Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [31]
Avoiding plastic bottles, which can leach petrochemicals, hormone disrupters, and plasticizers into your drinking water, is a great step toward detoxifying your body and saving a landfill from unnecessary waste. Plus, because bottled water isn’t regulated like public water supplies, you’ll probably have a better quality of water straight out of your tap. If you don’t like the taste or quality of your tap water, you can get great home water filters that will remove heavy metals, pesticides, chlorine, and bacteria. If you want to take water with you in the car or to your workouts, buy a stainless steel, reusable water bottle. Plastic ones are risky because, again, they can leach nasty chemicals into your water.
Chapter 5
Protein Protocols
In This Chapter
Getting to know the basics about protein
Understanding daily requirements
Determining the difference between animal and vegan sources of protein
Exploring vegan foods that are good sources of protein
Imagine you’re at a party about to meet some new people. As you’re introduced around, it might come up in conversation that you’re a vegan — perhaps you politely declined the passed shrimp hors d’oeuvres (or as I like to call them, “fingers of flesh”). You can be certain that one of the first questions will be “Where do you get your protein?”
Don’t be alarmed — take a deep breath and get ready to charm the pants off of those well-meaning yet ill-informed meat eaters. The basics of protein are simple, and vegans can and do get plenty. The average American has too much protein in her diet, mainly because she eats so many animal foods, including meat, eggs, and dairy. (According to USDA predictions for annual meat consumption, by 2007 each person in the United States consumed roughly 221 pounds of animal meat a year.) Yes, those foods are sources of protein. But they aren’t the only sources; nor are they necessarily the healthiest or cheapest!
In this chapter, you find out how protein works in the body and how much different people need on a daily basis. New vegans can get confused about the types and quality of plant sources of protein, so I’ve provided detailed charts and lists to help you plan your healthy diet successfully.
What You Need to Know about Protein
The difference between a source of protein and the protein itself is a matter of molecules. Good vegan sources of protein, for example, are tofu and nuts. But when you look at those foods, can you see the protein? Of course not. The protein is a part of the structure of the food, but it’s not the food itself.
Proteins are large, complex molecules that perform important functions in your body. They do most of the work in cells and are used by your body to regulate water in tissues and organs, perform functions like repairing cells and building new ones, and create the structure of the bones, blood, hormones, muscles, and everything else in the body. Every cell in the body contains protein, and protein is a large part of the muscles, organs, and skin.
Proteins are composed of many thousands of smaller units called amino acids. To form a complete protein, all 22 of the different amino acids must be present. Your body does create some of these amino acids by itself, but it must receive nine of the amino acids it needs from food, called essential amino acids — meaning it’s essential that you eat foods containing them! These essential amino acids can all be found in plant foods, so as long as your diet is varied and provides you with enough calories, you don’t need to worry about getting enough of these building blocks.
Your body creates the specific forms of protein it needs from the dietary protein you eat. When you eat a bunch of nuts, beans, or soy, your body macerates, or breaks down that food with saliva and chewing. Then the food gets digested by the stomach. The original food source of protein begins