The food portions mentioned below will provide a daily minimum of 75 grams of protein, that is, provided you can be certain that all this protein food is going to be digested thoroughly enough to assure complete assimilation into your bloodstream. These minimum portions of protein foods are listed merely that you may judge approximately how to double, even treble, this minimum protein intake to meet your own bodily needs. By no means am I recommending the following portions as adequate protein for three meals. These quantities are given for the sole purpose of allowing you to compare your own daily protein consumption with the absolute minimum for good health, so you may decide for yourself how far above, or far below, this minimum standard your meals will average:
* 1 average serving of meat (fish, poultry included)
* 1 egg
* 3 slices of whole grain bread
* l pint of milk (or its equivalent as powdered skim milk,
* buttermilk, sour milk, cottage or other cheeses)
* l serving of dried lentils, whole grain or seed cereal
* l serving of cooked green vegetables
* l green salad
* l serving of egg custard
* l serving of fresh or cooked fruit
There is no protein in air, in water, in a cigarette, in a cup of coffee or in an alcoholic or carbonated drink. The one and only place where you can obtain this imperatively needed repair material for your body cells is from the food you eat each day. (Concentrated protein in the form of amino acids is available to persons who, for some reason, cannot consume enough protein to supply their full needs. These amino acids are usually given only as a remedial or precautionary measure where it’s a question of healing bad burns, severe wounds or surgical incisions.) Even 100 to 150 grams of protein food a day (approximately double the arbitrarily established minimum) may not be enough to keep you from becoming a victim of premature aging. Why? Because we are not nourished by what we eat, but rather by what we digest and assimilate.
The cells in your body are not fed by what goes down your esophagus into your stomach; cell nourishment must come from the amount of wholly digested food that is assimilated through the intestinal walls into your bloodstream. The same portions of meat, eggs, cheese, milk and seed cereals that would be enough to meet your neighbor’s protein requirements for the day might fall far short of meeting your own needs-and vice versa. The reason? Because, as mentioned above, your stomach acids might not be plentiful enough or strong enough to break down all the protein in these foods into the form of protein (amino acids) that can be assimilated into your bloodstream. (Also, two identical steaks coming from two different kitchens will yield two varying quantities of digestible protein, all depending on the care-or carelessness-with which they are cooked.)
Although it’s easily possible for every man, woman and child in this country to get enough protein for optimum health, recent surveys have disclosed the alarming fact that the diets of from 60 to 80 per cent of the approximately i4o,~ 000,000 persons in the United States are dangerously lacking in protein. Because meat, eggs, cheese and milk are the most expensive food items, when the budget requires trimming these protein foods are either decreased or eliminated altogether in favor of low-cost starches. Milk is pushed to the background as a protective food by millions of children and adults who turn right around and indulge a bad preference for coffee, tea, soft drinks and alcoholic beverages. And thousands of persons, mostly women, eat little or no cheese, milk, whole grains or seed cereals because they are afraid of “getting fat.” It may come as a surprise to you to learn that not all proteins are alike. Frequently it’s not so much a question of “plenty of protein” as it is a question of making certain to eat enough of the right kind of protein-of complete proteins.
The youth-protecting value of the protein foods you eat depends not so much on the quantity as on the quality of the proteins you select. In recent years you have probably heard or read about “the 23 amino acids.” What this means is that all food protein is broken down in the chemical laboratory of your body into amino acids. Amino acids might be well described as the traveling form of protein in the human body. From these amino acids, after they reach the bloodstream, your chemically efficient body proceeds to construct the kinds of body proteins needed to repair or replace the varying types of worn-out body cells. To draw a comparison: The contractor who builds a house does not use sand, gravel and cement in the form in which these building materials are unloaded at the construction site. You would not have much of a basement or a foundation if he tried to lay down the unmixed sand, gravel and cement in their original form. To obtain the durable material needed for your foundation and basement, the contractor must prepare concrete from these raw materials. In like manner, the food protein contained in an egg, a piece of cheese, a slice of meat, a serving of milk, or a bowl of seed cereal is not usable by your body for cell-building material until it has been broken down into its separate amino acids, and then reconstructed into the hundreds of varieties of body protein needed by the many different types of cells. Up to the present time, food chemists have identified 23 different amino acids in our food proteins-some appearing in one protein food, others in another type and so on.
It is also known that only 10 of the 23 amino acids must be obtained from the protein foods we eat, since our bodies have the marvelously efficient power of being able to manufacture the other 13 amino acids, provided the essential 10 are supplied in each day’s meals. The truth about these various kinds of food proteins was first suspected when laboratory animals were noticed to be slowly starving to death on an exclusive diet of certain proteins, and yet thriving on an exclusive diet of still other proteins. From these observations it was discovered that some foods are complete proteins, while others are incomplete. What this means is simply that some foods (the complete proteins) contain all 10 of the essential amino acids, and other foods do not. You could live to a healthy, youthful old age by eating nothing except the foods that are complete proteins (witness the exclusively meat-eating Eskimos and Gauchos), whereas slow starvation, with the onset of debilitating diseases, would be the inevitable result if you attempted living exclusively on the incomplete, not wholly digestible proteins found in vegetables and fruits.