Garbage Protein Is Trying to Get Yuh

Garbage Protein Is Trying to Get Yuh
Michael Colgan Ph D 6 March 2013

From a blade of grass to the tallest tree, from fleas and frogs, to you and me, all living things are built from instructions written in the universal language of DNA. All are built from proteins made to DNA codes expressed by our genes. And most of the DNA is very similar. 80% of our genes are identical to the genes of a banana, 84% to the genes of a cockroach.

More than half the dry weight of a lean human is proteins. They form the structural framework and operating machinery of all tissues; brain, muscles, organs – the lot. All our thoughts are controlled by enzymes, and all enzymes are proteins. The protein collagen forms the essential structure of skin, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage. The protein hemoglobin is the machine that transports our oxygen. Thousands of different proteins control every nerve and every muscle contraction.

All our hormones are proteins. They form an interconnected information system far more complex that the best computers. All our growth factors are proteins, essential for the body to grow and repair itself. All the soldiers of our immune system are proteins. Proteins are our beams and rafters, architects and engineers, movers and shakers, growers and defenders. And all are made from the proteins that we eat, far and away our most important and most complex nutrients.

The molecular study of genes, (called genomics) got going about 2001, as work on translating the human genome neared completion. For a princely sum you can now get a profile of your own individual genome. Doesn’t mean much. Just when we thought we had hit the mother lode for understanding the basic processes of human life, scientists realized that the study of the proteins encoded by genes,(called proteomics) is much more important.(1)

Dr Hanno Steen, Director of the Proteomics Center at Children's Hospital, Boston sums it up. “To really understand biological processes, we need to understand how proteins function in and around cells since they are the functioning units.”

Proteomics is a lot more difficult than genomics. The human genome is more or less constant. Depending on whose figures you take, it contains between 20 and 40 thousand genes. But these genes can code for 10 to 20 times as many proteins. Some single genes alone can code for over 1,000 different proteins. The Human Proteome Project has recently done a fair count of the proteins in the human body: more than 350,000 different ones.(1,2)

In any protein, amino acids are linked to form long coded chains. The longest is titin, a protein that enables muscles to contract properly. Titin has a chain of 34,500 amino acids. Your body and mine has to make titin exactly every day. Consider how important it is for athletes (and the rest of us) to provide exactly the right raw materials from food proteins, so that the body can make titin precisely to code.

It’s doubtful our politicians understand any of this science, because it has never influenced the food supply to provide us better health. Most of the American food chain today results from the huge profit-driven historical error of agribusiness in the 1950s, that has now destroyed most of the land with NPK fertilizers and pesticides. Through its introduction of toxins and the progressive destruction of nutrients in the soils, crops and livestock, US agribusiness is directly responsible for most of the obesity, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s epidemics now undermining the American dream.(3) Eat their garbage proteins and you will grow a garbage body. No way to avoid it.

If you value the structure of your brain, your organs, your skin, your muscles, your looks, and the rate at which you age, never eat junkfood protein again. That’s all the burgers, hot dogs, battery chicken, turkey, pork, beef, tofu, or whatever.(3) If we were not so brainwashed by false advertising and lobby-driven government humbug, we would vote en masse with our pocketbooks and drive them all out of business.

1. Blackstock WP, Weir MP (1999). "Proteomics: quantitative and physical mapping of cellular proteins". Trends Biotechnol. 17 (3): 121–7.
2. Nature Methods, Editorial. The call of the human proteome Nature Methods, 2010;7,661 doi:10.1038/nmeth0910-661.
3. Salatin J. Folks This Ain’t Normal, New York: Center Street Publishers, 2011.