Protein

I was all excited to write my little schpeal about protein, and in looking up a few facts I found a web page that is so far superior to anything I could have written, I am just going to be totally unoriginal and paste a few things, make a few comments, and then put the link to the page at the end. Sorry, but it's more important to portray the best info than to come up with something original in this case!

To start: no dietary concept has been more hyped up than the one of protein.
This has an extremely simple reason, and it is that certain powerful people stand to gain a lot of money from their businesses if we think their product is nutritionally superior a.k.a. the meat and dairy associations. Otherwise, why wouldn't the average person know how much selenium, potassium, and vitamin D they need? Yet everyone knows about protein and calcium. This is sly corporate marketing and nothing else.

Did you know the beef and dairy associations supply free "educational" materials to children in schools? They get to color in pictures of happy cows on the farm to learn about nutrition: protein and calcium! What else is there?!?

I started doing some research to see which plant foods are complete protein because a few were mentioned in my raw food book, and I was surprised because of course I learned that no plant food contains all essential amino acids. Well, if I'm not the dumbest vegetarian that ever lived.

Here's some plant foods that contain all essential amino acids:

brown rice, tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, corn, lettuce, celery, cucumbers, oats, carrots, broccoli, pinto beans....and more. Maca contains all essential and unessential amino acids, along with some other superfoods.

The most everyday, common foods any American eats...

We have been duped.

The plant food with the lowest percentage of protein is the potato at 10% protein. Even the poor Irish farmers from the old days who had to sometimes survive on potatoes and water didn't have a protein deficiency.

Again, from this website:

"It's really meat that's incomplete:

When you think about it, it's kind of silly to single out protein, just one of the many nutrients, just so we can declare plant proteins to be incomplete (although they're not). Why aren't we declaring meat to be an incomplete vitamin? Because it is, you know. For example, beef is completely devoid of Vitamin C, an essential nutrient without which you'd die. And beef doesn't just have a lower level of this essential nutrient, it has zero. So why didn't the authorities ever caution us that we need to combine beef with chicken to get a complete vitamin?
But actually, no combination of meat will make a complete vitamin, since every single kind of meat has zero Vitamin C. And it's deficient in other vitamins as well. So while plants aren't actually deficient in protein, meat is definitely deficient in vitamins. But I'm sure you never heard about vitamin deficiency in animal foods. All you've heard about is the supposed deficiency of protein in plants.

And speaking about biases, the whole protein-combining idea supposes that vegetarians are eating just one food, which is allegedly incomplete. Okay, how many people do you know who eat one food? And since nobody eats just one food, the whole idea of protein combining would be unnecessary anyway, even if it were true. So here again, what would be the point of harping on protein combining when it doesn't matter?"

The World Health Organization recommends the diet be 5% protein. Mother's breast milk is 2% protein (although this website says 5%--I have always read 2%). There is no known death on record from lack of protein. The only way NOT to get your required protein is to not get a significant number of calories per day.

from http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/protein.html :

"We never talk about protein anymore, because it's absolutely not an issue, even among children," says Marion Nestle, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Nutrition, Food and Hotel Management at New York University. "If anything, we talk about the dangers of high-protein diets. Getting enough is simply a matter of getting enough calories."4.3

"'There was no basis for [protein combining] that I could see.... I began calling around and talking to people and asking them what the justification was for saying that you had to complement proteins, and there was none. And what I got instead was some interesting insight from people who were knowledgeable and actually felt that there was probably no need to complement proteins. So we went ahead and made that change in the paper. [Note: The paper was approved by peer review and by a delegation vote before becoming official.] And it was a couple of years after that that Vernon Young and Peter Pellet published their paper that became the definitive contemporary guide to protein metabolism in humans. And it also confirmed that complementing proteins at meals was totally unnecessary.8.5"

Let me repeat this: The person who wrote the American Dietetic Association's position paper described above said that complementing proteins at meals is "totally unnecessary".

There's a very easy way to see the completeness of plant proteins, that most nutrition writers haven't bothered to do: Look at what's actually in the food! It's not like this is a secret; that data has been publicly available from the USDA for decades, and now the USDA's database is even online.4'"

Did you know one teaspoon of sea kelp dissolved in water has 1,000 times the calcium of a glass of milk? 1,000 times the calcium! If we care so much about calcium, why don't we know that? Green leafy vegetables are a fabulous source of this essential mineral. The average person knows nothing about nutrition save the ridiculous claims and myths perpetrated by those who stand to gain from our purchase of animal products.

Vitamin B12 is one a lot of people have heard about because we have learned it can't be had without meat and dairy, and this PROVES we must eat meat and dairy! Humans need five millionths of a gram per day. The average meat eater can go vegan and not come up with a deficiency in this for over a decade because there is a massive quantity of it in a piece of meat. This is how out of proportion meat is with human dietary needs. Yet animal products are not the only source; otherwise, how could traditional vegan cultures survive without this necessary vitamin? Traditional vegan cultures do not have a deficiency in B12 for a simple reason: it is present in dirt and they do not meticulously wash their vegetables as we do. You can go without washing your (organic) produce and take in enough B12--again, only 5 millionths of a gram per day is needed.

What IS so special about meat? I have yet to hear of a miracle meat or egg that has helped eliminate free radicals in the body or protects against cancer. Yet we learn of new miracle plant foods every day from superfoods, to cancer-curing plants, to everything in between.

The human body, based on its teeth, saliva, stomach acid, and intestines, is an herbivore's body. As this website states, "we are most similar to other herbivores and drastically different from omnivores and carnivores." My best friend was Pre-Med in college, and her Anatomy & Physiology teacher, a Ph.D., said the same thing. The most common cause of choking death is eating meat, and animal omnivores and carnivores do not have that problem.

If you don't believe me...please, see for yourself!

Vegetarianism, Raw Food

I think some people are scared off by vegetarianism because when you are used to eating meat and then take it out of your diet, it feels kind of weird. You feel lighter. That sounds nice, but for some people, it's an unfamiliar feeling. I believe some people sort of feel subconsciously that without that heavy feeling, they could just float away or disappear. We are used to that "grounded" feeling that eating meat gives us. Yet it's not groundedness, it's more like sluggishness. And just because you are used to something, it doesn't mean it is good for you. We are used to all manner of sicknesses, obsessions, and addictions. Most of us are used to a muddled, heavy body as well as a muddled, heavy mind. Just because you don't feel tired and heavy after eating doesn't mean you didn't eat the right foods or you didn't eat enough!

It is our spiritual and physical nature to be and feel light. Being in a physical body is heavy enough, and eating meat adds to this unnecessarily. (Of course, there are a million other factors involved in choosing to eat or not eat meat, but I won't be going into those today!) Familiarity is comfortable for everyone, but what we eat must be looked at objectively and scientifically.

I think it is amazing the way that we talk about meat's nutritive value. We look at the lack of health of some vegetarians as proof that eating meat is part of the healthiest diet. Hunter/gatherer cultures have been found to eat hundreds and hundreds of different types of fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and seeds. Us European folks did the same thing long back. The lack of vegetarian nutrition is not due to a lack of meat but a lack of vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, and seeds! The typical grocery store carries a miniscule fraction of what nature offers us. Unfortunately, we don't grow up with the valuable information we need to make healthy choices, and you have to either do a lot of research and reading or be a nutritionist to figure it all out.

Being a vegetarian means learning about food and learning, finally, how to cook. (Throwing a slab of meat on the grill is easy.) These are not quick and easy things to learn. I went vegetarian on my own in college and lived with another vegetarian at the time. She ate worse than anyone I've ever known--and it showed. I was clueless but struggled through it and figured it out little by little. I wish it was easier, maybe more people would do it!

If you want to force variety on yourself overnight, go raw and vegan. The variety of ingredients in raw recipes is huge. The food is bursting with incredible flavor and depth. The food is unlike any vegetarian or meat-eating meals you have ever had. I tried this diet for a month and literally felt like I was eating like a queen. I went from eating the same 10 things (tomato, avocado, onion, potatoes, lettuce, sprouted grain bread, beans) to regularly eating figs, dates, cashews, almonds, vanilla bean, kale, collard greens, cilantro, carob powder, sprouted mung beans, sprouted barley, and on and on. None of these things did I eat previously.

You don't have to cut out all meat and dairy to add some of these to your diet to increase your nutrient intake-and probably health-by a lot. I highly recommend these raw food recipes to anyone at whatever level they want to add them to their diet. I will say: For them to taste the best, you will have to be 100% raw. Why? Because cooked food kills your taste buds!! Salt actually numbs taste buds. The first few days of all-raw food do not feel very exciting at all. After that, you will feel and taste total luxury in the raw food diet.