No matter what we eat or drink, the body just seems to know exactly how to make use of it. How does the body recognize that protein and its corresponding amino acids from ground beef works all the same as protein from chicken, fish, or whatnot?
Do the nutrients just flow idly through the bloodstream and get pulled into where it needs to like a radio wave frequency?
In: 1
Well, for starters, the amino acids in beef are the same amino acids in chicken and are the same amino acids in spinach (kind of, more details later). And yes, basically, nutrients are available in the bloodstream for uptake in the places where it is needed. Your body also has a way of storing some nutrients in the places where it is needed the most, for example storing sugars in your muscles in the form of glycogen. Fun fact: glycogen is one of the major differences between dark meat and white meat, and is why dark meet tends to be a bit sweeter.
Now, as far as the amino acids go, humans use 20 amino acids to make the proteins we need to stay alive. Of those 20, we can make 11 all on our own, meaning we need the get the other 9 amino acids from our diet. These are called the essential amino acids. Each and every food you eat will have a different amino acid profile, which is to say that the levels of each amino acid present will vary from one kind of food to another. Generally speaking though, Meats tend to contain an abundance of the essential amino acids, while many plants do not contain the full amino acid profile. This is where the concept of an incomplete protein comes from, and the idea of balancing your plant-based protein intake to ensure you get the full amino acid profile. This all being said, the amino acids operate identically once they’re in your body independent of where they come from
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