Protein

 For quite a long time in my life, I didn't think much about protein.  And it seems like current nutritional standards don't speak much to it either.  They have been all about reducing saturated fat.

I was only about 14 when I read a copy of "Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit" by Adelle Davis because my mother had a copy in the bookshelf.  It emphasized the importance of protein, suggesting you have steak and eggs for breakfast, and like that for the rest of the day.

Ironically it was during this same era that I was probably the most protein deficient.  That was because my mother was working nights and most often I had TV dinners for dinner.  So my diet consisted of breakfast cereal (I most often had "Total" thinking that was just what I needed), school lunch (a fried cheese sandwich might be typical), and TV dinners.

Protein deficiency might explain why my growth from ages 11-17 was not as much as my peers, and today at 5' 6"" I'm in the bottom 10% of hight for US males of my age.  I had thought my lack of growth had come earlier, after my double pneumonia hospitalization at age 7, but a friend recounts that when we met (at age 14) we were about the same height, and now he's 6 inches taller.  So much of my lack of growth happened after 14.

Anyway, it was easy to discredit Adele Davis at the time (who was a lifelong tobacco smoker and died of cancer) and the importance of protein faded away amidst many other health fads since then.  So I completely forgot about protein for most of my life.

In my last working years, I might have been getting enough protein anyway because I was eating at a steak bar about 3 times a week, the rest at Chinese and Thai restaurants.  I was getting enough protein, but way too much fats, and I had grown somewhat obese.

When I retired, I pretty much quit going to restaurants (and COVID made it nearly complete) and for awhile my diet at first was mostly frozen dinners (which generally do NOT have enough protein, just as when I was a kid).  It was during that era that I noticed that along with losing weight (which was very good) my muscles were getting very weak.  I started adding steak, prepared chicken, and spaghetti to my diet.

That helped, but I really didn't start getting enough protein to retain muscle mass until I started drinking whey protein powders in the last couple years.  I currently use a Whey Isolate with no added ingredients except Lecithin.  I'm not sure whether it's the fact that it's an isolate or the fact that it doesn't have Stevia* and other ingredients, but this power I am now using is the first one to not give me any gas (which causes lots of other problems, like making it harder to urinate at night).  Previously both whey powers and pea powders gave me terrible gas.  And pea powders were the worst.  (*My current theory is that Stevia is one of the things that gives me the worst gas.  Every single "high protein" product containing Stevia has given me too much gas to keep using.)  I've never notice any "lactose intolerance" from any other milk products, so I'm thinking I may not actually need to use a "whey protein isolate" which minimizes the lactose compared with a "whey protein concentrate."

Thanks to whey powder, it's possible for me to skip having any meat at breakfast or lunch.  I only have meat at dinner (and typically only 4-5 ounces).  And that's a big plus for me, because the luncheon meats I was chomping on before have way too high sodium.  By reserving meat for just one meal a day, I can cook it myself with no added salt.  I now believe that minimizing meat intake this way (one small portion per day, with protein supplements at other times) is the way to go.  I can hardly think about the complexity of getting enough protein on a Vegan diet.

As I make myself a glass of whey protein, I think of the fact that this is basically concentrated milk protein.  A glass of whey protein is much like a glass of milk, but with 2-3 times the protein and little to none of the sugars (lactose).

But this brings back another story about my childhood which might even better explain my stunted growth.

Sometime around the age of 14 I met a new friend who convinced me it was not necessary to drink milk.  Prior to that, I had been almost a religious milk drinker, drinking at least a quart a day.  "Milk is for babies" he said.  So I started drinking sugary fruit juices and sometimes even soft drinks (which had been nearly forbidden at my house).  Now it may have been true that he did not need milk, because he had a stay-at-home mother who cooked dinner every night.  But for me it was a probably essential supplement.

Milk had been a key part of my diet, providing the calcium I basically wasn't getting elsewhere, and supplementing the protein I wasn't getting enough of.

That was when I stopped drinking milk for the rest of my life, but the same message was underlined by a later friend with lactose intolerance (who temporarily had me convinced I had lactose intolerance too, it took a few years for me to figure out that I did not have any lactose intolerance) and read articles such as PETA's where they say that drinking beer is better than drinking milk.  (This same friend also had a theory that chocolate was nutritionally sufficient and sometimes, for a month at a time, lived on nothing but chocolate.  Now I know chocolate does not have enough protein, and has too much sugar and fat for the protein that it does have.)

For quite awhile I had 1-2 drinks of alcohol per day, and didn't think anything was wrong with that.  But alcohol has some negative effects, and alcoholic drinks generally have no protein and little other of nutritional value.  (Now I'm back to 1-2 drinks per week and not every week either, which had been my standard before the age of 40.)

Just how good is whey protein from milk?  According to Livestrong, whey protein has a better balance of proteins than red meat.