Protein is Your Body’s Vital Building Block

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When I tell my patients that they need a high protein diet, all they can think of is meat…but protein sources are found in many parts of our diet and eating a variety of protein sources is the key to health, we should find out what we should eat and why?
Protein contains amino acids that are the major building blocks to make our muscles, skin, connective tissue, tendons, ligaments and bones. It also supplies the components of our skin, hair and nails, and carries with it calcium (the major component of bones and connective tissue). Protein is found in cheese, milk, all milk products, whey for protein shakes, pea protein, fish, all seafood, chicken, lamb, eggs, Quinoa and beans for building muscle. Pieces of proteins make up every fluid the body makes, including hormones, enzymes, peptide communicators, the immune globulins, semen, breast milk, and vaginal discharge….is it any wonder that I tell my patients to increase protein in their diets!
Despite the need for amino acids and short chains of amino acids called peptides, we also need a variety of foods, all colors at every meal to provide the other building blocks of our body. For example, fat is a very necessary food for every person, at every meal. When I was pregnant, I wanted to feed my baby everything she needed to build a healthy beautiful brain, so I ate Braun Schweiger every day (made from liver) for lunch with a salad. The Braun Schweiger provided Rachel, my daughter, with the building blocks for an amazing brain. Our brains are almost all fat. That is the type of tissue that nerves are made of, but nerves also need B12 to work properly and B12 is primarily from animal products. It is relatively easy to include fat in our diets, but it is truly difficult to get enough protein to build muscle on a vegan diet. My vegan patients must be experts in obtaining protein from their diet and must be aware of the components in all the food they eat to get the proper nutrition.
Carbohydrates are made for “action”. Carbohydrates are required for exercise, walking and brains also burn carbohydrates when you are doing “brain work”. Carbohydrates are stored as fat if we eat them but don’t exercise! Think before you eat carbohydrates about your next 12 hours and whether you are going to exercise to burn the carbohydrates in your diet.
So How Much Protein Do We Need?
Growing teenagers, people who lift weights and try to gain muscle, pregnant women (need a minimum of 100 grams a day) and patients like mine on testosterone need more protein in their diet than the average sedentary, adult.
To quantitate the number of grams of protein you need to sustain your body with a high percentage of muscle, a person needs more than ½ their weight in grams of protein. For example, a 125 lb. woman with average to high muscle mass will need more than 62.5 grams of protein a day. A person with higher muscle mass will need more than that.
For athletes, weight lifters, patients trying to lose weight and sustain their current muscle mass, they need to eat the equivalent number of grams of protein to their weight, every day.
To do this a person will have to know how many grams are in each serving of their current foods and if they aren’t eating enough, they should add high protein, low carb protein shakes times before or after they work out or exercise. A typical protein shake will have 15 to 20 grams per serving and less than 5-10 grams of carbohydrate.
An average size hamburger has about 20 grams of protein. Add beans, peas, cheese, yogurt, butter, ricotta cheese, milk, eggs, custard, chicken, fish fillets, shrimp, and protein bars. Be careful not to overeat carbohydrate with your protein which can cause you to gain fat, while you make muscle.
Why do we need more protein on the days we work out, especially with weights? Weight training is a great muscle builder, in fact it is the best form of exercise for increasing your muscle mass. But why do people who engage in this type of activity require more protein than those who walk? The answer is in the physiology of human muscle when stressed by weight training exercises.