Animal Protein Perk #1: Complete Protein Our bodies need to manufacture proteins to conduct the business of life and make our cellular structures, many of which require complicated protein molecules. Those proteins are all manufactured from amino acids, which are classified in three ways: essential, conditionally essential, or nonessential. We must get the essential ones in our diets because we lack the machinery or enzymes to manufacture them intemally. Conditionally essential means that we can manufacture the amino acids ourselves under the right conditions. Our body can manufacture nonessential amino acids, so we needn’t get them through food. Because there are so many amino acids we need, our bodies will go to drastic measures to get them if we don’t provide them. For example, if we don’t have the correct amino acids to make the proteins needed by the bod) we will resort to autophagy (“eating of self”), meaning that we hegin “eating” or cannibalizing and digesting some of our own muscle and organ cells. The body takes what it needs for its most essential tasks, even if it means icing parts of itself that it deems less essential. This may be beneficial to us as in short-term fasting, in times when food is scarce, or in cases of famine, but it is obviously very harmful in the long term, compromising our ability to maintain our own muscle and organ integrity, leading to muscle wasting, weakness, and intemal organ damage. High-quality proteins are essential for optimal health and function! The great thing about meat is that it contains all of the essential amino acids. You get everything you need. Plants, however, do not contain all the amino acids necessary for your body. Grains are limited in their supply of lysine and/or threonine, and legumes are limited in the sulfur-containing saci amino acid methionine. That is why vegetarians need to eat a combination of grains and legumes to have all of the essential amino acids necessary to make complete proteins. You can do it, but it’s trickier. If vegetarians eat only grains or only legumes, they are not consuming a complete protein and will need to digest some portion of their own bodies to get the missing amino acids (usually methionine, lysine, or threonine) to manufacture the proteins necessary for life.Animal Protein Perk #2: Essential Fatty Acids Essential fatty acids are the fats that our cells need but cannot make themselves. We must consume them or we can become deficient, to the detriment of our own health. These include alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid, and linoleic acid (LA), an omega-6 fatty acid. In addition, there are two conditionally essential fats: docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid, and gamma-linolenic acid (GLA), an omega-6 fatty acid. The conditionally essential fatty acids, DHA and GLA, are more likely to be required if the person has developed a brain problem, autoimmune problem, or disease involving too much inflammation. For the first 2.5 million years of the human genus, Homo, and the first 500,000 years of our species, Homo sapiens, humans ate these omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids at roughly a 1:1 ratio. We ate things like plants and seeds that had omega-6, but we also ate a lot of wild animals that foraged for grasses, other greens, and wild fish, all of which contain omega-3 fatty acids. This provided us with that 1:1 balance! associated with a lower risk of both neurological and cardiovascular diseases? Today, life, and the human diet, is much different. That ratio has been dramatically skewed in favor of omega-6 fatty acids, and the amount of omega-3 fatty acid has dramatically declined 2 The introduction to the human diet of seed oils such as com cil, soybean oil, and canola oil—which were originally considered waste products until World War II—as well as an increase in feeding animals grain rather than grass (reducing the omega-3. fatty acid content in their meat) led to the dramatic increase in omega-6 consumption. The current omega-6-to-omega-3 ratio for some Americans is as high as 15:1 or even 45:1! ‘When the ratio shifts so far toward omege-6 fatty acids, many of our chemical pathways tilt toward inflammation and the development of chronic disease! As a result, we are much more likely to develop excessive inflammation in our blood vessels, leading to higher rates of autoimmune problems, atherosclerosis, heart disease, and mental health problems. This can easily be reversed, however, by ramping up the amount of grass-fed meat and wild-caught fish in your diet (while simultaneously eliminating or markedly decreasing the amount of vegetable oil). On a vegetarian diet, it isespecially difficult to achieve a 1:1 balance. (I'll explain this in more detail momentarily.) Fish Sources of Omega-3 Fatty Acids (ape fom fe “Tost or Cinicians fom te 2013 erin Spe fr Furcal Ndi, ln, 213, by eesti for "Prctonal ede) Fish (-ounce serving) Omega-3 fry acids Chinock salmon Die Hleming, pickled 18g Scallops lig Halibut 068 Shrimp 04g, Snapper 04g Tuna, yellowéin 038 Cod 038 Animal Protein Perk #3: Bone and Joint Benefits When traditional societies ate meat, they used the entire animal to maximize the health of the clan, Today we tend te focus on muscle meat only, but many other parts of an animal, such as chicken feet, contain beneficial nutrients that aren’t contained in the muscle Bones, sinews, gristle, and cartilage were staples in the diets of traditional societies. These people typically made soups and stews from the bones, cartilage, and connective tissue of animals. This nourished the bones and joints of the people who drank that broth by providing collagen and compounds from the glucosamine/glycan family of molecules. remember both of my grandmothers gnawing on the cartilage on the end of chicken bones. They told me that they needed that gristle for their jeints. Unfortunately, I didn’t value their wisdom at the time because I thought the whole practice a little bit disgusting. Now, however, I realize that they were doing what should come naturally to humans: taking advantage of a potent source of joint-healing compounds. I’m happy to say I now chew on that, gristle and include those gnarly parts in soups and stews.