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

This is disgusting, are you ready? If we are ready. We have human subjects who were conscientious targets in the Vietnam War and every day they took off their blue zoo suit and inhaled it, all the poop, all the urine,

everything

that came out of the human being. body was compiled welcome to Zoe science and nutrition, where world-leading scientists explained how their research can improve your health thank you for joining me today and it's a great pleasure that we've met, I think for over five years, um and by a The ones that our listeners refer to us, Christner is one of the leading nutritional scientists in the world and he conducts a whole series of large intervention studies in humans that are randomized controlled trials, which is very rare.

He has been a long-standing member of Zoe's Scientific Advisory Board and is also one of the authors of a major review on

protein

requirements for nutritional review, so no one better to talk about

protein

, which is one of the topics we've received the most questions about from our listeners and members of

everything

we touch. on this podcast, so I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Thank you for being here with us. This is a topic very close to my heart. There are many myths to debunk well when it comes to myth busting. Why not?

We start with our usual quick round of questions from our listeners and just to remind you, Christopher, you know the rules are pretty simple, you can say yes, you can say no or, if necessary, you can respond with a sentence, but no more than that and we know that this is the hardest thing for any teacher to do, but are you willing to try? Yeah, okay, you've got the hang of it. Yeah, okay, Christopher, will I die if I don't? I get protein in my food yes, do animals contain special proteins that you can't get from plants?

Should we all worry about getting enough protein? No, protein shakes and bars are healthy for most people compared to a spoonful of sugar, but I always think in comparison to what food is compared to. No, I told you it was difficult for a teacher to answer these. questions and the last question, can eating more protein help you lose weight? no, okay, I think a lot of people will already be surprised and I hope that now we can break this down in the rest of the podcast, maybe we can start from the beginning, so I think most of our listeners will feel like they know what a fat, which they are thinking of as an oil. cook with butter or you know, maybe the fat in a piece of meat and I think almost everyone feels safe about a carbohydrate, it's like it's bread or potatoes or something, I think though, if a lot of people is like me, Actually, you're not really clear on what protein is, except you know they're sure there's plenty of it and a piece of meat because you know your mom always said you

knew

how to eat meat and get protein, so could you begin?

At first, what is protein and why do we need it? When it comes to fats and carbohydrates, that's really the majority of our fuel. When it comes to protein, it's more of our structure, so all of our cells, our organs, our hair and our nails all that is structural protein all the enzymes that are in our body that catalyze reactions and make the metabolism move forward those they are all proteins many hormones our proteins there is actually a huge list of functional things that proteins do and to take them to the next level maybe this is useful maybe this is not that all proteins in the human body are made of 20 amino acids and I like to think of them as Scrabble letters in the Scrabble board game or the letter someone would put on a movie theater marquee and for perspective, there are a couple of them that are just three amino acids joined together, what you would call tripeptide, but that would be unusual.

The biggest one I know of is something called maybe Tin Tin, 35,000 amino acids linked together. I was thinking of these as words. and these amino acids are like letters, but you're saying these words can be very long and you need a lot of them, but fundamentally you can make any word like any protein from 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 important is not just that the specific amino acids, one after another, are perfect, like if you were spell-checking your writing in a document and you said no, 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 chains of amino acids, uh, twist and twist and adapt, they actually have to be next to each other in the correct way and if you change that and unravel them, what happens in your stomach with a low pH, 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 is As fuel. now you can separate the individual amino acids and use them, but it can't work like it should and that's why the protein is so complicated, it has so many things that it does so many ways to activate it and inactivate it, and that's why Christopher makes sure that I have this because it was a little scary what you just described, you're basically saying you know we eat protein foods, we break them down, there's like 20 of the potentials, like building blocks like letters, which is what we're calling these amino acids and then our body produces almost everything we are made of is made up of those like 20 letters in unimaginably complex combinations.

I like the way you said that and let me add a twist to this that is quite interesting. There are very few 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 unique amino acid levels and then the absorption travels through. from your body puts them back together I can't remember where it came from oh this came from a cow oh this came from a pig oh this comes from broccoli no idea it's like ah it's just this amino acid I don't know I even care that it comes from a supplement , I can't even say that it's just the building block that I have it, so this is like if I eat Shakespeare or I eat a comic book, my body just breaks it down into letters, which makes the protein sound even more.

Importantly, I guess the next natural question on this is that I think one of the things that we've learned in this podcast is that our body has this incredible ability to often convert carbohydrates into fat, so it doesn't really matter what you eat. always because your body will produce what you need, can't we just make these letters, these amino acids when we need them? Yes, I bet many 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. I have the ideas.

While carbohydrates and fats circulate in your body, their basic structure is built on carbons of different lengths and they have very complex metabolic processes. pathways and at certain points in carbohydrate metabolism and fat metabolism, you can borrow one of these molecules, put nitrogen on it in the form of an amino group, which means that a nitrogen with three hydrogens, an amino Amino reflects this portion of nitrogen, you can actually make 11 of the amino acids by borrowing some of the fats and carbohydrates and putting this ammonia amine group on them and the same way if you were breaking down protein because you had enough for the day, which I hope let's get to it later because most people eat more than enough if you take If you remove the ammonia nitrogen group, you can put it back into the carbohydrate or fat metabolizing chain and that works for 11 amino acids;

For nine of them, there's no specific place you can borrow it from in your body, so since then you need all 20 for almost every protein you synthesize. You also have to get the nine essential ones, and essential just means you can't assemble everything yourself. yourself you have to make sure it has Christopher because I was a little scared in chemistry again, you're saying there are these 20, we can actually do some of them ourselves, but actually I think you'd say nine of them we can't make them, so you have to eat them, you have to get them. nine to know essential things within you is okay so protein is really important we need to get some um let's talk about how much we need what was the number one question we had as we were preparing for this program.

Okay, you're going to have to stop me everywhere and have me explain it to you in English because this will be harder, but basically, I'm going to take a big step back and say if you've had enough to eat. calories for the day, you have enough protein, so stop obsessing about protein and everything the 20 amino acids are found in all plant foods, a great myth to debunk here and in all animal foods, so if you are just getting enough calories with reasonable variety. in your diet, for example, 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 wouldn't get much, you wouldn't get enough other nutrients either. so let me tell you how people figured out how to get enough protein.

This is disgusting. Are you ready? So yeah, we're ready. I got my PhD at UC Berkeley in California and they were one of the places that did some of the initial trials in the '50s and '60s to establish this and the fifth floor of my Morgan Hall building in Berkeley was called The Penthouse and we got human subjects. who were conscientious targets of the Vietnam War and volunteered to live there in blue suits and the Scientists would sequentially reduce their protein successfully to zero and give them only carbohydrates and fats and then slowly increase the protein in their diet and all the days they would take off their blue zoo suit and vacuum it the entire time.

The hair and skin cells that fell out during the day collected all the poop, all the urine, all the blowing of the nose, everything that came out of the human body was collected. Now we already talked about this about nitrogen in proteins and the initial studies were curiously called nitrogen balance. studies and instead of analyzing the amino acids in the poop, analyzing the amino acids in P, analyzing the amino acids in the hair, you just burn it all and analyze the nitrogen, that is the amount of protein, you can calculate how much protein came out of your body and then, because they were nutrition scientists.

They were calculating the amount of protein or nitrogen that was entering the body from food to know how much was going in and how much was going out, they raised it and lowered it for each individual until they were in balance, but Jonathan when they did this for a group of people, As you can imagine, they discovered that, oh my God, this person in the room needed more than that person in the room and when they combined their data with a group of other people who had done the same disgusting thing, they emerged. in math, get ready for this, a normal distribution curve, meaning a couple of people needed very little, a couple of people needed a lot, there's a bell curve, so there was an average in the middle, they came to what would be the average, okay and it's called ear is 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 formulate protein recommendations for the country what would you suggest recommend 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 is the average amount. If you only get the average amount, the half of you who are above average, not only intelligently but also in protein requirement, would be deficient. And this happens with protein and all vitamins and minerals, Jonathan. So when the United States presents 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 made your choice. a number that should be adequate for 97 and a half percent of the population and there may be a couple of people in line who need even more than that, but they would be so few that it is quite safe to recommend that amount now not only is it that quantity is adequate, but another mathematical thing to keep in mind here is that if really everyone in the US or the UK scored exactly that 97 and a half percent, two standard deviations more, how many would be exceeding their requirement?

Oh, actually, like 97 percent, so just to make sure I'm with you here, Christopher, because you know this is, you're moving to a certainsomething they had surpassed caffeine. Is there any evidence that at this point, when you're growing very fast, kids might actually not be getting enough protein and we really have to worry about that, yeah, for kids, if we go back to all those old dosage calculations recommended daily, children do not need 0.8 grams, but at different ages they need 0.9 1.0 1.1 because they are growing similarly to a pregnant woman who is growing a fetus inside her not only is she maintaining herself, but it is growing, so those needs are greater than 0.8 grams per kilogram per day.

The question is: can you get that just by eating food or do you need to get these additional sources? And as I suggest food supply, as long as you get a reasonable variety and we should focus on plant foods versus animal foods, but you would have to work very hard to not get as much protein. Jonathan I attended a job talk by a nephrologist at Stanford who is not a nutrition person, he said God, you know I'm trying to work with these people with kidney problems and I've been trying to get them on this very restricted 0.7 protein diet. grams per kilogram of body weight and I can't achieve it and I laughed and I said 0.7 grams per kilogram, it's a severely restricted protein which is pretty much the RDA.

He said yes, I can't lower them that much. I make them try to eat this and that and then I can't get them down that much, it's hard not to get them. That means, as a parent, you know you don't really need to worry about it, but isn't your refrigerator empty? So I have four children. Yes, he eats a lot of food. There is no doubt that he brings the friends to him. and it's like I skipped dinner, aren't you eating? oh no, I had like two pizzas half an hour ago but I'm skipping it, oh my god, and then I go out at midnight and he's eating a sandwich, it's like a bottomless pit now.

If you go to the other end of the spectrum, possibly there are some problems with the elderly because the digestive tract has dentures, so you know they are not chewing enough food, they have lost their appetite, we have this sarcopenia problem where they are. losing muscle mass there have been some studies, it's actually not just thehormones it's loneliness it's depression it's not eating you may have to make a special effort to make sure that in the small amount of calories they are consuming they are rich in protein because they just don't They're eating a lot, so Christopher, you.

I would be very patient not to talk about where the protein comes from, so thank you, let's do it and a lot of people asked us, basically, you know, kind of versions of the same question: is animal protein better than plant protein and you know? as. They are different? Know? And why might one 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 right now. I have to get down to that level of amino acids, so I'll do my best to describe some of these slides that I made for Jonathan, so if you look at the estimated average protein requirement for many people, it might be closer to 40 grams. of protein, which is pretty low and I like to use that number just for fun to clarify this point: there are 20 amino acids if you need 40 grams of protein simplistically it seems like it would be nice to have two grams of each 2 times 20 is 40. not even close, so you need tons of glutamate, glutamine, aspartate, asparagus, you hardly need tryptophan, methionine, cysteine, and the best way I've found to describe this is the game of Scrabble, so the Scrabble in which my wife wins me regularly it's a hundred chips in a bag and I don't know if you know this from country to country the distribution of letters is a little different depending on how often those letters are used in the language I'm learning about Scrabble and protein now Christopher said it's great so think about 26 letters in the alphabet there are 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 protein in eggs, chicken, pork, fish, beef and they are stunning, the distribution is strikingly similar, they say, wow, that's pretty interesting, all the animals have a lot of the same and some of the same and then I say, it's Well, everyone has heard that plants lack amino acids, which ones?

I think they are missing different plants that are missing different amino acids and I put in some fake data and say what do you think is rice, beans and broccoli and I don't let them think for too long and then I put in the real ones. distribution of amino acids and they are amazed all plants have all 20 amino acids the distribution of amino acids is almost identical in plants and animals and they say what people have told me Professor Gardner, are you lying? Did you like doing this? because this is not the reality that I have been told and it is a very simple and trivial thing, Jonathan, so rice and other grains in general tend to have a low ratio of lysine relative to the optimal ratio and in the same way Beans tend to be low in methionine and cysteine ​​in proportion to what they need, which is why I like this Scrabble analogy.

Imagine that you have played Scrabble for a long time and you lost the L for lysine and the M for methionine. you're missing all the valves and all the M's, no, actually, you only lost a couple of letters, so if you were using your board and trying to make words, you would run out of words that you could make with l and m before. What would happen if you had one? neighbor who hadn't played Scrabble in a long time either and had said oh I'm so sorry you're missing those letters, can you have my bag of Scrabble letters, oh I'm missing an L and an M too I'm sorry you could still complete the L and the M you were missing because your neighbor has extra L and M and I think Americans eat at least 80 grams of protein a day, not the 40 they need, so I'm thinking what if you had two bags of Scrabble letters, oh , that's how much protein Americans eat every day, two bags of Scrabble letters and if they eat plant protein, they have less lysine and methionine, then that would be optimal, but that's only a concern if they're only getting 40 grams of protein and they need every amino acid to count but they get 80 grams of protein even vegetarians and vegans and Christopher just a clarification I think it sounds like a general saying, don't worry about this, are you saying it because Are you mentioning two amino acids in particular that don't can I pronounce?

Are you saying that in all plants the relative amount is less than in animals? So even if you have a variety of plants, it's not just that. like one plant is low L and the other is low and yeah I'm actually averaging like all plants are lower relative to animals and so if you were eating a diet just of plants, so if you were going to eat With the 40 grams of protein, you will potentially have a low level of those two particular amino acids. I just want to make sure that yes, if you need 40. Actually, it's not that 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 a total From 40 grams of protein you would run out of lysine too soon if you only ate beans you would run out of methionine before you got enough to be able to supplement with just those individual amino acids or you could eat 80 grams of protein a day and end up getting the things you are missing . Now here's what happens: You really only needed 40 and you needed 880, what do you do with the extra 40?

It breaks down 40 and converts them into carbohydrates and fats, but that's what usually happens: people eat more than the total amount they need, since plants do not have the ideal distribution of amino acids they are almost always covered and they simply break down the else, so there's Jonathan, an old concept that was written in Francis Moore Lopez Died for a Small Planet about supplementing your protein because grains that are a little low in lysine have a little bit of methionine and beans have a little bit of methionine, but they have a little lysine. I'm going to say, ah, this is obvious, that's why some populations ate grains and beans together because they complemented each other. the deficiencies with the excesses and it's still never as good as meat, it's still not the optimal distribution but it's closer to the Optimal so you can try to supplement them or you can't worry because you probably weigh 880 or 90 grams and I really didn't have to think on that so you can meet absolutely all your needs on a completely plant-based diet, stop obsessing about protein, thanks, brilliant answer, so let's say someone is listening to all of this and you haven't quite gotten it. convince them that they shouldn't consume protein because you know it's hard to get rid of, so they say okay, but I'm worried or maybe I fit into one of those categories that we're talking about that they're potentially worried about. about what is the healthiest and tastiest protein source that you would recommend bean hummus three bean soup a three bean salad so David Katz and some other colleagues and I wrote an article called modernizing the definition of protein quality protein and in it we said Well, so there is this problem of perfect amino acid distribution in animal foods, less than perfect in plant foods, there is actually a problem of digestion and availability of bioavailability and it is a little bit higher for protein of meat than for vegetable protein, but when people eat meats.

They get a lot of saturated fat and sometimes they get hormones and antibiotics were used to grow that meat and there's no fiber. If you were eating beans, tofu, tempeh, and plant foods, you would be much less saturated. fat, you would get phytochemicals, antioxidants, you would get a lot of fiber for your microbiome. The Zoe guys may have heard of the microbiome, that's a very interesting thing, so this idea of ​​whether the definition of protein quality in the US is based on amino acid distribution, digestion and availability, and we propose that it also include the nutrients that come with those protein-rich foods that have sugar in their bar and that meat with saturated fats and no fiber versus those beans and grains that have antioxidants and others. things like that and if we are going to be Ecological Warriors these days and not destroy the planet we live on, legumes and cereals are much easier at the planetary limits of land use, water use, greenhouse gases greenhouse, eutrophication and biodiversity, and I think you already know.

To add, we discussed this just a few weeks ago, they are also incredibly cheap, you can buy them in cans, they last, meaning you capture all those nutrients at harvest and then they stay there. for months, so I think beans have had the worst marketing possible, probably because no one can block the copyright, you know, the same way as for that protein-enriched drink my son was talking to me about a while ago. couple weeks, oh gosh, I make a wheat and berry salad with some nuts and whole grains and I eat hummus all the time, there are so many ways to incorporate really fun dishes from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Latin America, uh, South Asia They really evolved around grains and beans, so there's globalization. fusion of flavors available to you, you don't have to look hard and your message is even if you're trying to know, be fast on the track or pump your iron or everything else, in fact you don't need to be an eat a steak a day kind of guy eat food yes wonderful Christopher this has been an amazing journey.

I'd love to try to do a little summary and then please keep me honest. If I'm

wrong

about something, okay, done. absolutely fine, I think you first explained what protein is and what I took away from this is that fat and carbohydrates are like the fuel that drives us through the day, but protein actually creates the structure, so everything from What we are made of basically comes from these proteins and they come from these 20 amino acids that I had never understood what they were before, but now I have in mind that they are like the letters of the alphabet and then I am like all these words that are created from these letters um, in terms of how much protein we need, the answer is a lot less than any of us realized or have been led to believe, your colleagues at Stanford, you know, a long time ago they did these crazy studies of people wrapping themselves in Christopher shakes his head, there's always some new technology, I think, but soMaybe that makes it possible, but right now you can't measure that for yourself, but what they did was figure out what the maximum is. which almost everyone needs and which was actually only 0.8 grams per kilogram and on average in the US people are eating twice that, um uh, which means they're eating, in fact, you know much more than they need, so they don't need. worry about that and then we talked about, well, what if you're not eating a lot of animal protein?

You know it's a problem and the answer really wasn't that there are actually all the amino acids in plants, there are a couple. Of these amino acids they have relatively lower amounts, but since we all eat a lot of them, it's not really a problem and I think the bottom line was almost anything that says like extra high protein or, you know, a bar or a shake. or any of these things are really bad for you, don't eat them and I think Christopher, your messages eat beans, yeah, perfect. I don't know why it took me an hour to say all that when you said it in three minutes. which is pretty cool, well there's a critical error, so those old studios 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.

Okay, you masturbate. I can see that you will be in a lot of trouble, you will have a lot of trouble there, so I apologize to you, Christopher. Thank you so much. I think it was fascinating. And I think you know some of these points and I'm sure we could address them. We'll talk in more detail in a future podcast, but I certainly think that hopefully you'll have met a lot of people who feel more relaxed, which is great, and they probably also look very differently at these foods that say they're sugar-free and They contain 10 grams of protein because Now I realize that if they eat that right before going to bed, they could have also eaten a chocolate bar, it would have been more fun and would have gotten the same result, something I hadn't realized before, so you probably won't do it. that at home is fine, great, it was a lot of fun to have this discussion and yes, I hope some people learned a few things thanks Jonathan, it's a great pleasure see you very soon Christopher, thanks Christopher for joining me today on Zoe's science and nutrition yes you're based on today's conversation.

If you would like to know how to support her body with the best foods for you, including many high-quality protein sources, then you can try Zoe's personalized nutrition program. Your Zoe membership includes food and recipe recommendations. Access to our nutrition advisors and scientific information. Backed nutritional advice on how to eat for better health, so you can feel more energetic and reduce your risk of chronic disease. Your personalized nutrition program is based on our scientific research and the results of your personal at-home test. If you are interested in learning more about Zoe, you can join the zoe.com podcast and get 10 off your purchase if you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review as we love reading your feedback.

If this episode left you with any questions, send them to 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 on Zoe until next time