03/02/2023
Eat.real.food 👊🏼
Imagine building your house out of rotten wood or disintegrating bricks. Remember the fable about building your house on sand? Or the one about the three pigs? Your structure and foundation matter. Why would you build your body from defective ingredients?
For example, we need the best quality fats—our brain is 60 percent fat, our nerve coverings are all made from fat, every one of your 10 trillion cells is wrapped in a little fatty membrane. Do you really want to make them from oxidized damaged refined oils in your French fries or KFC?
We also need the best quality protein. The body makes most of its important molecules from protein including muscle, cells, and immune molecules. Not all protein is the same. The best type of protein to build muscle is other muscle—animal protein. You can get protein from plant foods, but the quality is lower and it has lower levels of key amino acids needed to synthesize new muscle, especially the branched chain amino acids (leucine, isoleucine and valine and also lysine and sulfur based amino acids).
There are also compounds such as phytates in plant proteins like beans and nuts that impair protein absorption. Rather than being turned into muscle, plant proteins are often just burned as calories.
If you are vegan, especially as you age, you need to ensure you get these by increasing the overall volume of protein rich plant foods, adding protein powders, and supplementing with BCAA. If you want to eat less meat and include more plant proteins, combining them helps the body utilize the plant protein from beans. Think chili con carne!
And don’t forget all the vitamins and minerals we need to build tissues, muscles, and bones, including vitamin D, vitamin K, calcium, magnesium, and more. Next time you chomp down on something, ask yourself if you are fine with it becoming part of you for the long term. If not, don’t eat it and find the best quality ingredients you can, ingredients that help you thrive.