Comparing Protein Quality and Final Takeaways

I've spoken a lot on this channel about how different diets impact muscle and bone health I'm often asked about the differences between plant based and animal based protein The truth is, not all proteins are created equal, and plant proteins universally are going to be inferior to animal based proteins If you just got triggered If you're still here, it means that you might want to learn more and to see if maybe I have something to say about this that might make sense In this video, I'm going to walk you through why plant protein is indeed inferior to animal protein when it comes to human consumption I promise it's more than just amino acid deficiencies. I'm going to talk about three antionutrients that you probably haven't heard of that are tanking your protein intake if you're getting protein from plants. I'm also going to talk about some plants that you are probably better off avoiding I'm also going to discuss how plant proteins compare to animal proteins using terms like bioavailability and digestibility. I'm going to show you some studies that highlight the impact the ant nutrients have in animal and human models. I also want to give you some practical advice on how you might be able to counteract the antutrients in your plant foods to make the protein more bioavailable But first, If you find value in our content, please hit that subscribe button so you can help me serve our mission of educating the world that bone health can be improved and osteoporosis is reversible I can't do it without you So we often use the term bioavailability when referring to proteins, but what does that even mean Bioavailability is determined by a protein's capacity to be absorbed and used by the body when we consume it. And that's largely based on the protein's amino acid profile. In other words Does it contain all the essential amino acids? And if so, how much and in what ratio? But a major part of protein quality that's often overlooked is the actual digestibility. If you can't digest a protein, its individual amino acids don't do you any good Unfortunately, the digestibility of plant proteins is often limited by two things First of all, there's fiber. So fiber is a good thing, but specifically insoluble fiber, Because we can't digest it. If it's bound to protein and protein is sitting on it, we're not going to be able to digest that protein very well either Secondly, and probably more importantly are these any nutrients that I want to talk about. So what are these antiutrients? Well, ant nutrients are naturally occurring compounds. They're found in plants. and one way or another, they prevent the body from digesting, absorbing, or at least using a nutrients in plant food to some extent. So they are natural, they exist in nature and they don't necessarily need to be feared, but we need to understand what they're actually doing in our body I'm going to show you what you can do to optimize protein even through plant foods. But first, I'm going to give you these three examples of antutrients and show you some data that can highlight just how much they can impact the quality of the protein in plant foods I'm going to show you which plant foods have high amounts of these antutrients that you may want to consider avoiding as well. So the first class of antinutrients I want to talk about are called Tpsin inhibitors. Now, these are compounds that interfere with the digestive enzymes, and namely Tpsin, which the name would imply And ultimately this enzyme prevents protein being broken down because that's part of what trips and does. So when you have a lot of trips and inhibitors, you can't break down protein and therefore you can't utilize the amino acids. Now unfortunately, there's really no regulatory safe limits for the amount of trips and inhibitors that is allowed in food products. really no way to know how much of these you're consuming. But one of the things that stands out here for me is that soybeans are by far the most common source of trips and inhibitors. And as anybody here who's a big plant eater knows, if you're going to get protein through plants, you're probably going to be eating Soy. Now if you want to put some numbers on it, soy can have eight to forty eight milligrams per gram of soy and that's relatively high. And a lot of it just depends on how it's grown and how it's processed So if you're eating something that's been concentrated like a soy product or a soy isolate, you're going actually probably have more trips and inhibitors. So I'm going to put this table up on the screen here, and you can see that this is a list of foods that have high levels of trips and inhibitors in them. Clearly, soy has the highest And if you look at the different forms, you can see that there are some forms that have more and some forms that have less. But they're also found in things like legumes, potatoes, tomatoes, grains and cereals like millet and sorghum So trips inhibitors can be a problem, especially if you're utilizing a lot of soy for protein because we know that while soy and I'll talk about this later has a good amino acid profile, if you can't absorb and digest those amino acids, you're not getting adequate protein Now the good news is that with tripsin inhibitors, if we cook the food, we can reduce the amount of tripsin inhibitors in the food. differentifferent types of cooking is going to reduce it in different ways. So soaking, sprouting, cooking, higher temperatures, et cetera. The more you can manipulate soy, the less likely you're going to have trips and inhibitors in it. We'll show some more examples of that later. It is possible to reduce it, but you're not going to get rid of it completely. All right, the next one we're going to talk about are tannins. Now when I think of tannins, I think of wine, but there are actually tannins in food as well. And tannins are compounds that can bind to and precipitate proteins so that they can't be digested. Now, there have been studies showing that sorghum tannin is actually capable of binding and precipitating at least twelve times its own weight in protein. And there's no shortage of data showing that there is potentially a negative impact of tannins on protein quality. So this actually first study that I have here showed that tannin in grains significantly reduced the small intestine digestibility ofein And I have another study here too that found a significant inverse relationship between tannin content and the digestibility of all the amino acids and plant foods. So all in all the data are quite clear that tannins consistently and significantly lower protein quality, but again, I'll throw a table on the screen here and you can see how different foods compare in terms of their tannin content. But by and large, kidney beans are probably the major culprit here with anywhere from five point three to seventeen point five five grams of tannins per kilogram with sorghum, millet, various types of other beans and peas also being on this list. So in terms of treating your food to get rid of tannins, tannins are unfortunately pretty heat resistant. So cooking's not going to do much to free up the protein. But there are other methodes that people talk about like dehuling You can soak in water, but some people would say an alkaline solution to help break it up. You can potentially add other chemicals like polyethylene glycol or gelatin, but yeah, I'm not going to do any of that or eat that. So I'm going to take a quick break here before we talk about our third antonutrient and talk about our masterclass If you haven't attended our masterclass and you are struggling to find your way through the bone health confusion, please join our free masterclass. We go over the top myths, misconceptions, and mistakes that people are making in their bone health journey, leave some time to answer questions. So if that sounds like something that would be helpful for you on your bone health journey, look for a link in the description on YouTube or if you're listening to this on a podcast Just go to our website, optimalhumanhealth. com and you can find a link there. All right, so the third and last antutrient that we're going talk about are phytates. So phytates are what is known as a chelator, meaning that it binds other molecules in the food and ultimately in your body. And it renders them essentially non fununctional But most important for this discussion, phytate combines several cofactors necessary for protein digestion, and they can even bind the proteins directly. So phhytate has been shown to interfere with digestive enzymes like pepssin, Tpsin, just like a Tpsin inhibitor Many studies have shown that by deactivating phytase, there can be anywhere between a three percent and ten percent increase in the digestibility of amino acids. And that's actually being used in the agricultural space where animals are actually being given phytase, which breaks up the phytate or the phytic acid and allows better utilization of the protein and the foods that these animals are eating. So I'm not a fan of that. We're just using it as an example to demonstrate that these phytates can have up to a ten percent impact on the digestibility. And in fact, we'll see in a table below, it could be actually much more than that. So table three here shows the phytate abundance in different foods. And in general, they're incredibly potent in things like seeds, grains, and nuts, at concentrations up to several percent of dry weight So some big takeaways from this table for me are that things like rice wheat cororn. Sory and lentils all have a significant amount of phytic acid in them and could significantly impact the protein if you're trying to get protein from these things. And just like tannins, phytates are pretty heat stable, so cooking them thoroughly won't solve the problem So knowing which foods are phytite heavy is a really good starting point, and then you can decide if you need to reduce consumption of those foods or not. Okay, so now that we've gone through why plant proteins tend to be less bioavailable than animal proteins I want to show you some data comparing the relative digestibility and overall protein quality of these sources. So the third study I'm going to put up here is a review that investigated the anabolic properties of plant and animal based proteins in maintaining muscle mass Now what's cool about the study is that they provide this chart that compares the protein quality of plant and animal foods based on their digestibility and amino acid profile. and they call this the PDCAAS value. and I'm not going to go into what that means. But what's interesting here is that you can see that the digestibility for most animal products is nearly one hundred percent And there's only a couple of plant foods that actually hit that same metric. But remember, that protein digestibility is not always a great measure of protein quality when talking about plants because the presence of ant nutrients can limit our ability to break down that protein into individual amino acids So we would really need an amino acid digestibilility score to accurately compare the true difference in protein quality. And there is a way to do that, which I'll get to in a minute. But the PDCAAS is still a valuable measure of protein quality and table four here shows that the PDCAAS is consistently lower in plant products than in animal products because of their poor digestibility and scarce amino acid profile. The PDCAAS score for some plants is as low as twenty five percent compared to again, nearly one hundred percent for most animal products. Okay, so if that score isn't the best thing to use, what is? Well, I think it's something that takes into account the amino acid profile and digestibility And that's called the DIAAS or digestibility indispensable amino acid score So the fourth study is interesting because it does exactly what I would want, which is to now compare the PDCAAS to the DIAAS score of certain plant proteins and certain animal proteins. So the things that they measured are whey protein, isolate whey protein concentrate, milk protein concentrate, and skim milk powder. Then they measured pe protein concentrate, soya protein isolate, soya flour, and whole grain wheat. And you can see this in this table here But not only were the values for amino acid digestibility greater in the whey, all the whey products and milk than for pea, soy, and soya flour as well as wheat, but they also found that the PDCAAS values were consistently greater than the DIAAS values. So what that means is that the PDCAAS is overestimating the quality And the DIAAS actually shows because it's looking at amino acid and digestibility, showing that the plant proteins are actually much more inferior than animal proteins. In fact, animal proteins gooredred over one hundred for the most part where the plant proteins did not, including soy. So what are all the takeaways here? Well, number one, don't be afraid of animal protein when it comes to your health The most nutrient dense, bioavailable foods in the world are animal based. And there are a plethora of studies showing the superiority of animal proteins in building muscle and bone, which is way too much for me to dive into today. So I've looked at this in depth and I' presented and will continue to present more data to support my position that we can eat animal protein and not increase our heart disease risk Please make sure you're subscribed to this channel so you don't miss any of those videos If you're going to rely on pls for protein Be thorough and do a quick search for its PDCAAS or DAAAS score to maximize your results. And finally, avoid foods that are high in antiutrients that further limit your ability to digest and absorb these proteins. If you're going to consume these foods, please do the work to see if there are ways to get rid of some of the antutrients by processing or preparing your foods in a particular way. So take soy, for example. It turns out that like I said in the beginning of the video, if cook it If you soak it, the higher temperature you cook it, the more you're going to degrade the antinutrients that are in it. Now you're not going to get them all out, but if you can make enough improvement so that you can actually get the protein, use it, and stick to the diet that you want to stick to, then that's ultimately the goal So remember that you don't have to avoid plant sources of protein to build bone, but you do have to do your homework, or you could just eat animal sources All right, so that's it. Please remember that a diagnosis of osteoporosis is not the end, but deciding to reverse it is beginning