinical trials randomized humans change Behavior Etc I've actually never done a protein study per se okay a decade or so ago Harvard and The Culinary Institute of America started this thing called the menus of change and in the menus of change they were trying to move towards a more plant-based diet plants in the middle Meats would be a condiment small portion or even absent and they said oh people are going to freak out about protein Let's see we have this annual meeting Christopher will you give a protein 101 talk at the meeting I said sure I'd love to talk yeah how much time do I get I said eight minutes eight minutes like I have two two hour lectures in my undergraduate class at Stanford okay eight minutes that's all I get so I did it and when I finished Jaws were on the ground and they said no no really that's they said can you expand on that next year and do 15 minutes and then they asked me to do 30 and then they asked me to do an hour and I now have a protein rant that if you looked on YouTube it just you just typed in Gardener Stanford protein rant probably multiple versions would come up but here was the fun thing that because I was asked to give this talk that I did and I I had never actually done it before so in all my studies that I do we have to collect diet assessment data from people in the study and so we use something called ndsr the nutrition database system for research at a University of Minnesota it's fabulous and I can find every fatty acid every amino acid every vitamin mineral for 18 000 foods and so I said hey nutrition team I have to give this talk right can you give me every amino acid for this set of foods and so the first thing I did is I took a bunch of animal foods and then I sort of added up each different amino acid to see what proportions there were in a set amount of protein and I'm going to pick 40 grams for this example that I'm going to talk about because there's 20 amino acids and if you'd come to some of the talks at the meeting you'd see that protein recommendations for some people are close to 40 right so you think okay I need 40 grams of protein there's 20 amino acids 20 times two yeah I probably need two grams of each amino acid to get my 40. so it was really fun to see is some of the amino acids came out as eight grams and some is half a gram because you need them in different proportions you don't need them in the same proportion so right the thing that occurred to me right off the bat was Scrabble oh my God it's like Scrabble so I'm assuming you've played Scrabble almost everyone I know has played Scrabble at one point once or twice in my life yeah okay so think about it and you may never have counted all the tiles Instagram in that little bag there's a hundred chances yeah I can't say that I ever added all those up no no well I thought I was missing some so I counted and I learned there's a hundred and it turns out in different countries there's different proportions of amino acid Scrabble letters because the letters are there and the proportions that you make words in your language that's why there's way more A's and I's and E's than X Y and Z makes sense amino acids are just the same way so when I looked at eggs or chicken or poultry or beef different proportions of everything but they all had similar proportions it was always the most glutamate and the most aspartic acid and the least methionine tryptophan and cysteine across all these different animal foods and that the going thought is oh animal foods high quality protein these are the proportions you need and so my next step in all this was I wonder what will happen if I do oats versus grains and other Wheats versus fruits versus nuts so I did them and this is why Jaws dropped when I did this eight minute presentation that's all I had to show was I showed rice and beans and peanuts and broccoli and the proportions were almost identical get out and this is when Jaws dropped like no way wait a sec they're missing amino acids I've heard this I mean how many people have heard quinoa the only plant with all nine essential amino acids absolutely all have all 20 amino acids including all nine essential amino acids and the proportions are stunningly similar when I put this on a slide and show it somewhere and this is when jaws drop and they say but it can't be that there's nothing there there's this thing that we've heard about plants and it's there it's just more minor than people think so grains are relatively low in lysine it's not missing it's low in proportion right beans are low in methionine and cysteine it's not missing it's low in proportion so as you see a graphic of amino acids lined up according to their proportion for most of the foods it sort of goes down and down and down and for grains the lysine drip dips a little right methionine and cysteine Earth and you actually can't see that they dip because you need such a small amount of them they really aren't there in the right proportion but you don't need very many anyway right right so anyway this is where um they said oh can you expand this from eight minutes to 15 minutes to a half an hour so I started going through this I gave this presentation at a conference of the California dietetics Association and I had four questions about plants and amino acids and the first I gave one question with four answers the first answer was plants don't have amino acids the next one all plants are missing some amino acids third one was some plants are missing some essential amino acids and the fourth was all plants have all 20 amino acids the four senior dietitians in the front row all got the right answer and the 496 certified dietitians behind them all got the wrong answer what was the majority guess the summer is kind of two and three yeah maybe they're more enlightened we're at three some maybe some of them have it but some of some of them have to be missing it so this is really fascinating for people to see that they're not missing and I think this is largely semantics they're lower yeah in proportion yeah and somehow they got mistranslated into their not present they're absent they're missing you have to complement your proteins when in fact you really don't because the second part of the protein equation here other than proportion is amount okay so let's say let's say you needed your personal requirement was 40 grams of protein a day which is quite likely let's not get into that now maybe we'll get back later and you got 40 grams of protein but all you ate all day was rice right that's actually a lot of rice that is uh rice okay you would not meet your requirement because the lysine would run out before you made all the proteins you needed let's say you got 40 grams of protein the only thing you ate all day was beans which is highly unlikely but it actually would only be about six cups of beans still a lot of beans in a day that's the only thing you ate for the whole day two cups for breakfast two for lunch two for dinner nothing else nothing to drink okay if you've got 40 grams of total protein from Beans you wouldn't get enough methionine and cysteine you wouldn't be able to make all the hair fingernail enzymes hormones that you needed so what is the way out of that oh I gotta add meat no what if you ate instead of 40 grams of protein 60 70 80 90 or 100 then it doesn't matter how accurate the proportions are because all foods have lysine and methion and a typical intake even among vegetarians and vegans is more like 70 or 80 grams and you probably only need 40. wow and so it becomes a moot point if you look at that and so I have another Scrabble analogy for it you ready lay it almost yeah let's bring Scrabble back okay so let's say that you decided to count the tiles in your Scrabble bag and you have 98 or 96 something like that you don't have 100 and you look and you're missing the L and the M for lysine and methionine let's just say there it is uh and so that means you're probably if you're going to make words in the proportions that Americans do you're going to run out of the L M too soon before the game is over but you have a friend a neighbor who plays Scrabble also or did and they don't anymore and they're willing to give you their bag of Scrabble tiles to make up for your missing ones and oddly how How likely is this to happen they're missing an l and an M also but there wasn't just one LNM in their bag there were multiple right and so what if you take your somewhat missing l m and combine their somewhat missing l m with two bags together instead of getting 40 grams of protein or having one bag of Scrabble towels you have two bags of Scrabble tiles or 80 grams of protein it's really easy to get all the L's and M's that you want now there's one final part of this lay it on me so the final part is and you'd have to be a Scrabble player to know this all right hey man get to that pull us up all right to the end of the game and you've got a bingo and you are super excited that you have a bingo the Bingo's where you get 50 points use all seven letters from the tiles in front of you and you get extra points and you can't get it because there's no place on the board to fit it the board is full of words there's no place to fit it okay so now imagine you have a whole second bag of Scrabble tiles and you're toward the end of the game and you have all these extra letters we're gonna put you you can't there's the game's over Dude Let It Go people bored oh of letters and so here's what happens is at the end of the day you can't use almost all of the letters in the bag that your neighbor gave you which is what happens when you're eating protein we actually have no place to store it all the protein that we eat is functional at the end of the day you either have made some cellular structure muscle skeletal muscle or hair or fingernails or enzymes or hormones and at the end of the day if you have any left over it gets converted to carbs and fats protein can become fat and carbs carbs of course carbs would surprise okay that is next and so let's Sidetrack just for a minute just to put that in perspective so let's say you ate some extra fat today more than you needed all right uh how much of that might you be able to store for the next day and where would you store it do you have any idea well Christopher you're talking to somebody that used to weigh 420 pounds and I can tell you that there was plenty of storage available infinite capacity absolutely my friend yeah your arms belly yeah but you name it everywhere okay yeah infinite capacity all over your body now let's move to carbs yeah you're a runner you're trying to carb load you want to really run that marathon and so you've been eating your pasta and you've been building up your storage as much as possible how much can you store and where do you store it so you can only store carbs in your liver as glycogen and in your skeletal muscle and how much can you store so if you're a runner you know that 20 miles into the marathon is the Bonk the wall which is basically when you've used all your carbohydrate Source even if you carb loaded so four hours later all your carb storage would be gone so infinite fat all over limited carb liver and skeletal muscle for just a few hours depending on how your uh how fast you're running or how quickly you're trying to use it up protein completely different no storage Depot it's not in your little toe it's not in your spleen it's not in your elbow there isn't a physiological space where you can store it so you've eaten all this protein you've got your 80 or your 120 or your protein powder and you added your chicken breast and you made all the enzymes and hormones right on there's no place for it to go and so and you're really good at absorbing it so you're very efficient at breaking it down and absorbing it so you turn it into carbs first if your liver and skeletal muscle aren't full and if they are then you turn the protein into fat wow so these are some of the sort of aha moments that I got across in my eight minutes really quickly at that meeting a long time ago and people were like no way yeah these are some pretty simple physiological facts I have a PhD in nutrition science this is what I got taught why don't people know this myth protein myth I mean that is fascinating you completely took us to school no wonder you're a professor I mean my God man and you got me fired up to play Scrabble I wonder what the protein what the protein equivalent of a triple word score would be you know in your analogies have you come up with the triple word score that ties into protein like nah because they're all essential right on I mean your heart muscle would be the triple word and your lung muscles so you really want to make sure your organs work first yeah so if you if you were deficient in protein technically there's a storage Depot but it's a functional storage Depot you would start losing muscle right because you would break those proteins down into single amino acids and you would build the heart muscle or the lung muscle or the intestinal cell structure that you needed because you can't live without the heart lungs and GI tract but you can live with weaker arms or legs right right so that's kind of a storage Depot but if you draw from that you become weaker so I don't really consider that a story right so it's functional protein yeah probably it's fascinating things would be heart muscle okay that's fascinating man and you know it's just it's kind of crazy I look back at you know the 10 000 calories I used to eat a day and just I'm sure way more fat protein basically everything that I needed and I even at that weight I was still like I need my protein you know they tell me I need to eat protein to lose weight but nobody really said like you could be eating a lot healthier things and still get all the protein that you need lose the weight be a much healthier version of yourself and I mean clearly we need to start looking at protein much differently and um there's still a lot of work to do would you agree to that as far as just changing the general thinking of protein to continue to amplify this message yeah and actually David Katz brought it up today and maybe in your talk with him so we the two of us and some others wrote a research paper about modernizing the definition of protein team quality Yeah man so the existing protein quality I'll try to summarize it quickly is really figured out in rats how fast can you get little rat pups to grow and the two factors are how much protein are they getting in what proportions and how digestible is it so there's something called the pdcaa the protein digestibility chemical amino acid score right right it's all on amino acids and digestibility sources of food that carry our protein don't just have protein they do or don't have fiber and saturated fat they do or don't take up lots of land and lots of water and what we proposed is there's really nobody in the U.S that's protein deficient this is really bizarre at almost every meeting I go to now although I forgot to do it at this meeting I say how many of you Physicians have vegans or vegetarians in your practice every hand goes up I say leave your hand up if you've ever treated a patient for protein deficiency no one to this date has ever left their hand up so we don't have protein deficiency so if we did the quantity and the quality would be really important but since we don't part of the quality needs to be oh we were eating this meat that came with saturated fat and no fiber not good for heart disease nope uh we're eating this livestock that grazed and it was eating corn and soy that we chopped the Brazilian Rainforest down for so that we could graze the cattle or raise soy and corn so it's having an impact on the environment where legumes as a replacement lower land use lower water use definite health benefits for more fiber less saturated fat so in this paper we published about modernizing the definition of protein quality we said sure leave the chemical amino acid score in there leave the digestibility but please add the other nutrients that come with the foods that have those and please add the environmental impact because if we don't have a healthy planet to live on who cares what the protein quality is and we're burning the damn Planet down so putting those all together what you see is in our new calculated score beans and legumes and plant Foods rise up and meats go down for their environmental impact and for the presence of the saturated fat absence of fiber and other similar things right on man I wish that we had more time here's what I want to do with you I actually want to come out to you in California I'll bring a Scrabble board we'll sit down we'll do another interview as we're playing the game and we'll just continue the conversation because I feel like there's so much more that we could get into we can only use food words fair enough okay game on that would be too tough no no come on but at his Christopher Gardner Ph.D the man with the protein plan thank you my friend it's been fun yeah take care

Channel: Physicians Committee

Views: 53,747

Keywords:

Id: u-9D8VAowng

Length: 20min 52sec (1252 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023