A HOUSE OF PROTEINS 29recommended 125 grams per day (only about fifty-five grams per day is
now recommended). Later, we will see how important this early prec-
edent was to this government agency.
A cultural bias had become firmly entrenched. If you were civilized,
you ate plenty of protein. If you were rich, you ate meat, and if you were
poor, you ate staple plant foods, like potatoes and bread. The lower
classes were considered by some to be lazy and inept as a result of not
eating enough meat, or protein. Elitism and arrogance dominated much
of the burgeoning field of nutrition in the nineteenth century. The en-
tire concept that bigger is better, more civilized and perhaps even more
spiritual permeated every thought about protein.
Major McCay, a prominent English physician in the early twentieth
century, provided one of the more entertaining, but most unfortunate,
moments in this history. Physician McCay was stationed in the English
colony of India in 1912 in order to identify good fighting men in the In-
dian tribes. Among other things, he said that people who consumed less
protein were of a "poor physique, and a cringing effeminate disposition
is all that can be expected."PRESSING FOR QUALITY
Protein, fat, carbohydrate and alcohol provide virtually all of the calo-
ries that we consume. Fat, carbohydrate and protein, as macronutrients,
make up almost all the weight of food, aside from water, with the re-
maining small amount being the vitamin and mineral micronutrients.
The amounts of these latter micronutrients needed for optimum health
are tiny (milligrams to micrograms).
Protein, the most sacred of all nutrients, is a vital component of our
bodies and there are hundreds of thousands of different kinds. They
function as enzymes, hormones, structural tissue and transport mol-
ecules, all of which make life possible. Proteins are constructed as long
chains of hundreds or thousands of amino acids, of which there are
fifteen to twenty different kinds, depending on how they are counted.
Proteins wear out on a regular basis and must be replaced. This is ac-
complished by consuming foods that contain protein. When digested,
these proteins give us a whole new supply of amino acid building blocks
to use in making new protein replacements for those that wore out.
Various food proteins are said to be of different quality, depending on
how well they provide the needed amino acids used to replace our body
proteins.