I’m working out. I need to eat proteins. So I eat things like meat and beans. But who makes the proteins first and how? Why can’t I make them myself?
In: Biology
So technically you don’t need to eat proteins. You need to eat amino acids. However we don’t typically find amino acids by themselves, so the easiest way to get them is to eat proteins and let your body break down the protein into individual amino acids.
As for why your body can’t make them by itself, well.. for some of them it can. Your body can make 6 of them under normal circumstances, and 6 of them sometimes. The remaining 9 you have to consume from food. These 9 are called ‘essential amino acids’, and when you’re planning your diet, you want to make sure that you get all 9, otherwise your body will be deficient in one or more of them.
Foods that contain all 9 are considered ‘complete’ proteins, which is a term that you’ll hear sometimes. For example, pork rinds have a lot of protein, but the protein that they contain do not have all 9 essential amino acids. You’ll also want to make sure you get enough of each 9, but that’s a lot harder to calculate because we don’t exactly know how much of each one our body needs per day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid
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