The China Study (6 page)

28                              THE CHINA STUDY
Confusion reigns on many of the most basic questions about protein:
What are good sources of protein?
•
•   How much protein should one consume?
•   Is plant protein as good as animal protein?
•   Is it necessary to combine certain plant foods in a meal to get com-
plete proteins?
Is it advisable to take protein powders or amino acid supplements,
•
especially for someone who does vigorous exercise or plays sport?
Should one take protein supplements to build muscle?
•
•   Some protein is considered high quality, some low quality; what
does this mean?
•   Where do vegetarians get protein?
Can vegetarian children grow properly without animal protein?
•
Fundamental to many of these common questions and concerns is
the belief that meat is protein and protein is meat. This belief comes
from the fact that the "soul" of animal-based foods is protein. In many
meat and dairy products, we can selectively remove the fat but we are
still left with recognizable meat and dairy products. We do this all the
time, with lean cuts of meat and skim milk. But if we selectively remove
the protein from animal-based foods, we are left with nothing like the
original. A non-protein steak, for example, would be a puddle of water,
fat and a small amount of vitamins and minerals. Who would eat that?
In brief, for a food to be recognized as an animal-based food, it must
have protein. Protein is the core element of animal-based foods.
Early scientists like Carl Voit (1831-1908), a prominent German
scientist, were staunch champions of protein. Voit found that "man"
needed only 48.5 grams per day, but nonetheless he recommended a
whopping 118 grams per day because of the cultural bias of the time.
Protein equaled meat, and everyone aspired to have meat on his or her
table, just as we aspire to have bigger houses and faster cars. Voit figured
you can't get too much of a good thing.
Voit went on to mentor several well-known nutrition researchers of
the early 1900s, including Max Rubner (1854-1932) and WOo Atwater
(1844-1907). Both students closely followed the advice of their teacher.
Rubner stated that protein intake, meaning meat, was a symbol of civi-
lization itself: "a large protein allowance is the right of civilized man."
Atwater went on to organize the first nutrition laboratory at the United
States Department of Agriculture (USDA). As director of the USDA, he

A HOUSE OF PROTEINS                           29
recommended 125 grams per day (only about fifty-five grams per day is
now recommended). Later, we will see how important this early prec-
e d e n t was to this government agency.
A cultural bias had become firmly entrenched. If you were civilized,
you ate plenty of protein. If you were rich, you ate meat, and if you were
poor, you ate staple plant foods, like potatoes and bread. The lower
classes were considered by some to be lazy and inept as a result of not
eating enough meat, or protein. Elitism and arrogance dominated much
of the burgeoning field of nutrition in the nineteenth century. The en-
tire concept that bigger is better, more civilized and perhaps even more
spiritual permeated every thought about protein.
Major McCay, a prominent English physician in the early twentieth
century, provided one of the more entertaining, but most unfortunate,
moments in this history. Physician McCay was stationed in the English
colony of India in 1912 in order to identify good fighting men in the In-
dian tribes. Among other things, he said that people who consumed less
protein were of a "poor physique, and a cringing effeminate disposition
is all that can be expected."
PRESSING FOR QUALITY
Protein, fat, carbohydrate and alcohol provide virtually all of the calo-
ries that we consume. Fat, carbohydrate and protein, as macronutrients,
make up almost all the weight of food, aside from water, with the re-
m a i n i n g small amount being the vitamin and mineral micronutrients.
The amounts of these latter micronutrients needed for optimum health
are tiny (milligrams to micrograms).
Protein, the most sacred of all nutrients, is a vital component of our
bodies and there are hundreds of thousands of different kinds. They
function as enzymes, hormones, structural tissue and transport mol-
ecules, all of which make life possible. Proteins are constructed as long
chains of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, of which there are
fifteen to twenty different kinds, depending on how they are counted.
Proteins wear out on a regular basis and must be replaced. This is ac-
c o m p l i s h e d by consuming foods that contain protein. When digested,
these proteins give us a whole new supply of amino acid building blocks
to use in making new protein replacements for those that wore out.
Various food proteins are said to be of different quality, depending on
how well they provide the needed amino acids used to replace our body
proteins.

30                           THE CHINA STUDY
This process of disassembling and reassembling the amino acids of
proteins is like someone giving us a multicolored string of beads to re-
place an old string of beads that we lost. However, the colored beads on
the string given to us are not in the same order as the string we lost. $0,
we break the string and collect its beads. Then, we reconstruct our new
string so that the colored beads are in the same order as our lost string.
But if we are short of blue beads, for example, making our new string is
going to be slowed down or stopped until we get more blue beads. This
is the same concept as in making new tissue proteins to match our old
worn out proteins.
About eight amino acids ("colored beads") that are needed for mak-
ing our tissue proteins must be provided by the food we eat. They are
called "essential" because our bodies cannot make them. If, like our
string of beads, our food protein lacks enough of even one of these
eight "essential" amino acids, then the synthesis of the new proteins
will be slowed down or stopped. This is where the idea of protein qual-
ity comes into play. Food proteins of the highest quality are, very sim-
ply, those that provide, upon digestion, the right kinds and amounts of
amino acids needed to efficiently synthesize our new tissue proteins.
This is what that word "quality" really means: it is the ability of food
proteins to provide the right kinds and amounts of amino acids to make
our new proteins.
Can you guess what food we might eat to most efficiently provide
the building blocks for our replacement proteins? The answer is human
flesh. Its protein has just the right amount of the needed amino acids.
But while our fellow men and women are not for dinner, we do get
the next "best" protein by eating other animals. The proteins of other
animals are very similar to our proteins because they mostly have the
right amounts of each of the needed amino acids. These proteins can be
used very efficiently and therefore are called "high quality." Among ani-
mal foods, the proteins of milk and eggs represent the best amino acid
matches for our proteins, and thus are considered the highest quality.
While the "lower quality" plant proteins may be lacking in one or more
of the essential amino acids, as a group they do contain all of them.
The concept of quality really means the efficiency with which food
proteins are used to promote growth. This would be well and good if the
greatest efficiency equaled the greatest health, but it doesn't, and that's
why the terms efficiency and quality are misleading. In fact, to give you
a taste of what's to come, there is a mountain of compelling research

A HOUSE OF PROTEINS                            31
showing that "low-quality" plant protein, which allows for slow but
steady synthesis of new proteins, is the healthiest type of protein. Slow
but steady wins the race. The quality of protein found in a specific food
is determined by seeing how fast animals would grow while consuming
it. Some foods, namely those from animals, emerge with a very high
protein efficiency ratio and value. 1
This focus on efficiency of body growth, as if it were good health, en-
courages the consumption of protein with the highest "quality." As any
marketer will tell you, a product that is defined as being high quality
instantly earns the trust of consumers. For well over 100 years, we have
been captive to this misleading language and have oftentimes made the
unfortunate leap to thinking that more quality equals more health.
The basis for this concept of protein quality was not well known
among the public, but its impact was-and still is-highly significant.
People, for example, who choose to consume a plant-based diet will
often ask, even today, "Where do I get my protein? " as if plants don't
have protein. Even if it is known that plants have protein, there is still
the concern about its perceived poor quality: This has led people to
believe that they must meticulously combine proteins from different
plant sources during each meal so that they can mutually compensate
for each other's amino acid deficits. However, this is overstating the
case. We now know that through enormously complex metabolic sys-
tems, the human body can derive all the essential amino acids from the
natural variety of plant proteins that we encounter every day. It doesn't
require eating higher quantities of plant protein or meticulously plan-
n i n g every meal. Unfortunately, the enduring concept of protein quality
has greatly obscured this information.
THE PROTEIN GAP
The most important issue in nutrition and agriculture during my early
career was figuring out ways to increase the consumption of protein,
making sure it was of the highest possible quality: My colleagues and I
all believed in this common goal. From my early years on the farm to my
graduate education, I accepted this virtual reverence for protein. As a
youngster, I remember that the most expensive part of farm animal feed
was the protein supplements that we fed to our cows and pigs. Then,
at graduate school, I spent three years (1958-1961) doing my Ph.D. re-
search trying to improve the supply of high-quality protein by growing
cows and sheep more efficiently so we could eat more of them. 2.3

32                             THE CHINA STUDY
I went all the way through my graduate studies with a profound be-
lief that promoting high-quality protein, as in animal-based foods, was
a very important task. My graduate research, although cited a few times
over the next decade or so, was only a small part of much larger efforts
by other research groups to address a protein situation worldwide. Dur-
i n g the 1960s and 1970s, I was to hear over and over again about a so-
called "protein gap" in the developing world. 4
The protein gap stipulated that world hunger and malnutrition
among children in the third world was a result of not having enough
protein to consume, especially high-quality (i.e. animal) protein. I, 4,5
According to this view, those in the third world were especially de-
ficient in "high-quality" protein, or animal protein. Projects were
springing up all over the place to address this "protein gap" problem.
A prominent MIT professor and his younger colleague concluded in
1976 that "an adequate supply of protein is a central aspect of the world
food problem"5 and further that "unless ... desirably [supplemented]
by modest amounts of milk, eggs, meat or fish, the predominantly
cereal diets [of poor nations] are ... deficient in protein for growing chil-
d r e n .... " To address this dire problem:
• MIT was developing a protein-rich food supplement called INCA-
PARINA.
• Purdue University was breeding corn to contain more lysine, the
"deficient" amino acid in corn protein.
• The u.s. government was subSidizing the production of dried milk
powder to provide high-quality protein for the world's poor.
• Cornell University was providing a wealth of talent to the Philip-
p i n e s to help develop both a high-protein rice variety and a live-
s t o c k industry.
• Auburn University and MIT were grinding up fish to produce "fish
protein concentrate" to feed the world's poor.
The United Nations, the U.S. Government Food for Peace Program,
major universities and countless other organizations and universities
were taking up the battle cry to eradicate world hunger with high-qual-
ity protein. I knew most of the projects firsthand, as well as the indi-
viduals who organized and directed them.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAa) of the United Nations
exerts considerable influence in developing countries through their ag-
r i c u l t u r e development programs. Two of its staffers6 declared in 1970

33
A HOUSE OF PROTEINS
that " . . . by and large, the lack of protein is without question the most
serious qualitative deficiency in the nutrition of developing countries.
The great mass of the population of these countries subsists mainly on
foods derived from plants frequently deficient in protein, which results
in poor health and low productivity per man. " M. Autret, a very influ-
ential man from the FAO, added that "owing to the low-animal protein
content of the diet and lack of diversity of supplies [in developing
countries]' protein quality is unsatisfactory."4 He reported on a very
strong association between consumption of animal-based foods and an-
n u a l income. Autret strongly advocated increasing the production and
consumption of animal protein in order to meet the growing "protein
gap" in the world. He also advocated that "all resources of science and
technology must be mobilized to create new protein-rich foods or to
derive the utmost benefits from hitherto insufficiently utilized resources
to feed mankind. "4
Bruce Stillings at the University of Maryland and the U.S. Depart-
m e n t of Commerce, another proponent of consuming animal-based di-
ets, admitted in 1973 that "although there is no requirement for animal
protein in the diet per se, the quantity of dietary protein from animal
sources is usually accepted as being indicative of the overall protein
quality of the diet. " 1 He went on to say that the " ... supply of adequate
quantities of animal products is generally recognized as being an ideal
way to improve world protein nutrition."
Of course, it's quite correct that a supply of protein can be an im-
p o r t a n t way of improving nutrition in the third world, particularly if
populations are getting all of their calories from one plant source. But
it's not the only way, and, as we shall see, it isn't necessarily the way
most consistent with long-term health.
FEEDING THE CHILDREN
SO this was the climate at that time, and I was a part of it as much as
anyone else. I left MIT to take a faculty position at Virginia Tech in 1965.
Professor Charlie Engel, who was then the head of the Department of
Biochemistry and Nutrition at Virginia Tech, had considerable inter-
est in developing an international nutrition program for malnourished
children. He was interested in implementing a "mothercraft" self-help
project in the Philippines. This project was called "mothercraft" because
it focused on educating mothers of malnourished children. The idea was
that if mothers were taught that the right kinds of locally grown foods can