I recently overheard some people, obviously on different TV publicized diets, talking at each other about their need for protein. This matter probably interests some of you who realize that taking care of your vehicle in this incarnation and in this country is harder than it used to be because of the TV and processed food ads. And I heard them talking at each other about A protein being better than B protein, and on and on.
Later, on the same day, I was watching a DVD from a British detective series in which the older inspector asked the young and pretty lady cop what was the matter with older men. She said that she liked it that young men had flat stomachs and breasts that were smaller than hers.
Now lots of men are acquiring breasts nowadays because the cheapest meat available as money gets scarcer is chicken, and those critters are pumped full of hormones to make them fatten up faster. Eating lots of chicken protein is a path to needing monster bras for some men.
And thinking of another popular idea that milk is a good source of protein for you, when we tried to make yoghourt using milk from the store, we couldn’t, because the penicillin in the milk killed the bacteria in the yoghourt culture. The Bovine Growth hormone in the milk is a separate issue. Chicken anybody? Got milk? Where can we go to get protein that isn’t a health hazard?
Back to the dieters’ discussion. Having been a health writer for many years I knew many of the sources of the propaganda they were giving each other, and that and the comment of the lady cop did persuade me to put some stuff on the blog about the protein needed by my ‘living in the body’ readers.
Let’s start with school where many of the lies begin. When Elder Shirley was still teaching, her school was offered free material to help teachers teach nutrition. Since the material came from the people responsible both for the destruction of the rain forests and for damaging the health of millions with their fast food, I asked to review it.
When the four basic food groups were taught so that a cheeseburger came out as a fine example of a food containing all the essential elements of a healthy diet, it was clear to me what was going on. But it wasn't clear to many overworked teachers who needed health materials they could use. And everyone they taught was given the fast food merchant's propaganda as fact! And their children too.
The National Egg Board, the National Livestock and Meat Board, and the National Dairy Council, have for all practical purposes been the main source of information for teachers, and therefore of the public, for decades.
Scientific research that is NOT aimed at selling us the product it is researching gives a totally different picture from the propaganda. What matters most is this question:
Let's do something unusual, switch off the TV, throw away the drug ads in the family magazines, and use common sense. Let’s check the original protein source, mother's milk.
A human baby, whose body is growing faster, relatively speaking, than it will ever grow again in its entire lifetime, gets 5% of its calories as protein.
That data is unassailable. It's the end of the story for anyone trained in critical thinking. If people only knew that and thought about it for a while all would be well. But they are not allowed to think, even if they actually know how to think. They are flooded with misinformation from totally unscrupulous marketers that insists they act now, now, now.
Adults do vary in their percentage of calories-as-protein needs, but a range of from 2½% to 10% covers the entire spectrum of human needs. This means that some people can lead healthy lives with only 2½% of their calories coming from protein.
Suppose, as nearly everyone seems to think, you are in the 10% group. Well, if you ate no meat, no eggs, and no dairy of any kind, and just ate good quality food instead of empty calories like white sugar, white flour, white salt, white bread and such garbage, you could not get under 10% if you tried.
If you ate only potatoes, you would still be getting 11% of your calories from protein. If if you ate only wheat, and weren’t allergic to it, it's 17%. Soybean sprouts only, it's 54%, and so on. If you get enough calories, and you don't eat junk food, you cannot avoid getting enough protein.
How then did we fall for the lies of the marketing bodies mentioned? It's an interesting story. In 1914 Osborn and Mendel did some of the early work on protein requirements. They were studying rats incidentally, not humans, and reported in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that rats grew faster on animal protein than on vegetable protein.
At that time researchers just broke the two protein groups down as A and B protein. This was for convenience. It did NOT mean that A protein (animal) was superior to B protein (plant). It could easily have been other way around.
Then about the time of WW II it was found that the amino acid proportions that gave rats their fastest growth was similar to that found in animal protein, and eggs. Note that it is only an assumption of an American competitive mind set that fastest must be best. There is an optimum speed for everything in nature. As the Wall Street Journal once pointed out…“If you get nine women pregnant you don’t get a baby in a month. Some things take more time than others.”
The National Egg Board spin doctors used this rat data AS IF it were already proven for humans, and then tricked the public even more by using the A classification as if it meant superior to B.
People like the famous ninety year old vegetarian Bernard Shaw, who knew that A did not mean the same as 1st class, and said so, were labeled as cranks, the American way of killing debate. The same thing happened to double Nobel prize laureate Linus Pauling when he spoke of the virtues of vitamin C. The medical media treated him like a senile old man. He, like Shaw, outlived many of his critics.
The animal products people leapt on the band-wagon and began 'educating' people to know the lie that animal protein is better than vegetable protein. When the first edition of Diet for a Small Planet came out, and Lappe showed that communities world wide combined vegetable proteins with health results superior to the meat protein systems, millions of people were released from the tyranny of thinking meat was necessary to health. And they were also shown the price the whole world was paying, as millions of acres of forest, the lungs of the Earth, were cleared to raise beef cattle, and billions of gallons of water were wasted in raising food on the hoof, instead of in the field.
Lappe then formulated a diet that had no junk food, no meat, no dairy and no eggs, and found that it gave a 120 pound woman just over 57 grams of protein. The National Academy of Science recommends 44 grams in this case. All this was well known in Europe. The major British medical publication The Lancet, in 1959 said:
Formerly, vegetable proteins were classified as second class, and regarded as inferior to first class proteins of animal origin, but this distinction has been generally discarded.
Notice that this distinction has been discarded by real experts for nearly fifty years, but not here. Money rules. The food industry propaganda continued in this country. It was impossible for most people, and for nutritionally ignorant physicians, to realize that they were being misled by people with only the bottom line in mind. Even the National Academy of Sciences had to admit that pure vegetarianism produced healthy cultures all over the world. But that wasn’t newsworthy; no ad revenue. Medical doctors in the 70's had no education about nutrition. I often used to tell people to talk to the doctor’s receptionist if she was in Weight Watchers because she undoubtedly knew more about it than the doctor.
When I was writing in the 70’s there were people being sued by the AMA legal lackeys for daring to say that taking vitamins could improve your health. The lawyers managed to twist that advice into the offense of prescribing without a medical license. Doctors then were telling their patients that taking vitamins was just a way of getting expensive urine, a line they were given by the drug companies.
Nowadays they pretend that they knew about vitamins all along. The same thing happened with exercise. Health writers had been banging the vitamin and exercise gongs for decades with nothing but sneers and actual legal persecution from the white coats for their efforts.
That fact about healthy vegetarians, all over the world, known for hundreds of years, was totally disregarded by those working on getting a brain washed public 'educated' to need their products. Hence the MacDonald's 'help' for teachers.
The Journal of the American Dietetic Association did a study of three groups of people, meat eaters, lacto-vegetarians, (dairy and eggs) and vegans, (no animal products). The study examined the amino acid needs of all of them, and even included pregnant woman and fast growing adolescents. Each group exceeded twice its requirements for every essential amino acid, and greatly surpassed this amount for most people.
This was not a classified document. It's been around and available since 1973. Every health writer knew about it. So did everyone in the food industry who ignored it for dollar reasons. Most folks don't get the Journal so let's look at another authority known by everybody.
Arnold Schwarzeneggar is well known for his un-puny frame. In his book, Arnold's Bodybuilding for Men he says this about protein:
"Kids nowadays tend to go overboard when they discover body-building and eat diets consisting of 50% to 70% protein—something I believe to be totally unnecessary. In my formula for basic good eating, eat about one gram of protein for every two pounds of body weight."
This is right in line with the lower end of the 2½% to 10% of calories from protein rule, in fact it comes out to under 2%, and that’s for bodybuilders with Herculean physiques, super defined muscles and minimal fat.
Incidentally, while Arnold was getting five Mr. Universe titles, the ridiculous Body Mass Index tables provided by insurance companies and now used by unthinking doctors, would have labeled Arnold as obese! Maybe there aren’t quite as many obese people around as the ‘take a pill to lose weight’ people would have us believe. Moving the goal posts changes the game.
A pint of muscle weights much more than a pint of fat. The BMI index makes no distinction at all between muscle and fat. It just weighs the person and measures the height. It’s a totally ridiculous index used by almost everybody. Don't let anyone bully you about fat unless they measure you with calipers.
You wouldn't HAVE to eat ANY meat, eggs, or dairy to attain Arnold’s 2% of calories from protein. In fact, if you ate only broccoli or Brussels sprouts, you would get about four times Arnold's number. You can get all the protein you need by just avoiding food with empty calories, sugars, jams, and junk food generally.
Ask yourself the origin of the knee jerk reactions that vegetarians are anemic (they aren't), or don't get enough protein (they do), or real men eat red meat ( ) fill that one yourself.
The Iron Man athletic competition in Hawaii, one of the most strenuous events in the world has been won by vegetarians. The run up the Canadian radio tower has been won several times by vegetarians. The strongest animals in the world are vegetarians.
The orang-utan is about ten times as strong as a man its own size and eats mainly bananas. I lived on bananas only for a month or so just to check a theory I had about orang-utans. I felt fine, had scads of energy and lost a little weight. I drank no water either for that period. I ate my water by eating bananas. Lots of animals eat their water.
Incidentally, orang-utan is Malayan for 'Man of the woods.' I take no credit for experimenting on myself instead of on school children or prisoners or draftees, in spite of the examples set by the authorities.
The intention of this article is NOT to make vegetarians of us all. In an article Blood of our Ancestors I actually suggested that some meat may be necessary for blood type O folks, and possibly others. The aim is here is to help those who may want to eat meat to do so from personal preference, without having their decision based on the widespread lies and propaganda of the food industry which is obviously only on the side of money, not health.
Organically raised meat avoids drugs and hormones. Check water buffalo, bison and ostrich meat. Look around. Do some research. If you don’t take care of your body where are you going to live? (Note: 1 oz is about 28 grams.)
