When I tell people I’m vegan, often the first question out of their mouths is, “Ok, so where do you get your protein?” As soon as I hear this question, I know that I’m dealing with someone who doesn’t know very much about plants.

Nothing in our modern human diet has been as misunderstood, and as misrepresented, as protein. It's considered by most people as the foundation of nutrition. The importance of eating enough protein, primarily from animal sources, is drilled into us daily from childhood.

Here are some of the biggest protein myths in our culture and the truth about our need for protein.

Myth #1:  Protein is the Most Important Nutrient in our Diet

Protein is one of the three required macronutrients for humans. Carbohydrates and fats are the other two.

Proteins are body builders. Much of our body, except for water, is made up of different kinds of protein. All living tissue contains protein.  Protein supports and maintains our blood, organs, muscles, hair, skin, and nails.

Carbohydrates provide the body with a source of fuel and energy that is required to carry out daily activities and exercise. Any extra energy is stored in the body until it is needed.

Our bodies need a constant supply of energy to function properly and a lack of carbohydrates in the diet can cause tiredness or fatigue, poor mental function and lack of endurance and stamina.

Carbohydrates are also important for the correct working of our brain, heart and nervous, digestive and immune systems. Fibre, which is also a form of carbohydrate, is essential for the elimination of waste materials and toxins from the body and helps to keep the intestines disease-free and clean.
Fat makes up part of our brain, it protects some of our joints and it provides reserves for when we're sick.  Fat surrounds and insulates nerve fibers to help transmit nerve impulses.  Fat is also needed so our body can absorb the fat soluble vitamins A, S, E, K, and prevent deficiencies of these vitamins.

Myth #2: The More Protein the Better

Perhaps the most predominant food fallacy is the high protein intake (40 to 100 grams daily) usually recommended. Protein in excess of our needs is not utilized by the body.  Too much protein is as harmful as too little, and is linked with shorter life expectancy, increased cancer and heart disease risk, widespread obesity and diabetes, osteoporosis, kidney stress, and bad digestion

It's been estimated that the average person in this country eats two - six times more protein, usually from animals, than is needed for good nutrition. At it's most extreme, our protein fixation has led to the popularity of high-protein low-carb weight loss diets, condemned by doctors and nutritionists from around the world.  High protein-diets bring about temporary weight-loss, at the expense of overall health, and people quickly regain weight once they return to a normal diet.

There is more disease and death in the world due to excess protein then there is due to lack of protein.
There ARE ways to become protein deficient, but it's pretty difficult. One way is not to get enough food. In parts of the world where famine is real, we can see people with bloated bellies who are obviously protein deficient. But they don't just lack protein - they lack calories, iron, calcium, vitamins - everything. In other words, they're starving to death.

So what is our daily protein requirement? The adult body loses about 0.34 g of protein per kg body weight per day. With a safety margin added we need .45 g/kg per day of "quality" protein to replace what's lost.  So someone weighing 70kg needs to eat 31.5g of protein daily.

Human breast milk contains approximately 6% of calories from protein. This supplies all the protein needs during infancy, the time of a human's life when protein needs are the highest. On a diet of  6% protein, an infant will double its weight in 6 months and triple its weight in a year. How can an adult who is not building new tissue at the same rate possibly need a higher percentage of protein than this?

Here's the unscientific answer to how much protein we need: Do we look good, feel good, maintain optimum weight, and have good muscle tone? Do our hair and nails grow quickly? Do our wounds heal well? Are we generally healthy, and recover quickly from illness? If so, then we must be getting enough protein!

Myth #3: Plants are low in protein

Plant foods are generally abundant in protein. For example, lettuce gets 34% of its calories from protein, and broccoli gets 45% of its calories from protein. Spinach is 49%. Cauliflower is 40%. Celery is 21%. Beans range from 23% to 54% depending on the variety. Grains are 8% to 31%. Nuts and seeds are 8% to 21%. Fruits are the lowest at around 5-8% on average.  Most vegetables are excellent sources of protein, especially the green leafy ones, but often the problem is most people don't eat enough greens.

If you wanted to suffer from protein deficiency on a vegetarian diet, you’d either have to seriously restrict total calories (i.e. starve yourself), or you’d have to eat a really messed up, unbalanced diet, like nothing but low-protein junk foods and certain fruits. But in those cases, protein deficiency probably won’t be your biggest risk.

Personally I’ve never met anyone suffering from protein deficiency in NZ, vegan or otherwise. The much greater risk is overconsumption of protein.

Myth #4: Plant proteins are incomplete

Another myth is the idea that you need to combine different plant foods to form complete proteins. The idea is that most plant foods only contain some of the essential amino acids, so you’d have to combine “incomplete” foods like beans and rice to form meals that contained complete proteins. This idea was put forth in the 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé. It was a million-copy bestseller. Unfortunately, many people still aren’t aware that this theory was later found to be completely false, as Lappé herself recanted her original theory in later works that were far less popular.

The truth is that most plant foods do contain all the essential amino acids, but furthermore, your body will store amino acids in a pool between meals — it doesn’t even need to get all the essentials in a single meal. So the theory of combining plant foods to form complete proteins isn’t even remotely correct.

Myth #5:  Animal Protein is Superior to Plant Protein

There are some important differences between protein obtained from animal sources and protein obtained from plant sources.
        Animal Protein                Plant Protein
        More Acid (Sulphur)            Less Acid
        More Concentrated                Less Concentrated
        Rapid absorption (no fibre)        Slower Absorption

These differences mean that plant protein is far more gentle on your body and digestive system.  Also as animal protein is more concentrated, chances are you are eating too much protein if you rely on animal sources to obtain it.  Our bodies can't store excess protein and so has to eliminate it.  As the liver breaks down excess animal protein it releases toxic wastes due to its acidic nature such as urea, amonia and amino acid fragments.

These wastes make their way to the kidneys for elimination.  In order for our kidneys to deal with these toxins it requires additional calcium which it yanks out of our tissues and bones.  This well documented condition is known as “Protein Induced Hypercalciuria” (Too much calcium going out in the urine).

Diets high in animal protein cause a negative calcium balance even in the presence of more than adequate calcium intake.  Thus Osteoporosis is not so much a disease of calcium deficiency but of protein excess.  This is why throughout the world the incidence of  osteoporosis correlates directly with protein intake.  World health statistics show that osteoporosis is most common in exactly those countries where meat and dairy products are consumed in the largest quantities (including NZ).
Quality Protein:

The quality of and our requirement for protein depends on several factors, for instance on heating, which can considerably lower the quality of the protein. If we use meat as our source of protein, cooking destroys some of the essential amino acids needed for building enzymes and healthy tissue. Cooking can destroy 40 to 85 percent of the available protein in most food.  It probably isn't acceptable to eat raw meat to avoid these deteriorations; but eating other raw foods contributes to reducing the total need for protein.

Raw food decreases the need for protein in yet another way: the usual, everyday diet requires 6-8 grams of protein per day just for the synthesis of digestive juices. But raw foods are easily digested, thanks to the enzyme content, thus economizing on digestive enzymes.

So instead of worrying about getting enough protein maybe we whould be worried about what the excess of animal protein is doing to our long term health.
By cutting back or eliminating animal protein in our diet and relying on green leafy vegetables, nuts and seeds for our protein requirements we can not only get enough quality protein to meet our bodies immediate needs but also protect ourselves from many, so called, normal, age related, degenerative diseases.

Recipe – Protein Shake

Ingredients: 1 Banana

1 Desert Spoon Tahini

1 teaspoon honey

1 Cup water

A handful of green leafy vegetables

Put all ingredients into a blender or food processor and blend until smooth. If your blender is not powerful enough to blend the greens to a smooth enough consistency try chopping them before putting into the blender or use wheat, barley or spirulina powder.