What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Dietary Fat Content
As with the issue of micro-nutrients, the presence or absence of dietary fat (either in terms of the quantity or quality) can impact on the choice of protein source. And this actually turns out to be a place where dietary fat content can vary massively, not only between protein sources but between different sources of the same protein.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Micronutrient Content
Today I want to look at an issue that I don’t think is addressed as much as it could be when folks are looking at protein source; that topic is the presence (or absence) of other nutrients. Outside of a few select groups (that often get a majority of their protein from isolated sources such as protein powders or amino acids), the fact is that most people get their daily protein from whole food sources and whole foods contain other nutrients. Some of those nutrients may be beneficial, some of them may be detrimental; all need to be considered when look at protein sources.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Amino Acid Profile Part 3
Although there are certainly other adaptations occurring to training (e.g. neural, cardiovascular), one of the primary places where adaptation to regular training occurs in skeletal muscle. Both endurance training and heavy resistance training stimulate specific adaptations in skeletal muscle that work to improve performance in the long run.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Amino Acid Profile Part 2
There are a number of different ways by which by which exercise training might increase protein/amino acids requirements. This includes the use of amino acids for energy directly during exercise, other pathways of interest (see below), and finally the actual adaptation to training. I also want to touch briefly on the issue of dieting.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Amino Acid Profile Part 1
Now, as I’ve mentioned but not gone into any great detail in this series, amino acids are simply the building blocks of protein. Depending on which reference source you use, there are 18-22 different amino acids that occur in the human food supply. Whole food proteins are simply long chains of these amino acids bonded together. Typically whole food proteins are extremely long chains of amino acids, as I discussed in What are good sources of protein? – Digestibility, these long chains are cut into smaller and smaller chunks during digestion until only single amino acids and chains of 2-3 amino acids are actually absorbed.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Protein Quality
Essentially, protein quality simply refers to how well or how poorly a given protein is used by the body once it has been digested. Clearly, any protein that escapes digestion (as discussed in What are good sources of protein? – Digestibility) can’t do anything in the body but that doesn’t mean that all of the protein that is digested automatically works the same in the body.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Speed of Digestion Part 3
I finished up What are Good Sources of Protein? Speed of Digestion Part 2 with a short chart showing the estimated digestion speeds of various proteins, including some whole foods. As someone brought up in the comments, it’s unfortunate that there isn’t more data for whole foods because of the fact that, outside of athletes, most people are eating whole food protein sources, not protein powders, to obtain the majority of their daily protein.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Speed of Digestion Part 2
Of more relevance, the researchers also found that the whey protein stimulated whole-body protein synthesis without much effect on protein breakdown while casein decreased protein breakdown with little effect on protein synthesis; I’d note that there was also an increase in the oxidation (burning for energy) of the whey protein. Thus whey became known as an ‘anabolic’ protein and casein an ‘anti-catabolic’ protein.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Speed of Digestion Part 1
Recently (and by that I mean the late 90’s or so), an interest in the speed of digestion and how that impacts on various aspects of human physiology has occurred. It’s turning out that proteins can digest at fairly different rates and this turns out to affect various physiological processes; the main two are protein synthesis and protein breakdown. As with the last article, I’m going to talk about these terms in brief before moving onto the main thrust of today’s article.
What Are Good Sources of Protein? – Digestibility
Today I want to talk about the issue of protein digestibility; to keep the length down I’ll save speed of digestion for Part 3 of the series.. Once again I’ll note that much of what will appear in this and subsequent articles in this series is being excerpted or paraphrased from The Protein Book, my complete look at the issue of dietary protein.
